Archives des mots-clés : Scholarly Publishing

Beyond journals and peer review: towards a more flexible ecosystem for scholarly communication

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Author : Michael Wood

This article challenges the assumption that journals and peer review are essential for developing,evaluating and disseminating scientific and other academic knowledge. It suggests a more flexible ecosystem, and examines some of the possibilities this might facilitate. The market for academic outputs should be opened up by encouraging the separation of the dissemination service from the evaluation service.

Publishing research in subject-specific journals encourages compartmentalising research into rigid categories. The dissemination of knowledge would be better served by an open access, web-based repository system encompassing all disciplines. There would then be a role for organisations to assess the items in this repository to help users find relevant, high-quality work.

There could be a variety of such organisations which could enable reviews from peers to be supplemented with evaluation by non-peers from a variety of different perspectives: user reviews, statistical reviews, reviews from the perspective of different disciplines, and so on. This should reduce the inevitably conservative influence of relying on two or three peers, and make the evaluation system more critical, multi-dimensional and responsive to the requirements of different audience groups, changing circumstances, and new ideas.

Non-peer review might make it easier to challenge dominant paradigms, and expanding the potential audience beyond a narrow group of peers might encourage the criterion of simplicity to be taken more seriously – which is essential if human knowledge is to continue to progress.

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.4566

Dataset Artefacts are the Hidden Drivers of the Declining Disruptiveness in Science

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Authors : Vincent Holst, Andres Algaba, Floriano Tori, Sylvia Wenmackers, Vincent Ginis

Park et al. [1] reported a decline in the disruptiveness of scientific and technological knowledge over time. Their main finding is based on the computation of CD indices, a measure of disruption in citation networks [2], across almost 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents.

Due to a factual plotting mistake, database entries with zero references were omitted in the CD index distributions, hiding a large number of outliers with a maximum CD index of one, while keeping them in the analysis [1]. Our reanalysis shows that the reported decline in disruptiveness can be attributed to a relative decline of these database entries with zero references. Notably, this was not caught by the robustness checks included in the manuscript.

The regression adjustment fails to control for the hidden outliers as they correspond to a discontinuity in the CD index. Proper evaluation of the Monte-Carlo simulations reveals that, because of the preservation of the hidden outliers, even random citation behaviour replicates the observed decline in disruptiveness.

Finally, while these papers and patents with supposedly zero references are the hidden drivers of the reported decline, their source documents predominantly do make references, exposing them as pure dataset artefacts.

URL : Dataset Artefacts are the Hidden Drivers of the Declining Disruptiveness in Science

DOI : https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10656940

Is gold open access helpful for academic purification? A causal inference analysis based on retracted articles in biochemistry

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Authors : Er-Te Zheng, Zhichao Fang, Hui-Zhen Fu

The relationship between transparency and credibility has long been a subject of theoretical and analytical exploration within the realm of social sciences, and it has recently attracted increasing attention in the context of scientific research. Retraction serves as a pivotal mechanism in addressing concerns about research integrity.

This study aims to empirically examining the relationship between open access level and the effectiveness of current mechanism, specifically academic purification centered on retracted articles. In this study, we used matching and Difference-in-Difference (DiD) methods to examine whether gold open access is helpful for academic purification in biochemistry field.

We collected gold open access (Gold OA) and non-open access (non-OA) biochemistry retracted articles as the treatment group, and matched them with corresponding unretracted articles as the control group from 2005 to 2021 based on Web of Science and Retraction Watch database.

The results showed that compared to non-OA, Gold OA is advantageous in reducing the retraction time of flawed articles, but does not demonstrate a significant advantage in reducing citations after retraction. This indicates that Gold OA may help expedite the detection and retraction of flawed articles, ultimately promoting the practice of responsible research.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2023.103640

On the Fast Track to Full Gold Open Access

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Author : Robert Kudelić

The world of scientific publishing is changing; the days of an old type of subscription-based earnings for publishers seem over, and we are entering a new era. It seems as if an ever-increasing number of journals from disparate publishers are going Gold, Open Access that is, yet have we rigorously ascertained the issue in its entirety, or are we touting the strengths and forgetting about constructive criticism and careful weighing of evidence?

We will therefore present the current state of the art, in a compact review/bibliometrics style, of this more relevant than ever hot topic and suggest solutions that are most likely to be acceptable to all parties–while the performed analysis also shows there seems to be a link between trends in scientific publishing and tumultuous world events, which in turn has a special significance for the publishing environment in the current world stage.

