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Innovative Strategies for Peer Review

Author : Edward Barroga

Peer review is a crucial part of research and publishing. However, it remains imperfect and suffers from bias, lack of transparency, and professional jealousy. It is also overburdened by an increasing quantity of complex papers against the stagnant pool of reviewers, causing delays in peer review.

Additionally, many medical, nursing, and healthcare educators, peer reviewers, and authors may not be completely familiar with the current changes in peer review. Moreover, reviewer education and training have unfortunately remained lacking.

This is especially crucial since current initiatives to improve the review process are now influenced by factors other than academic needs. Thus, increasing attention has recently focused on ways of streamlining the peer review process and implementing alternative peer-review methods using new technologies and open access models.

This article aims to give an overview of the innovative strategies for peer review and to consider perspectives that may be helpful in introducing changes to peer review. Critical assessments of peer review innovations and incentives based on past and present experiences are indispensable.

A theoretical appraisal must be balanced by a realistic appraisal of the ethical roles of all stakeholders in enhancing the peer review process.

As the peer review system is far from being perfect, identifying and developing core competencies among reviewers, continuing education of researchers, reviewer education and training, and professional engagement of the scientific community in various disciplines may help bridge gaps in an imperfect but indispensable peer review system.

URL : Innovative Strategies for Peer Review

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2020.35.e138

Publié le

Dear Reviewer 2: Go F’ Yourself

Author : David A. M. Peterson

Objectives

The objective of this study was to empirically test the wide belief that Reviewer #2 is a uniquely poor reviewer.

Methods

The test involved analyzing the reviewer database from Political Behavior . There are two main tests. First, the reviewer’s categorical evaluation of the manuscript was compared by reviewer number. Second, the data were analyzed to test if Reviewer #2 was disproportionately likely to be more than one category below the mean of the other reviewers of the manuscript.

Results

There is no evidence that Reviewer #2 is either more negative about the manuscript or out of line with the other reviewers. There is, however, evidence that Reviewer #3 is more likely to be more than one category below the other reviewers.

Conclusions

Reviewer #2 is not the problem. Reviewer #3 is. In fact, he is such a bad actor that he even gets the unwitting Reviewer #2 blamed for his bad behavior.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12824

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The role of metadata in reproducible computational research

Authors : Jeremy Leipzig, Daniel Nüst, Charles Tapley Hoyt, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Karthik Ram, Jane Greenberg

Reproducible computational research (RCR) is the keystone of the scientific method for in silico analyses, packaging the transformation of raw data to published results.

In addition to its role in research integrity, RCR has the capacity to significantly accelerate evaluation and reuse. This potential and wide-support for the FAIR principles have motivated interest in metadata standards supporting RCR.

Metadata provides context and provenance to raw data and methods and is essential to both discovery and validation. Despite this shared connection with scientific data, few studies have explicitly described the relationship between metadata and RCR.

This article employs a functional content analysis to identify metadata standards that support RCR functions across an analytic stack consisting of input data, tools, notebooks, pipelines, and publications.

Our article provides background context, explores gaps, and discovers component trends of embeddedness and methodology weight from which we derive recommendations for future work.

URL : The role of metadata in reproducible computational research

Original location : https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08589

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Journal research data sharing policies: a study of highly-cited journals in neuroscience, physics, and operations research

Authors : Antti M. Rousi, Mikael Laakso

The practices for if and how scholarly journals instruct research data for published research to be shared is an area where a lot of changes have been happening as science policy moves towards facilitating open science, and subject-specific repositories and practices are established.

This study provides an analysis of the research data sharing policies of highly-cited journals in the fields of neuroscience, physics, and operations research as of May 2019. For these 120 journals, 40 journals per subject category, a unified policy coding framework was developed to capture the most central elements of each policy, i.e. what, when, and where research data is instructed to be shared.

The results affirm that considerable differences between research fields remain when it comes to policy existence, strength, and specificity. The findings revealed that one of the most important factors influencing the dimensions of what, where and when of research data policies was whether the journal’s scope included specific data types related to life sciences which have established methods of sharing through community-endorsed public repositories.

The findings surface the future research potential of approaching policy analysis on the publisher-level as well as on the journal-level. The collected data and coding framework is provided as open data to facilitate future research and journal policy monitoring.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03467-9

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« Innovez ! Participez ! » Interroger la relation entre musée et numérique au travers des injonctions adressées aux professionnels

Auteurs/Authors : Sébastien Appiotti, Éva Sandri

Cet article propose d’interroger la relation entre mondes numériques et musée à travers le prisme des injonctions au numérique qui lui sont adressées. Pour ce faire, une enquête de terrain a été menée dans des services de médiation, de communication et du numérique de deux institutions culturelles françaises : la RMN – Grand Palais (Paris) et le Museon Arlaten (Musée d’ethnographie provençale d’Arles).

Chacune à leur échelle, les institutions étudiées donnent à voir une transformation profonde des relations qu’elles entretiennent avec le numérique. L’article étudie plus particulièrement les dynamiques de mise en forme des discours injonctifs au numérique (innovation, participation) au sein des politiques des établissements étudiés et leurs impacts sur les pratiques professionnelles.

URL : https://journals.openedition.org/culturemusees/4383

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Charting the Open Access scholarly journals landscape in the UAE

Author : Mohamed Boufarss

The purpose of this study is to chart the scholarly journal landscape in the UAE in order to provide a scientific perspective on research productivity, distribution, and access in the country and lay the foundations for further research in this area.

The study aims also to contribute to research endeavoring to paint a global picture of scholarly publishing. We carried out a mapping of scholarly journals published in the UAE compiled from international and local sources.

The resulting journal list was studied focusing on the share of OA titles, language of publication, discipline, and type of publisher.

Our results show that: (1) 534 journals are published in the UAE and that the share of OA is quite noteworthy with about 64% of all online journals; (2) the APC-based OA model is prevalent with around 75% of OA journals levying a publication fee; (3) UAE journals are predominantly in English while the number of Arabic-language journals is marginal; (4) science, technology and medicine prevail as the most prevalent subject areas of the journals; and (5) commercial publishers control most of the publications especially in the medical field.

The study lays a foundation for further studies on scholarly journals in the UAE. The combination of regional indexes and international directories to measure the country’s scholarly journal output can also be replicated and built upon for other countries where the major international bibliometric databases do not provide a comprehensive representation of scholarly publishing activities.

URL : Charting the Open Access scholarly journals landscape in the UAE

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03349-0

Publié le

Open Sesame? Open access priorities, incentives, and policies among higher education institutions in the United Arab Emirates

Authors : Mohamed Boufarss, Mikael Laakso

Higher education institutions (HEIs) have an instrumental role in the move towards Open Access (OA) by shaping the national strategies, policies, and agendas.

This study sets out to explore the role of HEIs in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) OA uptake and reflect on the ongoing international initiatives pushing for universal OA to research.

The study is based on an online survey targeted at UAE higher education institutions research management units. In order to measure the institutional views, only one response was solicited from each institution.

A total of 19 valid responses were received, making up 47% of HEIs included in the population of organisations. Our results suggest that there is low commitment to OA among UAE HEIs as attested by the low number of OA policies, scarce OA funding, limited proliferation of institutional repositories, perceived lack of urgency to migrate from current access models, and little consideration of OA for promotion purposes.

The study is the first of its kind in the UAE, Arab and Middle Eastern countries, providing rare insight into a growing phenomenon that is global, yet most vocally discussed from a western perspective and context.

The study contributes to the debate on the role of HEIs in the transition to OA and in shaping national and regional OA policies, as well as informing international initiatives about the current status of OA in the region.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03529-y