Étiquette : Scholarly Publishing

Catégories
EN

What Constitutes Authorship in the Social Sciences?

Author : Gernot Pruschak

Authorship represents a highly discussed topic in nowadays academia. The share of co-authored papers has increased substantially in recent years allowing scientists to specialize and focus on specific tasks.

Arising from this, social scientific literature has especially discussed author orders and the distribution of publication and citation credits among co-authors in depth. Yet only a small fraction of the authorship literature has also addressed the actual underlying question of what actually constitutes authorship.

To identify social scientists’ motives for assigning authorship, we conduct an empirical study surveying researchers around the globe. We find that social scientists tend to distribute research tasks among (individual) research team members. Nevertheless, they generally adhere to the universally applicable Vancouver criteria when distributing authorship.

More specifically, participation in every research task with the exceptions of data work as well as reviewing and remarking increases scholars’ chances to receive authorship. Based on our results, we advise journal editors to introduce authorship guidelines that incorporate the Vancouver criteria as they seem applicable to the social sciences.

We further call upon research institutions to emphasize data skills in hiring and promotion processes as publication counts might not always depict these characteristics.

URL : What Constitutes Authorship in the Social Sciences?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.655350

Catégories
EN

Publication practices during the COVID-19 pandemic: Biomedical preprints and peer-reviewed literature

Authors : Yulia V. Sevryugina, Andrew J. Dicks

The coronavirus pandemic introduced many changes to our society, and deeply affected the established in biomedical sciences publication practices. In this article, we present a comprehensive study of the changes in scholarly publication landscape for biomedical sciences during the COVID-19 pandemic, with special emphasis on preprints posted on bioRxiv and medRxiv servers.

We observe the emergence of a new category of preprint authors working in the fields of immunology, microbiology, infectious diseases, and epidemiology, who extensively used preprint platforms during the pandemic for sharing their immediate findings. The majority of these findings were works-in-progress unfitting for a prompt acceptance by refereed journals.

The COVID-19 preprints that became peer-reviewed journal articles were often submitted to journals concurrently with the posting on a preprint server, and the entire publication cycle, from preprint to the online journal article, took on average 63 days. This included an expedited peer-review process of 43 days and journal’s production stage of 15 days, however there was a wide variation in publication delays between journals. Only one third of COVID-19 preprints posted during the first nine months of the pandemic appeared as peer-reviewed journal articles.

These journal articles display high Altmetric Attention Scores further emphasizing a significance of COVID-19 research during 2020. This article will be relevant to editors, publishers, open science enthusiasts, and anyone interested in changes that the 2020 crisis transpired to publication practices and a culture of preprints in life sciences.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.21.427563

Catégories
EN

Honest signaling in academic publishing

Authors : Leonid Tiokhin, Karthik Panchanathan, Daniel Lakens, Simine Vazire, Thomas Morgan, Kevin Zollman

Academic journals provide a key quality-control mechanism in science. Yet, information asymmetries and conflicts of interests incentivize scientists to deceive journals about the quality of their research.

How can honesty be ensured, despite incentives for deception? Here, we address this question by applying the theory of honest signaling to the publication process. Our models demonstrate that several mechanisms can ensure honest journal submission, including differential benefits, differential costs, and costs to resubmitting rejected papers.

Without submission costs, scientists benefit from submitting all papers to high-ranking journals, unless papers can only be submitted a limited number of times. Counterintuitively, our analysis implies that inefficiencies in academic publishing (e.g., arbitrary formatting requirements, long review times) can serve a function by disincentivizing scientists from submitting low-quality work to high-ranking journals.

Our models provide simple, powerful tools for understanding how to promote honest paper submission in academic publishing.

URL : Honest signaling in academic publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246675

Catégories
EN

Publishing at any cost: a cross-sectional study of the amount that medical researchers spend on open access publishing each year

Authors : Mallory K. Ellingson, Xiaoting Shi, Joshua J. Skydel, Kate Nyhan,Richard Lehman, Joseph S. Ross, Joshua D. Wallach

Objective

To estimate the financial costs paid by individual medical researchers from meeting the article processing charges (APCs) levied by open access journals in 2019.

Design

Cross-sectional analysis.

Data sources

Scopus was used to generate two random samples of researchers, the first with a senior author article indexed in the ‘Medicine’ subject area (general researchers) and the second with an article published in the ten highest-impact factor general clinical medicine journals (high-impact researchers) in 2019.

