Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Overlay journals: A study of the current landscape

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Authors : Antti Mikael Rousi, Mikael Laakso

Overlay journals are characterised by their articles being published on open access repositories, often already starting in their initial preprint form as a prerequisite for submission to the journal prior to initiating the peer-review process.

In this study we aimed to identify currently active overlay journals and examine their characteristics. We utilised an explorative web search and contacted key service providers for additional information. The final sample consisted of 34 overlay journals.

While the results show that new overlay journals have been actively established within recent years, the current presence of overlay journals remains diminutive compared to the overall number of open access journals. Most overlay journals publish articles in natural sciences, mathematics or computer sciences, and are commonly published by groups of academics rather than formal organisations.

They may also rank highly within the traditional journal citation metrics. None of the investigated journals required fees from authors, which is likely related to the cost-effective aspects of the overlay publishing model.

Both the growth in adoption of open access preprint repositories and researchers’ willingness to publish in overlay journals will determine the model’s wider impact on scholarly publishing.

URL : Overlay journals: A study of the current landscape

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006221125208

Analysis of predatory emails in early career academia and attempts at prevention

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Author : Owen W. Tomlinson

Predatory publishers—those who do not adhere to rigorous standards of academic practice such as peer review—are increasingly infiltrating biomedical databases, to the detriment of the wider scientific community. These publishers frequently send unsolicited ‘spam’ emails to generate submission to their journals, with early career researchers (ECR) particularly susceptible to these practices because of pressures such as securing employment and promotion.

This analysis sought to record and characterize the emails received over the course of a PhD and post-doctoral position (~8 years), as well as attempts to unsubscribe from such emails, using a progressive and step-wise manner. A total of 1,280 emails identified as academic spam were received (990 journal invitations, 220 conference invitations, 70 ‘other’).

The first email was received 3 months after registration for an international conference. Attempts at unsubscribing were somewhat effective, whereby implications of reporting to respective authorities resulted in a 43% decrease in emails, although did not eliminate them completely, and therefore alternative approaches to eliminating academic spam may be needed.

Ongoing education about predatory publishers, as well as action by key academic stakeholders, should look to reduce the impact these predatory publishers have upon the wider literature base.

URL : Analysis of predatory emails in early career academia and attempts at prevention

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1500

Gender and country biases in Wikipedia citations to scholarly publications

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Authors : Xiang Zheng, Jiajing Chen, Erjia Yan, Chaoqun Ni

Ensuring Wikipedia cites scholarly publications based on quality and relevancy without biases is critical to credible and fair knowledge dissemination. We investigate gender- and country-based biases in Wikipedia citation practices using linked data from the Web of Science and a Wikipedia citation dataset.

Using coarsened exact matching, we show that publications by women are cited less by Wikipedia than expected, and publications by women are less likely to be cited than those by men. Scholarly publications by authors affiliated with non-Anglosphere countries are also disadvantaged in getting cited by Wikipedia, compared with those by authors affiliated with Anglosphere countries.

The level of gender- or country-based inequalities varies by research field, and the gender-country intersectional bias is prominent in math-intensive STEM fields. To ensure the credibility and equality of knowledge presentation, Wikipedia should consider strategies and guidelines to cite scholarly publications independent of the gender and country of authors.

URL : Gender and country biases in Wikipedia citations to scholarly publications

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24723

Des voix plurielles dans l’écriture de la recherche : Pour une réflexivité incarnée

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Auteur/Author : Philippe Hert

L’approche qui est développée ici se situe entre les sciences de l’information et de la communication et les études de sciences. Elle met en dialogue une réflexion sur l’écriture d’un terrain que j’ai mené pendant plusieurs années sur le clown, avec la manière dont le terrain peut « prendre la parole » dans l’écriture.

Cet article est constitué de plusieurs voix : celle de la théorie, du chercheur, celle sur l’écriture qui est réflexive, celle du terrain et de l’expérience vécue. Ces trois voix sont apparues au fil de la rédaction de cet article. J’étais habitué à la première, une analyse à partir de lectures et d’expériences de terrain. La deuxième est apparue rapidement à partir du moment où je me suis demandé comment écrire sur l’écriture sans tomber dans un abyme de réflexivité. C’est la troisième qui a été plus surprenante : le terrain dont j’avais décidé de parler, le clown, faisait des apparitions soudaines, en venant défaire ce que j’essayais péniblement d’écrire.

