Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Publishing

Working with publication technology to make open access journals sustainable

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Authors : Marcel Wrzesinski, Patrick Urs Riechert, Frédéric Dubois, Christian Katzenbach

Over the last 25 years, scholars around the world have used electronic publishing to open up their work, share it with interested publics instantly or even become publishers themselves.

This white paper explores in what ways advances in publication technology in the journal sector (e.g. the widespread use of content management and editorial systems) contributes to a more inclusive and sustainable open access ecosystem.

Drawing on a study we did in Germany in 2019-2021, and for which we tested technical solutions together with the international, peer-reviewed diamond open access journal Internet Policy Review, we present and discuss publishing solutions based on software, workflows, and collaborations with regard to their practicability and scalability.

The paper finds that scholar-led publishing is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to technical solutions tending towards increased bibliodiversity (i.e., variety of content, publication formats and publishing institutions).

URL : Working with publication technology to make open access journals sustainable

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4558781

A Billion Dollar Donation: The Cost, and Inefficiency of, Researchers’ Time Spent on Peer Review

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Authors : Balazs Aczel, Barnabas Szaszi, Alex Holcombe

Background

The amount and value of researchers’ peer review work is critical for academia and publishing. However, it is rarely recognized, its magnitude is unknown, and alternative ways of organizing peer review labor are rarely considered.

Methods

In this paper, we provide an estimate of researchers’ time and the salary-based contribution to the peer-review system, using publicly available data.

Results

We found that the total time reviewers globally worked on peer reviews was over 100 million hours in 2019, equivalent to over 12 thousand years. The estimated monetary value of the time US-based reviewers spent on reviews was over 1.1 billion USD in 2019. For China-based reviewers, the estimate is over 600 million USD, and for UK-based, over 200 million USD.

Conclusions

While these results are only rough estimates, they highlight the enormous amount of work and time that researchers provide to the publication system, and the importance of considering alternative ways of structuring, and paying for, peer review. We foster this process by discussing some alternative models that aim to improve the return on investment of scholarly publishing.

URL : A Billion Dollar Donation: The Cost, and Inefficiency of, Researchers’ Time Spent on Peer Review

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/5h9z4

Self-help for learned journals: Scientific societies and the commerce of publishing in the 1950s

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Author : Aileen Fyfe

In the decades after the Second World War, learned society publishers struggled to cope with the expanding output of scientific research and the increased involvement of commercial publishers in the business of publishing research journals.

Could learned society journals survive economically in the postwar world, against this competition? Or was the emergence of a sales-based commercial model of publishing – in contrast to the traditional model of subsidized journal publishing – an opportunity to transform the often-fragile finances of learned societies?

But there was also an existential threat: if commercial firms could successfully publish scientific journals, were learned society publishers no longer needed? This paper investigates how British learned society publishers adjusted to the new economic realities of the postwar world, through an investigation of the activities organized by the Royal Society of London and the Nuffield Foundation, culminating in the 1963 report Self-Help for Learned Journals.

It reveals the postwar decades as the time when scientific research became something to be commodified and sold to libraries, rather than circulated as part of a scholarly mission. It will be essential reading for all those campaigning to transition academic publishing – including learned society publishing – away from the sales-based model once again.

URL : Self-help for learned journals: Scientific societies and the commerce of publishing in the 1950s

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275321999901

 

Ants-Review: A Privacy-Oriented Protocol for Incentivized Open Peer Reviews on Ethereum

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Authors  : Bianca Trovò, Nazzareno Massari

Peer review is a necessary and essential quality control step for scientific publications but lacks proper incentives. Indeed, the process, which is very costly in terms of time and intellectual investment, not only is not remunerated by the journals but it is also not openly recognized by the academic community as a relevant scientific output for a researcher.

Therefore, scientific dissemination is affected in timeliness, quality and fairness. Here, to solve this issue, we propose a blockchain-based incentive system that rewards scientists for peer reviewing other scientists’ work and that builds up trust and reputation.

We designed a privacy-oriented protocol of smart contracts called Ants-Review that allows authors to issue a bounty for open anonymous peer reviews on Ethereum.

If requirements are met, peer reviews will be accepted and paid by the approver proportionally to their assessed quality. To promote ethical behaviour and inclusiveness the system implements a gamified mechanism that allows the whole community to evaluate the peer reviews and vote for the best ones.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71593-9_2

The Most Widely Disseminated COVID-19-Related Scientific Publications in Online Media: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Top 100 Articles with the Highest Altmetric Attention Scores

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Authors : Ji Yoon Moon, Dae Young Yoon, Ji Hyun Hong, Kyoung Ja Lim, Sora Baek, Young Lan Seo, Eun Joo Yun

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a global pandemic. This study’s aim was to identify and characterize the top 100 COVID-19-related scientific publications, which had received the highest Altmetric Attention Scores (AASs).

Hence, we searched Altmetric Explorer using search terms such as “COVID” or “COVID-19” or “Coronavirus” or “SARS-CoV-2” or “nCoV” and then selected the top 100 articles with the highest AASs. For each article identified, we extracted the following information: the overall AAS, publishing journal, journal impact factor (IF), date of publication, language, country of origin, document type, main topic, and accessibility.

The top 100 articles most frequently were published in journals with high (>10.0) IF (n = 67), were published between March and July 2020 (n = 67), were written in English (n = 100), originated in the United States (n = 45), were original articles (n = 59), dealt with treatment and clinical manifestations (n = 33), and had open access (n = 98).

Our study provides important information pertaining to the dissemination of scientific knowledge about COVID-19 in online media.

URL : The Most Widely Disseminated COVID-19-Related Scientific Publications in Online Media: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Top 100 Articles with the Highest Altmetric Attention Scores

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare9020239

Assessment of transparency indicators across the biomedical literature: How open is open?

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Authors : Stylianos Serghiou, Despina G. Contopoulos-Ioannidis, Kevin W. Boyack, Nico Riedel, Joshua D. Wallach, John P. A. Ioannidis

Recent concerns about the reproducibility of science have led to several calls for more open and transparent research practices and for the monitoring of potential improvements over time. However, with tens of thousands of new biomedical articles published per week, manually mapping and monitoring changes in transparency is unrealistic.

We present an open-source, automated approach to identify 5 indicators of transparency (data sharing, code sharing, conflicts of interest disclosures, funding disclosures, and protocol registration) and apply it across the entire open access biomedical literature of 2.75 million articles on PubMed Central (PMC).

Our results indicate remarkable improvements in some (e.g., conflict of interest [COI] disclosures and funding disclosures), but not other (e.g., protocol registration and code sharing) areas of transparency over time, and map transparency across fields of science, countries, journals, and publishers.

This work has enabled the creation of a large, integrated, and openly available database to expedite further efforts to monitor, understand, and promote transparency and reproducibility in science.

URL : Assessment of transparency indicators across the biomedical literature: How open is open?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001107

Attracting new users or business as usual? A case study of converting academic subscription-based journals to open access

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Author : Lars Wenaas

This paper studies a selection of 11 Norwegian journals in the humanities and social sciences and their conversion from subscription to open access, a move heavily incentivized by governmental mandates and open access policies.

By investigating the journals’ visiting logs in the period 2014–2019, the study finds that a conversion to open access induces higher visiting numbers; all journals in the study had a significant increase, which can be attributed to the conversion.

Converting a journal had no spillover in terms of increased visits to previously published articles still behind the paywall in the same journals. Visits from previously subscribing Norwegian higher education institutions did not account for the increase in visits, indicating that the increase must be accounted for by visitors from other sectors.

The results could be relevant for policymakers concerning the effects of strict policies targeting economically vulnerable national journals, and could further inform journal owners and editors on the effects of converting to open access.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00126