Catégorie : EN

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Article processing charge expenditure in Chile: The current situation

Author : Erwin Krauskopf

The National Agency of Research and Development from Chile is proposing, for the first time, a national OA policy aiming to ensure access to the scientific knowledge contained in publications resulting from research projects and graduate thesis.

Since no information regarding APC expenditure in Chile is available, this study examined the cost of APC for the 2019 publications that included at least one Chilean affiliation. The total expenditure for the year 2019 was estimated at USD 9,129,939.

The results confirm that almost one third of the total APC was spent on publications from Health & Medical Sciences, research area with the highest APC (USD 6000). Furthermore, five commercial publishers collected 52% of the total APC expenditure.

Unfortunately, the cost of publishing in some journals is so high that it causes detrimental effects on the research capacity of under resourced individuals. In the Chilean scenario, APC is not well suited to scale as most universities do not have an OA budget to support researchers that are eager to publish their work in OA journals.

Perhaps the implementation of an OA policy ought to be accompanied by sustainable APC funding grants aimed at supporting under resourced researchers that want to make their research freely available.

URL : Article processing charge expenditure in Chile: The current situation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1413

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Good friend or good student? An interview study of perceived conflicts between personal and academic integrity among students in three European countries

Authors : Mads Paludan Goddiksen, Una Quinn, Nóra Kovács, Thomas Bøker Lund, Peter Sandøe, Orsolya Varga, Mikkel Willum Johansen

Students are often reluctant to report the academic dishonesty of their peers. Loyalty to friends and classmates has previously been identified as an important reason for this. This paper explores loyalty conflicts among students from upper secondary school, through bachelor’s, to Ph.D. level.

Drawing on semi-structured qualitative interviews (N = 72) conducted in Denmark, Ireland and Hungary, we show that loyalty considerations among students can be complex and draw on a range of norms including responsibility.

The study demonstrates how students are often willing to assume substantial personal responsibility for dealing with the academic dishonesty of a peer, often preferring this to reporting.

However, when deciding on the right course of action, they also perceive tensions between the norms of the good researcher and student and their own norms of being a good friend and person.

The loyalty considerations and tension were identified in all three countries and across the educational levels, which suggests that this is a cross-cultural challenge.

We argue that institutions should formally decide whether they want students to take some degree of responsibility themselves for addressing less serious cases of academic dishonesty and communicate their decision to their students.

URL : Good friend or good student? An interview study of perceived conflicts between personal and academic integrity among students in three European countries

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2020.1826319

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Over-promotion and caution in abstracts of preprints during the COVID-19 crisis

Authors : Frederique Bordignon, Liana Ermakova, Marianne Noel

The abstract is known to be a promotional genre where researchers tend to exaggerate the benefit of their research and use a promotional discourse to catch the reader’s attention. The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted intensive research and has changed traditional publishing with the massive adoption of preprints by researchers.

Our aim is to investigate whether the crisis and the ensuing scientific and economic competition have changed the lexical content of abstracts. We propose a comparative study of abstracts associated with preprints issued in response to the pandemic relative to abstracts produced during the closest pre-pandemic period.

We show that with the increase (on average and in percentage) of positive words (especially effective) and the slight decrease of negative words, there is a strong increase in hedge words (the most frequent of which are the modal verbs can and may).

Hedge words counterbalance the excessive use of positive words and thus invite the readers, who go probably beyond the ‘usual’ audience, to be cautious with the obtained results.

The abstracts of preprints urgently produced in response to the COVID-19 crisis stand between uncertainty and over-promotion, illustrating the balance that authors have to achieve between promoting their results and appealing for caution.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1411

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Game theory and scholarly publishing: premises for an agreement around open access

Author : Abdelghani Maddi

Stakeholders in research and scientific publishing are gradually joining the Open-Access (OA) movement, which is gaining momentum to become nowadays at the heart of scientific policies in high-income countries.

The rise of OA generates profound changes in the chain of production and dissemination of knowledge. Free access to peer-reviewed research methods and results has contributed to the dynamics of science observed in recent years.

