Étiquette : Scholarly Publishing

Publié le

Attitudes toward open peer review among stakeholders of a scholar-led journal in Brazil

Authors : Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle, Thiago Dias Sarti

Scholarly journals should consider the attitudes of their communities before adopting any of the seven traits of open peer review. Unfortunately, surveys from the Global North might not apply to the Global South, where double-blind peer review is commonplace even among natural sciences and medicine journals.

This paper reports the findings of a survey on attitudes toward open peer review among four stakeholder groups of a scholar-led medical journal in Brazil: society members, journal readers, authors, and reviewers.

Compared to a previous survey, which mostly recruited natural sciences researchers from Europe, this survey found similar support for open peer review in general and for most of its traits.

One important exception was open identities, which were considered detrimental by most participants, even more in this survey than in the previous one. Interestingly, participants were more dismissive of open identities as a whole than of statements about its specific consequences.

Because preprints are increasingly popular but incompatible with double-blind review, future research should examine the effects of transitioning from double-blind to open identities, especially on gender bias.

Meanwhile, scholarly journals with double-blind review might prefer to begin by adopting other traits of open review or to make open identities optional at first.

URL : Attitudes toward open peer review among stakeholders of a scholar-led journal in Brazil

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1590/2318-0889202133e200072

Publié le

Journals in Beall’s list perform as a group less well than other open access journals indexed in Scopus but reveal large differences among publishers

Authors : Henk F. Moed, Carmen Lopez-Illescas, Vicente P. Guerrero-Bote, Felix de Moya-Anegon

The list of potential, possible or probable predatory scholarly open access (OA) publishers compiled by Jeffrey Beall was examined to determine the effect of their inclusion upon authors, and a possible bias against OA journals.

Manually collected data from the publication archives of a sample of 250 journals from Beall publishers reveals a strong tendency towards a decline in their article output during 2012–2020. A comparison of the subset of 506 Beall journals indexed in Scopus with a benchmark set of other OA journals in Scopus with similar characteristics shows that Beall journals reveal as a group a strong decline in citation impact over the years, and reached an impact level far below that of their benchmarks.

The Beall list of publishers was found to be heterogeneous in terms of bibliometric indicators but to be clearly differentiated from OA journals not included in the list. The same bibliometric comparison against comparable non-OA journals reveal similar, but less marked, differences in citation and publication growth.

URL : Journals in Beall’s list perform as a group less well than other open access journals indexed in Scopus but reveal large differences among publishers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1428

Publié le

The gendered nature of authorship

Authors : Chaoqun Ni, Elise Smith, Haimiao Yuan, Vincent Larivière, Cassidy R. Sugimoto

Authorship is the primary form of symbolic capital in science. Despite this, authorship is rife with injustice and malpractice, with women expressing concerns regarding the fair attribution of credit. Based on an international survey, we examine gendered practices in authorship communication, disagreement, and fairness.

Our results demonstrate that women were more likely to experience authorship disagreements and experience them more often. Their contributions to research papers were more often devalued by both men and women.

Women were more likely to discuss authorship with coauthors at the beginning of the project, whereas men were more likely to determine authorship unilaterally at the end. Women perceived that they received less credit than deserved, while men reported the opposite.

This devaluation of women’s work in science creates cumulative disadvantages in scientific careers. Open discussion regarding power dynamics related to gender is necessary to develop more equitable distribution of credit for scientific labor.

URL : The gendered nature of authorship

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abe4639

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Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)

Author : M. Ángeles Oviedo-García

The extent to which predatory journals can harm scientific practice increases as the numbers of such journals expand, in so far as they undermine scientific integrity, quality, and credibility, especially if those journals leak into prestigious databases.

Journal Citation Reports (JCRs), a reference for the assessment of researchers and for grant-making decisions, is used as a standard whitelist, in so far as the selectivity of a JCR-indexed journal adds a legitimacy of sorts to the articles that the journal publishes.

The Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) once included on Beall’s list of potential, possible or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers, had 53 journals ranked in the 2018 JCRs annual report.

