Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Evaluating research and researchers by the journal impact factor: is it better than coin flipping?

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Authors : Ricardo Brito, Alonso Rodríguez-Navarro

The journal impact factor (JIF) is the average of the number of citations of the papers published in a journal, calculated according to a specific formula; it is extensively used for the evaluation of research and researchers.

The method assumes that all papers in a journal have the same scientific merit, which is measured by the JIF of the publishing journal. This implies that the number of citations measures scientific merits but the JIF does not evaluate each individual paper by its own number of citations.

Therefore, in the comparative evaluation of two papers, the use of the JIF implies a risk of failure, which occurs when a paper in the journal with the lower JIF is compared to another with fewer citations in the journal with the higher JIF.

To quantify this risk of failure, this study calculates the failure probabilities, taking advantage of the lognormal distribution of citations. In two journals whose JIFs are ten-fold different, the failure probability is low.

However, in most cases when two papers are compared, the JIFs of the journals are not so different. Then, the failure probability can be close to 0.5, which is equivalent to evaluating by coin flipping.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.10999

OpenAPC: a contribution to a transparent and reproducible monitoring of fee-based open access publishing across institutions and nations

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Authors : Dirk Pieper, Christoph Broschinski

The OpenAPC initiative releases data sets on fees paid for open access (OA) journal articles by universities, funders and research institutions under an open database licence.

OpenAPC is part of the INTACT project, which is funded by the German Research Foundation and located at Bielefeld University Library.

This article provides insight into OpenAPC’s technical and organizational background and shows how transparent and reproducible reporting on fee-based open access can be conducted across institutions and publishers to draw conclusions on the state of the OA transformation process.

As part of the INTACT subproject, ESAC, the article also shows how OpenAPC workflows can be used to analyse offsetting deals, using the example of Springer Compact agreements.

URL : OpenAPC: a contribution to a transparent and reproducible monitoring of fee-based open access publishing across institutions and nations

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.439

Predatory Open Access Journals Publishing: What, Why and How?

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Author : Shamprasad M. Pujar

The Internet has transformed scholarly publishing and made the availability of online resources possible, both in subscription and open access models. Open access, has enabled wider access to the scholarly literature, thus reducing the digital divide among the haves and have-nots.

In the case of journal articles, even though its ‘Gold’ (author pays model) and ‘Green’ access models have risen to the occasion, but some publishers of journals have turned its ‘Gold’ model to their advantage to earn a profit by charging fees for publication and adopting certain unethical practices of publishing.

An effort has been made here to explore what is ‘Predatory’ open access journals publishing, why this kind of publishing is flourishing and how this model works.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10760/32032

La tension entre la pratique de recherche et l’intégrité scientifique : l’exemple de l’activité bibliographique

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Auteurs/Authors : Sophie Kennel, Elsa Poupardin

L’activité bibliographique des chercheurs va de la constitution d’une culture savante à l’enrichissement de la connaissance scientifique par la publication. Notre étude interroge le lien entre l’intégrité scientifique et les constituants de cette production scientifique.

Elle permet de situer les connaissances et les positionnements des chercheurs sur la question de l’intégrité scientifique et montre les tensions entre l’activité prescrite, induite et l’activité réelle de lecture et de citation des chercheurs souvent déterminée par les normes d’évaluation.

URL : https://lesenjeux.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/2018/04-Kennel-Poupardin/

A guideline for reporting experimental protocols in life sciences

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Authors : Olga Giraldo​, Alexander Garcia, Oscar Corcho

Experimental protocols are key when planning, performing and publishing research in many disciplines, especially in relation to the reporting of materials and methods. However, they vary in their content, structure and associated data elements.

This article presents a guideline for describing key content for reporting experimental protocols in the domain of life sciences, together with the methodology followed in order to develop such guideline.

As part of our work, we propose a checklist that contains 17 data elements that we consider fundamental to facilitate the execution of the protocol. These data elements are formally described in the SMART Protocols ontology.

By providing guidance for the key content to be reported, we aim (1) to make it easier for authors to report experimental protocols with necessary and sufficient information that allow others to reproduce an experiment, (2) to promote consistency across laboratories by delivering an adaptable set of data elements, and (3) to make it easier for reviewers and editors to measure the quality of submitted manuscripts against an established criteria.

Our checklist focuses on the content, what should be included. Rather than advocating a specific format for protocols in life sciences, the checklist includes a full description of the key data elements that facilitate the execution of the protocol.

URL : A guideline for reporting experimental protocols in life sciences

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4795

Leveraging Elsevier’s Creative Commons License Requirement to Undermine Embargo

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Author : Josh Bolick

In the last round of author-sharing policy revisions, Elsevier created a labyrinthine title-by-title embargo structure requiring embargoes from 12 to 48 months for authors sharing via institutional repository (IR), while permitting immediate sharing via an author’s personal website or blog. At the same time, all prepublication versions are to bear a Creative Commons-Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) license.

At the time this policy was announced, it was criticized by many in the scholarly communication community as overly complicated and restrictive. However, this CC licensing requirement creates an avenue for subverting an embargo in the IR to achieve quicker and wider open distribution of the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM).

To wit, authors may post an appropriately licensed copy on their personal site or blog, at which point the author’s host institution may deposit without an embargo in the IR, not through the license granted in the publication agreement, but through the CC license on the author’s version, which the sharing policy mandates.

This article outlines the background and rationale of the issue and discusses the benefits, workflows, and remaining questions.

URL : Leveraging Elsevier’s Creative Commons License Requirement to Undermine Embargo

DOI : https://doi.org/10.17161/jcel.v2i2.7415

Towards a Decentralized Process for Scientific Publication and Peer Review using Blockchain and IPFS

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Authors : Antonio Tenorio-Fornés, Viktor Jacynycz, David Llop, Antonio A. Sanchez-Ruiz, Samer Hassan

The current processes of scientific publication and peer review raise concerns around fairness, quality, performance, cost, and accuracy. The Open Access movement has been unable to fulfill all its promises, and a few middlemen publishers can still impose policies and concentrate profits.

This paper, using emerging distributed technologies such as Blockchain and IPFS, proposes a decentralized publication system for open science.

The proposed system would provide (1) a distributed reviewer reputation system, (2) an Open Access by-design infrastructure, and (3) transparent governance processes.

A survey is used to evaluate the problems, proposed solutions and possible adoption resistances, while a working prototype serves as a proof-of-concept.

Additionally, the paper discusses the implementation, in a distributed context, of different privacy settings for both open peer review and reputation systems, introducing a novel approach supporting both anonymous and accountable reviews. The paper concludes reviewing the open challenges of this ambitious proposal.

URL : Towards a Decentralized Process for Scientific Publication and Peer Review using Blockchain and IPFS