Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Two scholarly publishing cultures? Open access drives a divergence in European academic publishing practices

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Authors : Leon Kopitar, Nejc Plohl, Mojca Tancer Verboten, Gregor Štiglic, Roger Watson, Dean Korošak

The current system of scholarly publishing is often criticized for being slow, expensive, and not transparent. The rise of open access publishing as part of open science tenets, promoting transparency and collaboration, together with calls for research assesment reforms are the results of these criticisms. The emergence of new open access publishers presents a unique opportunity to empirically test how universities and countries respond to shifts in the academic publishing landscape. These new actors challenge traditional publishing models, offering faster review times and broader accessibility, which could influence strategic publishing decisions.

Our findings reveal a clear division in European publishing practices, with countries clustering into two groups distinguished by the ratio of publications in new open access journals with accelerated review times versus legacy journals. This divide underscores a broader shift in academic culture, highlighting new open access publishing venues as a strategic factor influencing national and institutional publishing practices, with significant implications for research accessibility and collaboration across Europe.

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.06282

Diamond open access and open infrastructures have shaped the Canadian scholarly journal landscape since the start of the digital era

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Authors : Simon van Bellen, Lucía Céspedes

Scholarly publishing involves multiple stakeholders having various types of interest. In Canada, the implication of universities, the presence of societies and the availability of governmental support for periodicals seem to have contributed to a rather diverse ecosystem of journals. This study presents in detail the current state of these journals, in addition to past trends and transformations during the 20th century and, in particular, the digital era.

To this effect, we created a new dataset, including a total of 1256 journals, 944 of which appeared to be active today, specifically focusing on the supporting organizations behind the journals, the types of (open) access, disciplines, geographic origins, languages of publication and hosting platforms and tools. The main overarching traits across Canadian scholarly journals are an important presence of Diamond open access, which has been adopted by 62% of the journals, a predominance of the Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines and a scarce presence of the major commercial publishers.

The digital era allowed for the development of open infrastructures, which contributed to the creation of a new generation of journals that massively adopted Diamond open access, often supported by university libraries. However, journal cessation also increased, especially among the recently founded journals. These results provide valuable insights for the design of tailored practices and policies that cater to the needs of different types of periodicals and that take into account the evolving practices across the Canadian scholarly journal landscape.

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05942

Global insights: ChatGPT’s influence on academic and research writing, creativity, and plagiarism policies

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Authors : Muhammad Abid Malik, Amjad Islam Amjad, Sarfraz Aslam, Abdulnaser Fakhrou

Introduction: The current study explored the influence of Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) on the concepts, parameters, policies, and practices of creativity and plagiarism in academic and research writing.

Methods: Data were collected from 10 researchers from 10 different countries (Australia, China, the UK, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Nigeria, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turkiye) using semi-structured interviews. NVivo was employed for data analysis.

Results: Based on the responses, five themes about the influence of ChatGPT on academic and research writing were generated, i.e., opportunity, human assistance, thought-provoking, time-saving, and negative attitude. Although the researchers were mostly positive about it, some feared it would degrade their writing skills and lead to plagiarism. Many of them believed that ChatGPT would redefine the concepts, parameters, and practices of creativity and plagiarism.

Discussion: Creativity may no longer be restricted to the ability to write, but also to use ChatGPT or other large language models (LLMs) to write creatively. Some suggested that machine-generated text might be accepted as the new norm; however, using it without proper acknowledgment would be considered plagiarism. The researchers recommended allowing ChatGPT for academic and research writing; however, they strongly advised it to be regulated with limited use and proper acknowledgment.

URL : Global insights: ChatGPT’s influence on academic and research writing, creativity, and plagiarism policies

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2024.1486832

Peer Reviews of Peer Reviews: A Randomized Controlled Trial and Other Experiments

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Authors : Alexander Goldberg, Ivan Stelmakh, Kyunghyun Cho, Alice Oh, Alekh Agarwal, Danielle Belgrave, Nihar B. Shah

Is it possible to reliably evaluate the quality of peer reviews? We study this question driven by two primary motivations — incentivizing high-quality reviewing using assessed quality of reviews and measuring changes to review quality in experiments. We conduct a large scale study at the NeurIPS 2022 conference, a top-tier conference in machine learning, in which we invited (meta)-reviewers and authors to evaluate reviews given to submitted papers.

