Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Publishing

The Essence and Transcendence of Scientific Publishing

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Authors : José L. Medina-Franco, Edgar López-López

Disseminating the results of scientific research in various forms (typically, peer-reviewed papers, conferences, and so on) nurtures and shapes the advancement of science. Scientific publishing is highly attached to the four well-known Mertonian norms and values that comprise the character or ethos of modern science, namely: communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism (Merton, 1973).

This is particularly true for publications that follow a rigorous peer-review and editorial process. Alongside dissemination of science that arguably is the primary reason for scientific publishing, it has other scientific, academic, and professional benefits on the large.

However, the pressure of publishing as a documented proof of productivity in academic and other professional settings has led to the “publish or perish’ aphorism (Neill, 2008; Publish or perish, 2010). In many cases, such paradigms obscure or alter the actual reasons and motivations for publishing, making it a “survival mechanism.”

This manuscript aims to share the authors’ opinions and revisit the right and fundamental reasons for scientific publishing. This Opinion is mainly directed to the students and young researchers that sometimes struggle at the beginning to organize, plan, and develop a manuscript.

The younger generations (and other more advanced or senior researchers) should consider scientific publishing as more than a survival mechanism to not perish, because such a focused motivation is counterproductive and burdens these initial steps.

Here, we highlight several other valid and collateral reasons for publishing beyond academic survival. Other important aspects of scientific publishing are not addressed in detail here, such as peer-review, the cost associated with open access, metrics to evaluate and rank the journals’ quality, and ethics in publishing. Instead, they are mentioned and discussed in the context of the primary goals and collateral benefits of publishing.

URL : The Essence and Transcendence of Scientific Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.822453

Examining linguistic shifts between preprints and publications

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Authors : David N. Nicholson, Vincent Rubinetti, Dongbo Hu, Marvin Thielk, Lawrence E. Hunter, Casey S. Greene

Preprints allow researchers to make their findings available to the scientific community before they have undergone peer review. Studies on preprints within bioRxiv have been largely focused on article metadata and how often these preprints are downloaded, cited, published, and discussed online.

A missing element that has yet to be examined is the language contained within the bioRxiv preprint repository. We sought to compare and contrast linguistic features within bioRxiv preprints to published biomedical text as a whole as this is an excellent opportunity to examine how peer review changes these documents.

The most prevalent features that changed appear to be associated with typesetting and mentions of supporting information sections or additional files. In addition to text comparison, we created document embeddings derived from a preprint-trained word2vec model.

We found that these embeddings are able to parse out different scientific approaches and concepts, link unannotated preprint–peer-reviewed article pairs, and identify journals that publish linguistically similar papers to a given preprint.

We also used these embeddings to examine factors associated with the time elapsed between the posting of a first preprint and the appearance of a peer-reviewed publication. We found that preprints with more versions posted and more textual changes took longer to publish.

Lastly, we constructed a web application (https://greenelab.github.io/preprint-similarity-search/) that allows users to identify which journals and articles that are most linguistically similar to a bioRxiv or medRxiv preprint as well as observe where the preprint would be positioned within a published article landscape.

URL : Examining linguistic shifts between preprints and publications

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001470

More journal articles and fewer books: Publication practices in the social sciences in the 2010’s

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Authors : William E. Savage, Anthony J. Olejniczak

The number of scholarly journal articles published each year is growing, but little is known about the relationship between journal article growth and other forms of scholarly dissemination (e.g., books and monographs).

Journal articles are the de facto currency of evaluation and prestige in STEM fields, but social scientists routinely publish books as well as articles, representing a unique opportunity to study increased article publications in disciplines with other dissemination options.

We studied the publishing activity of social science faculty members in 12 disciplines at 290 Ph.D. granting institutions in the United States between 2011 and 2019, asking: 1) have publication practices changed such that more or fewer books and articles are written now than in the recent past?; 2) has the percentage of scholars actively participating in a particular publishing type changed over time?; and 3) do different age cohorts evince different publication strategies?

