Trust in Scholarly Communications and Infrastructure: Indigenous Data Sovereignty

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Author : Katharina Ruckstuhl

Many Indigenous people have a deep mistrust of research, with some describing research as one of the “dirtiest” words in Indigenous language. The histories and experiences behind such mistrust are long and painful.

Given what has been perceived as Indigenous objectification at the hands of largely Anglo-European others for research from which they fail to benefit, many communities now refuse research unless it is undertaken under certain, Indigenous-defined circumstances.

Such refusal is a move away from others’ purposes and a move towards autonomy and self-determination. For some, this is a statement of sovereignty and it applies to all areas of endeavour, including the new frontiers of research and the structures that support them, such as datification of knowledge.

This article examines data sovereignty from the perspective of Indigenous peoples. While data sovereignty has become a ubiquitous concern, Indigenous data sovereignty arises from contexts specific to Indigenous peoples.

The focus of this article is to provide a brief overview of recent data sovereignty developments, along with the context that lies behind these activities. Through this examination, implications for trust in scholarly communications will be discussed.

URL : Trust in Scholarly Communications and Infrastructure: Indigenous Data Sovereignty

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.752336

Characteristics of retracted editorial articles in the biomedical literature

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Author : Bakthavachalam Elango

The main purpose of this short communication is to identify and analyze retracted editorials in the biomedical literature. Twenty-five of the 33 editorials are chosen for further analysis. All of the editorials were published as commentaries and concise reviews between 1998 and 2021.

Due to plagiarism and data-related issues, the majority of the editorial articles were retracted. Alarmingly, one-fifth of the editorials were funded by external agencies, with the USA leading the list of retracted editorials.

The average time between the publication of the editorials and their retraction is 2.48 years, and two editorials were retracted with the longest durations; both were written by the same author.

The conclusion is that, at the very least, editorial articles should be devoid of research/scientific misconduct.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04263-9

Édition critique numérique avec le logiciel Ekdosis pour LuaLaTeX. L’exemple des fragments latins d’atellanes

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Autrice : Estelle Debouy

Les avantages d’une édition numérique ne sont plus à démontrer : non seulement le texte lui-même peut être enrichi de commentaires, de traductions multiples, d’annotations grammaticales, métriques, etc., mais encore, grâce à l’encodage XML-TEI, le texte et son apparat peuvent être transformés en une base de données complète consultable par le lecteur en fonction de ses besoins.

La TEI fournit des éléments normalisés très précis pour la description des sources manuscrites. Cependant, les apparats construits en XML-TEI sont moins destinés à une consultation par l’homme qu’à une analyse réalisée par la machine.

À ce titre, le logiciel Ekdosis développé par Robert Alessi est un atout précieux pour le philologue qui se lance dans l’édition critique d’un texte ancien : il lui permet en effet de saisir sous LaTeX tous les éléments constitutifs de l’édition (variantes, sources, traductions, commentaires) et de demander une sortie aussi bien vers un fichier PDF que vers un fichier XML-TEI qui pourra être l’objet de requêtes.

Ainsi, Ekdosis apparaît comme un outil qui combine deux impératifs : celui de produire une édition imprimée s’inscrivant dans une longue tradition philologique et celui de fournir ce que Donald J. Mastronarde et Richard J. Tarrant ont appelé « actionable texts for use in digital research ».

L’objet de cet article est d’exposer, à partir d’un exemple commenté tiré de mon édition des atellanes, la méthode que j’ai suivie pour saisir avec Ekdosis les éléments constitutifs d’une édition critique numérique.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/revuehn.2509

Making the most of world talent for science? The Nobel Prize and Fields Medal experience

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Author  : Juan Gabriel Rodríguez

Opportunities in science largely affect the accumulation of scientific knowledge and, therefore, technological change. However, there is little evidence of how much of people’s talent is actually wasted.

Here we focus on scientists with the highest performance, the recipients of the Nobel Prize and Fields Medal. We found that the average age of scientists at the time of the breakthrough was higher for researchers from less developed countries.

Moreover, individual opportunities in the world were extremely unequal by country of birth, gender significantly conditioned any participation in research, and the probability of becoming a top researcher more than doubled for individuals with parents belonging to the most favoured occupational categories.

Thus, inequality of opportunity in science at the highest level was higher than in sports excellence (Olympic medals) and educational attainment. These findings would not be so negative if opportunities in science at the highest level had increased over time.

