arXiv and the Symbiosis of Physics Preprints and Journal Review Articles: A Model

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Author : Brian Simboli

This paper recommends a publishing model that can help achieve the goal of reforming physics publishing. It distinguishes two complementary needs in scholarly communication.

Preprints, increasingly important in science, are properly the vehicle for claiming priority of discovery and for eliciting feedback that will help with versioning.

Traditional journal publishing, however, should focus on providing synthesis in the form of overlay journals that play the same role as review articles.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.01470

What does better peer review look like? Underlying principles and recommendations for better practice

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Authors : Heidi Allen, Alexandra Cury, Thomas Gaston, Chris Graf, Hannah Wakley, Michael Willis

We conducted a literature review of best practice in peer review. Following this research, we identified five principles for better peer review: Content Integrity, Content Ethics, Fairness, Usefulness, and Timeliness. For each of these principles, we have developed a set of recommendations to improve peer review standards.

In this article, we describe the role of peer review and how our five principles support that goal. This article is intended to continue the conversation about improving peer review standards and provide guidance to journal teams looking to improve their standards. It is accompanied by a detailed checklist, which could be used by journal teams to assess their current peer review standards.

URL : What does better peer review look like? Underlying principles and recommendations for better practice

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1222

OER: Lessons from the Field

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Authors : Roy Kaufman, Andrew Campana

As open educational resources (OER) expand in the US and elsewhere, attention should be paid to the challenges of implementing OER and solutions to those challenges. OER currently hold great promise for instructing students in K-12 (secondary) and primary school classrooms, because – unlike traditional curriculum materials – OER content can legally and freely be copied, used, adapted and reshared by anyone.

Notwithstanding the benefits, OER developers have not yet worked out certain structural issues that can make it difficult for teachers and students to use OER, impeding the adoption and broader acceptance of even the best designed OER curricula.

Links which disappear over time, device management, data and privacy concerns, quality, scope, sequence and alignment challenges, copyright issues and sustainability of OER curricula are all challenges that advocates of OER and curriculum designers often miss, ignore or avoid.

These challenges, however, can be overcome through thoughtful planning and partnerships, as has been done in the US with the successful Louisiana Guidebooks and other OER course materials.

URL : OER: Lessons from the Field

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.464

Crowdsourcing in medical research: concepts and applications

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Authors : Joseph D. Tucker, Suzanne Day, Weiming Tang, Barry Bayus

Crowdsourcing shifts medical research from a closed environment to an open collaboration between the public and researchers. We define crowdsourcing as an approach to problem solving which involves an organization having a large group attempt to solve a problem or part of a problem, then sharing solutions.

Crowdsourcing allows large groups of individuals to participate in medical research through innovation challenges, hackathons, and related activities. The purpose of this literature review is to examine the definition, concepts, and applications of crowdsourcing in medicine.

This multi-disciplinary review defines crowdsourcing for medicine, identifies conceptual antecedents (collective intelligence and open source models), and explores implications of the approach. Several critiques of crowdsourcing are also examined.

Although several crowdsourcing definitions exist, there are two essential elements: (1) having a large group of individuals, including those with skills and those without skills, propose potential solutions; (2) sharing solutions through implementation or open access materials.

The public can be a central force in contributing to formative, pre-clinical, and clinical research. A growing evidence base suggests that crowdsourcing in medicine can result in high-quality outcomes, broad community engagement, and more open science.

URL : Crowdsourcing in medical research: concepts and applications

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.6762

Knowledge and motivations of researchers publishing in presumed predatory journals: a survey

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Authors : Kelly D Cobey, Agnes Grudniewicz, Manoj M Lalu, Danielle B Rice, Hana Raffoul, David Moher

Objectives

To develop effective interventions to prevent publishing in presumed predatory journals (ie, journals that display deceptive characteristics, markers or data that cannot be verified), it is helpful to understand the motivations and experiences of those who have published in these journals.

Design

An online survey delivered to two sets of corresponding authors containing demographic information, and questions about researchers’ perceptions of publishing in the presumed predatory journal, type of article processing fees paid and the quality of peer review received. The survey also asked six open-ended items about researchers’ motivations and experiences.

Participants

Using Beall’s lists, we identified two groups of individuals who had published empirical articles in biomedical journals that were presumed to be predatory.

Results

Eighty-two authors partially responded (~14% response rate (11.4%[44/386] from the initial sample, 19.3%[38/197] from second sample) to our survey. The top three countries represented were India (n=21, 25.9%), USA (n=17, 21.0%) and Ethiopia (n=5, 6.2%).

Three participants (3.9%) thought the journal they published in was predatory at the time of article submission. The majority of participants first encountered the journal via an email invitation to submit an article (n=32, 41.0%), or through an online search to find a journal with relevant scope (n=22, 28.2%).

Most participants indicated their study received peer review (n=65, 83.3%) and that this was helpful and substantive (n=51, 79.7%). More than a third (n=32, 45.1%) indicated they did not pay fees to publish.

Conclusions

This work provides some evidence to inform policy to prevent future research from being published in predatory journals.

Our research suggests that common views about predatory journals (eg, no peer review) may not always be true, and that a grey zone between legitimate and presumed predatory journals exists. These results are based on self-reports and may be biased thus limiting their interpretation.

URL : Knowledge and motivations of researchers publishing in presumed predatory journals: a survey

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2018-026516

Do Authors Deposit on Time? Tracking Open Access Policy Compliance

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Authors : Drahomira Herrmannova, Nancy Pontika, Petr Knoth

Recent years have seen fast growth in the number of policies mandating Open Access (OA) to research outputs.

We conduct a large-scale analysis of over 800 thousand papers from repositories around the world published over a period of 5 years to investigate: a) if the time lag between the date of publication and date of deposit in a repository can be effectively tracked across thousands of repositories globally, and b) if introducing deposit deadlines is associated with a reduction of time from acceptance to open public availability of research outputs.

We show that after the introduction of the UK REF 2021 OA policy, this time lag has decreased significantly in the UK and that the policy introduction might have accelerated the UK’s move towards immediate OA compared to other countries.

This supports the argument for the inclusion of a time-limited deposit requirement in OA policies.

URL : http://oro.open.ac.uk/id/eprint/60478