Étiquette : scientific communication

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Risk and uncertainty in digital preservation: A survey of CoreTrustSeal certified repositories

Author : Rebecca D. Frank

Digital repositories certified as trustworthy through systems such as CoreTrustSeal (CTS) are expected to demonstrate readiness for the ongoing work of long-term digital preservation.

Yet certification processes rest on largely positivistic assumptions about risk: that risks can be identified, classified, and quantified, and that all parties will interpret risk information consistently.

This article challenges that assumption by applying a social constructionist lens to examine how staff members from CTS certified repositories understand risk and characterize uncertainty in the context of digital preservation. Drawing on survey data from 88 respondents across the CTS community (a 54% response rate), the study uses qualitative coding to analyze open-ended responses about the most significant risks and uncertainties facing certified repositories.

Findings show that respondents understood risk in terms of concrete threats across five categories: finance, legal, organizational infrastructure, repository processes, and technical infrastructure.

Financial sustainability, staffing, and technical infrastructure were particularly prominent. Respondents characterized uncertainty in three areas: finance, data and infrastructure, and the Designated Community. Notably, sources of uncertainty were primarily external to the repository, and respondents frequently treated risk and uncertainty as overlapping or interchangeable concepts.

These findings reveal that even repositories that have passed an external audit continue to face significant interconnected threats, particularly around the ability to sustain funding, retain expertise, and maintain infrastructure over time.

The study contributes to information science scholarship by demonstrating that technical and procedural standards alone cannot address the complex challenges of digital preservation, and that attention to how practitioners construct meaning around risk is essential for improving both certification systems and preservation practice.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006261486056

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Opening Pandora’s box: Paper mills in conference proceedings

Authors : Anna Abalkina, Marie Kunešová, Yagmur Ozturk, Solal Pirelli

Objective

Paper mills are a growing threat to the integrity of science, yet their penetration in conference proceedings remains underexplored despite conferences being more important than journals in some scientific subfields. This study aims to identify papers in conference proceedings whose titles have been offered for sale on social media platforms.

Methods

We collected publication offers for more than 4,000 unique paper titles or topics from more than 200 social media channels and used semi-automated methods along with human assessment to match offers with papers published in IEEE conference proceedings.

Results

We identified 2,062 papers in 366 IEEE conference proceedings, accounting for up to 23.5% of an individual conference. These problematic papers are coauthored by more than 7,500 researchers from over 2,000 institutions or companies in 56 countries. The identified papers demonstrate collaboration anomalies, high diversity of affiliations per paper, citation manipulation, a predominance of six-author papers, and content irregularities.

Conclusions

Our findings show that paper mills are a large, organized, and often public market that commercializes scientific misconduct.

URL : Opening Pandora’s box: Paper mills in conference proceedings

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2026.2733727

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Awareness of Predatory Journals and Open Access: an online survey among Italian Researchers

Authors : Silvia Maccarini, Núria Bautista-Puig, Eva Méndez

This study investigates Italian academics’ awareness, perceptions, and experiences of predatory publishing, a phenomenon recognised as a threat to research integrity and scholarly communication. An online survey of researchers affiliated with Italian universities and research institutes yielded 258 responses, which were analysed.

Results show that awareness of predatory publishing is high: almost half of respondents (47.9%) had discussed it with colleagues, and more than one-third had encountered it as authors, reviewers, or readers. Familiarity varies across dimensions, with predatory journals and spam emails being most recognised, and fraudulent websites and podcasts less so. 30% of participants reported personal experience of editorial misleading, mainly as authors, and 76% had received spam or phishing solicitations. Significant differences emerged by professional title and age, with senior researchers demonstrating greater awareness and greater exposure to training.

Most participants perceive predatory publishing as having a moderate or high impact on scientific integrity, but only half have received training in research ethics or use verification tools. Open-ended responses show concern about the “publish or perish” culture and the difficulty of distinguishing legitimate from predatory journals. The findings highlight awareness and vulnerability in the Italian academic publishing landscape.

URL : Awareness of Predatory Journals and Open Access: an online survey among Italian Researchers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-720

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Recent Advances and Trends in Research Paper Recommender Systems: A Comprehensive Survey

Authors : Iratxe Pinedo, Mikel Larrañaga, Ana Arruarte

As the volume of scientific publications grows exponentially, researchers increasingly face difficulties in locating relevant literature. Research Paper Recommender Systems have become vital tools to mitigate this information overload by delivering personalized suggestions.

This survey provides a comprehensive analysis of Research Paper Recommender Systems developed between November 2021 and December 2024, building upon prior reviews in the field. It presents an extensive overview of the techniques and approaches employed, the datasets utilized, the evaluation metrics and procedures applied, and the status of both enduring and emerging challenges observed during the research. Unlike prior surveys, this survey goes beyond merely cataloguing techniques and models, providing a thorough examination of how these methods are implemented across different stages of the recommendation process.

