Étiquette : scientific communication

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The limitations to our understanding of peer review

Authors : Jonathan P. Tennant, Tony Ross-Hellauer

Peer review is embedded in the core of our scholarly knowledge generation systems, conferring legitimacy on research while distributing academic capital and prestige on individuals.

Despite its critical importance, it curiously remains poorly understood in a number of dimensions. In order to address this, we have programmatically analysed peer review to assess where the major gaps in our theoretical and empirical understanding of it lie.

We distill this into core themes around editorial accountability, the subjectivity and bias of reviewers, the function and quality of peer review, the role of the reviewer, the social and epistemic implications of peer review, and regarding innovations in open peer review platforms and services.

We use this to present a guide for the future of peer review, and the development of a new research discipline based on the study of peer review. Such a field requires sustained funding and commitment from publishers and research funders, who both have a commitment to uphold the integrity of the published scholarly record.

This will require the design of a consensus for a minimal set of standards for what constitutes peer review, and the development of a shared data infrastructure to support this.

We recognise that many of the criticisms attributed to peer review might reflect wider issues within academia and wider society, and future care will be required in order to carefully demarcate and address these.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/jq623

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Workflows Allowing Creation of Journal Article Supporting Information and Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR)-Enabled Publication of Spectroscopic Data

Authors : Agustin Barba, Santiago Dominguez, Carlos Cobas, David P. Martinsen, Charles Romain, Henry S. Rzepa; Felipe Seoane

There is an increasing focus on the part of academic institutions, funding agencies, and publishers, if not researchers themselves, on preservation and sharing of research data. Motivations for sharing include research integrity, replicability, and reuse.

One of the barriers to publishing data is the extra work involved in preparing data for publication once a journal article and its supporting information have been completed.

In this work, a method is described to generate both human and machine-readable supporting information directly from the primary instrumental data files and to generate the metadata to ensure it is published in accordance with findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) guidelines.

Using this approach, both the human readable supporting information and the primary (raw) data can be submitted simultaneously with little extra effort.

Although traditionally the data package would be sent to a journal publisher for publication alongside the article, the data package could also be published independently in an institutional FAIR data repository.

Workflows are described that store the data packages and generate metadata appropriate for such a repository. The methods both to generate and to publish the data packages have been implemented for NMR data, but the concept is extensible to other types of spectroscopic data as well.

URL : Workflows Allowing Creation of Journal Article Supporting Information and Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR)-Enabled Publication of Spectroscopic Data

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1021/acsomega.8b03005

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EN

Is Scholarly Publishing Like Rock and Roll?

Author : David W. Lewis

This article uses Alan B. Krueger’s analysis of the music industry in his book Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life as a lens to consider the structure of scholarly publishing and what could happen to scholarly publishing going forward.

Both the music industry and scholarly publishing are facing disruption as their products become digital. Digital content provides opportunities to a create a better product at lower prices and in the music industry this has happened. Scholarly publishing has not yet done so.

Similarities and differences between the music industry and scholarly publishing will be considered. Like music, scholarly publishing appears to be a superstar industry. Both music and scholarly publishing are subject to piracy, which threatens revenue, though Napster was a greater disrupter than Sci-Hub seems to be.

It also appears that for a variety of reasons market forces are not effective in driving changes in business models and practices in scholarly publishing, at least not at the rate we would expect given the changes in technology. After reviewing similarities and differences, the prospects for the future of scholarly publishing will be considered.

URL : Is Scholarly Publishing Like Rock and Roll?

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/1805/20430

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COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations

Authors : Ivan Heibi, Silvio Peroni, David Shotton

In this paper, we present COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations (this http URL). COCI is the first open citation index created by OpenCitations, in which we have applied the concept of citations as first-class data entities, and it contains more than 445 million DOI-to-DOI citation links derived from the data available in Crossref.

These citations are described in RDF by means of the newly extended version of the OpenCitations Data Model (OCDM).

