Authors : Tom Price, Sabine Hossenfelder
Who has not read letters of recommendations that comment on a student’s `broadness’ and wondered what to make of it?
We here propose a way to quantify scientific broadness by a semantic analysis of researchers’ publications. We apply our methods to papers on the open-access server arXiv.org and report our findings.
Authors : Julian N. Marewski, Lutz Bornmann
In science and beyond, numbers are omnipresent when it comes to justifying different kinds of judgments. Which scientific author, hiring committee-member, or advisory board panelist has not been confronted with page-long « publication manuals », « assessment reports », « evaluation guidelines », calling for p-values, citation rates, h-indices, or other statistics in order to motivate judgments about the « quality » of findings, applicants, or institutions?
Yet, many of those relying on and calling for statistics do not even seem to understand what information those numbers can actually convey, and what not. Focusing on the uninformed usage of bibliometrics as worrysome outgrowth of the increasing quantification of science and society, we place the abuse of numbers into larger historical contexts and trends.
These are characterized by a technology-driven bureaucratization of science, obsessions with control and accountability, and mistrust in human intuitive judgment. The ongoing digital revolution increases those trends.
We call for bringing sanity back into scientific judgment exercises. Despite all number crunching, many judgments – be it about scientific output, scientists, or research institutions – will neither be unambiguous, uncontroversial, or testable by external standards, nor can they be otherwise validated or objectified.
Under uncertainty, good human judgment remains, for the better, indispensable, but it can be aided, so we conclude, by a toolbox of simple judgment tools, called heuristics.
In the best position to use those heuristics are research evaluators (1) who have expertise in the to-be-evaluated area of research, (2) who have profound knowledge in bibliometrics, and (3) who are statistically literate.
Authors : Qian Dai, Eunjung Shin, Carthage Smith
Open science can be variously defined. In some communities it is related principally to open access to scientific publications, for others it includes open access to research data and for others still it includes opening up the processes of academic research to engage all interested civil society stakeholders.
The absence of a common understanding of what is, and isn’t, included in open science creates confusion in discussions across these different communities. It is potentially holding back efforts to develop effective policies for promoting open science at the international level.
This paper builds on the limited conceptual work that has been published to date and proposes a broad framework for open science. The framework is not meant to be prescriptive but should help different communities and policy makers to decide on their own priorities within the open science space and to better visualise how these priorities link to different stage of the scientific process and to different actors.
Such a framework can be useful also in considering how best to incentivise and measure various aspects of open science. Digitalisation is fundamentally changing science and the paper lays out some of the opportunities, risks and major policy challenges associated with these changes.
Author : Alexandru-Ionut Petrisor
Spam e-mail and calls from the predatory publishers are very similar in purpose: they are deceptive and produce material losses. Moreover, the predatory publishers show evolving strategies to lure potential victims, as their number increases. In an effort to help researchers defending against their constant menace, this article aims to identify a set of common features of spam e-mail and calls from predatory publishers.
The methodology consisted of a comparative analysis of data found on the Internet and e-mails received at several addresses during December 2017 – January 2018. The results indicate that concealed, fake or disguised identity of the sender and/or of the message, mass mailing, missing or useless opt-out option and an obvious commercial character are the most prominent common features.
Moreover, the location of predatory publishers is well disguised; the analysis of the real location, found using web-based tools, suggests a joint management or at least a concerted action of several publishers, and raises additional questions related to the reasons of masking the true location.
From a theoretical standpoint, the results show, once again, that predatory publishers are a part of the worldwide scam, and should be ‘convicted’ in a similar way, including the means of legal actions. From a practical perspective, distinct recommendations were phrased for researchers, policy makers, libraries, and future research.
Alternative location : http://publications.drdo.gov.in/ojs/index.php/djlit/article/view/12551
Authors : Lisa M. Federer, Christopher W. Belter, Douglas J. Joubert, Alicia Livinski, Ya-Ling Lu, Lissa N. Snyders, Holly Thompson
A number of publishers and funders, including PLOS, have recently adopted policies requiring researchers to share the data underlying their results and publications. Such policies help increase the reproducibility of the published literature, as well as make a larger body of data available for reuse and re-analysis.
In this study, we evaluate the extent to which authors have complied with this policy by analyzing Data Availability Statements from 47,593 papers published in PLOS ONE between March 2014 (when the policy went into effect) and May 2016.
Our analysis shows that compliance with the policy has increased, with a significant decline over time in papers that did not include a Data Availability Statement. However, only about 20% of statements indicate that data are deposited in a repository, which the PLOS policy states is the preferred method.
More commonly, authors state that their data are in the paper itself or in the supplemental information, though it is unclear whether these data meet the level of sharing required in the PLOS policy.
These findings suggest that additional review of Data Availability Statements or more stringent policies may be needed to increase data sharing.
URL : Data sharing in PLOS ONE: An analysis of Data Availability Statements
Authors : John Baillieul, Gerry Grenier, Gianluca Setti
In the years since the launch of the World Wide Web in 1993, there have been profoundly transformative changes to the entire concept of publishing—exceeding all the previous combined technical advances of the centuries following the introduction of movable type in medieval Asia around the year 10001 and the subsequent large-scale commercialization of printing several centuries later by J. Gutenberg (circa 1440).
Periodicals in print—from daily newspapers to scholarly journals—are now quickly disappearing, never to return, and while no publishing sector has been unaffected, many scholarly journals are almost unrecognizable in comparison with their counterparts of two decades ago.
To say that digital delivery of the written word is fundamentally different is a huge understatement. Online publishing permits inclusion of multimedia and interactive content that add new dimensions to what had been available in print-only renderings.
As of this writing, the IEEE portfolio of journal titles comprises 59 online only2 (31%) and 132 that are published in both print and online. The migration from print to online is more stark than these numbers indicate because of the 132 periodicals that are both print and online, the print runs are now quite small and continue to decline.
In short, most readers prefer to have their subscriptions fulfilled by digital renderings only.
Author : PWW Research Team
Publishing Without Walls (PWW) is a Mellon-funded initiative at the University of Illinois led by the University Library in partnership with the School of Information Sciences, the department of African American Studies, and the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.
Our project is developing a scalable, sustainable model for library-based digital scholarly publishing. The model aims to lower publishing barriers – both for scholars new to digital publishing and for institutions with limited resources – while opening publications to the widest possible readership.
With a goal of broad adoption in academic libraries, our model locates the humanities scholar at the center of the scholarly communication ecosystem and affords services that are informed by and responsive to scholarly needs.
The research guiding development of this model aims to identify and explore perceived gaps in the current publishing system, including the gap between what and how scholars want to publish and what existing systems accommodate; the gap between the everyday practices of humanities scholars and tools for producing and supporting digital scholarship; and the gap between digital scholarship and publishing opportunities at resource-rich institutions and resource-limited institutions, especially Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
This report gives the results of one piece of an ongoing, multimodal research effort. Through a large-scale survey and a series of interviews with humanities scholars, this effort aims to lay a solid foundation of understanding about scholarly needs in the contemporary publishing environment.
This report explains the survey method, gives a summary of participants’ self-reported demographics, and details survey results, proceeding question by question. The goal of this report is not to provide interpretation of the meaning or significance of survey results, but to document the results themselves as a foundation for future interpretation, and for informing ongoing research and development of the publishing service model.
URL : Understanding the needs of scholars in a contemporary publishing environment: Survey results