Étiquette : scientific communication

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Retraction policies of top scientific journals ranked by impact factor

Objective

This study gathered information about the retraction policies of the top 200 scientific journals, ranked by impact factor.

Methods

Editors of the top 200 science journals for the year 2012 were contacted by email.

Results

One hundred forty-seven journals (74%) responded to a request for information. Of these, 95 (65%) had a retraction policy. Of journals with a retraction policy, 94% had a policy that allows the editors to retract articles without authors’ consent.

Conclusions

The majority of journals in this sample had a retraction policy, and almost all of them would retract an article without the authors’ permission.

URL : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4511053/

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Non classé

Publishing Ethics and Predatory Practices: A Dilemma for All Stakeholders of Science Communication

Publishing scholarly articles in traditional and newly-launched journals is a responsible task, requiring diligence from authors, reviewers, editors, and publishers. The current generation of scientific authors has ample opportunities for publicizing their research. However, they have to selectively target journals and publish in compliance with the established norms of publishing ethics. Over the past few years, numerous illegitimate or predatory journals have emerged in most fields of science. By exploiting gold Open Access publishing, these journals paved the way for low-quality articles that threatened to change the landscape of evidence-based science.

 

Authors, reviewers, editors, established publishers, and learned associations should be informed about predatory publishing practices and contribute to the trustworthiness of scholarly publications. In line with this, there have been several attempts to distinguish legitimate and illegitimate journals by blacklisting unethical journals (the Jeffrey Beall’s list), issuing a statement on transparency and best publishing practices (the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association’s and other global organizations’ draft document), and tightening the indexing criteria by the Directory of Open Access Journals. None of these measures alone turned to be sufficient. All stakeholders of science communication should be aware of multiple facets of unethical practices and publish well-checked and evidence-based articles.

 

URL : Publishing Ethics and Predatory Practices: A Dilemma for All Stakeholders of Science Communication

 

Related URL : http://www.ease.org.uk/services/member-publications/publishing-ethics-and-predatory-practices-dilemma-all-stakeholders-scie
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You are invited to submit…

The academic community is under great pressure to publish. This pressure is compounded by high rejection rates at many journals. A more recent trend is for some journals to send invitations directly to researchers inviting them to submit a manuscript to their journals. Many researchers find these invitations annoying and unsure how best to respond to them. We collected electronic invitations to submit a manuscript to a journal between April 1, 2014, and March 31, 2015.

We analyzed their content and cross-tabulated them against journals listed in Beall’s list of potential predatory journals. During this time period, 311 invitations were received for 204 journals, the majority of which were in Beall’s list (n = 244; 79 %). The invitations came throughout the calendar year and some journals sent up to six invitations. The majority of journals claimed to provide peer review (n = 179; 57.6 %) although no mention was made of expedited review process. Similarly, more than half of the journals claimed to be open access (n = 186; 59.8 %). The majority of invitations included an unsubscribe link (n = 187; 60.1 %). About half of the invitations came from biomedical journals (n = 179).

We discuss strategies researchers and institutions can consider to reduce the number of invitations received and strategies to handle those invitations that make it to the recipients’ inbox, thus helping to maintain the credibility and reputation of researchers and institutions.

URL : You are invited to submit…

Related URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/13/180

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Les revues de sciences humaines et sociales en France: libre accès et audience

« La Commission européenne a émis le 17 juillet 2012 une recommandation en faveur du libre accès aux résultats de la recherche financée sur fonds publics.

La question posée aux politiques publiques est celle de la durée pendant laquelle l’accès peut être payant avant le passage à la gratuité de l’article. Il s’agit donc de prendre la mesure des gains et des coûts d’une telle politique de libre accès pour déterminer quel serait le délai optimal d’embargo. »

URL : http://www.ipp.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/revues-shs-rapport-IPP-juillet2015.pdf

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Accelerating Scientific Publication in Biology

« Scientific publications enable results and ideas to be transmitted throughout the scientific community. The number and type of journal publications also have become the primary criteria used in evaluating career advancement. Our analysis suggests that publication practices have changed considerably in the life sciences over the past thirty years. Considerably more experimental data is now required for publication, and the average time required for graduate students to publish their first paper has increased and is approaching the desirable duration of Ph.D. training.

Since publication is generally a requirement for career progression, schemes to reduce the time of graduate student and postdoctoral training may be difficult to implement without also considering new mechanisms for accelerating communication of their work. The increasing time to publication also delays potential catalytic effects that ensue when many scientists have access to new information. The time has come for the life scientists, funding agencies, and publishers to discuss how to communicate new findings in a way that best serves the interests of the public and scientific community. »

URL : http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/07/11/022368

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Non classé

Mining and Analyzing the Future Works in Scientific Articles

« Future works in scientific articles are valuable for researchers and they can guide researchers to new research directions or ideas. In this paper, we mine the future works in scientific articles in order to 1) provide an insight for future work analysis and 2) facilitate researchers to search and browse future works in a research area.

First, we study the problem of future work extraction and propose a regular expression based method to address the problem. Second, we define four different categories for the future works by observing the data and investigate the multi-class future work classification problem. Third, we apply the extraction method and the classification model to a paper dataset in the computer science field and conduct a further analysis of the future works.

Finally, we design a prototype system to search and demonstrate the future works mined from the scientific papers. Our evaluation results show that our extraction method can get high precision and recall values and our classification model can also get good results and it outperforms several baseline models. Further analysis of the future work sentences also indicates interesting results. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.02140

Catégories
EN

From Peer-Reviewed to Peer-Reproduced in Scholarly Publishing: The Complementary Roles of Data Models and Workflows in Bioinformatics

Motivation

Reproducing the results from a scientific paper can be challenging due to the absence of data and the computational tools required for their analysis. In addition, details relating to the procedures used to obtain the published results can be difficult to discern due to the use of natural language when reporting how experiments have been performed.

The Investigation/Study/Assay (ISA), Nanopublications (NP), and Research Objects (RO) models are conceptual data modelling frameworks that can structure such information from scientific papers. Computational workflow platforms can also be used to reproduce analyses of data in a principled manner. We assessed the extent by which ISA, NP, and RO models, together with the Galaxy workflow system, can capture the experimental processes and reproduce the findings of a previously published paper reporting on the development of SOAPdenovo2, a de novo genome assembler.

Results

Executable workflows were developed using Galaxy, which reproduced results that were consistent with the published findings. A structured representation of the information in the SOAPdenovo2 paper was produced by combining the use of ISA, NP, and RO models. By structuring the information in the published paper using these data and scientific workflow modelling frameworks, it was possible to explicitly declare elements of experimental design, variables, and findings.

The models served as guides in the curation of scientific information and this led to the identification of inconsistencies in the original published paper, thereby allowing its authors to publish corrections in the form of an errata. »

URL : From Peer-Reviewed to Peer-Reproduced in Scholarly Publishing: The Complementary Roles of Data Models and Workflows in Bioinformatics

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0127612