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

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

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

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

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

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

Student publishing in peer reviewed journals: Evidence from the International Political Science Review

Authors : Daniel Stockemer, Theresa Reidy, Antonia Teodoro, Guy Gerba

Publishing in peer-reviewed journals has become an essential requirement for PhD students wishing to pursue a career in academia. Yet, there are few studies of student publishing and little discussion of norms around attribution of authorship for student research collaborators. (1) How often do students feature as submitters and authors in political science journals? (2) In what format (i.e., solo author, co-author, multiple authors) do students normally submit and publish? (3)

Are there gender differences in student submission and publication rates between male and female students? This article uses 2 years of data from the International Political Science Review (IPSR; i.e., 2019 and 2020) to answer these questions.

Mainly using cross-tabulations, we found that just one in eight submitting authors was a student (i.e., undergraduate and postgraduate). In terms of acceptance rates, students had generally lower acceptance rates than faculty.

Yet, there were also important differences within the student body. As expected PhD students were more successful than undergraduate and masters’ students, and in line with general disciplinary publishing patterns, female PhD students had a higher publication success rate than their male colleagues.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1468

“Who Is the FAIRest of Them All?” Authors, Entities, and Journals Regarding FAIR Data Principles

Author : Luis Corujo

The perceived need to improve the infrastructure supporting the re-use of scholarly data since the second decade of the 21st century led to the design of a concise number of principles and metrics, named FAIR Data Principles. This paper, part of an extended study, intends to identify the main authors, entities, and scientific journals linked to research conducted within the FAIR Data Principles.

The research was developed by means of a qualitative approach, using documentary research and a constant comparison method for codification and categorization of the sampled data.

The sample studied showed that most authors were located in the Netherlands, with Europe accounting for more than 70% of the number of authors considered. Most of these are researchers and work in higher education institutions. T

hese entities can be found in most of the territorial-administrative areas under consideration, with the USA being the country with more entities and Europe being the world region where they are more numerous.

The journal with more texts in the used sample was Insights, with 2020 being the year when more texts were published. Two of the most prominent authors present in the sample texts were located in the Netherlands, while the other two were in France and Australia.

URL : “Who Is the FAIRest of Them All?” Authors, Entities, and Journals Regarding FAIR Data Principles

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10030031