Étiquette : scientific communication

Catégories
EN

Why we publish where we do: Faculty publishing values and their relationship to review, promotion and tenure expectations

Authors : Meredith T. Niles, Lesley A. Schimanski, Erin C. McKiernan, Juan Pablo Alperin

Using an online survey of academics at 55 randomly selected institutions across the US and Canada, we explore priorities for publishing decisions and their perceived importance within review, promotion, and tenure (RPT).

We find that respondents most value journal readership, while they believe their peers most value prestige and related metrics such as impact factor when submitting their work for publication.

Respondents indicated that total number of publications, number of publications per year, and journal name recognition were the most valued factors in RPT.

Older and tenured respondents (most likely to serve on RPT committees) were less likely to value journal prestige and metrics for publishing, while untenured respondents were more likely to value these factors.

These results suggest disconnects between what academics value versus what they think their peers value, and between the importance of journal prestige and metrics for tenured versus untenured faculty in publishing and RPT perceptions.

URL : Why we publish where we do: Faculty publishing values and their relationship to review, promotion and tenure expectations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228914

Catégories
Non classé

Open Access+ Service: reframing library support to take research outputs to non-academic audiences

Author: Scott Taylor

The University of Manchester Library has established a key role in facilitating scholarly discourse through its mediated open access (OA) services, but has little track record in intentionally taking OA research outputs to non-academic audiences.

This article outlines recent exploratory steps the Library has taken to convince researchers to fully exploit this part of the scholarly communication chain. Driving developments within this service category is a belief that despite the recent rise in OA, the full public benefit of research outputs is often not being realized as many papers are written in inaccessibly technical language.

Recognizing our unique position to help authors reach broader audiences with simpler expressions of their work, we have evolved our existing managed OA services to systematically share plain-English summaries of OA papers via Twitter.

In parallel, we have taken steps to ensure that our commercial analytics tools work harder to identify and reach the networked communities that form around academic disciplines in the hope that these simpler expressions of research will be more likely to diffuse beyond these networks.

URL : Open Access+ Service: reframing library support to take research outputs to non-academic audiences

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.499

Catégories
EN

Demarcating Spectrums of Predatory Publishing: Economic and Institutional Sources of Academic Legitimacy

Author : Kyle Sile

The emergence of Open Access (OA) publishing has altered incentives and opportunities for academic stakeholders and publishers. These changes have yielded a variety of new economic and academic niches, including journals with questionable peer review systems and business models, commonly dubbed ‘predatory publishing.’ Empirical analysis of the Cabell’s Journal Blacklist reveals substantial diversity in types and degrees of predatory publishing.

While some blacklisted publishers produce journals with many severe violations of academic norms, ‘grey’ journals and publishers occupy borderline or ambiguous niches between predation and legitimacy.

Predation in academic publishing is not a simple binary phenomenon and should instead be perceived as a spectrum with varying types and degrees of illegitimacy. Conceptions of predation are based on overlapping evaluations of academic and economic legitimacy.

High institutional status benefits publishers by reducing conflicts between – if not aligning – professional and market institutional logics, which are more likely to conflict and create illegitimacy concerns in downmarket niches.

High rejection rates imbue high-status journals with value and pricing power, while low-status OA journals face ‘predatory’ incentives to optimize revenue via low selectivity.

Status influences the social acceptability of profit-seeking in academic publishing, rendering lower-status publishers vulnerable to being perceived and stigmatized as illegitimate.

URL : https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/6r274/

Catégories
EN

Scopus as a curated, high-quality bibliometric data source for academic research in quantitative science studies

Authors : Jeroen Baas, Michiel Schotten, Andrew Plume, Grégoire Côté, Reza Karimi

Scopus is among the largest curated abstract and citation databases, with a wide global and regional coverage of scientific journals, conference proceedings, and books, while ensuring only the highest quality data are indexed through rigorous content selection and re-evaluation by an independent Content Selection and Advisory Board.

Additionally, extensive quality assurance processes continuously monitor and improve all data elements in Scopus. Besides enriched metadata records of scientific articles, Scopus offers comprehensive author and institution profiles, obtained from advanced profiling algorithms and manual curation, ensuring high precision and recall.

The trustworthiness of Scopus has led to its use as bibliometric data source for large-scale analyses in research assessments, research landscape studies, science policy evaluations, and university rankings.

