Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Towards an open science publishing platform

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Authors : Vitek Tracz, Rebecca Lawrence

The way science and research is done is rapidly becoming more open and collaborative. The traditional way of publishing new findings in journals is becoming increasingly outdated and no longer serves the needs of much of science.

Whilst preprints can bring significant benefits of removing delay and selection, they do not go far enough if simply implemented alongside the existing journal system. We propose that we need a new approach, an Open Science Platform, that takes the benefits of preprints but adds formal, invited, and transparent post-publication peer review.

This bypasses the problems of the current journal system and, in doing so, moves the evaluation of research and researchers away from the journal-based Impact Factor and towards a fairer system of article-based qualitative and quantitative indicators.

In the long term, it should be irrelevant where a researcher publishes their findings. What is important is that research is shared and made available without delay within a framework that encourages quality standards and requires all players in the research community to work as collaborators.

URL : Towards an open science publishing platform

DOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.12688%2Ff1000research.7968.1

Open Post Publication Peer Review: An Innovation in Scientific Communication

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Authors : Peiling Wang, Manasa Rath, Michael Deike, Wu Qiang

This research observes the emerging open peer review journals. In scientific publishing, transparency in peer review is a growing topic of interest for online journals. The traditional blind refereeing process has been criticized for lacking transparency.

Although the idea of open peer review (OPR) has been explored since 1980s, it is only in this decade that OPR journals are born. Towards a more open publishing model, the peer review process–once accessible only to the editors and referees—is now available to public.

The published article and its review history are being integrated into one entity; readers can submit or post comments to extend the peer process. This preliminary study observed four pioneer OPR journals representing pre-publication OPR and post-publication OPR.

Data collection focuses on publication’s lifecycle from its submission to peer approval. Preliminary results include comparisons of the level of openness and nature of interactions during refereeing process.

URL : http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_infosciepubs/55/

Etude critique des nouveaux modes « d’éditorialisation » de revues scientifiques en accès-ouvert

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Auteur/Author : Pierre-Carl Langlais

Ce rapport commandé par BSN 4 et BSN 7 porte sur les nouveaux modes d’éditorialisation des revues en accès ouvert. La transition vers le libre accès s’est accélérée au cours de ces dernières années.

Plusieurs pays ont instauré un cadre légal pour sécuriser le dépôt en archive ouverte (en France, une disposition de ce type est intégrée au projet de loi sur le Numérique). En mai 2016 le conseil de l’Union Européenne a appelé à faire du libre accès une “option par défaut” d’ici 2020 dans l’ensemble des pays-membres.

Si la conversion de l’édition scientifique vers la diffusion en libre accès paraît acquise à court terme, ses modalités restent incertaines : se limite-t-elle à un simple transfert des budgets consacrés aux abonnements vers le paiement de droits à publier sans fondamentalement changer les structures éditoriales existantes (ou journal flipping) ?

Ou fait-elle émerger des modèles inédits, qui reconfigurent l’ensemble des paramètres existants ? Cette dynamique de changement ouvre la perspective de réformes à grande échelle.

La commande initiale s’inscrit dans ce cadre : quelles formes éditoriales l’État peut-il encourager à l’heure du numérique, de la mutation de l’édition scientifique et de la faillite de l’évaluation scientifique ?

Le rapport dresse une cartographie des pratiques et des initiatives émergentes qui s’étend dans quatre dimensions : les outils d’édition, les formes d’écriture, l’évaluation, et les modèles économiques.

Notre dernière partie porte un constat plus global : dans un écosystème aussi « interdépendant » que l’édition scientifique numérique, cette transformation impliquerait la mise en œuvre de politiques d’infrastructure qui, au-delà du soutien d’usages ou d’outils spécifiques définiraient des articulations convergentes entre dispositifs, acteurs et pratiques.

URL : Etude critique des nouveaux modes « d’éditorialisation » de revues scientifiques en accès-ouvert

Alternative location : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01388556/

Should Indian researchers pay to get their work published?

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Authors : Muthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekaran, Subbiah Arunachalam

We raise the financial and ethical issue of paying for getting papers published in professional journals. Indian researchers have published more than 37,000 papers in over 880 open access journals from 61 countries in the five years 2010-14 as seen from Science Citation Index Expanded.

This accounts for about 14.4% of India’s overall publication output, considerably higher than the 11.6% from the world. Indian authors have used 488 OA journals levying article processing charge (APC), ranging from INR 500 to US$5,000, in the five years to publish about 15,400 papers.

