EN

Automatically Annotating Articles Towards Opening and Reusing Transparent Peer Reviews

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Afshin Sadeghi, Sarven Capadisli, Johannes Wilm, Christoph Lange, Philipp Mayr

An increasing number of scientific publications are created in open and transparent peer review models: a submission is published first, and then reviewers are invited, or a submission is reviewed in a closed environment but then these reviews are published with the final article, or combinations of these.

Reasons for open peer review include giving better credit to reviewers and enabling readers to better appraise the quality of a publication. In most cases, the full, unstructured text of an open review is published next to the full, unstructured text of the article reviewed.

This approach prevents human readers from getting a quick impression of the quality of parts of an article, and it does not easily support secondary exploitation, e.g., for scientometrics on reviews.

While document formats have been proposed for publishing structured articles including reviews, integrated tool support for entire open peer review workflows resulting in such documents is still scarce.

We present AR-Annotator, the Automatic Article and Review Annotator which employs a semantic information model of an article and its reviews, using semantic markup and unique identifiers for all entities of interest.

The fine-grained article structure is not only exposed to authors and reviewers but also preserved in the published version. We publish articles and their reviews in a Linked Data representation and thus maximize their reusability by third-party applications.

We demonstrate this reusability by running quality-related queries against the structured representation of articles and their reviews.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.01027

FR

Valoriser les publications d’un laboratoire universitaire dans l’environnement de la science ouverte : Retour d’expérience de la collection GERiiCO sur HAL

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteurs/Authors : Joachim Schöpfel, Hélène Prost, Amel Fraisse, Stéphane Chaudiron

La question de la diffusion des résultats de la recherche et, en particulier, le libre accès aux publications des chercheurs est au cœur de la politique pour la science ouverte. Comment peut se positionner un laboratoire de recherche universitaire ? Comment peut se traduire la politique pour la science ouverte sur le terrain d’un campus universitaire ?

Sous forme d’un retour d’expérience, notre étude analyse la mise en place de la collection du laboratoire GERiiCO de l’Université de Lille sur l’archive ouverte nationale HAL.

L’objectif de l’initiative est double : d’une part, assurer une visibilité maximale et un impact au-delà de la communauté disciplinaire, à travers des médias sociaux et le référencement des moteurs de recherche ; d’autre part, contribuer à l’évaluation de la production scientifique du laboratoire.

Nous présentons les ressources mobilisées et les actions mises en oeuvre, analysons les résultats en termes de dépôts, d’usage et de services, et évoquons les facteurs de succès, les problèmes rencontrés et quelques perspectives pour le futur développement.

En particulier, nous comparons le contenu de la collection HAL avec les résultats de la base de données scientométrique d’Elsevier (Scopus) et du moteur de recherche Google Scholar, et nous montrons le potentiel de la collection pour visualiser les relations au sein du laboratoire (analyse de réseaux) et son rayonnement international.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01940352

EN

What about ODTs? Are they grey?

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Joachim Schöpfel, Snjezana Cirkovic, Hélène Prost

The term of grey literature is sometimes applied for older material and special collections, especially in the field of digitization projects of scientific heritage.

The following paper will analyse this term of “grey scientific heritage” and, based on empirical and conceptual elements, contribute to a better understanding of grey literature. Special attention will be paid on older theses and dissertations (OTDs), as a main part of scientific heritage especially from universities.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01916964

FR

Analyse de l’offre des objets pédagogiques numériques dans les archives ouvertes

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Mohamed Ben Romdhane, Rachid Zghibi

Ce  travail de  recherche  s’inscrit dans  le  cadre  d’une  étude exploratoire relative à l’analyse de  l’offre des objets pédagogiques dans les  archives  ouvertes  à  l’échelle internationale en nous basant sur le répertoire  OpenDOAR  comme source  d’information  principale.  Parmi les 545 dépôts recensés, 177 ont été sélectionnés formant, ainsi, le corpus de l’étude.

Pour l’analyse du contenu des dépôts retenus, nous nous sommes fondés sur un ensemble des critères tels que l’origine géographique, le logiciel utilisé, la ou les langue(s) des ressources et de l’interface, le schéma des métadonnées adopté, le nombre d’objets pédagogiques, les licences et droits d’auteurs, etc.  Les résultats de cette étude montrent que cette offre reste.

URL : https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01944237

EN

Biomedical authors’ awareness of publication ethics: an international survey

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Sara Schroter, Jason Roberts, Elizabeth Loder, Donald B Penzien, Sarah Mahadeo, Timothy T Houle

Objective

The extent to which biomedical authors have received training in publication ethics, and their attitudes and opinions about the ethical aspects of specific behaviours, have been understudied. We sought to characterise the knowledge and attitudes of biomedical authors about common issues in publication ethics.

