Investigation of potential gender bias in the peer review system at Reproduction

Authors : Marie BiolkováTom MooreKaren SchindlerKarl SwannAndy VailLindsay FlookHelen DickGreg FitzharrisChristopher A. PriceNorah Spears

This study examined whether publication outcome was affected by the gender of author, handling associate editor (AE), or reviewer, and whether there was gender bias in reviewer selection, in the journal Reproduction.

Analyses were carried out on 4289 original research manuscripts submitted to the journal between 2007 and 2019. Both female and male AEs appointed more male reviewers than female reviewers, but female AEs were significantly more likely to appoint female reviewers than male AEs were (p < 0.001).

When examining the gender of either first or last author manuscripts, those with female authors that were reviewed by female reviewers received better scores than those with male authors that were reviewed by female reviewers (p < 0.05): where the reviewer was male, no such effect was observed.

Acceptance rates of manuscripts were similar for both female and male authors, whether first or last, regardless of AE gender. Overall, there was no significant correlation between gender of first or last author, or of AE, on the likelihood of acceptance of a research paper.

These data suggest no bias against female authors during the peer review process in this reproductive biology journal.

URL : Investigation of potential gender bias in the peer review system at Reproduction

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1537

The Rise of GitHub in Scholarly Publications

Authors : Emily Escamilla, Martin Klein, Talya Cooper, Vicky Rampin, Michele C. Weigle, Michael L. Nelson

The definition of scholarly content has expanded to include the data and source code that contribute to a publication. While major archiving efforts to preserve conventional scholarly content, typically in PDFs (e.g., LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, Portico), are underway, no analogous effort has yet emerged to preserve the data and code referenced in those PDFs, particularly the scholarly code hosted online on Git Hosting Platforms (GHPs).

Similarly, the Software Heritage Foundation is working to archive public source code, but there is value in archiving the issue threads, pull requests, and wikis that provide important context to the code while maintaining their original URLs. In current implementations, source code and its ephemera are not preserved, which presents a problem for scholarly projects where reproducibility matters.

To understand and quantify the scope of this issue, we analyzed the use of GHP URIs in the arXiv and PMC corpora from January 2007 to December 2021. In total, there were 253,590 URIs to GitHub, SourceForge, Bitbucket, and GitLab repositories across the 2.66 million publications in the corpora.

We found that GitHub, GitLab, SourceForge, and Bitbucket were collectively linked to 160 times in 2007 and 76,746 times in 2021. In 2021, one out of five publications in the arXiv corpus included a URI to GitHub.

The complexity of GHPs like GitHub is not amenable to conventional Web archiving techniques. Therefore, the growing use of GHPs in scholarly publications points to an urgent and growing need for dedicated efforts to archive their holdings in order to preserve research code and its scholarly ephemera.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.04895

Scholarly publishing and peer review in the Global South: the role of the reviewer

Author : Peter Lor

Peer review is an integral part of contemporary scholarly publishing, especially journal publishing. Work submitted by scholars from all parts of the world is subjected to it. This includes submissions by scholars from the Global South, who wish to publish in “international” journals or in local journals which follow the same model.

These authors may not be native English speakers and may be unfamiliar with the conventions of Western scholarship. Many of them conduct research and write their manuscripts under challenging circumstances.

They may find it difficult to comply with the requirements of the journals to which they submit their articles. Their manuscripts quite often pose challenges to the peer reviewers.

The purpose of this article is to provide some background on scholarly publishing in the Global South and the challenges those colleagues face, and to outline what this may mean for the role of the reviewer.

URL : Scholarly publishing and peer review in the Global South: the role of the reviewer

DOI : https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-512

Global Trends in Knowledge Production and the Evolving Peer Review Process

Author : Steven Witt

This essay thus seeks to provide further critique and clarity to the peer review process and the ways in which management of peer review is evolving. These changes occur within a context of massive growth in the knowledge production process: global trends, information technologies, and policies that encourage more people globally to take part in the research process.

Associated with these global changes are stressors on the peer review process and particularly questions about who gets to be a peer reviewer and who has the right to produce knowledge under these processes.

Less a formal review and analysis of peer review across LIS, this essay takes the form of an autoethnographic narrative that that seeks to draw upon the researcher’s personal observations, experience, and reflections to critically examine changes to the peer review system that are taking place.

URL : Global Trends in Knowledge Production and the Evolving Peer Review Process

DOI : https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-515

Neither Computer Science, nor Information Studies, nor Humanities Enough: What Is the Status of a Digital Humanities Conference Paper?

