Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Openness in Scholarship: A Return to Core Values?

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Author : Cameron Neylon

The debate over the meaning, and value, of open movements has intensified. The fear of co-option of various efforts from Open Access to Open Data is driving a reassessment and re-definition of what is intended by “open”.

In this article I apply group level models from cultural studies and economics to argue that the tension between exclusionary group formation and identity and aspirations towards inclusion and openness are a natural part of knowledge-making.

Situating the traditional Western Scientific Knowledge System as a culture-made group, I argue that the institutional forms that support the group act as economic underwriters for the process by which groups creating exclusive knowledge invest in the process of making it more accessible, less exclusive, and more public-good-like, in exchange for receiving excludable goods that sustain the group.

A necessary consequence of this is that our institutions will be conservative in their assessment of what knowledge-goods are worth of consideration and who is allowed within those institutional systems. Nonetheless the inclusion of new perspectives and increasing diversity underpins the production of general knowledge.

I suggest that instead of positioning openness as new, and in opposition to traditional closed systems, it may be more productive to adopt a narrative in which efforts to increase inclusion are seen as a very old, core value of the academy, albeit one that is a constant work in progress.

URL : Openness in Scholarship: A Return to Core Values?

Assessing the utility of an institutional publications officer: a pilot assessment

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Authors : Kelly D. Cobey, James Galipeau, Larissa Shamseer, David Moher

Background

The scholarly publication landscape is changing rapidly. We investigated whether the introduction of an institutional publications officer might help facilitate better knowledge of publication topics and related resources, and effectively support researchers to publish.

Methods

In September 2015, a purpose-built survey about researchers’ knowledge and perceptions of publication practices was administered at five Ottawa area research institutions. Subsequently, we publicly announced a newly hired publications officer (KDC) who then began conducting outreach at two of the institutions.

Specifically, the publications officer gave presentations, held one-to-one consultations, developed electronic newsletter content, and generated and maintained a webpage of resources. In March 2016, we re-surveyed our participants regarding their knowledge and perceptions of publishing.

Mean scores to the perception questions, and the percent of correct responses to the knowledge questions, pre and post survey, were computed for each item. The difference between these means or calculated percentages was then examined across the survey measures.

Results

82 participants completed both surveys. Of this group, 29 indicated that they had exposure to the publications officer, while the remaining 53 indicated they did not. Interaction with the publications officer led to improvements in half of the knowledge items (7/14 variables).

While improvements in knowledge of publishing were also found among those who reported not to have interacted with the publications officer (9/14), these effects were often smaller in magnitude. Scores for some publication knowledge variables actually decreased between the pre and post survey (3/14).

Effects for researchers’ perceptions of publishing increased for 5/6 variables in the group that interacted with the publications officer.

Discussion

This pilot provides initial indication that, in a short timeframe, introducing an institutional publications officer may improve knowledge and perceptions surrounding publishing.

This study is limited by its modest sample size and temporal relationship between the introduction of the publications officer and changes in knowledge and perceptions. A randomized trial examining the publications officer as an effective intervention is needed.

URL : Assessing the utility of an institutional publications officer: a pilot assessment

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3294

On the “persistency” of scientific publications: introducing an h-index for journals

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Author : Roberto Piazza

What do we really mean by a “good” scientific journal? Do we care more about the short-time impact of our papers, or about the chance that they will still bhe read and cited on the long run?

Here I show that, by regarding a journal as a “virtual scientist” that can be attributed a time-dependent Hirsch h-index, we can introduce a parameter that, arguably, better captures the “persistency” of a scientific publication. Curiously, however, this parameter seems to depend above all on the “thickness” of a journal.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.09390

L’édition scientifique au prisme des enjeux territoriaux

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Auteur/Author : Édith Laviec

Cette communication s’intéresse au positionnement des régions sur les plans scientifique et du développement des technologies du numérique, et sa traduction auprès des secteurs professionnels comme l’édition d’ouvrages scientifiques.

Nous cherchons à comprendre dans quelle mesure le numérique peut susciter des attentes voire des promesses notamment au niveau politique, qui vont se heurter aux logiques et attentes propres à l’édition de sciences.