First, we conduct a RCT to examine bias due to the length of reviews. We generate elongated versions of reviews by adding substantial amounts of non-informative content. Participants in the control group evaluate the original reviews, whereas participants in the experimental group evaluate the artificially lengthened versions.

We find that lengthened reviews are scored (statistically significantly) higher quality than the original reviews. In analysis of observational data we find that authors are positively biased towards reviews recommending acceptance of their own papers, even after controlling for confounders of review length, quality, and different numbers of papers per author.

We also measure disagreement rates between multiple evaluations of the same review of 28%-32%, which is comparable to that of paper reviewers at NeurIPS. Further, we assess the amount of miscalibration of evaluators of reviews using a linear model of quality scores and find that it is similar to estimates of miscalibration of paper reviewers at NeurIPS.

Finally, we estimate the amount of variability in subjective opinions around how to map individual criteria to overall scores of review quality and find that it is roughly the same as that in the review of papers. Our results suggest that the various problems that exist in reviews of papers — inconsistency, bias towards irrelevant factors, miscalibration, subjectivity — also arise in reviewing of reviews.

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09497

Enhancing peer review efficiency: A mixed-methods analysis of artificial intelligence-assisted reviewer selection across academic disciplines

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Author : Shai Farber

This mixed-methods study evaluates the efficacy of artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted reviewer selection in academic publishing across diverse disciplines. Twenty journal editors assessed AI-generated reviewer recommendations for a manuscript. The AI system achieved a 42% overlap with editors’ selections and demonstrated a significant improvement in time efficiency, reducing selection time by 73%.

Editors found that 37% of AI-suggested reviewers who were not part of their initial selection were indeed suitable. The system’s performance varied across disciplines, with higher accuracy in STEM fields (Cohen’s d = 0.68). Qualitative feedback revealed an appreciation for the AI’s ability to identify lesser-known experts but concerns about its grasp of interdisciplinary work. Ethical considerations, including potential algorithmic bias and privacy issues, were highlighted.

The study concludes that while AI shows promise in enhancing reviewer selection efficiency and broadening the reviewer pool, it requires human oversight to address limitations in understanding nuanced disciplinary contexts. Future research should focus on larger-scale longitudinal studies and developing ethical frameworks for AI integration in peer-review processes.

URL : Enhancing peer review efficiency: A mixed-methods analysis of artificial intelligence-assisted reviewer selection across academic disciplines

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1638

The role of online search platforms in scientific diffusion

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Author : Kyriakos Drivas

After the launch of Google Scholar older papers experienced an increase in their citations, a finding consistent with a reduction in search costs and introduction of ranking algorithms. I employ this observation to examine how recombination of science takes place in the era of online search platforms.

The findings show that as papers become more discoverable, their knowledge is diffused beyond their own broad field. Results are mixed when examining knowledge diffusion within the same field.

The results contribute to the ongoing debate of narrowing of science. While there might a general reduction in recombination of knowledge across distant fields over the last decades, online search platforms are not the culprits.

URL : The role of online search platforms in scientific diffusion

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24959

Publish or perish? Innovative models for scholarly publishing in Zimbabwe

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Authors : Nomsa Chirisa, Mpho Ngoepe

Innovative publishing models have emerged to meet the demands of the ‘publish or perish’ philosophy prevalent in academic and scholarly circles. Publishing models serve as the operational blueprint underpinning the value and supply chains of products in the publishing industry, aligning operational plans, design strategies, and production methodologies with the overarching goal of scholarly publishing. The duty of scholarly publishers to advance knowledge and disseminate it widely necessitates their role in supporting researchers to meet the expectations of the ‘publish or perish’ culture.

This philosophy becomes even more critical in the endangered landscape of scholarly publishing in Africa, where scholarly publishing is evidently perishing, as researchers in the region face additional challenges in accessing reputable publishing outlets for their work. Zimbabwe has a low research publishing output, and although it ranks second in southern Africa, it lags behind South Africa by an astounding 65%. This intensifies the pressure to publish to maintain visibility and credibility within the global academic community.

This paper thus examines the publishing models implemented in the publishing of scholarly works by scholarly publishers in Zimbabwe. Qualitative data were collected through the Delphi Technique design, with publishing experts over three rounds of interviews, and triangulated with data from document analysis.

The key findings indicate open access, self-publishing, and collaborative publishing as effective market models for university presses. However, Zimbabwean universities are still lagging behind, as few have established university presses.

URL : Publish or perish? Innovative models for scholarly publishing in Zimbabwe

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/02666669241289916