Authors : Laura Estill, Jennifer Guiliano

This paper explores the disciplinary and regional conventions that surround the status of conference papers throughout their lifecycle from submission/abstract, review, presentation, and in some cases, publication.

Focusing on national and international Digital Humanities conferences, while also acknowledging disciplinary conferences that inform Digital Humanities, this paper blends close readings of conference calls for papers with analysis of conference practices to reckon with what constitutes a conference submission and its status in relationship to disciplinary conventions, peer review, and publication outcomes.

Ultimately, we argue that the best practice for Digital Humanities conferences is to be clear on the review and publication process so that participants can gauge how to accurately reflect their contributions.

URL : Neither Computer Science, nor Information Studies, nor Humanities Enough: What Is the Status of a Digital Humanities Conference Paper?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.8090

Le contexte et l’hypertexte. Tentative de transposition des pratiques documentaires contributives d’un tiers-lieu aux enjeux des sciences participatives

Auteur : Victor Ecrement

Ce mémoire rend compte d’une enquête réalisée auprès du tiers-lieu la Myne, à Lyon, où je me suis intéressé à la manière dont ses membres écrivent et mobilisent des documents numériques partagés.

J’y défends que certaines de ces pratiques peuvent soutenir la production de connaissances scientifiques en collectif, bien que peu des projets de cette association tiennent des sciences participatives. Je m’appuie sur les théories des technologies intellectuelles, des travaux en sciences de la documentation et en études des sciences, pour essayer d’identifier ce que le logiciel d’écriture en ligne utilisé à la Myne change aux formes documentaires et à la production de connaissances.

J’essaye de rendre compte de la complexité du rapport entre paroles, écrits, gestes et techniques, dans une posture de participation observante, en mobilisant des entretiens, des observations, des analyses de corpus et des visualisations de données numériques.

Je conclus en identifiant des usages dont pourraient bénéficier les initiatives de sciences participatives et en proposant des directions pour la conception de futurs outils d’écriture qui soutiendraient la production de connaissances en collectif.

URL : Le contexte et l’hypertexte. Tentative de transposition des pratiques documentaires contributives d’un tiers-lieu aux enjeux des sciences participatives

Original location : https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-03878265

Do open-access dermatology articles have higher citation counts than those with subscription-based access?

Authors : Fangyi Xie, Sherief Ghozy, David F. Kallmes, Julia S. Lehman

Background

Open-access (OA) publishing is increasingly prevalent in dermatology, and many journals now offer hybrid options, including conventional (subscription-based access [SA]) publishing or OA (with an author publishing charge) in a subscription journal. OA publishing has been noted in many disciplines, but this has been rarely studied in dermatology.

Methods

Using the Clarivate Journal Citation Report, we compiled a list of English-language dermatology hybrid OA journals containing more than 5% OA articles. We sampled any OA review or original research article in 4 issues from 2018 to 2019 and matched an equal number of SA articles. Citation count, citation count excluding self-citations and view counts found using Scopus and Altmetrics score were recorded for each article. Statistical analyses were performed using logistic and negative binomial models using R software.

Results

Twenty-seven hybrid dermatology journals were found, and 538 articles were sampled (269 OA, 269 SA). For both original research and review articles, OA articles had significantly higher mean citation counts (mean 13.2, standard deviation [SD] 17.0) compared to SA articles (mean 7.9, SD 8.8) (odds ratio [OR] 1.04; 95% CI 1.02–1.05; P < .001) including when adjusted for time from publication.

Original research OA articles had significantly higher citation counts than original research SA articles (excluding self-citations; OR, 1.03; 95% CI, 1.01–1.05; P = .003), and review articles also had OA citation advantage than review SA articles (OR, 1.06; 95% CI, 1.02–1.11; P = .008). There was, however, no significant difference in citation counts between review articles and original research articles (OR, 1.00; 95% CI, 0.19–5.31; P = 1.000).

There was no significant difference seen in view counts (OA: mean±SD 17.7±10.8; SA: mean±SD 17.1±12.4) and Altmetric score (OA: mean±SD 13.2±47.8; SA: mean±SD 6.3±25.0) between OA and SA articles. Potential confounders included the fact that more OA articles were published in Europe than in Asia, and pharmaceutical-funded articles were more likely to be published OA.

Conclusions

We noted a higher citation count for OA articles than SA articles in dermatology hybrid journals. However, dermatology researchers should take into account confounding factors when deciding whether to increase the impact of their work by selecting OA over SA publishing.

URL : Do open-access dermatology articles have higher citation counts than those with subscription-based access?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279265