Ce travail de recherche relève à la fois de l’industrialisation de la culture, de la communication scientifique articulées à la territorialisation des politiques publiques. Il s’appuie sur une série d’entretiens semi-directifs auprès d’éditeurs d’ouvrages scientifiques et des acteurs politiques de la région Rhône-Alpes.

Les premiers résultats indiquent que, bien que les différentes catégories d’acteurs semblent avoir des stratégies communes, les moyens mobilisés et les objectifs sous-jacents diffèrent et ne permettent pas une rencontre des acteurs.

URL : https://lesenjeux.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/2016-supplementA/11-Laviec/

Peer reviewing: a private affair between the individual researcher and the publishing houses, or a responsibility of the university?

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Authors : Leif Longva, Eirik Reierth, Lars Moksness, Bård Smedsrød

Peer reviewing is mandatory for scientific journals as quality control of submitted manuscripts, for universities to rank applicants for scientific positions, and for funding agencies to rank grant applications.

In spite of this deep dependency of peer reviewing throughout the entire academic realm, universities exhibit a peculiar lack of interest in this activity.

The aim of this article is to show that by taking an active interest in peer reviewing the universities will take control over the management and policy shaping of scientific publishing, a regime that is presently largely controlled by the big publishing houses.

The benefits of gaining control of scientific publishing policy include the possibility to implement open access publishing and to reduce the unjustifiably high subscription rates currently charged by some of the major publishing houses.

A common international clean-up action is needed to move this pivotal element of scientific publishing from the dark hiding places of the scientific journals to where it should be managed: namely, at the universities.

In addition to the economic benefits, we postulate that placing peer reviewing at the universities will improve the quality of published research.

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0020.103

Is there agreement on the prestige of scholarly book publishers in the Humanities? DELPHI over survey results

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Authors : Elea Giménez-Toledo, Jorge Mañana-Rodríguez

Despite having an important role supporting assessment processes, criticism towards evaluation systems and the categorizations used are frequent. Considering the acceptance by the scientific community as an essential issue for using rankings or categorizations in research evaluation, the aim of this paper is testing the results of rankings of scholarly book publishers’ prestige, Scholarly Publishers Indicators (SPI hereafter).

SPI is a public, survey-based ranking of scholarly publishers’ prestige (among other indicators). The latest version of the ranking (2014) was based on an expert consultation with a large number of respondents.

In order to validate and refine the results for Humanities’ fields as proposed by the assessment agencies, a Delphi technique was applied with a panel of randomly selected experts over the initial rankings.

The results show an equalizing effect of the technique over the initial rankings as well as a high degree of concordance between its theoretical aim (consensus among experts) and its empirical results (summarized with Gini Index).

The resulting categorization is understood as more conclusive and susceptible of being accepted by those under evaluation.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.04517

TrueReview: A Platform for Post-Publication Peer Review

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Authors : Luca de Alfaro, Marco Faella

In post-publication peer review, scientific contributions are first published in open-access forums, such as arXiv or other digital libraries, and are subsequently reviewed and possibly ranked and/or evaluated.

Compared to the classical process of scientific publishing, in which review precedes publication, post-publication peer review leads to faster dissemination of ideas, and publicly-available reviews. The chief concern in post-publication reviewing consists in eliciting high-quality, insightful reviews from participants.

We describe the mathematical foundations and structure of TrueReview, an open-source tool we propose to build in support of post-publication review.

In TrueReview, the motivation to review is provided via an incentive system that promotes reviews and evaluations that are both truthful (they turn out to be correct in the long run) and informative (they provide significant new information).

TrueReview organizes papers in venues, allowing different scientific communities to set their own submission and review policies. These venues can be manually set-up, or they can correspond to categories in well-known repositories such as arXiv.

The review incentives can be used to form a reviewer ranking that can be prominently displayed alongside papers in the various disciplines, thus offering a concrete benefit to reviewers. The paper evaluations, in turn, reward the authors of the most significant papers, both via an explicit paper ranking, and via increased visibility in search.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.07878