Scopus data have been offered for free for selected studies by the academic research community, such as through application programming interfaces, which have led to many publications employing Scopus data to investigate topics such as researcher mobility, network visualizations, and spatial bibliometrics.

In June 2019, the International Center for the Study of Research was launched, with an advisory board consisting of bibliometricians, aiming to work with the scientometric research community and offering a virtual laboratory where researchers will be able to utilize Scopus data.

URL : Scopus as a curated, high-quality bibliometric data source for academic research in quantitative science studies

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00019

Catégories
EN

Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata

Authors : Ginny Hendricks, Dominika Tkaczyk, Jennifer Lin, Patricia Feeney

This paper describes the scholarly metadata collected and made available by Crossref, as well as its importance in the scholarly research ecosystem. Containing over 106 million records and expanding at an average rate of 11% a year, Crossref’s metadata has become one of the major sources of scholarly data for publishers, authors, librarians, funders, and researchers.

The metadata set consists of 13 content types, including not only traditional types, such as journals and conference papers, but also data sets, reports, preprints, peer reviews, and grants.

The metadata is not limited to basic publication metadata, but can also include abstracts and links to full text, funding and license information, citation links, and the information about corrections, updates, retractions, etc.

This scale and breadth make Crossref a valuable source for research in scientometrics, including measuring the growth and impact of science and understanding new trends in scholarly communications. The metadata is available through a number of APIs, including REST API and OAI-PMH.

In this paper, we describe the kind of metadata that Crossref provides and how it is collected and curated. We also look at Crossref’s role in the research ecosystem and trends in metadata curation over the years, including the evolution of its citation data provision.

We summarize the research used in Crossref’s metadata and describe plans that will improve metadata quality and retrieval in the future.

URL : Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00022

Catégories
EN

Rethinking the Journal Impact Factor and Publishing in the Digital Age

Authors : Mark S. Nestor, Daniel Fischer, David Arnold, Brian Berman, James Q. Del Rosso

Clinical and experimental literature search has changed significantly over the past few decades, and with it, the way in which we value information. Today, our need for immediate access to relevant and specific literature, regardless of specialty, has led to a growing demand for open access to publications.

The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) has been a long-time standard for representing the quality or “prestige” of a journal, but it appears to be losing its relevance. Here, we define the JIF and deconstruct its validity as a modern measure of a journal’s quality, discuss the current models of academic publication, including their advantages and shortcomings, and discuss the benefits and shortcomings of a variety of open-access models, including costs to the author.

We have quantified a nonsubscribed physician’s access to full articles associated with dermatologic disease and aesthetics cited on PubMed. For some of the most common dermatology conditions, 23.1 percent of citations (ranging from 17.2% for melasma to 31.9% for malignant melanoma) were available as free full articles, and for aesthetic procedures, 18.9 percent of citations (ranging from 11.9% for laser hair removal to 27.9% for botulinum toxin) were available as free full articles.

Finally, we discuss existing alternative metrics for measuring journal impact and propose the adoption of a superior publishing model, one that satisfies modern day standards of scholarly knowledge pursuit and dissemination of scholarly publications for dermatology and all of medical science.

URL : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7028381/

Catégories
EN

Funding Sources for Open Access Article Processing Charges in the Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities in the United States

Authors : Melissa H. Cantrell, Juleah A. Swanson

Article processing charges (APCs) are one method of many to ensure open access to research literature, but studies that explore the funding sources for such payments, especially as related to open access publications in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, have been limited.

This study seeks to understand the range of funding sources that are available and used by faculties in these disciplines to pay for APCs associated with publishing in open access journals, as well as attitudes towards and awareness of available institutional funds that may inflect future engagement with open access publishing.

The authors distributed a survey to faculty who had an open access journal article published in 2017 from three doctoral granting, high research activity universities in the United States.

Twenty-two scholars participated in the final survey, ten of whom indicated that they paid an APC for their publication. While the results cannot make generalizations about funding sources, they do suggest that both the prevalence of APCs as well as attitudes about open access engagement may be influenced by disciplinary self-identification.

This research contributes to discussions around the future of open access funding models as well as to disciplinary outreach regarding APC funding for journal publications.

URL : Funding Sources for Open Access Article Processing Charges in the Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities in the United States

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8010012