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Open Science in Poland 2014 : A Diagnosis

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The process of producing and distributing scientific knowledge has been undergoing significant changes recently, termed collectively as “opening” of science. The changes were begun with the development of new technologies, but their dynamics was also influenced by the features of scholary communication and the social role of scientific research, as well as its institutional and political context. The basic aspect of Open Science is Open Access to scientific literature and data, but openness can also concern other elements of science, such
as conducting, evaluating, disseminating and using research and its findings.

The open models were initially implemented locally, as a “grassroot” movement, but with time a need arose for a more systematic approach, especially in strategies and policies of institutions responsible for research and funding, both state-owned and international bodies. In Poland such strategies and policies are yet to be developed, and the basic condition to be fulfilled is establishing a diagnosis of the current state of openness in the Polish science sector. The present report is an attempt to draw such a diagnosis.

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Szprot2015.pdf

Alternative location : http://pon.edu.pl/index.php/nasze-publikacje?pubid=16

Retraction policies of top scientific journals ranked by impact factor

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Objective

This study gathered information about the retraction policies of the top 200 scientific journals, ranked by impact factor.

Methods

Editors of the top 200 science journals for the year 2012 were contacted by email.

Results

One hundred forty-seven journals (74%) responded to a request for information. Of these, 95 (65%) had a retraction policy. Of journals with a retraction policy, 94% had a policy that allows the editors to retract articles without authors’ consent.

Conclusions

The majority of journals in this sample had a retraction policy, and almost all of them would retract an article without the authors’ permission.

URL : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4511053/

Publishing Ethics and Predatory Practices: A Dilemma for All Stakeholders of Science Communication

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Publishing scholarly articles in traditional and newly-launched journals is a responsible task, requiring diligence from authors, reviewers, editors, and publishers. The current generation of scientific authors has ample opportunities for publicizing their research. However, they have to selectively target journals and publish in compliance with the established norms of publishing ethics. Over the past few years, numerous illegitimate or predatory journals have emerged in most fields of science. By exploiting gold Open Access publishing, these journals paved the way for low-quality articles that threatened to change the landscape of evidence-based science.

 

Authors, reviewers, editors, established publishers, and learned associations should be informed about predatory publishing practices and contribute to the trustworthiness of scholarly publications. In line with this, there have been several attempts to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate journals by blacklisting unethical journals (the Jeffrey Beall’s list), issuing a statement on transparency and best publishing practices (the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association’s and other global organizations’ draft document), and tightening the indexing criteria by the Directory of Open Access Journals. None of these measures alone turned to be sufficient. All stakeholders of science communication should be aware of multiple facets of unethical practices and publish well-checked and evidence-based articles.

 

 

You are invited to submit…

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The academic community is under great pressure to publish. This pressure is compounded by high rejection rates at many journals. A more recent trend is for some journals to send invitations directly to researchers inviting them to submit a manuscript to their journals. Many researchers find these invitations annoying and unsure how best to respond to them. We collected electronic invitations to submit a manuscript to a journal between April 1, 2014, and March 31, 2015.

We analyzed their content and cross-tabulated them against journals listed in Beall’s list of potential predatory journals. During this time period, 311 invitations were received for 204 journals, the majority of which were in Beall’s list (n = 244; 79 %). The invitations came throughout the calendar year and some journals sent up to six invitations. The majority of journals claimed to provide peer review (n = 179; 57.6 %) although no mention was made of expedited review process. Similarly, more than half of the journals claimed to be open access (n = 186; 59.8 %). The majority of invitations included an unsubscribe link (n = 187; 60.1 %). About half of the invitations came from biomedical journals (n = 179).

We discuss strategies researchers and institutions can consider to reduce the number of invitations received and strategies to handle those invitations that make it to the recipients’ inbox, thus helping to maintain the credibility and reputation of researchers and institutions.

URL : You are invited to submit…

Related URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/13/180

Sizing the Problem of Improving Discovery and Access to NIH-Funded Data: A Preliminary Study

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Objective

This study informs efforts to improve the discoverability of and access to biomedical datasets by providing a preliminary estimate of the number and type of datasets generated annually by research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). It focuses on those datasets that are “invisible” or not deposited in a known repository.

Methods

We analyzed NIH-funded journal articles that were published in 2011, cited in PubMed and deposited in PubMed Central (PMC) to identify those that indicate data were submitted to a known repository. After excluding those articles, we analyzed a random sample of the remaining articles to estimate how many and what types of invisible datasets were used in each article.

Results

About 12% of the articles explicitly mention deposition of datasets in recognized repositories, leaving 88% that are invisible datasets. Among articles with invisible datasets, we found an average of 2.9 to 3.4 datasets, suggesting there were approximately 200,000 to 235,000 invisible datasets generated from NIH-funded research published in 2011. Approximately 87% of the invisible datasets consist of data newly collected for the research reported; 13% reflect reuse of existing data. More than 50% of the datasets were derived from live human or non-human animal subjects.

Conclusion

In addition to providing a rough estimate of the total number of datasets produced per year by NIH-funded researchers, this study identifies additional issues that must be addressed to improve the discoverability of and access to biomedical research data: the definition of a “dataset,” determination of which (if any) data are valuable for archiving and preservation, and better methods for estimating the number of datasets of interest. Lack of consensus amongst annotators about the number of datasets in a given article reinforces the need for a principled way of thinking about how to identify and characterize biomedical datasets.

URL : Sizing the Problem of Improving Discovery and Access to NIH-Funded Data: A Preliminary Study

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0132735

Identifying Open Access Articles within the Top Ten Closed Access LIS Journals: A Global Perspective

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Librarians have embraced the open access movement. They work to raise awareness of issues surrounding scholarly communication, to educate faculty about authors’ rights, and to help implement and maintain institutional repositories (IRs). But for all of the research and commentary from librarians about the importance of IRs and of making research freely available, there still exists the glaring contradiction that few librarians and Library and Information Science (LIS) authors provide free access to their own research publications.

In this study, we will look at the open access availability of articles from the top 20 closed access LIS journals and discuss some factors that may explain the discrepancies between LIS authors’ attitudes towards open access and their own self-archiving practices.

URL : http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/1245/

A Case Study of Scholars’ Open and Sharing Practices

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Although the open scholarship movement has successfully captured the attention and interest of higher education stakeholders, researchers currently lack an understanding of the degree to which open scholarship is enacted in institutions that lack institutional support for openness. I help fill this gap in the literature by presenting a descriptive case study that illustrates the variety of open and sharing practices enacted by faculty members at a North American university. Open and sharing practices enacted at this institution revolve around publishing manuscripts in open ways, participating on social media, creating and using open educational resources, and engaging with open teaching.

This examination finds that certain open practices are favored over others. Results also show that even though faculty members often share scholarly materials online for free, they frequently do so without associated open licenses (i.e. without engaging in open practices). These findings suggest that individual motivators may significantly affect the practice of openness, but that environmental factors (e.g., institutional contexts) and technological elements (e.g., YouTube’s default settings) may also shape open practices in unanticipated ways.

URL : A Case Study of Scholars’ Open and Sharing Practices

Related URL : http://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/view/206