The modes of publication and access have also evolved; the classic model, based on journal subscriptions is gradually giving way to new economic models that have appeared with the arrival of OA.

The objective of this article is twofold. First, propose a model for the publishing market based on the literature as well as on changes in open science policies. Second, analyze publishing strategies of publishers and institutions.

To do so, we relied on game theory in economics. Results show that in the short term, the publisher’s equilibrium strategy is to adopt a hybridpublishing model, while the institutions’ equilibrium strategy is to publish in OA.

This equilibrium is not stable and that in the medium/long term, the two players will converge on an OA publishing strategy. The analysis of the equilibrium in mixed-strategies confirms this result.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03265171v2

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Digital humanities—A discipline in its own right? An analysis of the role and position of digital humanities in the academic landscape

Authors : Jan Luhmann, Manuel Burghardt

Although digital humanities (DH) has received a lot of attention in recent years, its status as “a discipline in its own right” (Schreibman et al., A companion to digital humanities (pp. xxiii–xxvii). Blackwell; 2004) and its position in the overall academic landscape are still being negotiated.

While there are countless essays and opinion pieces that debate the status of DH, little research has been dedicated to exploring the field in a systematic and empirical way (Poole, Journal of Documentation; 2017:73).

This study aims to contribute to the existing research gap by comparing articles published over the past three decades in three established English-language DH journals (Computers and the Humanities, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Digital Humanities Quarterly) with research articles from journals in 15 other academic disciplines (corpus size: 34,041 articles; 299 million tokens).

As a method of analysis, we use latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling, combined with recent approaches that aggregate topic models by means of hierarchical agglomerative clustering.

Our findings indicate that DH is simultaneously a discipline in its own right and a highly interdisciplinary field, with many connecting factors to neighboring disciplines—first and foremost, computational linguistics, and information science.

Detailed descriptive analyses shed some light on the diachronic development of DH and also highlight topics that are characteristic for DH.

URL : Digital humanities—A discipline in its own right? An analysis of the role and position of digital humanities in the academic landscape

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24533

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Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?

Authors : Pantea Kamrani, Isabelle Dorsch, Wolfgang G. Stock

The h-index is a widely used scientometric indicator on the researcher level working with a simple combination of publication and citation counts. In this article, we pursue two goals, namely the collection of empirical data about researchers’ personal estimations of the importance of the h-index for themselves as well as for their academic disciplines, and on the researchers’ concrete knowledge on the h-index and the way of its calculation.

We worked with an online survey (including a knowledge test on the calculation of the h-index), which was finished by 1081 German university professors. We distinguished between the results for all participants, and, additionally, the results by gender, generation, and field of knowledge.

We found a clear binary division between the academic knowledge fields: For the sciences and medicine the h-index is important for the researchers themselves and for their disciplines, while for the humanities and social sciences, economics, and law the h-index is considerably less important.

Two fifths of the professors do not know details on the h-index or wrongly deem to know what the h-index is and failed our test. The researchers’ knowledge on the h-index is much smaller in the academic branches of the humanities and the social sciences.

As the h-index is important for many researchers and as not all researchers are very knowledgeable about this author-specific indicator, it seems to be necessary to make researchers more aware of scholarly metrics literacy.

URL : Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03968-1

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TeamTree analysis: A new approach to evaluate scientific production

Author : Frank W. Pfrieger

Advances in science and technology depend on the work of research teams and the publication of results through peer-reviewed articles representing a growing socio-economic resource. Current methods to mine the scientific literature regarding a field of interest focus on content, but the workforce credited by authorship remains largely unexplored.

Notably, appropriate measures of scientific production are debated. Here, a new bibliometric approach named TeamTree analysis is introduced that visualizes the development and composition of the workforce driving a field.

A new citation-independent measure that scales with the H index estimates impact based on publication record, genealogical ties and collaborative connections.

This author-centered approach complements existing tools to mine the scientific literature and to evaluate research across disciplines.

URL : TeamTree analysis: A new approach to evaluate scientific production

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253847