Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Communication

Scaling Small; Or How to Envision New Relationalities for Knowledge Production

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Authors: Janneke Adema, Samuel A. Moore

Within the field of open access (OA) publishing, community-led publishing projects are experimenting increasingly with new forms of collaboration and organisation. They do so by focusing on setting up horizontal alliances between independent projects within a certain sector (e.g., scholar-led presses), or vertically across sectors with other not-for-profit organisations (e.g., through collaborations with libraries, universities, and funders), in order to create multi-stakeholder ecologies within scholarly publishing.

Yet at the same time, imaginaries for future modes of OA knowledge production are still controlled through demands for ‘scalability’ and ‘sustainability’, which are both seen as preconditions for scholarly communication models and practices to succeed and to be efficient. But they are also prerequi­sites to receive funding for publishing projects or infrastructure development.

The scalability of open models is perceived as essential to compete in a landscape dominated by a handful of major corporate players.Drawing on our work with the Radical Open Access Collective, the ScholarLed consortium, and the Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Mono­graphs (COPIM) project, this article outlines an alternative organisational prin­ciple for governing community-led publishing projects based on mutual reliance, care, and other forms of commoning.

Termed ‘scaling small’, this principle eschews standard approaches to organisational growth that tend to flatten community diversity through economies of scale. Instead, it puts forward the idea that scale can be nurtured through intentional collaborations between community-driven pro­jects that promote a bibliodiverse ecosystem while providing resilience through resource sharing and other kinds of collaboration.

Following Anna Tsing’s recom­mendations to keep in mind how reimagining our knowledge practices requires we pay particular attention to articulations between the scalable and the nonscalable (Tsing, 2012), what is needed to enable this is, first and foremost, a rethinking of existing systems and infrastructures and how they currently function – systems that have historically developed and been continuously remade to encourage fur­ther scalability.

We further explore the possibilities of scaling small with particular reference to Anna Tsing’s work on the ‘latent commons’ and Massimo De Angelis’ discussion of ‘boundary commoning’, examining how these concepts are on display within the Radical Open Access Collective, ScholarLed and the COPIM project.

As we will argue, reimagining the relations within publishing beyond a mere calcula­tive logic, i.e., one that is focused on assessing the sustainability of alternative models, is essential in not-for-profit OA publishing environments, particularly if we want new forms of collaboration to arise and to redefine the future of scholarly publishing in communal settings.

URL : Scaling Small; Or How to Envision New Relationalities for Knowledge Production

DOI : https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.918

The case for an inclusive scholarly communication infrastructure for social sciences and humanities

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Authors : Maciej Maryl, Marta Błaszczyńska, Agnieszka Szulińska, Paweł Rams

This article presents a vision for a scholarly communication research infrastructure for social sciences and humanities (SSH). The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the pressing need to access research outputs without the traditional economic and temporal barriers.

This article explores the current scholarly communication landscape, assessing the reasons for the slower uptake of open access in SSH research. The authors discuss such frontiers as commercial interests, sources of academic prestige and discipline-specific genres.

This article defines and discusses the key areas in which a research infrastructure can play a vital role in making open scholarly communication a reality in SSH: (1) providing a federated and easy access to scattered SSH outputs; (2) supporting publication and dissemination of discipline-specific genres (e.g. monographs, critical editions); (3) providing help with evaluation and quality assurance practices in SSH; (4) enabling scholarly work in national languages, which is significant for local communities; (5) being governed by researchers and for researchers as a crucial factor for productive, useful and accessible services; (6) lastly, considering the needs of other stakeholders involved in scholarly communication, such as publishers, libraries, media, non-profit organisations, and companies.

They conclude that a scholarly-driven, inclusive, dedicated infrastructure for the European Research Area is needed in order to advance open science in SSH and to address the issues tackled by SSH researchers at a structural and systemic level.

URL : The case for an inclusive scholarly communication infrastructure for social sciences and humanities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.26545.1

Decolonizing Scholarly Communications through Bibliodiversity

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Authors : Shearer Kathleen, Becerril-García Arianna

Diversity is an important characteristic of any healthy ecosystem. In the field of scholarly communications, diversity in services and platforms, funding mechanisms and evaluation measures will allow the ecosystem to accommodate the different workflows, languages, publication outputs and research topics that support the needs of different research communities.

Diversity also reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, which leads to monopolization and high prices. Yet this ‘bibliodiversity’ is undermined by the fact that researchers around the world are evaluated according to journal-based citation measures, which have become the major currency of academic research.

Journals seek to maximize their bibliometric measures by adopting editorial policies that increase citation counts, resulting in the predominance of Northern/Western research priorities and perspectives in the literature, and an increasing marginalization of research topics of more narrow or local nature.