Contrary to the expectations, our results show that opportunities in science, in contrast with humanities, have stagnated.

URL : Making the most of world talent for science? The Nobel Prize and Fields Medal experience

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04236-y

Library funding for open access at KU Leuven

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Authors : Demmy Verbeke, Laura Mesotten

As main buyers of scholarly literature, research libraries have always provided essential economic support for sustaining the market of academic publishing. With the switch to open access (OA), libraries are now faced with transitioning this support from the demand (subscriptions) to the supply (publications) side.

The way in which this is currently done, in general, risks strengthening the preponderance of the for-profit approach to scholarly communication. We therefore believe that it is essential to apply library budgets to foster a greater diversity.

That is exactly the purpose of the Fund for Fair Open Access, set up by KU Leuven Libraries in 2018, which is exclusively devoted to stimulating the development of non-profit and community-led initiatives.

This is achieved by library memberships to sustain open scholarship infrastructure, by supporting diamond OA programmes and by subsidizing OA books published by Leuven University Press.

In this article, we will demonstrate the accomplished successes of the fund and share some insights we have gathered along the way, such as our decision to cease financing article processing charges, even in a Fair OA business model.

URL : Library funding for open access at KU Leuven

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.565

The Uptake and Impact of a Label for Peer-Reviewed Books

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Authors : Eline Vandewalle, Raf Guns, Tim C. E. Engels

This article presents an analysis of the uptake of the GPRC label (Guaranteed Peer Reviewed Content label) since its introduction in 2010 until 2019. GPRC is a label for books that have been peer reviewed introduced by the Flemish publishers association.

The GPRC label allows locally published scholarly books to be included in the regional database for the Social Sciences and Humanities which is used in the Flemish performance-based research funding system. Ten years after the start of the GPRC label, this is the first systematic analysis of the uptake of the label.

We use a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. Our two main data sources are the Flemish regional database for the Social Sciences and Humanities, which currently includes 2,580 GPRC-labeled publications, and three interviews with experts on the GPRC label. Firstly, we study the importance of the label in the Flemish performance-based research funding system.

Secondly, we analyse the label in terms of its possible effect on multilingualism and the local or international orientation of publications. Thirdly, we analyse to what extent the label has been used by the different disciplines.

Lastly, we discuss the potential implications of the label for the peer review process among book publishers. We find that the GPRC label is of limited importance to the Flemish performance-based research funding system.

However, we also conclude that the label has a specific use for locally oriented book publications and in particular for the discipline Law. Furthermore, by requiring publishers to adhere to a formalized peer review procedure, the label affects the peer review practices of local publishers because not all book publishers were using a formal system of peer review before the introduction of the label and even at those publishers who already practiced peer review, the label may have required the publishers to make these procedures more uniform.

URL : The Uptake and Impact of a Label for Peer-Reviewed Books

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.746452

Perspectives on Open Science and The Future of Scholarly Communication: Internet Trackers and Algorithmic Persuasion

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Authors : Tiberius Ignat, Paul Ayris, Beatrice Gini, Olga Stepankova, Deniz Özdemir, Damla Bal, Yordanka Deyanov

The current digital content industry is heavily oriented towards building platforms that track users’ behaviour and seek to convince them to stay longer and come back sooner onto the platform. Similarly, authors are incentivised to publish more and to become champions of dissemination.

Arguably, these incentive systems are built around public reputation supported by a system of metrics, hard to be assessed. Generally, the digital content industry is permeable to non-human contributors (algorithms that are able to generate content and reactions), anonymity and identity fraud. It is pertinent to present a perspective paper about early signs of track and persuasion in scholarly communication.

Building our views, we have run a pilot study to determine the opportunity for conducting research about the use of “track and persuade” technologies in scholarly communication. We collected observations on a sample of 148 relevant websites and we interviewed 15 that are experts related to the field.

Through this work, we tried to identify 1) the essential questions that could inspire proper research, 2) good practices to be recommended for future research, and 3) whether citizen science is a suitable approach to further research in this field.

The findings could contribute to determining a broader solution for building trust and infrastructure in scholarly communication. The principles of Open Science will be used as a framework to see if they offer insights into this work going forward.

URL : Perspectives on Open Science and The Future of Scholarly Communication: Internet Trackers and Algorithmic Persuasion

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.748095