More than half of these papers were published in just 13 journals. PLoS One and Current Science are the OA journals Indian researchers use most often. Most leading Indian journals are open access and they do not charge APC. Use of OA journals levying APC has increased over the four years from 242 journls and 2557 papers in 2010 to 328 journals and 3,634 papers in 2014.

There has been an increase in the use of non-APC journals as well, but at a lower pace. About 27% of all Indian papers in OA journals are in ‘Clinical Medicine,’ and 11.7% in ‘Chemistry.’ Indian researchers have used nine mega journals to publish 3,100 papers.

We estimate that India is potentially spending about US$2.4 million annually on APCs and suggest that it would be prudent for Indian authors to make their work freely available through interoperable repositories, a trend that is growing significantly in Latin America and China, especially when research is facing a funding crunch.

We further suggest bringing all Indian OA journals on to a single platform similar to SciELO, and all repositories be harvested by CSIR-URDIP which is already managing the OA repositories of the laboratories of CSIR, DBT and DST.

Such resource sharing will not only result in enhanced efficiency and reduced overall costs but also facilitate use of standard metadata among repositories.

URL : http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/54926/

Developing a theory of open access: a grounded theory based literature review

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Author : Kent-Inge Andersson

The thesis presents a conceptual literature review of the subject of open access as it is reflected in literature relevant to digital library research. An approach to the grounded theory method specifically created for the purpose of performing a literature review is applied to 70 articles and conference proceedings found in the databases LISA and LISTA.

Through the coding of the literature five categories that conceptually order the subject of open access emerged; Open Access, Authors, Scholarly Communication, Libraries and Librarians, and Developing and Transitional Countries.

The conceptual relations of the categories are discussed in the presentation of the categories. The emerged theory is then validated through a review of earlier literature, which focused on literature reviews on open access.

A model of the emerged theory with explanatory narratives are then presented in the concluding chapter.

URL : http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1033071/FULLTEXT01.pdf

Opening Review in LIS Journals: A Status Report

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Author : Emily Ford

INTRODUCTION

Peer-review practices in scholarly publishing are changing. Digital publishing mechanisms allow for open peer review, a peer review process that discloses author and reviewer identities to one another.

This model of peer review is increasingly implemented in scholarly publishing. In science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines, open peer review is implemented in journal publishing processes, and, in the humanities and social sciences, it is often coupled with new scholarship practices, such as the digital humanities.

This article reports findings from an exploratory study on peer-review and publishing practices in Library and Information Science (LIS), focusing on LIS’s relationships with open peer review.

METHODS

Editors of LIS journals were surveyed regarding journal peer review and publishing practices.

RESULTS

This article reports the general “pulse” of attitudes and conversations regarding open peer review and discusses its challenges in LIS. Results show an ideological split between traditionally-published journals and open access and association-affiliated journals. Open access and association-affiliated journal editors are more likely to consider investigating open peer review.

DISCUSSION

The LIS community of journal editors, authors, reviewers, and readers need to discuss open peer review as well as experiment with it. Experiments with open peer review in scholarly LIS publishing will inform our praxis as librarians.

URL : Opening Review in LIS Journals: A Status Report

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2148

Researchers’ Individual Publication Rate Has Not Increased in a Century

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Authors : Daniele Fanelli, Vincent Larivière

Debates over the pros and cons of a “publish or perish” philosophy have inflamed academia for at least half a century. Growing concerns, in particular, are expressed for policies that reward “quantity” at the expense of “quality,” because these might prompt scientists to unduly multiply their publications by fractioning (“salami slicing”), duplicating, rushing, simplifying, or even fabricating their results.

To assess the reasonableness of these concerns, we analyzed publication patterns of over 40,000 researchers that, between the years 1900 and 2013, have published two or more papers within 15 years, in any of the disciplines covered by the Web of Science.

The total number of papers published by researchers during their early career period (first fifteen years) has increased in recent decades, but so has their average number of co-authors. If we take the latter factor into account, by measuring productivity fractionally or by only counting papers published as first author, we observe no increase in productivity throughout the century.

Even after the 1980s, adjusted productivity has not increased for most disciplines and countries. These results are robust to methodological choices and are actually conservative with respect to the hypothesis that publication rates are growing.

Therefore, the widespread belief that pressures to publish are causing the scientific literature to be flooded with salami-sliced, trivial, incomplete, duplicated, plagiarized and false results is likely to be incorrect or at least exaggerated.

URL : Researchers’ Individual Publication Rate Has Not Increased in a Century

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0149504