This contribution examines the distinctive, non-commercial approach to open access (OA) found in Latin America and reflects on how greater diversity in OA infrastructures helps to address inequalities in global knowledge production as well as knowledge access.

The authors argue that bibliodiversity, rather than adoption of standardized models of OA, is central to the development of a more equitable system of knowledge production.

URL : Decolonizing Scholarly Communications through Bibliodiversity

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4423996

How to achieve short-term green open access and long-term radical reform of scholarly communication. The BitViews Project as a test case

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Author : Manfredi La Manna

The Open Access movement has reached adulthood, but not maturity: fewer than one-third of newly-published peer-reviewed articles are available open access (OA) and progress widening OA has stalled.

Scores of uncoordinated initiatives try to achieve universal OA, but academic journal publishing is still dominated by a handful of powerful commercial publishers. Individual authors show little interest in OA and indeed have to be mandated (see the UK REF or Plan S) to release their research on OA.

The BitViews Project is a low-cost, no-risk, high-return initiative to turn all academic journals «green» through a combination of blockchain technology, provision of appropriate incentives to authors, and a new crowdfunding mechanism.

The project is predicated on the active participation of individual libraries taking direct action. The paper will provide an interim report on the progress of the project and an account of how libraries and their various associations (both in the global South and in the global North) have reacted to the project.

The concluding section of the paper sketches a possible direction for academic journal publishing in the near future. Huge savings and increased efficiency can flow to the academy from finally dissolving its current one-sided contract with publishers and from reclaiming control of the peer-review process.

Practical and incentive-based suggestions are proposed for the transition from publisher-owned to academy-owned peer review.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02544856

Metascience as a scientific social movement

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Authors : David Peterson, Aaron Panofsky

Emerging out of the “reproducibility crisis” in science, metascientists have become central players in debates about research integrity, scholarly communication, and science policy. The goal of this article is to introduce metascience to STS scholars, detail the scientific ideology that is apparent in its articles, strategy statements, and research projects, and discuss its institutional and intellectual future.

Put simply, metascience is a scientific social movement that seeks to use the tools of science- especially, quantification and experimentation- to diagnose problems in research practice and improve efficiency.

It draws together data scientists, experimental and statistical methodologists, and open science activists into a project with both intellectual and policy dimensions. Metascientists have been remarkably successful at winning grants, motivating news coverage, and changing policies at science agencies, journals, and universities.

Moreover, metascience represents the apotheosis of several trends in research practice, scientific communication, and science governance including increased attention to methodological and statistical criticism of scientific practice, the promotion of “open science” by science funders and journals, the growing importance of both preprint and data repositories for scientific communication, and the new prominence of data scientists as research makes a turn toward Big Science.

URL : Metascience as a scientific social movement

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/4dsqa

The Enlightenment of Peer Review : How Academic Librarians Can Utilize Open Peer Review Methods to Advance Information Literacy

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Author : Sandra Moore

In today’s world of digital scholarly publishing, it is increasingly clear that movements such as open access (OA), Open Science, and open peer review (OPR) are increasingly impactful and gaining momentum.

The shift towards openness in the academy reveals a transformation of traditional structures that compose scholarly communication as well as changing attitudes about the nature of authority and access within these systems.

These new directions in the scholarly information landscape have created a need for academic librarians to realign roles and respond in ways that build resiliency in an era of rapid change.

Recognizing that many core elements of scholarly communication are powerful tools for teaching students about information literacy can lead to transformative instructional strategies.

This paper explores how academic librarians can leverage the innovative traits of OPR to advance information literacy through experiential student learning opportunities grounded in the ACRL (2016) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.

URL : The Enlightenment of Peer Review : How Academic Librarians Can Utilize Open Peer Review Methods to Advance Information Literacy

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5206/elip.v3i1.8618

Data journals: incentivizing data access and documentation within the scholarly communication system

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Authors : William H. Walters

Data journals provide strong incentives for data creators to verify, document and disseminate their data. They also bring data access and documentation into the mainstream of scholarly communication, rewarding data creators through existing mechanisms of peer-reviewed publication and citation tracking.

These same advantages are not generally associated with data repositories, or with conventional journals’ data-sharing mandates. This article describes the unique advantages of data journals. It also examines the data journal landscape, presenting the characteristics of 13 data journals in the fields of biology, environmental science, chemistry, medicine and health sciences.

These journals vary considerably in size, scope, publisher characteristics, length of data reports, data hosting policies, time from submission to first decision, article processing charges, bibliographic index coverage and citation impact. They are similar, however, in their peer review criteria, their open access license terms and the characteristics of their editorial boards.

URL : Data journals: incentivizing data access and documentation within the scholarly communication system

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.510