Design

Cross-sectional online survey.

Setting and participants

Corresponding authors of research submissions to 20 journals.

Main outcome measure(s)

Perceived level of unethical behaviour (rated 0 to 10) presented in five vignettes containing key variables that were experimentally manipulated on entry to the survey and perceived level of knowledge of seven ethical topics related to publishing (prior publication, author omission, self-plagiarism, honorary authorship, conflicts of interest, image manipulation and plagiarism).

Results

4043/10 582 (38%) researchers responded. Respondents worked in 100 countries and reported varying levels of publishing experience. 67% (n=2700) had received some publication ethics training from a mentor, 41% (n=1677) a partial course, 28% (n=1130) a full course and 55% (n=2206) an online course; only a small proportion rated training received as excellent.

There was a full range (0 to 10 points) in ratings of the extent of unethical behaviour within each vignette, illustrating a broad range of opinion about the ethical acceptability of the behaviours evaluated, but these opinions were little altered by the context in which it occurred.

Participants reported substantial variability in their perceived knowledge of seven publication ethics topics; one-third perceived their knowledge to be less than ‘some knowledge’ for the sum of the seven ethical topics and only 9% perceived ‘substantial knowledge’ of all topics.

Conclusions

We found a large degree of variability in espoused training and perceived knowledge, and variability in views about how ethical or unethical scenarios were. Ethical standards need to be better articulated and taught to improve consistency of training across institutions and countries.

URL : Biomedical authors’ awareness of publication ethics: an international survey

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2017-021282

EN

Journals that Rise from the Fourth Quartile to the First Quartile in Six Years or Less: Mechanisms of Change and the Role of Journal Self-Citations

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Juan Miguel Campanario

Journal self-citations may be increased artificially to inflate a journal’s scientometric indicators. The aim of this study was to identify possible mechanisms of change in a cohort of journals that rose from the fourth (Q4) to the first quartile (Q1) over six years or less in Journal Citation Reports (JCR), and the role of journal self-citations in these changes.

A total of 51 different journals sampled from all JCR Science Citation Index (SCI) subject categories improved their rank position from Q4 in 2009 to Q1 in any year from 2010 to 2015. I identified changes in the numerator or denominator of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) that were involved in each year-to-year transition.

The main mechanism of change was the increase in the number of citations used to compute the JIF. The effect of journal self-citations in the increase of the JIF was studied. The main conclusion is that there was no evidence of widespread JIF manipulation through the overuse of journal self-citations.

URL : Journals that Rise from the Fourth Quartile to the First Quartile in Six Years or Less: Mechanisms of Change and the Role of Journal Self-Citations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications6040047

EN

Confused about copyright? Assessing Researchers’ Comprehension of Copyright Transfer Agreements

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors: Alexandra Kohn, Jessica Lange

INTRODUCTION

Academic authors’ confusion about copyright and publisher policy is often cited as a challenge to their effective sharing of their own published research, from having a chilling effect on selfarchiving in institutional and subject repositories, to leading to the posting of versions of articles on social networking sites in contravention of publisher policy and beyond.

This study seeks to determine the extent to which authors understand the terms of these policies as expressed in publishers’ copyright transfer agreements (CTAs), taking into account such factors as the authors’ disciplines and publishing experience, as well as the wording and structure of these agreements.

METHODS

We distributed an online survey experiment to corresponding authors of academic research articles indexed in the Scopus database. Participants were randomly assigned to read one of two copyright transfer agreements and were subsequently asked to answer a series of questions about these agreements to determine their level of comprehension.

The survey was sent to 3,154 participants, with 122 responding, representing a 4% response rate. Basic demographic information as well as information about participants’ previous publishing experience was also collected. We analyzed the survey data using Ordinary Least Squared (OLS) regressions and probit regressions.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Participants demonstrated a low rate of understanding of the terms of the CTAs they were asked to read. Participants averaged a score of 33% on the survey, indicating a low comprehension level of author rights.

This figure did not vary significantly, regardless of the respondents’ discipline, time in academia, level of experience with publishing, or whether or not they had published previously with the publisher whose CTA they were administered. Results also indicated that participants did equally poorly on the survey regardless of which of the two CTAs they received.

However, academic authors do appear to have a greater chance of understanding a CTA when a specific activity is explicitly outlined in the text of the agreement.

URL : Confused about copyright? Assessing Researchers’ Comprehension of Copyright Transfer Agreements

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2253