How are academic libraries in Spanish-speaking Latin America responding to new models of scholarly communication and predatory publishing?

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Author : Jairo Buitrago Ciro

The topic of predatory publishing and ways to combat it is garnering considerable attention in many parts of the developed world, where academic librarians are emerging as leaders in this regard. However, less is known about how this phenomenon is playing out in developing regions, including Spanish-speaking Latin America.

This study presents the results of a survey of 104 academic librarians in this region, along with follow-up interviews with seven respondents. The findings reveal that scholarly publishing literacy in general, and predatory publishing in particular, currently has low visibility in this part of the world, although there is growing recognition of and increasing concern about the issue.

Although there is some debate about whether scholarly publishing literacy should be the sole responsibility of the library, many participants agree that the library has a role to play. Moreover, while most of the librarians who participated perceive that they have a solid knowledge of open access, they are less confident in their understanding of predatory practices and are seeking to increase their skills and knowledge in this regard to better support researchers at their institutions.

To address this shortcoming, academic librarians in the region have expressed an interest in receiving training and in participating in international collaborations with other libraries that have already developed resources or programming in this area.

URL : How are academic libraries in Spanish-speaking Latin America responding to new models of scholarly communication and predatory publishing?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006211016533

Who Guards the Gates? Feminist Methods of Scholarly Publishing

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Authors : Laura Wildemann Kane, Amanda Licastro, Danica Savonick

As demonstrated by recent studies on bias in academic publishing, the traditional tiered system of peer-reviewed journals reproduces social hierarchies in terms of race, class, and gender.

Often, marginalized voices and methods are dismissed as less important, less rigorous, or too narrowly focused. These dismissals perpetuate the myths that only certain scholarship constitutes legitimate knowledge and only certain scholars can count as “knowers.”

In this essay, we explore how digital publishing can intervene in these processes and serve as a form of feminist activism. We take as our focus the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP), founded in 2011 to expand the perspectives and standpoints that count as scholarly knowledge production and provide graduate students with editorial experience.

As three long-standing members of the journal’s editorial collective, we have firsthand knowledge of how JITP’s publishing methods were developed through debate, struggle, and dialogue, including many missteps and failures along the way.

We argue that JITP‘s collaborative knowledge practices of inclusive editorial governance, open access, and open peer review are fundamentally feminist, as they diversify scholarly voices and increase access to the material channels in and through which knowledge circulates.

At stake in our reflective analysis is a broader claim that extends beyond the parameters of our work with one particular journal: that feminist digital publishing methods can expand what counts as knowledge production.

URL : Who Guards the Gates? Feminist Methods of Scholarly Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.21428/f1f23564.49e99379

Exploring the merits of research performance measures that comply with the San FranciscoDeclaration on Research Assessment and strategies to overcome barriers of adoption: qualitative interviews with administrators and researchers

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Authors : Himani Boury, Mathieu Albert, Robert H. C. Chen, James C. L. Chow, Ralph DaCosta, Michael M. Hoffman, Behrang Keshavarz, Pia Kontos, Mary Pat McAndrews, Stephanie Protze, Anna R. Gagliardi

Background

In prior research, we identified and prioritized ten measures to assess research performance that comply with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, a principle adopted worldwide that discourages metrics-based assessment.

Given the shift away from assessment based on Journal Impact Factor, we explored potential barriers to implementing and adopting the prioritized measures.

Methods

We identified administrators and researchers across six research institutes, conducted telephone interviews with consenting participants, and used qualitative description and inductive content analysis to derive themes.

Results

We interviewed 18 participants: 6 administrators (research institute business managers and directors) and 12 researchers (7 on appointment committees) who varied by career stage (2 early, 5 mid, 5 late). Participants appreciated that the measures were similar to those currently in use, comprehensive, relevant across disciplines, and generated using a rigorous process.

They also said the reporting template was easy to understand and use. In contrast, a few administrators thought the measures were not relevant across disciplines. A few participants said it would be time-consuming and difficult to prepare narratives when reporting the measures, and several thought that it would be difficult to objectively evaluate researchers from a different discipline without considerable effort to read their work.

Strategies viewed as necessary to overcome barriers and support implementation of the measures included high-level endorsement of the measures, an official launch accompanied by a multi-pronged communication strategy, training for both researchers and evaluators, administrative support or automated reporting for researchers, guidance for evaluators, and sharing of approaches across research institutes.

Conclusions

While participants identified many strengths of the measures, they also identified a few limitations and offered corresponding strategies to address the barriers that we will apply at our organization. Ongoing work is needed to develop a framework to help evaluators translate the measures into an overall assessment.

Given little prior research that identified research assessment measures and strategies to support adoption of those measures, this research may be of interest to other organizations that assess the quality and impact of research.

