Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Predatory publications in evidence syntheses

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Authors : Amanda Ross-White, Christina M. Godfrey, Kimberley A. Sears, Rosemary Wilson

Objectives

The number of predatory journals is increasing in the scholarly communication realm. These journals use questionable business practices, minimal or no peer review, or limited editorial oversight and, thus, publish articles below a minimally accepted standard of quality.

These publications have the potential to alter the results of knowledge syntheses. The objective of this study was to determine the degree to which articles published by a major predatory publisher in the health and biomedical sciences are cited in systematic reviews.

Methods

The authors downloaded citations of articles published by a known predatory publisher. Using forward reference searching in Google Scholar, we examined whether these publications were cited in systematic reviews.

Results

The selected predatory publisher published 459 journals in the health and biomedical sciences. Sixty-two of these journal titles had published a total of 120 articles that were cited by at least 1 systematic review, with a total of 157 systematic reviews citing an article from 1 of these predatory journals.

Discussion

Systematic review authors should be vigilant for predatory journals that can appear to be legitimate. To reduce the risk of including articles from predatory journals in knowledge syntheses, systematic reviewers should use a checklist to ensure a measure of quality control for included papers and be aware that Google Scholar and PubMed do not provide the same level of quality control as other bibliographic databases.

 

 

Market research report: What has become of new entrants in research workflows and scholarly communication?

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Author : Yvonne Campfens

Over the years, many names of new entrants in research workflows and scholarly communication have appeared. These players aim to provide improvements on solutions for existing needs, or address new requirements or unarticulated needs in all areas of the research cycle.

What has become of these hopeful new entrants and their products, services, and tools? This Fall, market research was conducted to investigate various questions in this respect:

1. Did they still exist (independently) in 2018?

2. If so, how were they funded and how were they doing?

3. If acquired by 2018, by whom and when were they taken over?

This white paper describes the approach and results of the market research. The underlying data are available from Zenodo.

URL : Market research report: What has become of new entrants in research workflows and scholarly communication?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/a78zj

Access to Scholarly Publications through Consortium in Sri Lanka A Case Study

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Author : Pradeepa Wijetunge

This paper illustrates the complicated process of formulating a library consortium in Sri Lanka, and the process of preliminary activities, selection of databases, awareness raising and training and the later developments are presented as a case study, using appropriate Tables, Figures and textual discussions.

Insights are provided to the factors that contributed to the slow but steady establishment and development including the support of the top management of the University Grants Commission, participation of as many academics as possible and the collaborative nature of the implementation process.

This is the first ever paper written on the formulation of the Sri Lankan consortium and the publishing will help many researchers to gain firsthand information about its beginnings.

Also, the library leaders from other countries where the socio-economic and attitudinal conditions are similar can use the lessons learnt from this initiative for their benefit.

URL : Access to Scholarly Publications through Consortium in Sri Lanka A Case Study

Alternative location : http://publications.drdo.gov.in/ojs/index.php/djlit/article/view/13718

Preprints in Scholarly Communication: Re-Imagining Metrics and Infrastructures

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Authors : B. Preedip Balaji, M. Dhanamjaya

Digital scholarship and electronic publishing among the scholarly communities are changing when metrics and open infrastructures take centre stage for measuring research impact. In scholarly communication, the growth of preprint repositories over the last three decades as a new model of scholarly publishing has emerged as one of the major developments.

As it unfolds, the landscape of scholarly communication is transitioning, as much is being privatized as it is being made open and towards alternative metrics, such as social media attention, author-level, and article-level metrics. Moreover, the granularity of evaluating research impact through new metrics and social media change the objective standards of evaluating research performance.

Using preprint repositories as a case study, this article situates them in a scholarly web, examining their salient features, benefits, and futures. Towards scholarly web development and publishing on semantic and social web with open infrastructures, citations, and alternative metrics—how preprints advance building web as data is discussed.

We examine that this will viably demonstrate new metrics and in enhancing research publishing tools in scholarly commons facilitating various communities of practice.

However, for the preprint repositories to sustain, scholarly communities and funding agencies should support continued investment in open knowledge, alternative metrics development, and open infrastructures in scholarly publishing.

URL : Preprints in Scholarly Communication: Re-Imagining Metrics and Infrastructures

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7010006

Scholarly Communication Practices in Humanities and Social Sciences: A Study of Researchers’ Attitudes and Awareness of Open Access

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Authors: Bhuva Narayan, Edward J. Luca, Belinda Tiffen, Ashley England, Mal Booth, Henry Boateng

This paper examines issues relating to the perceptions and adoption of open access (OA) and institutional repositories. Using a survey research design, we collected data from academics and other researchers in the humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) at a university in Australia.

We looked at factors influencing choice of publishers and journal outlets, as well as the use of social media and nontraditional channels for scholarly communication.

We used an online questionnaire to collect data and used descriptive statistics to analyse the data. Our findings suggest that researchers are highly influenced by traditional measures of quality, such as journal impact factor, and are less concerned with making their work more findable and promoting it through social media.

This highlights a disconnect between researchers’ desired outcomes and the efforts that they put in toward the same. Our findings also suggest that institutional policies have the potential to increase OA awareness and adoption.

This study contributes to the growing literature on scholarly communication by offering evidence from the HASS field, where limited studies have been conducted.

Based on the findings, we recommend that academic librarians engage with faculty through outreach and workshops to change perceptions of OA and the institutional repository.

URL : Scholarly Communication Practices in Humanities and Social Sciences: A Study of Researchers’ Attitudes and Awareness of Open Access

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1515/opis-2018-0013

Creating a Library Publishing Program for Scholarly Books: Your Options Are Limited

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Author : Kevin Scott Hawkins

Publishing programs in academic libraries vary in their scope, offerings, and business models. Despite the many forms that these programs take, I have argued in the past that various factors constrain the design of a start-up publishing operation.

In this commentary, I discuss in greater depth the key questions to be addressed before establishing a library publishing program for scholarly books, arguing that the viable options are in fact quite limited.

URL : Creating a Library Publishing Program for Scholarly Books: Your Options Are Limited

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2262

Open access medical journals: Benefits and challenges

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Authors : Jenny Z.Wang, Aunna Pourang, Barbara Burrall

The world of medical science literature is ever increasingly accessible via the Internet. Open access online medical journals, in particular, offer access to a wide variety of useful information at no cost.

In addition, they provide avenues for publishing that are available to health care providers of all levels of training and practice. Whereas costs are less with the publishing of online open access journals, fewer resources for funding and technical support also exist.

A recent rise in predatory journals, which solicit authors but charge high fees per paper published and provide low oversight, pose other challenges to ensuring the credibility of accessible scientific literature.

Recognizing the value and efforts of legitimate open access online medical journals can help the reader navigate the over 11,000 open access journals that are available to date.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clindermatol.2018.09.010