Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Peer reviewers equally critique theory, method, and writing, with limited effect on the final content of accepted manuscripts

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Author : Dimity Stephen

The primary aims of peer review are to detect flaws and deficiencies in the design and interpretation of studies, and ensure the clarity and quality of their presentation. However, it has been questioned whether peer review fulfils this function.

Studies have highlighted a stronger focus of reviewers on critiquing methodological aspects of studies and the quality of writing in biomedical sciences, with less focus on theoretical grounding. In contrast, reviewers in the social sciences appear more concerned with theoretical underpinnings.

These studies also found the effect of peer review on manuscripts’ content to be variable, but generally modest and positive. I qualitatively analysed 1430 peer reviewers’ comments for a sample of 40 social science preprint-publication pairs to identify the key foci of reviewers’ comments.

I then quantified the effect of peer review on manuscripts by examining differences between the preprint and published versions using the normalised Levenshtein distance, cosine similarity, and word count ratios for titles, abstracts, document sections and full-texts.

I also examined changes in references used between versions and linked changes to reviewers’ comments. Reviewers’ comments were nearly equally split between issues of methodology (30.7%), theory (30.0%), and writing quality (29.2%).

Titles, abstracts, and the semantic content of documents remained similar, although publications were typically longer than preprints.

Two-thirds of citations were unchanged, 20.9% were added during review and 13.1% were removed. These findings indicate reviewers equally attended to the theoretical and methodological details and communication style of manuscripts, although the effect on quantitative measures of the manuscripts was limited.

URL : Peer reviewers equally critique theory, method, and writing, with limited effect on the final content of accepted manuscripts

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04357-y

Implementing the Declaration on Research Assessment: a publisher case study

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Authors : Victoria Gardner, Mark Robinson, Elisabetta O’Connell

There has been much debate around the role of metrics in scholarly communication, with particular focus on the misapplication of journal metrics, such as the impact factor in the assessment of research and researchers.

Various initiatives have advocated for a change in this culture, including the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which invites stakeholders throughout the scholarly communication ecosystem to sign up and show their support for practices designed to address the misuse of metrics.

This case study provides an overview of the process undertaken by a large academic publisher (Taylor & Francis Group) in signing up to DORA and implementing some of its key practices in the hope that it will provide some guidance to others considering becoming a signatory.

Our experience suggests that research, consultation and flexibility are crucial components of the process. Additionally, approaching signing with a project mindset versus a ‘sign and forget’ mentality can help organizations to understand the practical implications of signing, to anticipate and mitigate potential obstacles and to support cultural change.

URL : Implementing the Declaration on Research Assessment: a publisher case study

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.573

Persistent Identification for Conferences

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Authors : Julian Franken, Aliaksandr Birukou, Kai Eckert, Wolfgang Fahl, Christian Hauschke, Christoph Lange

Persistent identification of entities plays a major role in the progress of digitization of many fields. In the scholarly publishing realm there are already persistent identifiers (PID) for papers (DOI), people (ORCID), organisation (GRID, ROR), books (ISBN) but there is no generally accepted PID system for scholarly events such as conferences or workshops yet.

This article describes the relevant use cases that motivate the introduction of persistent identifiers for conferences. The use cases were mainly derived from interviews, discussions with experts and their previous work. As primary stakeholders who are involved in the typical conference event life cycle researchers, conference organizers, and data consumers were identified.

The resulting list of use cases illustrates how PIDs for conference events will improve the current situation for these stakeholders and help with problems they are facing today.

URL : Persistent Identification for Conferences

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-011

International disparities in open access practices in the Earth Sciences

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Authors : Olivier Pourret, David William Hedding, Daniel Enrique Ibarra, Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Haiyan Liu, Jonathan Peter Tennant

Background

Open access (OA) implies free and unrestricted access to and re-use of research articles. Recently, OA publishing has seen a new wave of interest, debate, and practices surrounding that mode of publishing.

Objectives

To provide an overview of publication practices and to compare them among six countries across the world to stimulate further debate and to raise awareness about OA to facilitate decision-making on further development of OA practices in earth sciences.

Methods

The number of OA articles, their distribution among the six countries, and top ten journals publishing OA articles were identified using two databases, namely Scopus and the Web of Science, based mainly on the data for 2018.

