Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Transparency versus anonymity: which is better to eliminate bias in peer review?

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Authors: Faye Holst, Kim Eggleton, Simon Harris

Peer review is a critical component of the scientific process. When conducted properly by dedicated and competent reviewers, it helps to safeguard the quality, validity, authority and rigour of academic work. However, bias in peer review is well documented and can skew objectivity of the review and hinder fair assessment of research.

To mitigate against bias and enhance accountability, IOP Publishing has introduced two different, but complementary, approaches to all their peer-reviewed, open access (OA) journals: double-anonymous peer review and transparent peer review.

Double-anonymous peer review, where the reviewer and author identities are concealed, is designed to tackle inequality in the scholarly publishing process as it reduces bias with respect to gender, race, country of origin or affiliation.

Transparent peer review shows readers the full peer review history, including reviewer reports, editor decision letters and the authors’ responses alongside the published article. Making this process visible to the community increases accountability, allows reviewers to be recognized more for their work and can aid the training of aspiring reviewers.

IOP Publishing is the first physics publisher to adopt both of these approaches portfolio wide. In this article we discuss how applying these methods has altered different elements of the publishing process. Early indicators show that there may be a marked difference in acceptance rates across regions.

URL : Transparency versus anonymity: which is better to eliminate bias in peer review?

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.584

Scientific authorship by gender: trends before and during a global pandemic

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Authors : Ji-Young Son, Michelle L. Bell

Many fields of science are still dominated by men. COVID-19 has dramatically changed the nature of work, including for scientists, such as lack of access to key resources and transition to online teaching. Further, scientists face the pandemic-related stressors common to other professions (e.g., childcare, eldercare).

As many of these activities fall more heavily on women, the pandemic may have exacerbated gender disparities in science. We analyzed self-identified gender of corresponding author for 119,592 manuscripts from 151 countries submitted January 2019 to July 2021 to the Institute of Physics (IOP) portfolio of 57 academic journals, with disciplines of astronomy and astrophysics, bioscience, environmental science, materials, mathematics, physics, and interdisciplinary research.

We consider differences by country, journal, and pre-pandemic versus pandemic periods. Gender was self-identified by corresponding author for 82.9% of manuscripts (N = 99,114 for subset of submissions with gender). Of these manuscripts, authors were 82.1% male, 17.8% female, and 0.08% non-binary. Most authors were male for all countries (country-specific values: range 0.0–100.0%, median 86.1%) and every journal (journal-specific values range 63.7–91.5%, median 83.7%).

The contribution of female authors was slightly higher in the pandemic (18.7%) compared to pre-pandemic (16.5%). However, prior to the pandemic, the percent of submissions from women had been increasing, and this value slowed during the pandemic. Contrary to our hypothesis, we did not find that manuscript submissions from women decreased during the pandemic, although the rate of increased submissions evident prior to the pandemic slowed.

In both pre-pandemic and pandemic periods, authorship was overwhelmingly male for all journals, countries, and fields. Further research is needed on impacts of the pandemic on other measures of scientific productivity (e.g., accepted manuscripts, teaching), scientific position (e.g., junior vs. senior scholars), as well as the underlying gender imbalance that persisted before and during the pandemic.

URL : Scientific authorship by gender: trends before and during a global pandemic

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01365-4

“Knock knock! Who’s there?” A study on scholarly repositories’ availability

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Authors : Andrea Mannocci, Miriam Baglioni, Paolo Manghi

Scholarly repositories are the cornerstone of modern open science, and their availability is vital for enacting its practices. To this end, scholarly registries such as FAIRsharing, re3data, OpenDOAR and ROAR give them presence and visibility across different research communities, disciplines, and applications by assigning an identifier and persisting their profiles with summary metadata.

Alas, like any other resource available on the Web, scholarly repositories, be they tailored for literature, software or data, are quite dynamic and can be frequently changed, moved, merged or discontinued.

Therefore, their references are prone to link rot over time, and their availability often boils down to whether the homepage URLs indicated in authoritative repository profiles within scholarly registries respond or not.