Comme ce terrain n’est pas qu’un objet extérieur, mais que j’en fais partie, en tant qu’apprenti clown, j’ai bien dû lui laisser la parole. C’est de cette parole dont j’aimerais rendre compte, car elle porte selon moi la marque du désir.

La question que je pose est la suivante : comment articuler l’écriture scientifique avec le désir qui s’y manifeste. En effet, l’écriture scientifique est une pratique qui peut être angoissante, crispante, et qui n’est pas source de plaisir, alors même qu’elle est également alimentée par un désir d’écrire (avant de commencer…) et se nourrit de terrains de recherche qui sont souvent très engageants, passionnants et qui donnent envie d’en transmettre quelque chose par l’écriture.

Comment expliquer cette tension, et comment réintroduire du désir dans l’écriture des sciences. Ma contribution sera d’explorer ici, théoriquement et en pratique, la question de la réflexivité, ce qu’elle engage et ce qu’elle révèle du désir du chercheur, pour essayer de dégager quelques leçons pratiques.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/communication.16445

Choices of immediate open access and the relationship to journal ranking and publish-and-read deals

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Author : Lars Wenaas

The role of academic journals is significant in the reward system of science, which makes their rank important for the researcher’s choice in deciding where to submit. The study asks how choices of immediate gold and hybrid open access are related to journal ranking and how the uptake of immediate open access is affected by transformative publish-and-read deals, pushed by recent science policy.

Data consists of 186,621 articles published with a Norwegian affiliation in the period 2013–2021, all of which were published in journals ranked in a National specific ranking, on one of two levels according to their importance, prestige, and perceived quality within a discipline.

The results are that researchers chose to have their articles published as hybrid two times as often in journals on the most prestigious level compared with journals on the normal level. The opposite effect was found with gold open access where publishing on the normal level was chosen three times more than on the high level.

This can be explained by the absence of highly ranked gold open access journals in many disciplines. With the introduction of publish-and-read deals, hybrid open access has boosted and become a popular choice enabling the researcher to publish open access in legacy journals.

The results confirm the position of journals in the reward system of science and should inform policymakers about the effects of transformative arrangements and their costs against the overall level of open access.

URL : Choices of immediate open access and the relationship to journal ranking and publish-and-read deals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.943932

Five ways to optimize open access uptake after a signed read and publish contract: lessons learned from the Dutch UKB consortium

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Author : Arjan Schalken

Consortia and publishers invest a lot of time and expertise in the negotiation process. A well-drafted read and publish contract is, however, not enough to guarantee an optimal open access publishing service. The Dutch UKB consortium uses several tools and practices to actively monitor and manage open access uptake during an agreement.

Library help desks are provided with a knowledge base covering most frequently asked questions from authors. A journal list gives an integral overview of the more than 11,000 journals that are part of 16 consortium deals.

Because researchers wanted to know about open access publishing possibilities from a journal perspective, a journal browser was developed. Workflow improvement and retrospective open access are regular topics in mid-term meetings with publishers, resulting in increased open access uptake.

A purpose-built datahub provides the consortium and libraries with publication data that helps monitoring and managing output on both article and deal level. Finally, licence choice including funder compliance is taken into account, resulting in an increasing percentage of CC BY versus the more restricted CC BY-NC and CC BY-NC-ND options.

URL: Five ways to optimize open access uptake after a signed read and publish contract: lessons learned from the Dutch UKB consortium

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.595

Open Editors: A dataset of scholarly journals’ editorial board positions

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Authors : Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher, Tamara Heck, Kerstin Schoch

Editormetrics analyses the role of editors of academic journals and their impact on the scientific publication system. Such analyses would best rely on open, structured, and machine-readable data about editors and editorial boards, which still remains rare.

To address this shortcoming, the project Open Editors collects data about academic journal editors on a large scale and structures them into a single dataset. It does so by scraping the websites of 7,352 journals from 26 publishers (including predatory ones), thereby structuring publicly available information (names, affiliations, editorial roles, ORCID etc.) about 594,580 researchers.

The dataset shows that journals and publishers are immensely heterogeneous in terms of editorial board sizes, regional diversity, and editorial role labels. All codes and data are made available at Zenodo, while the result is browsable at a dedicated website (https://openeditors.ooir.org).

This dataset carries implications for both practical purposes of research evaluation and for meta-scientific investigations into the landscape of scholarly publications, and allows for critical inquiries regarding the representation of diversity and inclusivity across academia.

URL : Open Editors: A dataset of scholarly journals’ editorial board positions

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvac037