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Theoretical Aspects of Scholarly Publishing about the Internet in Spanish Communication Journals

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Rainer Rubira-García, Silvia Margarita Baldiris-Navarro, Jacqueline Venet-Gutiérrez, Silvia Magro-Vela

Theoretical aspects of scholarly publishing about the Internet in communication sciences in Spain have received little attention. The present text analyses scientific framework, categories, concepts and keywords used in research, collected from the most relevant specialized Spanish journals in the field, as well as research objectives that are pursued in connection to communication levels of study and types of data.

A content analysis of a representative sample of 227 scientific articles was done in the five leading Spanish journals in communication in the period 1995–2015, in which the academic interesting on Internet as an object of study was consolidated.

The results show a predominance of descriptive theoretical frameworks and a hegemony of journalism as an academic reference. Nevertheless, there is an increase complexity out of the mass media field.

The research on the Internet in the communication field is presented as a reflexive opportunity to understand interdisciplinarity and the way this acquires epistemological consistence in the scientific discourse.

URL : Theoretical Aspects of Scholarly Publishing about the Internet in Spanish Communication Journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8030042

EN

PRINCIPIA: a Decentralized Peer-Review Ecosystem

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Andrea Mambrini, Andrea Baronchelli, Michele Starnini, Daniele Marinazzo, Manlio De Domenico

Peer review is a cornerstone of modern scientific endeavor. However, there is growing consensus that several limitations of the current peer review system, from lack of incentives to reviewers to lack of transparency, risks to undermine its benefits.

Here, we introduce the PRINCIPIA (http://www.principia.network/) framework for peer-review of scientific outputs (e.g., papers, grant proposals or patents).

The framework allows key players of the scientific ecosystem — including existing publishing groups — to create and manage peer-reviewed journals, by building a free market for reviews and publications. PRINCIPIA’s referees are transparently rewarded according to their efforts and the quality of their reviews.

PRINCIPIA also naturally allows to recognize the prestige of users and journals, with an intrinsic reputation system that does not depend on third-parties. PRINCIPIA re-balances the power between researchers and publishers, stimulates valuable assessments from referees, favors a fair competition between journals, and reduces the costs to access research output and to publish.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.09011

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Digital Editions and Version Numbering

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Paul A. Broyles

Digital editions are easily modified after they are first published — a state of affairs that poses challenges both for long-term scholarly reference and for various forms of electronic distribution and analysis.

This article argues that producers of digital editions should assign meaningful version numbers to their editions and update those version numbers with each change, allowing both humans and computers to know when resources have been modified and how significant the changes are.

As an examination of versioning practices in the software industry reveals, version numbers are not neutral descriptors but social products intended for use in specific contexts, and the producers of digital editions must consider how version numbers will be used in developing numbering schemes.

It may be beneficial to version different parts of an edition separately, and in particular to version the data objects or content of an edition independently from the environment in which it is displayed.

The article concludes with a case study of the development of a versioning policy for the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive, and includes an appendix surveying how a selection of digital editions handle the problem of recording and communicating changes.

URL : http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/2/000455/000455.html

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Research methodology and characteristics of journal articles with original data, preprint articles and registered clinical trial protocols about COVID-19

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Mahir Fidahic, Danijela Nujic, Renata Runjic, Marta Civljak, Zvjezdana Lovric Makaric, Livia Puljak

Background

The research community reacted rapidly to the emergence of COVID-19. We aimed to assess characteristics of journal articles, preprint articles, and registered trial protocols about COVID-19 and its causal agent SARS-CoV-2.

Methods

We analyzed characteristics of journal articles with original data indexed by March 19, 2020, in World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 collection, articles published on preprint servers medRxiv and bioRxiv by April 3, 2010.

Additionally, we assessed characteristics of clinical trials indexed in the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (WHO ICTRP) by April 7, 2020.

Results

Among the first 2118 articles on COVID-19 published in scholarly journals, 533 (25%) contained original data. The majority was published by authors from China (75%) and funded by Chinese sponsors (75%); a quarter was published in the Chinese language.

Among 312 articles that self-reported study design, the most frequent were retrospective studies (N = 88; 28%) and case reports (N = 86; 28%), analyzing patients’ characteristics (38%). Median Journal Impact Factor of journals where articles were published was 5.099.

Among 1088 analyzed preprint articles, the majority came from authors affiliated in China (51%) and were funded by sources in China (46%). Less than half reported study design; the majority were modeling studies (62%), and analyzed transmission/risk/prevalence (43%).

Of the 927 analyzed registered trials, the majority were interventional (58%). Half were already recruiting participants. The location for the conduct of the trial in the majority was China (N = 522; 63%).

The median number of planned participants was 140 (range: 1 to 15,000,000). Registered intervention trials used highly heterogeneous primary outcomes and tested highly heterogeneous interventions; the most frequently studied interventions were hydroxychloroquine (N = 39; 7.2%) and chloroquine (N = 16; 3%).

Conclusions

Early articles on COVID-19 were predominantly retrospective case reports and modeling studies. The diversity of outcomes used in intervention trial protocols indicates the urgent need for defining a core outcome set for COVID-19 research.

Chinese scholars had a head start in reporting about the new disease, but publishing articles in Chinese may limit their global reach. Mapping publications with original data can help finding gaps that will help us respond better to the new public health emergency.

URL : Research methodology and characteristics of journal articles with original data, preprint articles and registered clinical trial protocols about COVID-19

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-020-01047-2

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Problematizing ‘predatory publishing’: A systematic review of factors shaping publishing motives, decisions, and experiences

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : David Mills, K. Inouye

This article systematically reviews recent empirical research on the factors shaping academics’ knowledge about, and motivations to publish work in, so‐called ‘predatory’ journals. Growing scholarly evidence suggests that the concept of ‘predatory’ publishing’ – used to describe deceptive journals exploiting vulnerable researchers – is inadequate for understanding the complex range of institutional and contextual factors that shape the publication decisions of individual academics.

This review identifies relevant empirical studies on academics who have published in ‘predatory’ journals, and carries out a detailed comparison of 16 papers that meet the inclusion criteria. While most start from Beall’s framing of ‘predatory’ publishing, their empirical findings move the debate beyond normative assumptions about academic vulnerability.

They offer particular insights into the academic pressures on scholars at the periphery of a global research economy. This systematic review shows the value of a holistic approach to studying individual publishing decisions within specific institutional, economic and political contexts.

Rather than assume that scholars publishing in ‘questionable’ journals are naïve, gullible or lacking in understanding, fine‐grained empirical research provides a more nuanced conceptualization of the pressures and incentives shaping their decisions. The review suggests areas for further research, especially in emerging research systems in the global South.

URL : Problematizing ‘predatory publishing’: A systematic review of factors shaping publishing motives, decisions, and experiences

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1325

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Global Flow of Scholarly Publishing and Open Access

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Olivier Pourret

Open access is not a new topic for Elements. The topic was addressed by Alex Speer, Kevin Murphy, and Sharon Tahirkheliin 2013 (Speer et al. 2013) and, later, by Christian Chopin in 2018 (Chopin 2018). I fully agree that there is a strong imperative for the geochemistry, mineralogy, and petrology communities to ensure that the research it produces is widely accessible, especially in the increasingly important context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Indeed, according to the STM Report 2018 (Johnson et al. 2018), two thirds of the scholarly literature in 2016 remains inaccessible to the public because it is hidden behind a paywall. Scholars have been making various cases for wider public access to published research, known as open access (OA), since the late 1980s.

Scientific publishing is currently undergoing a major transformation,with a move towards OA marking a major shift in the financial models of the major publishers. This opens up greater diversity in publishing routes and raises wider issues around publishing ethics.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02496933/

EN

Genuine semantic publishing

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Tobias Kuhn, Michel Dumontier

Various approaches and systems have been presented in the context of scholarly communication for what has been called semantic publishing. Closer inspection, however, reveals that these approaches are mostly not about publishing semantic representations, as the name seems to suggest. Rather, they take the processes and outcomes of the current narrative-based publishing system for granted and only work with already published papers.

This includes approaches involving semantic annotations, semantic interlinking, semantic integration, and semantic discovery, but with the semantics coming into play only after the publication of the original article. While these are interesting and important approaches, they fall short of providing a vision to transcend the current publishing paradigm.

We argue here for taking the term semantic publishing literally and work towards a vision of genuine semantic publishing, where computational tools and algorithms can help us with dealing with the wealth of human knowledge by letting researchers capture their research results with formal semantics from the start, as integral components of their publications.

We argue that these semantic components should furthermore cover at least the main claims of the work, that they should originate from the authors themselves, and that they should be fine-grained and light-weight for optimized re-usability and minimized publication overhead.

This paper is in fact not just advocating our concept, but is itself a genuine semantic publication, thereby demonstrating and illustrating our points.

URL : Genuine semantic publishing

Original location : https://content.iospress.com/articles/data-science/ds010