URL : Exploring the merits of research performance measures that comply with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment and strategies to overcome barriers of adoption: qualitative interviews with administrators and researchers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-023-01001-w

Fast, Furious and Dubious? MDPI and the Depth of Peer Review Reports

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Authors : Abdelghani Maddi, Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri

Peer review is a central component of scholarly communication as it brings trust and quality control for scientific knowledge. One of its goals is to improve the quality of manuscripts and prevent the publication of work resulting from dubious or misconduct practices.

In a context marked by a massification of scientific production, the reign of Publish or Perish rule and the acceleration of research, journals are leaving less and less time to reviewers to produce their reports. It is therefore is crucial to study whether these regulations have an impact on the length of reviewer reports.

Here, we address the example of MDPI, a Swiss Open Access publisher, depicted as a Grey Publisher and well known for its short deadlines, by analyzing the depth of its reviewer reports and its counterparts. For this, we used Publons data with 61,197 distinct publications reviewed by 86,628 reviewers.

Our results show that, despite the short deadlines, when they accept to review a manuscript, reviewers assume their responsibility and do their job in the same way regardless of the publisher, and write on average the same number of words.

Our results suggest that, even if MDPI’s editorial practices may be questionable, as long as peer review is assured by researchers themselves, publications are evaluated similarly.

URL : Fast, Furious and Dubious? MDPI and the Depth of Peer Review Reports

DOI : https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-3027724/v1

CORE: A Global Aggregation Service for Open Access Papers

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Authors : Petr Knoth, Drahomira Herrmannova, Matteo Cancellieri, Lucas Anastasiou, Nancy Pontika, Samuel Pearce, Bikash Gyawali, David Pride

This paper introduces CORE, a widely used scholarly service, which provides access to the world’s largest collection of open access research publications, acquired from a global network of repositories and journals.

CORE was created with the goal of enabling text and data mining of scientific literature and thus supporting scientific discovery, but it is now used in a wide range of use cases within higher education, industry, not-for-profit organisations, as well as by the general public.

Through the provided services, CORE powers innovative use cases, such as plagiarism detection, in market-leading third-party organisations. CORE has played a pivotal role in the global move towards universal open access by making scientific knowledge more easily and freely discoverable.

In this paper, we describe CORE’s continuously growing dataset and the motivation behind its creation, present the challenges associated with systematically gathering research papers from thousands of data providers worldwide at scale, and introduce the novel solutions that were developed to overcome these challenges.

The paper then provides an in-depth discussion of the services and tools built on top of the aggregated data and finally examines several use cases that have leveraged the CORE dataset and services.

URL : CORE: A Global Aggregation Service for Open Access Papers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02208-w

The Platformisation of Scholarly Information and How to Fight It

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Author : Lai Ma

The commercial control of academic publishing and research infrastructure by a few oligopolistic companies has crippled the development of open access movement and interfered with the ethical principles of information access and privacy.

In recent years, vertical integration of publishers and other service providers throughout the research cycle has led to platformisation, characterized by datafication and commodification similar to practices on social media platforms. Scholarly publications are treated as user-generated contents for data tracking and surveillance, resulting in profitable data products and services for research assessment, benchmarking and reporting.

Meanwhile, the bibliodiversity and equal open access are denied by the dominant gold open access model and the privacy of researchers is being compromised by spyware embedded in research infrastructure.

This article proposes four actions to fight the platformisation of scholarly information after a brief overview of the market of academic journals and research assessments and their implications for bibliodiversity, information access, and privacy: (1) Educate researchers about commercial publishers and APCs; (2) Allocate library budget to support scholar-led and library publishing; (3) Engage in the development of public research infrastructures and copyright reform; and (4) Advocate for research assessment reforms.

URL : The Platformisation of Scholarly Information and How to Fight It

DOI : https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.13561

Modèles et outils pour la publication de métadonnées d’archives géographiques et de leurs données dérivées

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Auteur.ices/Authors : Hersent Melvin, Abadie Nathalie, Duménieu Bertrand, Perret Julien

L’interopérabilité des données dans un projet pluridisciplinaire est primordiale. Prenant l’exemple d’un projet de recherche en histoire spatiale, nous comparerons dans un premier temps les standards et vocabulaires à notre disposition pour décrire des données géographiques et des documents d’archives.

Nous proposons ensuite un alignement entre les standards retenus : l’ISO 19115 et RiC-O. Enfin, nous proposons une architecture de microservices pour la saisie, le stockage, la publication sur le Web et l’interrogation unifiée des métadonnées de nos sources.

URL : Modèles et outils pour la publication de métadonnées d’archives géographiques et de leurs données dérivées

Original location : https://hal.science/hal-04110787