Results

In 2018, only 24%–31% of the total number of articles indexed by either of the databases were OA articles. Six of the top ten earth sciences journals that publish OA articles were fully OA journals and four were hybrid journals. Fully OA journals were mostly published by emerging publishers and their article processing charges ranged from $1000 to $2200.

Conclusions

The rise in OA publishing has potential implications for researchers and tends to shift article-processing charges from organizations to individuals. Until the earth sciences community decides to move away from journal-based criteria to evaluate researchers, it is likely that such high costs will continue to maintain financial inequities within this research community, especially to the disadvantage of researchers from the least developed countries.

However, earth scientists, by opting for legal self- archiving of their publications, could help to promote equitable and sustainable access to, and wider dissemination of, their work.

URL : International disparities in open access practices in the Earth Sciences

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2021.e63663

Open Access in Geochemistry from Preprints to Data Sharing: Past, Present, and Future

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Authors : Olivier Pourret, Dasapta Erwin Irawan

In this short communication, we discuss the latest advances regarding Open Access in the earth sciences and geochemistry community from preprints to findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data following the 14f session held at Goldschmidt conference (4–9 July 2021) dedicated to “Open Access in Earth Sciences”.

URL : Open Access in Geochemistry from Preprints to Data Sharing: Past, Present, and Future

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10010003

Opening Up of Editorials Activities at Chemistry Journals. What Does Editorship Mean and What Does It Involve?

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Author : Marianne Noel

The article unpacks the publishing practices and focuses on the curating work carried out by the editors of chemistry journals. Based on a qualitative analysis of multiple sources in two publishing houses (the American Chemical Society, ACS and Nature Research), it first shows that the role of editor-in-chief covers a wide range of realities and is far from being limited to that of a gatekeeper (the most common metaphor in the literature).

In journals that are part of the Nature Research portfolio, in-house editors, who are no longer active scientists, work full time for the journals. The article describes the professional trajectories and skills required to join the publishing house.

Interviews highlight collective identity-based actions, attention to the growth and the flow of manuscripts, but also specific epistemic properties of outputs in chemistry. Besides tasks that editors outline “as really the same as they were 100 years ago,” as they spend most of their time handling manuscripts and providing quality assurance, they also travel to conferences to support journals and encourage submissions, visit labs where researchers pitch their work or ask questions about journals, and “educate the actors themselves” about new fields.

In both cases studied, the publishing houses partner with institutions to offer events (ACS on Campus programme, Nature masterclass) that a university or department can freely host or buy, where editors organize workshops on all aspects of manuscript preparation. Second, publishing houses, whether non-for-profit or commercial, have embraced a catalog logic, where the journals are not necessarily in competition and have an assumed place and hierarchy.

At Nature Research, editors-in-chief head business units inscribed in the company’s organization. Despite standardized processes imposed by the procedural chain, there is still room to maneuver in these relatively autonomous structures that are ultimately evaluated on their results (the annual production of a certain number of high-quality papers).

On the other hand, ACS is seen as a vessel whose course cannot easily be deviated. The conclusion calls for extending this type of investigation to other contexts or types of journals.

URL : Opening Up of Editorials Activities at Chemistry Journals. What Does Editorship Mean and What Does It Involve?

Original location : https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2022.747846/full

Diamond Open Access in Norway 2017–2020

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Author : Jan Erik Frantsvåg

We see from information published elsewhere that Gold OA is on the increase globally. The OA Diamond study indicates that Diamond OA is an important component of scholarly communications, with an estimated 8–9% of the total global scholarly output.

These numbers, however, are on a global scale and are not necessarily representative of any given country; country case studies are needed to find this information. Norway is a country where the government has declared a 100% OA goal and most research has public funding. Norway has good financing structures for various models of OA, and it has a national CRIS system.

This study tries to find and present numbers for articles in scholarly journals to describe both recent developments and relative numbers for Norway as a whole, and for scholarly fields in Norway, with regards to Diamond OA. Numbers for and development of Gold OA will also be given and commented upon to some extent.

URL : Diamond Open Access in Norway 2017–2020

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10010013