By furnishing a detailed and structured reference, this work aims to function as a consultative resource for the research community, supporting informed decision-making and guiding future investigations in the advances of effective Research Paper Recommender Systems.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.08828

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Artificial Intelligence in Scientific Publishing: Citation Impact and Thematic Trends

Author : Mohammadamin Erfanmanesh

Introduction: The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has a significant impact on scientific publishing and librarianship. This study explores the citation impact and thematic patterns of AI-related research in scientific publishing through four objectives: (1) to analyze bibliometric characteristics; (2) to evaluate citation performance using normalized metrics; (3) to identify major thematic trends; and (4) to review AI-related publications that specifically address librarianship and examine their implications for library practices.

Methods: A bibliometric analysis was conducted on 295 AI-related publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection. Citation performance was assessed using two field-normalized metrics from Clarivate’s InCites platform: the Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) and the Journal Normalized Citation Impact (JNCI). To determine whether the median CNCI and JNCI values differed significantly from the category and journal benchmarks, a one-sample Wilcoxon signed-rank test was performed. Sub-themes within AI-related research were identified through thematic analysis. Additionally, to highlight important themes and professional implications, publications that specifically mention libraries, librarians, or librarianship were reviewed.

Results: The median CNCI was 2.7, and the median JNCI was 2.2, both significantly above the benchmark of 1.0 (P < .001). This indicates that AI-related research in scientific publishing receives significantly more citations than comparable publications within the same subject areas and journals. Seven sub-themes were identified, all showing above-average citation impact. Among these, themes focused on frameworks, policies, and ethical guidelines for AI integration achieved the highest normalized citation scores. Additionally, four publications focusing specifically on librarianship explored how AI intersects with open access and scholarly communication, ethics and governance, professional training, the development of machine-readable collections, and the integration of AI technologies into library services.

Discussion: These findings suggest that AI-related research has rapidly emerged as a highly influential area within scientific publishing. The variety of themes demonstrates the broad impact of AI technologies on scientific publishing.

Conclusion: Research on AI in scientific publishing is a rapidly growing and dynamic area, notable for its high citation impact, broad thematic scope, and growing influence on libraries and librarianship.

URL : Artificial Intelligence in Scientific Publishing: Citation Impact and Thematic Trends

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.20363

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Examining Persistence of European Open Repository Infrastructure and its Diffusion in the Scholarly Record

Authors : George Macgregor, Joy Davidson 

This article seeks to determine the extent to which the principle of persistence is observed by repositories and the organizations that operate them. In addition, the impact that negative repository persistence levels may be having on the scholarly record is assessed.

This is achieved by interrogating and combining data on European repositories from several repository registries and web-scraped sources, including the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which creates a unique dataset of historic repository locations and their OAI-PMH endpoints.

Then, this data is used as the basis for text mining CORE, a vast corpus of scholarly outputs, to determine the extent to which impersistent European repository content has permeated the scholarly literature.

The findings indicate that over one-fifth of European repositories (greater than 20 per cent) could be classified as “dead,” with an even greater proportion (greater than 40 per cent) of the machine interfaces associated with these repositories similarly dead.

Problematically, this analysis indicates that approximately 12,000 unique scholarly works cite, refer to, or actively use this repository content, amounting to approximately 19,000 unique repository locations, all of which are now dead and unretrievable from their stated resource locations.

Partly owing to limitations in available repository registry data and the existence of “zombie” repositories, there are reasons to conclude that the total number of scholarly works referring to dead repository content is far higher. In addition, evidence of dead repository content entering the current scholarly record is found, which is described as “dead on arrival” referencing.

The implications of these observations are considered, explanations are proffered, and possible policy interventions to address repository persistence are proposed.

The dataset also enables several observations on the nature of impersistent repositories to be made, including their profile and their decay rate.

URL : Examining Persistence of European Open Repository Infrastructure and its Diffusion in the Scholarly Record

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v20i1.1116

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If You Really Want to Know How AI Is Changing Peer Review Talk to Early Career Researchers

Authors : David Nicholas, Blanca Rodríguez-Bravo, David Clark, Abdullah Abrizah, Jorge Revez, Marzena Swigon, John Akeroyd, Jie Xu, Tatyana Polezhaeva, Eti Herman

The Harbingers study of early career researchers (ECRs), their work life and scholarly communications, began by studying generational—Millennial—change (H1 c.2016), then pandemic change (H2 c2020) and is now investigating yet another: artificial intelligence (H3 2024–).

We report here on a scoping pilot study, which looks at the impact of AI on peer review from over 150 international ECRs from all disciplines. The data were collected by open-ended, in-depth interviews, but being a convenience sample the findings need to be treated with caution.

We find that ECRs are displaying a complex, shifting attitude towards the integration of AI into peer review, characterised by cautious optimism on the one hand and scepticism on the other. ECRs are already reporting specific instances of AI increasingly influencing reviewing practices: both potentially beneficial applications and actual misuse.

AI is seen as a new systemic threat, potentially worsening the alleged exploitative nature of publishing if adopted without ethical guidelines.

URL : If You Really Want to Know How AI Is Changing Peer Review Talk to Early Career Researchers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.2082