EN

Requiem for impact factors and high publication charges

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Chris R Triggle, Ross MacDonald, David J. Triggle, Donald Grierson

Journal impact factors, publication charges and assessment of quality and accuracy of scientific research are critical for researchers, managers, funders, policy makers, and society. Editors and publishers compete for impact factor rankings, to demonstrate how important their journals are, and researchers strive to publish in perceived top journals, despite high publication and access charges.

This raises questions of how top journals are identified, whether assessments of impacts are accurate and whether high publication charges borne by the research community are justified, bearing in mind that they also collectively provide free peer-review to the publishers.

Although traditional journals accelerated peer review and publication during the COVID-19 pandemic, preprint servers made a greater impact with over 30,000 open access articles becoming available and accelerating a trend already seen in other fields of research.

We review and comment on the advantages and disadvantages of a range of assessment methods and the way in which they are used by researchers, managers, employers and publishers.

We argue that new approaches to assessment are required to provide a realistic and comprehensive measure of the value of research and journals and we support open access publishing at a modest, affordable price to benefit research producers and consumers.

URL : Requiem for impact factors and high publication charges

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2021.1909481

EN

Open Research Data and Open Peer Review: Perceptions of a Medical and Health Sciences Community in Greece

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Eirini Delikoura, Dimitrios Kouis

Recently significant initiatives have been launched for the dissemination of Open Access as part of the Open Science movement. Nevertheless, two other major pillars of Open Science such as Open Research Data (ORD) and Open Peer Review (OPR) are still in an early stage of development among the communities of researchers and stakeholders.

The present study sought to unveil the perceptions of a medical and health sciences community about these issues. Through the investigation of researchers‘ attitudes, valuable conclusions can be drawn, especially in the field of medicine and health sciences, where an explosive growth of scientific publishing exists.

A quantitative survey was conducted based on a structured questionnaire, with 179 valid responses. The participants in the survey agreed with the Open Peer Review principles. However, they ignored basic terms like FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and appeared incentivized to permit the exploitation of their data.

Regarding Open Peer Review (OPR), participants expressed their agreement, implying their support for a trustworthy evaluation system.

Conclusively, researchers need to receive proper training for both Open Research Data principles and Open Peer Review processes which combined with a reformed evaluation system will enable them to take full advantage of the opportunities that arise from the new scholarly publishing and communication landscape.

URL : Open Research Data and Open Peer Review: Perceptions of a Medical and Health Sciences Community in Greece

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9020014

EN

Adaptable Methods for Training in Research Data Management

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors: Katarzyna Biernacka, Kerstin Helbig, Petra Buchholz

The management of research data has become an essential aspect of good scientific practice. Education in research data management is, however, scarce. The low number of trainers can be attributed on the one hand to a lack of educational paths. On the other hand, qualification opportunities for academics who have already completed their studies and are in employment are missing.

Within the research project FDMentor a Train-the-Trainer programme was therefore developed to teach potential multipliers of research data management, and at the same time impart basic didactic knowledge.

The resulting concept was created, in addition to freely re-usable materials, to support researchers and research support staff in passing on this knowledge. In addition, the generic development and free licensing of the concept enables transferability to other thematic contexts, such as Open Access or Open Science.

URL : Adaptable Methods for Training in Research Data Management

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2021-014

FR

Le libre accès au service de la communication sur le changement climatique en Afrique

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteur/Author : Marième Pollèle Ndiaye

Cette contribution est issue d’un projet de recherche consacré aux défis de la science ouverte pour stimuler la communication sur le changement climatique en Afrique. Nous tentons de comprendre d’abord, ce qui explique l’invisibilité des recherches dans ce domaine avant de questionner ce qui définit le décloisonnement scientifique.

En nous servant des sciences de l’information et de la communication (SIC) comme guide, deux hypothèses serviront de fils conducteurs à la réflexion. La première consistera à envisager les temporalités organisationnelles comme facteurs pouvant influencer l’engagement des chercheurs en faveur d’une science ouverte.

Dans le même ordre d’idée, la seconde hypothèse considérera l’aspect rhizomique (au sens de Gilles Deuleuze et Felix Guattari, 1976) des SIC tel un écueil pour identifier les recherches africaines autour de la communication sur le changement climatique.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ctd.4008

EN

Preprint Abstracts in Times of Crisis: a Comparative Study with the Pre-pandemic Period

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Frédérique Bordignon, Liana Ermakova, Marianne Noel

The urgency to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak has driven an unprecedented surge in preprints that aim to speed up knowledge dissemination as they are available much sooner than peer-reviewed publications.

In this study we consider abstracts of research articles and preprints as main entry points that draw attention to the most important information of the document and that try to entice us to read the whole article. In this paper, we try to capture and examine shifts in scientific abstract writing produced at the very beginning of the pandemic.

We made a comparative study of abstracts in terms of their informativeness associated with preprints issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and those produced in 2019, the closest pre-pandemic period. Our results clearly differ from one preprint server to another and show that there are community-centered habits as regards writing and reporting results.

The preprints issued from the arXiv, ChemRxiv and Research Square servers tend to have more informative (generous) abstracts than the ones submitted to the other servers. In four servers, the ratio of structured abstracts decreases with the pandemic.

URL : Preprint Abstracts in Times of Crisis: a Comparative Study with the Pre-pandemic Period

Original location : https://hal-enpc.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03187900

EN

Open Access Models, Pirate Libraries and Advocacy Repertoires: Policy Options for Academics to Construct and Govern Knowledge Commons

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Melanie Dulong de Rosnay

In this article, I propose exploring open access publishing through the lenses of Knowledge Commons. Instead of focusing on users’ rights to access and reuse the output under open copyright licensing conditions, I study the governance of the academic publishing ecosystem, and its political economy, technical and labour infrastructure. Based on selected examples, I discuss how they comply with the concept of the commons.

I use analytical frameworks from the Ostromian literature of the governance of Knowledge Commons to provide insights on the various steps of academic publishing work as a process. I then analyse a scope of open access publishing projects, including gold, green, diamond, platinum and pirate libraries. Finally, I draw from practices a repertoire of advocacy actions and I make recommendations for academics to develop policies supporting Academic Commons.

URL : Open Access Models, Pirate Libraries and Advocacy Repertoires: Policy Options for Academics to Construct and Govern Knowledge Commons

DOI : https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.913

EN

What happens when a journal converts to Open Access? A bibliometric analysis

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Fakhri Momeni, Philipp Mayr, Nicholas Fraser, Isabella Peters

In recent years, increased stakeholder pressure to transition research to Open Access has led to many journals converting, or ‘flipping’, from a closed access (CA) to an open access (OA) publishing model.

Changing the publishing model can influence the decision of authors to submit their papers to a journal, and increased article accessibility may influence citation behaviour. In this paper we aimed to understand how flipping a journal to an OA model influences the journal’s future publication volumes and citation impact.

We analysed two independent sets of journals that had flipped to an OA model, one from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and one from the Open Access Directory (OAD), and compared their development with two respective control groups of similar journals. For bibliometric analyses, journals were matched to the Scopus database.

We assessed changes in the number of articles published over time, as well as two citation metrics at the journal and article level: the normalised impact factor (IF) and the average relative citations (ARC), respectively. Our results show that overall, journals that flipped to an OA model increased their publication output compared to journals that remained closed.

Mean normalised IF and ARC also generally increased following the flip to an OA model, at a greater rate than was observed in the control groups. However, the changes appear to vary largely by scientific discipline. Overall, these results indicate that flipping to an OA publishing model can bring positive changes to a journal.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14522