For each researcher, Scopus was used to identify all first and senior author original research or review articles published in 2019. Data were obtained from Scopus, institutional profiles, Journal Citation Reports, publisher databases, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and individual journal websites.

Main outcome measures

Median APCs paid by general and high-impact researchers for all first and senior author research and review articles published in 2019.

Results

There were 241 general and 246 high-impact researchers identified as eligible for our study. In 2019, the general and high-impact researchers published a total of 914 (median 2, IQR 1–5) and 1471 (4, 2–8) first or senior author research or review articles, respectively. 42% (384/914) of the articles from the general researchers and 29% (428/1471) of the articles from the high-impact medical researchers were published in fully open access journals.

The median total APCs paid by general researchers in 2019 was US$191 (US$0–US$2500) and the median total paid by high-impact researchers was US$2900 (US$0–US$5465); the maximum paid by a single researcher in total APCs was US$30115 and US$34676, respectively.

Conclusions

Medical researchers in 2019 were found to have paid between US$0 and US$34676 in total APCs. As journals with APCs become more common, it is important to continue to evaluate the potential cost to researchers, especially on individuals who may not have the funding or institutional resources to cover these costs.

URL : Publishing at any cost: a cross-sectional study of the amount that medical researchers spend on open access publishing each year

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2020-047107

Catégories
EN

Implementing the Global University Publications Licence: a new open scholarship model for advocating change

Authors : Jiafeng Zhou, Ke Wu, Neil Smyth

Universities want a voluntary, non-exclusive licence from authors to disseminate publications. This practitioner case study explores an innovative model to communicate and advance open and equitable scholarship through the implementation of the Global University Publications Licence at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China.

This article explains the licensing policy and key influences, including, the copyright law of the People’s Republic of China and the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).

The University approved the Global University Publications Licence, with implementation from 1 August 2019. It is available in Chinese and English. Since implementation, the University has retained rights for 74% of research publications submitted. 100% of those publications are available through the University with a CC-BY licence and zero embargo.

The open scholarship model provides an equitable approach to versions and citation. The article concludes by suggesting university libraries can exploit copyright law in China to progress open scholarship strategies, including recognition of employers as authors of works, a priority right to the exploitation of works and an embargo protection of two years after the completion of the work.

The author’s final version of publications can be open, discoverable, cited and preserved through trusted universities with global reputations for high-quality research.

URL : Implementing the Global University Publications Licence: a new open scholarship model for advocating change

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.531

Catégories
EN

Preprints: Their Evolving Role in Science Communication

Authors : Iratxe Puebla, Jessica Polka, Oya Rieger

The use of preprints for the dissemination of research in some life sciences branches has increased substantially over the last few years. In this document, we discuss preprint publishing and use in the life sciences, from initial experiments back in the 1960s to the current landscape.

We explore the perspectives, advantages and perceived concerns that different stakeholders associate with preprints, and where preprints stand in the context of research assessment frameworks.

We also discuss the role of preprints in the publishing ecosystem and within open science more broadly, before outlining some remaining open questions and considerations for the future evolution of preprints.

URL : Preprints: Their Evolving Role in Science Communication

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/ezfsk

Catégories
EN

Open is not forever: A study of vanished open access journals

Authors : Mikael Laakso, Lisa Matthias, Najko Jahn

The preservation of the scholarly record has been a point of concern since the beginning of knowledge production. With print publications, the responsibility rested primarily with librarians, but the shift toward digital publishing and, in particular, the introduction of open access (OA) have caused ambiguity and complexity.

Consequently, the long‐term accessibility of journals is not always guaranteed, and they can even disappear from the web completely. The focus of this exploratory study is on the phenomenon of vanished journals, something that has not been carried out before.

For the analysis, we consulted several major bibliographic indexes, such as Scopus, Ulrichsweb, and the Directory of Open Access Journals, and traced the journals through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

We found 174 OA journals that, through lack of comprehensive and open archives, vanished from the web between 2000 and 2019, spanning all major research disciplines and geographic regions of the world.

Our results raise vital concern for the integrity of the scholarly record and highlight the urgency to take collaborative action to ensure continued access and prevent the loss of more scholarly knowledge.

We encourage those interested in the phenomenon of vanished journals to use the public dataset for their own research.

URL : Open is not forever: A study of vanished open access journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24460