For this study, we harvested the content of four prominent scholarly registries and resolved over 13 thousand unique repository URLs. By performing a quantitative analysis on such an extensive collection of repositories, this paper aims to provide a global snapshot of their availability, which bewilderingly is far from granted.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.12879

Preprints as a driver of open science: Opportunities for Southeast Asia

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Authors : Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Hilyatuz Zahroh, Iratxe Puebla

Southeast Asia is an emerging force of open access scholarly output. For example, Indonesia is in a tight competition with United Kingdom as the largest publisher of open access journals and the second largest producer of open access articles in the world (according to DOAJ and the COKI OA Dashboard, respectively).

However, this support for open practices is not yet reflected in institutional research policies in Southeast Asian countries, which still rely on criteria influenced by world university rankings that focus on publication outputs and do not incorporate elements related to research culture, integrity, or open science.

Preprints have gained increasing attention across disciplines in the last few years, but they are still not included in institutional policies in SouthEast Asia. This paper discusses the potential for preprints to be a driving force for open science and for quality and integrity in scholarly outputs from Southeast Asia.

There is a fledgling preprinting culture in the region, catalyzed by the RINarxiv preprint server in Indonesia and the Malaysia Open Science Platform. We argue that preprints have many advantages: opportunities for open access and for researchers to maintain copyright to their work, wide dissemination, encouraging feedback and critical thinking, and community governance.

With these advantages, preprints can become a fast and open communication hub between researchers and all stakeholders in the research process. We recommend regulatory and practical steps to incorporate preprints into science policy and researchers’ practices as an effort to promote research integrity, open data and reproducibility.

URL : Preprints as a driver of open science: Opportunities for Southeast Asia

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.992942

The Role of Publons in the Context of Open Peer Review

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Authors : Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva, Serhii Nazarovets

Publons was a peer reviewer rewards platform that aimed to recognize the contribution that academics made during peer review to a journal. For about 10 years of its existence, Publons became the most popular service among peer reviewers.

Having gained traction and popularity, Publons was purchased in 2017 by Clarivate Analytics (now Clarivate), and many academics, journals and publishers invested time and effort to participate in Publons. Using Publons, various peer review-related experiments or pilot programs were initiated by some academic publishers regarding the introduction of open peer review into their journals’ editorial processes.

In this paper, we examine pertinent literature related to Publons, and reflect on its benefits and flaws during its short-lived history. In mid-August 2022, Clarivate fused Publons into the Web of Science platform.

Publons, as a brand peer review service, has now ceased to exist but some of the functionality remains in Web of Science while other aspects that used to be open and free at Publons are now paid-for services.

We reflect on the effect of such experiments, which initially had bold and ambitious academic objectives to fortify peer review, on academics’ trust, especially when such projects become commercialized.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-022-09914-0

Journals preserved or how to turn Diamond into JASPER

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Author : Gaelle Bequet

The increase in the number of digital journals has redefined the respective roles of libraries and publishers in the selection, provision and preservation of this content. A new player has emerged, i.e. the archiving agency specializing in long-term digital preservation.

Open access journals are poorly preserved, as shown by two recent studies based on an analysis of titles indexed by DOAJ. This worrying finding has motivated DOAJ, CLOCKSS, Keepers Registry, Internet Archive and Public Knowledge Project to join forces to propose an archiving solution for journals without article processing charges.

The JASPER project resulted in the creation of a tool and a workflow allowing the preservation of a dozen journals. The next step is to go to scale (more journals archived, more agencies involved), conditioned subject to the mobilization of external funding.

URL : Journals preserved or how to turn Diamond into JASPER

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.591

Analyse de coût de la production d’un numéro de la revue française de sciences de l’information Études de communication

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Autrice : Marie Le Bivic

Revue française qualifiante en sciences de l’information au rayonnement international, Études de communication s’interroge sur le coût de production d’un numéro suivant différents aspects, notamment la structuration des tâches qui composent son processus de fabrication.

À partir d’une méthodologie d’enquête construite sur la conduite d’entretiens préalablement préparés par un questionnaire, l’objectif de ce stage, ainsi que de ce travail de recherche, sera de fournir un compte rendu analytique de segmentation des tâches au sein de la revue afin de réaliser une analyse de coût.

Cette analyse de coût sera méthodologiquement axée sur le facteur du temps, afin de déterminer le volume de travail et l’investissement nécessaire au fonctionnement de la revue.

URL : https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-03779889