Quantifying and contextualizing the impact of bioRxiv preprints through automated social media audience segmentation

Authors : Jedidiah Carlson, Kelley Harris

Engagement with scientific manuscripts is frequently facilitated by Twitter and other social media platforms. As such, the demographics of a paper’s social media audience provide a wealth of information about how scholarly research is transmitted, consumed, and interpreted by online communities.

By paying attention to public perceptions of their publications, scientists can learn whether their research is stimulating positive scholarly and public thought. They can also become aware of potentially negative patterns of interest from groups that misinterpret their work in harmful ways, either willfully or unintentionally, and devise strategies for altering their messaging to mitigate these impacts.

In this study, we collected 331,696 Twitter posts referencing 1,800 highly tweeted bioRxiv preprints and leveraged topic modeling to infer the characteristics of various communities engaging with each preprint on Twitter.

We agnostically learned the characteristics of these audience sectors from keywords each user’s followers provide in their Twitter biographies. We estimate that 96% of the preprints analyzed are dominated by academic audiences on Twitter, suggesting that social media attention does not always correspond to greater public exposure.

We further demonstrate how our audience segmentation method can quantify the level of interest from nonspecialist audience sectors such as mental health advocates, dog lovers, video game developers, vegans, bitcoin investors, conspiracy theorists, journalists, religious groups, and political constituencies.

Surprisingly, we also found that 10% of the preprints analyzed have sizable (>5%) audience sectors that are associated with right-wing white nationalist communities. Although none of these preprints appear to intentionally espouse any right-wing extremist messages, cases exist in which extremist appropriation comprises more than 50% of the tweets referencing a given preprint.

These results present unique opportunities for improving and contextualizing the public discourse surrounding scientific research.

URL : Quantifying and contextualizing the impact of bioRxiv preprints through automated social media audience segmentation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000860

Directory of Open Access Journals in Keywords. Distribution and Themes of Articles

Authors : Rosangela Schwarz Rodrigues, Breno Kricheldorf Hermes de Araújo, Laura Lavinia Sabino dos Santos, Ana Lidia Campos Brizola

Researchers depend on consultation with previous work in their field, most of which is published in scientific journals. The open access movement has affected journals and articles, providing new alternatives for accessing scientific content, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is the most specialized and multidisciplinary database of open access journals.

The main goal of this study is to analyze publications that include “DOAJ” in their keywords, to determine how researchers in the areas of Library and Information Science and Social Science are studying it.

The specific objectives are: a) to describe the characteristics of journals indexed in the Web of Science, DOAJ, or SCOPUS that have published articles with “DOAJ” as a keyword; b) to identify the institutional affiliations of the authors of those articles; and c) to classify the articles according to subject area.

We identified 39 articles from 29 journals. The countries with the largest numbers of journals are the United States and the United Kingdom (six journals each). Most of the journals were open access, of which universities were the biggest publishers.

The countries with the largest numbers of authors were India (12), and Italy and Russia (11 each), and the journal that published the most articles was the University of Nebraska’s Library Philosophy and Practice (four articles).

Most articles analyze the quality (65.5%), followed by the growth (25.6%), of the Open Access Movement. An analysis of the subject areas covered revealed significant gaps, as the economic, legal and technological aspects of DOAJ were not represented.

URL : Directory of Open Access Journals in Keywords. Distribution and Themes of Articles

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4403/jlis.it-12630

Open Data and Open Access Articles: Exploring Connections in the Life Sciences

Author : Sarah C. Williams

Objectives

This small-scale study explores the current state of connections between open data and open access (OA) articles in the life sciences.

Methods

This study involved 44 openly available life sciences datasets from the Illinois Data Bank that had 45 related research articles. For each article, I gathered the OA status of the journal and the article on the publisher website and checked whether the article was openly available via Unpaywall and Research Gate. I also examined how and where the open data was included in the HTML and PDF versions of the related articles.

Results

Of the 45 articles studied, less than half were published in Gold/Full OA journals, and while the remaining articles were published in Gold/Hybrid journals, none of them were OA. This study found that OA articles pointed to the Illinois Data Bank datasets similarly to all of the related articles, most commonly with a data availability statement containing a DOI.

Conclusions

The findings indicate that Gold OA in hybrid journals does not appear to be a popular option, even for articles connected to open data, and this study emphasizes the importance of data repositories providing DOIs, since the related articles frequently used DOIs to point to the Illinois Data Bank datasets. This study also revealed concerns about free (not licensed OA) access to articles on publisher websites, which will be a significant topic for future research.

URL : Open Data and Open Access Articles: Exploring Connections in the Life Sciences

DOI : https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol9/iss1/3/

Publication strategies under the Publish or Perish Paradigm – using Kolb’s ELT to understand PhD students’ needs

Authors : Charlotte Nordahl Wien, Bertil F. Dorch, Lone Bredahl, Mette Brandt Eriksen

Having a viable publication strategy at an early stage of the career can nowadays make a researcher. Not having one appears to break them. We as librarians are in a unique position to guide them in their endeavours to create a viable publication strategy.

In this paper we use Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory as our theoretical framework for understanding learning processes related to the development of a publication strategy.

We compare a set of publication strategies developed by newly enrolled PhD students 4 to 5 years ago to articles retrieved from PubMed and Scopus using the PhD students’ ORCID as identifier. We subdivide the publication strategies into three categories (fulfilled, partially fulfilled, abandoned).

We find evidence that the more realistic the publication plan is, the more likely it is to be followed.

This indicates that it is of importance that PhD schools support students’ efforts in developing their publication strategy at an early stage of their career.

URL : Publication strategies under the Publish or Perish Paradigm – using Kolb’s ELT to understand PhD students’ needs

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10349

Transitioning to Open Access: An Evaluation of the UK Springer Compact Agreement Pilot 2016–2018

Authors : Mafalda Marques, Graham Stone

This article analyzes the UK’s first “read and publish” journals agreement. The Springer Compact Agreement pilot ran from 2016 to 2018. The authors outline the methodology and data sources used to undertake a detailed analysis of the agreement.

This includes the number of open access articles published, the number of author opt-outs and rejected articles. Institutional savings (or cost avoidance), and the financial implications resulting from the number of opt-outs and rejected articles are also discussed.

The value of articles published and cost per download for non-OA content are also covered. The agreement, at the consortia level, has constrained the total cost of publication—during the three years, the HE sector has avoided paying additional costs of €20,000,800 ($22,761,688) for publishing OA by paying the single combined fee that capped publication costs at 2014 rates.

All institutions taking part in the Springer Compact agreement published OA articles equivalent to or in excess of their total 2014 APC spend between 2016 and 2018. By 2018, 30 percent of institutions published OA articles to the value of or in excess of the combined fee paid to Springer. The article concludes with a number of recommendations for future agreements and considers compliance with Plan S guidelines.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.81.6.913

Open Access Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences: an Open Access Altmetric Advantage

Author : Michael Taylor

The last decade has seen two significant phenomena emerge in research communication: the rise of open access (OA) publishing, and evidence of online sharing in the form of altmetrics. There has been limited examination of the effect of OA on online sharing for journal articles, and little for books.

This paper examines the altmetrics of a set of 32,222 books (of which 5% are OA) and a set of 220,527 chapters (of which 7% are OA) indexed by the scholarly database Dimensions in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

Both OA books and chapters have significantly higher use on social networks, higher coverage in the mass media and blogs, and evidence of higher rates of social impact in policy documents. OA chapters have higher rates of coverage on Wikipedia than their non-OA equivalents, and are more likely to be shared on Mendeley.

Even within the Humanities and Social Sciences, disciplinary differences in altmetric activity are evident. The effect is confirmed for chapters, although sampling issues prevent the strong conclusion that OA facilitates extra attention at whole book level, the apparent OA altmetrics advantage suggests that the move towards OA is increasing social sharing and broader impact.

URL  : https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10442

La prédation dans le champ de la publication scientifique : un objet de recherche révélateur des mutations de la communication scientifique ouverte

Autueurs/Authors : Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri, Sarah Rakotoary, Pascal Bador

L’article présente un état de l’art critique du phénomène des revues prédatrices qui touche le champ de la communication scientifique et en fait une de ses actualités les plus médiatisées. Il rend compte des débats en cours, des recherches menées et de leurs méthodologies.

L’article discute la définition de la revue prédatrice et propose une analyse du nouveau marché de listes de revues « légitimes » et « illégitimes ». Il identifie les principaux enjeux éthiques et scientifiques que les revues prédatrices font peser sur la publication en Libre Accès et rend compte des contextes qui conduisent des chercheurs (jeunes et seniors) à y publier.

En rattachant les revues prédatrices au champ de la communication scientifique, l’article en pointe les principales problématiques et les érige en objet de recherche. L’article conclut sur des pistes de recherches contribuant à l’analyse des mutations de la communication scientifique numérique.

URL : La prédation dans le champ de la publication scientifique : un objet de recherche révélateur des mutations de la communication scientifique ouverte

Original location : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02941731