We introduce the workflow we have developed for creating these data, and also show the additional services that facilitate the access to and querying of these data via different access points: a SPARQL endpoint, a REST API, bulk downloads, Web interfaces, and direct access to the citations via HTTP content negotiation.

Finally, we present statistics regarding the use of COCI citation data, and we introduce several projects that have already started to use COCI data for different purposes.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.06052

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Ten years of research on ResearchGate, a scoping review using Google Scholar 2008-2017

Authors : Prieto-Gutierrez, Juan Jose

Objective

To analyse quantitatively the articles published during 2008_2017 about the academic social networking site ResearchGate.

Methods

A scoping bibliometric review of documents retrieved using Google Scholar was conducted, limited to publications that contained the word « ResearchGate » in their title and were published from 2008 to 2017.

Results

The search yielded 159 documents, once a preliminary list of 386 documents retrieved from Google Scholar was filtered, which eliminated about 60% of the results that were bibliographic citations and not documents. Papers in journals were the most numerous type of documents (n73; 46%), followed by conference papers (n_31; 19.5 %).

Contributing eight publications, two Spanish scholars (Delgado Lopez-Cozar and Orduna Malea, who were coauthors in each case) were the most prolific authors writing on this topic during the ten-year period. The keywords most used in the documents were « ResearchGate » and « Altmetrics ».

The publications were cited frequently since 2014 (more than 90% of the total cites fell in that period), and those with more than one author were the most cited ones.

The authors of the documents were mainly librarians and information science professionals, who wrote primarily as co-authors with colleagues from their own institutions, mostly published in English.

Conclusions

Interest in ResearchGate has grown since 2015, as evident from the number of articles published and the citations they received.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08752

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Open Up: A Survey on Open and Non-anonymized Peer Reviewing

Authors : Lonni Besançon, Niklas Rönnberg, Jonas Löwgren, Jonathan P. Tennant, Matthew Cooper

We present a discussion and analysis regarding the benefits and limitations of open and non-anonymized peer review based on literature results and responses to a survey on the reviewing process of alt.chi, a more or less open-review track within the CHI conference, the predominant conference in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI).

This track currently is the only implementation of an open-peer-review process in the field of HCI while, with the recent increase in interest in open science practices, open review is now being considered and used in other fields.

We collected 30 responses from alt.chi authors and reviewers and found that, while the benefits are quite clear and the system is generally well liked by alt.chi participants, they are reluctant to see it used in other venues.

This concurs with a number of recent studies that suggest a divergence between support for a more open review process and its practical implementation. The data and scripts are available on https://osf.io/vuw7h/, and the figures and follow-up work on http://tiny.cc/OpenReviews.

URL : Open Up: A Survey on Open and Non-anonymized Peer Reviewing

Alternative location : https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201905.0098/v2

 

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EN

A Crisis in “Open Access”: Should Communication Scholarly Outputs Take 77 Years to Become Open Access?

Authors : Abbas Ghanbari Baghestan, Hadi Khaniki, Abdolhosein Kalantari, Mehrnoosh Akhtari-Zavare, Elaheh Farahmand, Ezhar Tamam, Nader Ale Ebrahim, Havva Sabani, Mahmoud Danaee

This study diachronically investigates the trend of the “open access” in the Web of Science (WoS) category of “communication.” To evaluate the trend, data were collected from 184 categories of WoS from 1980 to 2017.

A total of 87,997,893 documents were obtained, of which 95,304 (0.10%) were in the category of “communication.” In average, 4.24% of the documents in all 184 categories were open access. While in communication, it was 3.29%, which ranked communication 116 out of 184.

An Open Access Index (OAI) was developed to predict the trend of open access in communication. Based on the OAI, communication needs 77 years to fully reach open access, which undeniably can be considered as “crisis in scientific publishing” in this field.

Given this stunning information, it is the time for a global call for “open access” by communication scholars across the world. Future research should investigate whether the current business models of publications in communication scholarships are encouraging open access or pose unnecessary restrictions on knowledge development.

URL : A Crisis in “Open Access”: Should Communication Scholarly Outputs Take 77 Years to Become Open Access?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019871044