Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

The Costs of Open Access Publication: A Case Study at Catalan Universities

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Authors : Ángel Borrego, Lluís Anglada

This article explores the financial dynamics of open access (OA) publication in Catalan universities by combining four data sources: publication data coupled with article processing charge (APC) estimates; information on journal subscriptions, transformative agreements and APC payments made by universities; acknowledgements of APC funding sources in OA scholarly outputs; and a survey of authors.

The findings reveal a consistent increase in OA publication across Catalan universities, with 60% of the articles indexed in the Web of Science being published in either gold or hybrid OA in 2022. In parallel, investment in the research publishing system shows an upward trend. Resources allocated to journal subscription licenses have been redirected towards transformative agreements, leading to a rise in hybrid OA publications. Additional budget allocations have been made to accommodate APCs for gold OA journals.

Authors employ varied funding sources for gold and hybrid OA, with university funding programmes and research grants commonly facilitating gold OA, while transformative agreements often support hybrid OA. Authors associated with Catalan universities frequently benefit from funding schemes and transformative agreements that are accessible to their coauthors.

However, survey responses underscore the multifaceted nature of researchers’ financial support, including personal assets and waivers. Authors express frustration with the evolving OA landscape, particularly concerning the exorbitant publication fees.

Nevertheless, the allure of high-impact journals and expedited peer review processes continues to incentivize authors towards gold OA. Researchers voice concerns regarding the lack of equitable funding programmes and potential conflicts of interest within gold OA models, which signals the risk of compromising peer review integrity to prioritize profits.

This study underscores the need for further research to deepen our understanding of scholarly publishing expenditure and inform strategies for fostering a sustainable, equitable OA ecosystem.

URL : The Costs of Open Access Publication: A Case Study at Catalan Universities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.19069

The use of ChatGPT for identifying disruptive papers in science: a first exploration

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Authors : Lutz Bornmann, Lingfei Wu, Christoph Ettl

ChatGPT has arrived in quantitative research evaluation. With the exploration in this Letter to the Editor, we would like to widen the spectrum of the possible use of ChatGPT in bibliometrics by applying it to identify disruptive papers.

The identification of disruptive papers using publication and citation counts has become a popular topic in scientometrics. The disadvantage of the quantitative approach is its complexity in the computation. The use of ChatGPT might be an easy to use alternative.

URL : The use of ChatGPT for identifying disruptive papers in science: a first exploration

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05176-z

When researchers pay to publish: Results from a survey on APCs in four countries

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Authors : Osvaldo Gallardo, Matías Milia, André Luiz Appel, Grip-APC Team, François van Schalkwyk

This paper provides an empirical overview of the impact and practices of paying Article Processing Charges (APCs) by four nationally categorized groups of researchers in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa.

The data was collected from 13,577 researchers through an online questionnaire. The analysis compares the practice of publishing in journals that charge APCs across different dimensions, including country, discipline, gender, and age of the researchers.

The paper also focuses on the maximum amount APC paid and the methods and strategies researchers use to cover APC payments, such as waivers, research project funds, payment by coauthors, and the option to publish in closed access, where possible. Different tendencies were identified among the different disciplines and the national systems examined.

Findings show that Argentine researchers apply for waivers most frequently and often use personal funds or international coauthors for APCs, with younger researchers less involved in APC payments. In contrast, Brazil, South Africa, and Mexico have more older researchers, yet younger researchers still publish more in APC journals. South African researchers lead in APC publications, likely due to better funding access and read and publish agreements.

This study lays the groundwork for further analysis of gender asymmetries, funding access, and views on the commercial Open Access model of scientific dissemination.

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12144

Altmetric.com or PlumX: Does it matter?