URL : On the Fast Track to Full Gold Open Access

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08313

“On the ruins of seriality”: The scientific journal and the nature of the scientific life

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Author : Dorien Daling

Twenty-first-century discourse on science has been marked by narratives of crisis. Science is said to be experiencing crises of public trust, of peer review and publishing, of reproducibility and replicability, and of recognition and reward.

The dominant response has been to “repair” the scientific literature and the system of scientific publishing through open science. This paper places the current predicament of scholarly communication in historical perspective by exploring the evolution of the scientific journal in the second half of the twentieth century.

I focus on a new genre of scientific journal invented by Dutch commercial publishers shortly after World War II, and on its effects on the nature of the scientific life. I show that profit-oriented publishers and discipline-building scientists worked together to make postwar science more open, while also arguing that formats of scientific publication have their own agency.

URL : “On the ruins of seriality”: The scientific journal and the nature of the scientific life

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2023.100885

How many authors are (too) many? A retrospective, descriptive analysis of authorship in biomedical publications

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Authors : Martin Jakab, Eva Kittl, Tobias Kiesslich

Publishing in academic journals is primary to disseminate research findings, with authorship reflecting a scientist’s contribution, yielding academic recognition, and carrying significant financial implications. Author numbers per article have consistently risen in recent decades, as demonstrated in various journals and fields.

This study is a comprehensive analysis of authorship trends in biomedical papers from the NCBI PubMed database between 2000 and 2020, utilizing the Entrez Direct (EDirect) E-utilities to retrieve bibliometric data from a dataset of 17,015,001 articles. For all publication types, the mean author number per publication significantly increased over the last two decades from 3.99 to 6.25 (+ 57%, p < 0.0001) following a linear trend (r2 = 0.99) with an average relative increase of 2.28% per year.

This increase was highest for clinical trials (+ 5.67 authors per publication, + 97%), the smallest for case reports (+ 1.01 authors, + 24%). The proportion of single/solo authorships dropped by a factor of about 3 from 17.03% in 2000 to 5.69% in 2020. The percentage of eleven or more authors per publication increased ~ sevenfold, ~ 11-fold and ~ 12-fold for reviews, editorials, and systematic reviews, respectively. Confirming prior findings, this study highlights the escalating authorship in biomedical publications.

Given potential unethical practices, preserving authorship as a trustable indicator of scientific performance is critical. Understanding and curbing questionable authorship practices and inflation are imperative, as discussed through relevant literature to tackle this issue.

URL : How many authors are (too) many? A retrospective, descriptive analysis of authorship in biomedical publications

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04928-1

Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles

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Author : Martin Paul Eve

Introduction

Digital preservation underpins the persistence of scholarly links and citations through the digital object identifier (DOI) system. We do not currently know, at scale, the extent to which articles assigned a DOI are adequately preserved.

Methods

We construct a database of preservation information from original archival sources and then examine the preservation statuses of 7,438,037 DOIs in a random sample.

Results

Of the 7,438,037 works examined, there were 5.9 million copies spread over the archives used in this work. Furthermore, a total of 4,342,368 of the works that we studied (58.38%) were present in at least one archive. However, this left 2,056,492 works in our sample (27.64%) that are seemingly unpreserved.

The remaining 13.98% of works in the sample were excluded either for being too recent (published in the current year), not being journal articles, or having insufficient date metadata for us to identify the source.

Discussion

Our study is limited by design in several ways. Among these are the facts that it uses only a subset of archives, it only tracks articles with DOIs, and it does not account for institutional repository coverage. Nonetheless, as an initial attempt to gauge the landscape, our results will still be of interest to libraries, publishers, and researchers.

Conclusion

This work reveals an alarming preservation deficit. Only 0.96% of Crossref members (n = 204) can be confirmed to digitally preserve over 75% of their content in three or more of the archives that we studied. (Note that when, in this article, we write “preserved,” we mean “that we were able to confirm as preserved,” as per the specified limitations of this study.) A slightly larger proportion, i.e., 8.5% (n = 1,797), preserved over 50% of their content in two or more archives.

However, many members, i.e., 57.7% (n = 12,257), only met the threshold of having 25% of their material in a single archive. Most worryingly, 32.9% (n = 6,982) of Crossref members seem not to have any adequate digital preservation in place, which is against the recommendations of the Digital Preservation Coalition.

URL : Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.16288