In all disciplines, journal articles per person increased between 3% and 64% between 2011 and 2019, while books per person decreased by at least 31% and as much as 54%. All age cohorts show increased article authorship over the study period, and early career scholars author more articles per person than the other cohorts in eight disciplines.

The article-dominated literatures of the social sciences are becoming increasingly similar to those of STEM disciplines.

URL : More journal articles and fewer books: Publication practices in the social sciences in the 2010’s

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263410

Identify scientific publications country-wide and measure their open access: The case of the French Open Science Barometer (BSO)

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Authors : Lauranne Chaignon, Daniel Egret

We use several sources to collect and evaluate academic scientific publication on a country scale, and we apply it to the case of France for the years 2015–2020, while presenting a more detailed analysis focused on the reference year 2019.

These sources are diverse: databases available by subscription (Scopus, Web of Science) or open to the scientific community (Microsoft Academic Graph), the national open archive HAL, and databases serving thematic communities (ADS and PUBMED).

We show the contribution of the different sources to the final corpus. These results are then compared to those obtained with another approach, that of the French Open Science Barometer (Jeangirard, 2019) for monitoring open access at the national level.

We show that both approaches provide a convergent estimate of the open access rate. We also present and discuss the definitions of the concepts used, and list the main difficulties encountered in processing the data.

The results of this study contribute to a better understanding of the respective contributions of the main databases and their complementarity in the broad framework of a country-wide corpus.

They also shed light on the calculation of open access rates and thus contribute to a better understanding of current developments in the field of open science.

URL : Identify scientific publications country-wide and measure their open access: The case of the French Open Science Barometer (BSO)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00179

The Rise of the Guest Editor—Discontinuities of Editorship in Scholarly Publishing

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Authors : Marcel Knöchelmann, Felicitas Hesselmann, Martin Reinhart, Cornelia Schendzielorz

Scholarly publishing lives on traditioned terminology that gives meaning to subjects such as authors, inhouse editors and external guest editors, artifacts such as articles, journals, special issues, and collected editions, or practices of acquisition, selection, and review.

These subjects, artifacts, and practices ground the constitution of scholarly discourse. And yet, the meaning ascribed to each of these terms shifts, blurs, or is disguised as publishing culture shifts, which becomes manifest in new digital publishing technology, new forms of publishing management, and new forms of scholarly knowledge production.

As a result, we may come to over- or underestimate changes in scholarly communication based on traditioned but shifting terminology. In this article, we discuss instances of scholarly publishing whose meaning shifted.

We showcase the cultural shift that becomes manifest in the new, prolific guest editor. Though the term suggests an established subject, this editorial role crystallizes a new cultural setting of loosened discourse communities and temporal structures, a blurring of publishing genres and, ultimately, the foundations of academic knowledge production.

URL : The Rise of the Guest Editor—Discontinuities of Editorship in Scholarly Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.748171

Two-dimensional books for the new Open Access academic publishing

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Author : Fulvio Guatelli

Metadata have become a key element of scientific communication. Indeed, the content of a publication – that is, what we love, discuss and judge – is no longer the alpha and omega of a scientific publication nor its exclusive centre of gravity. Books are gradually taking the form of an iceberg, whose visible part is represented by the content, while the submerged part is constituted by metadata.

In the current communication approach of scientific research, metadata and dissemination go hand in hand, as metadata provide a huge contribution to the success of the research itself.

In this paper, I will illustrate how – in the field of today’s scholarly publishing – best practices, simple metadata, and cataloguing indicators such as DOI and ORCID are taking on the task that was once accomplished by chariots pulled by sturdy horses coming out of Aldo Manuzio’s workshop: spreading books and the discoveries of scientific research all over the world.

URL : Two-dimensional books for the new Open Access academic publishing

Original location : https://jlis.fupress.net/index.php/jlis/article/view/425

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