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Authors : Behrooz Rasuli, Majid Nabavi

Facing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, medical publishers rose to the occasion, moving to make their full portfolio of COVID-19–related research available to read for free and expediting peer review and production processes. With such a rapid transition from paper submission to publication, however, concerns also arose regarding whether the quality of the research publication process was being affected. This article seeks to document the transformation of medical publishers’ practices in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and briefly discuss where they may go from here. For this goal, a literature search was performed in PubMed at several points to identify papers that reported early trends in how medical publishers handled COVID-19 research.

URL : Altmetric.com or PlumX: Does it matter?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1625

Academic writing in the age of AI: Comparing the reliability of ChatGPT and Bard with Scopus and Web of Science

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Authors : Swati Garg, Asad Ahmad, Dag Øivind Madsen

ChatGPT and Bard (now known as Gemini) are becoming indispensable resources for researchers, academicians and diverse stakeholders within the academic landscape. At the same time, traditional digital tools such as scholarly databases continue to be widely used. Web of Science and Scopus are the most extensive academic databases and are generally regarded as consistently reliable scholarly research resources. With the increasing acceptance of artificial intelligence (AI) in academic writing, this study focuses on understanding the reliability of the new AI models compared to Scopus and Web of Science.

The study includes a bibliometric analysis of green, sustainable and ecological buying behaviour, covering the period from 1 January 2011 to 21 May 2023. These results are used to compare the results from the AI and the traditional scholarly databases on several parameters. Overall, the findings suggest that AI models like ChatGPT and Bard are not yet reliable for academic writing tasks. It appears to be too early to depend on AI for such tasks.

URL : Academic writing in the age of AI: Comparing the reliability of ChatGPT and Bard with Scopus and Web of Science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jik.2024.100563

Field-specific gold open access dynamics in the Chinese mainland: Overviews, disparities, and strategic insights

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Authors : Xinyi Chen, Zhiqiang Liu

Gold Open Access (OA) journals are crucial for scholarly communication, highlighting the need for a thorough evaluation of their academic influence on different research fields. This study leverages the InCites platform to examine article-level characteristics relating to 22 Essential Science Indicators (ESI) research fields, with a focus on the dynamics of gold OA articles, including gold OA uptake in the Chinese mainland and gold OA adoption in the domestic English-language academic journal publishing of the Chinese mainland.

The findings reveal that disparities in gold OA adoption across 22 ESI fields are more pronounced in the Chinese mainland compared with the world scenario. In the Chinese mainland, there is a significant polarization in gold OA publishing volumes across different ESI fields, particularly in Chemistry, Clinical Medicine, and Engineering.

This study builds on the understanding of OA citation advantage (OACA) by incorporating gold OA publishing volume into a two-dimensional framework, resulting in the development of a “distance” metric. It further categorizes gold OA citation effects into four quadrants: positive citation effects (quadrants A and B) and negative citation effects (quadrants C and D), based on category normalized citation impact (CNCI) and journal normalized citation impact (JNCI) indicators from the InCites database.

The findings underscore the importance of developing tailored strategies to address field-specific challenges and promote gold OA dynamics in the Chinese mainland; while prioritizing high-quality gold OA journals is essential for fostering gold OA development in the rest of the world.

URL : Field-specific gold open access dynamics in the Chinese mainland: Overviews, disparities, and strategic insights

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1630

“Giving them the best information I could with whatever I had at hand”. Physicians’ online health communication practices in a post-normal science context

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Authors : Lucía Céspedes, Alice Fleerackers,  Lauren A. Maggio

This study describes US-based physicians’ online public communication practices, particularly on the social media platform Twitter/X, during the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw on 28 semi-structured interviews to examine how they responded to the unique COVID-19 context with respect to each of the four features of post-normal science (PNS): facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent.

Our analysis reveals that the pandemic shifted what, why, and how physicians used the platform, and with whom they aimed to communicate. We discuss the implications of these changes in their online communication habits, discourses, and representations around social media as a reaction to the context of PNS brought about by the pandemic.

URL : “Giving them the best information I could with whatever I had at hand”. Physicians’ online health communication practices in a post-normal science context

DOI : https://doi.org/10.22323/2.23060204