These journals are analysed, not only to contrast the formal criteria for the identification of predatory journals, but taking a step further, their background is also analysed with regard to self-citations and the source of those self-citations in 2018 and 2019.

The results showed that the self-citation rates increased and was very much higher than those of the leading journals in the JCR category. Besides, an increasingly high rate of citations from other MDPI-journals was observed.

The formal criteria together with the analysis of the citation patterns of the 53 journals under analysis all singled them out as predatory journals. Hence, specific recommendations are given to researchers, educational institutions and prestigious databases advising them to review their working relations with those sorts of journals.

URL : Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvab020

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Dawning of a new age? Economics journals’ data policies on the test bench

Author : Sven Vlaeminck

In the field of social sciences and particularly in economics, studies have frequently reported a lack of reproducibility of published research. Most often, this is due to the unavailability of data reproducing the findings of a study.

However, over the past years, debates on open science practices and reproducible research have become stronger and louder among research funders, learned societies, and research organisations.

Many of these have started to implement data policies to overcome these shortcomings. Against this background, the article asks if there have been changes in the way economics journals handle data and other materials that are crucial to reproduce the findings of empirical articles.

For this purpose, all journals listed in the Clarivate Analytics Journal Citation Reports edition for economics have been evaluated for policies on the disclosure of research data.

The article describes the characteristics of these data policies and explicates their requirements. Moreover, it compares the current findings with the situation some years ago.

The results show significant changes in the way journals handle data in the publication process. Research libraries can use the findings of this study for their advisory activities to best support researchers in submitting and providing data as required by journals.

URL : Dawning of a new age? Economics journals’ data policies on the test bench

DOI : https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.10940

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La fin de la publication scientifique ? Une analyse entre légitimité, prédation et automatisation

Auteure/Author : Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri

La courte histoire de la communication scientifique sur le Web se caractérise par des régulations spécifiques au numérique : accélération, ouverture et fragmentation. Au cœur de ces régulations, le modèle de la « Revue » devient moins le vecteur de diffusion de l’information scientifique que le lieu de structuration et de convergence des stratégies des acteurs impliqués.

Revues légitimes, revues médias, revues prédatrices ou bien encore revues générées automatiquement, composent aujourd’hui « l’offre » de la publication scientifique disponible via des plateformes qui contribuent à en effacer les caractéristiques et les repères.

Ainsi, l’information scientifique, concept apparu après-guerre, trouve un champ d’intervention conceptuel et opératoire nouveau, qui dépasse la multiplication et la généralisation du modèle de la plateforme (archives ouvertes, serveurs de pré-prints, réseaux sociaux…). Il permet de prendre en charge l’évolution des sciences, de leurs objets et de leurs pratiques.

Mais surtout il permet de penser les nouvelles formes de validation scientifiques qui se redéfinissent, à l’intersection des champs scientifique, social et médiatique, et qui soulèvent de nouvelles questions à leur tour.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03435153

Publié le

metajelo: A metadata package for journals to support external linked objects

Authors : Lars Vilhuber, Carl Lagoze

We propose a metadata package that is intended to provide academic journals with a lightweight means of registering, at the time of publication, the existence and disposition of supplementary materials. Information about the supplementary materials is, in most cases, critical for the reproducibility and replicability of scholarly results.

In many instances, these materials are curated by a third party, which may or may not follow developing standards for the identification and description of those materials. As such, the vocabulary described here complements existing initiatives that specify vocabularies to describe the supplementary materials or the repositories and archives in which they have been deposited.

Where possible, it reuses elements of relevant other vocabularies, facilitating coexistence with them. Furthermore, it provides an “at publication” record of reproducibility characteristics of a particular article that has been selected for publication.

The proposed metadata package documents the key characteristics that journals care about in the case of supplementary materials that are held by third parties: existence, accessibility, and permanence. It does so in a robust, time-invariant fashion at the time of publication, when the editorial decisions are made.

It also allows for better documentation of less accessible (non-public data), by treating it symmetrically from the point of view of the journal, therefore increasing the transparency of what up until now has been very opaque.

URL : metajelo: A metadata package for journals to support external linked objects

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v16i1.600