Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Introducing a data availability policy for journals at IOP Publishing: Measuring the impact on authors and editorial teams

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Authors : Jade Holt, Andrew Walker, Phill Jones

As the open research movement continues to gather pace, a number of publishers, funders, and institutions are mandating the sharing of underlying research data. At the same time, concerns about introducing extra quality control steps around data availability statements (DAS) are driving a discussion about the best way to make data more open without slowing down publication.

This article describes a pilot project to introduce a new Open Data policy to three IOP Publishing (IOPP) journals as part of IOPP’s commitment to increasing transparency and support for open science.

An investigation was undertaken using an automated workflow monitoring tool to understand the impact of this change on authors and the editorial staff. Changes in revised submission processing times and how often manuscripts were returned to the author were measured.

An overall increase in the time editorial staff spent processing manuscripts was found as well as an increase in the number of times manuscripts were returned to authors. Detailed analysis shows that manuscripts in which authors claim in the DAS to have included data within the manuscript were the most strongly affected. Steps to mitigate the effects through improved author communication were found to be effective.

URL : Introducing a data availability policy for journals at IOP Publishing: Measuring the impact on authors and editorial teams

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1386

Classification and analysis of PubPeer comments: How a web journal club is used

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Author : José Luis Ortega

This study explores the use of PubPeer by the scholarly community, to understand the issues discussed in an online journal club, the disciplines most commented on, and the characteristics of the most prolific users.

A sample of 39,985 posts about 24,779 publications were extracted from PubPeer in 2019 and 2020. These comments were divided into seven categories according to their degree of seriousness (Positive review, Critical review, Lack of information, Honest errors, Methodological flaws, Publishing fraud, and Manipulation).

The results show that more than two-thirds of comments are posted to report some type of misconduct, mainly about image manipulation. These comments generate most discussion and take longer to be posted. By discipline, Health Sciences and Life Sciences are the most discussed research areas.

The results also reveal “super commenters,” users who access the platform to systematically review publications. The study ends by discussing how various disciplines use the site for different purposes.

URL : Classification and analysis of PubPeer comments: How a web journal club is used

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24568

Structure of Research Article Abstracts in Political Science: A Genre-Based Study

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Author : Hesham Suleiman Alyousef

The research article (RA) abstract is the first section researchers read to determine its relevance to their interests. Researchers need to possess an implicit knowledge of the rhetorical move structure and organization of this section. Unlike most scientific disciplines, political science RA abstracts are unstructured, that is, with no headings (or moves), which makes it more challenging.

To the best of our knowledge, the rhetorical move structure in high readership political science RA abstracts has not been researched. This study investigated (a) the rhetorical move structure in 120 political science RA abstracts from six high-impact journals, (b) the most common move patterns, and (c) the move(s) occupying most textual space. The findings indicated the lack of obligatory moves. A move structure model for writing a political science RA abstract is proposed, comprising four conventional moves (Introduction [I]–Purpose [P]–Methods [M]–Results [R]) and two optional step/move, namely, Research Gap step and Discussion [D] move. The results also showed that the first most frequent move pattern is I-P-M-R-D, followed by I-P-M-R and the I-P-R-D.

The fact that an RA abstract summarizes the whole RA results in move embedding, particularly in the four moves, I-P-M-R. The findings revealed the importance of the Results move as it occupied nearly one third of text space. The results may contribute to the fields of discourse and genre studies.

They may provide invaluable insights for novice political science researchers attempting to publish their work in high-ranking journals. The proposed move structure model can act as a guide for English for Academic Purposes (EAP)/English for Specific Purposes (ESP) tutors and political science authors.

URL : Structure of Research Article Abstracts in Political Science: A Genre-Based Study

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177%2F21582440211040797

Visual Summary Identification From Scientific Publications via Self-Supervised Learning

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Authors : Shintaro Yamamoto, Anne Lauscher, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Goran Glavaš, Shigeo Morishima

The exponential growth of scientific literature yields the need to support users to both effectively and efficiently analyze and understand the some body of research work. This exploratory process can be facilitated by providing graphical abstracts–a visual summary of a scientific publication.

Accordingly, previous work recently presented an initial study on automatic identification of a central figure in a scientific publication, to be used as the publication’s visual summary.

This study, however, have been limited only to a single (biomedical) domain. This is primarily because the current state-of-the-art relies on supervised machine learning, typically relying on the existence of large amounts of labeled data: the only existing annotated data set until now covered only the biomedical publications.

In this work, we build a novel benchmark data set for visual summary identification from scientific publications, which consists of papers presented at conferences from several areas of computer science. We couple this contribution with a new self-supervised learning approach to learn a heuristic matching of in-text references to figures with figure captions.

Our self-supervised pre-training, executed on a large unlabeled collection of publications, attenuates the need for large annotated data sets for visual summary identification and facilitates domain transfer for this task. We evaluate our self-supervised pretraining for visual summary identification on both the existing biomedical and our newly presented computer science data set.

The experimental results suggest that the proposed method is able to outperform the previous state-of-the-art without any task-specific annotations.

URL : Visual Summary Identification From Scientific Publications via Self-Supervised Learning

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.719004

How Long Can We Build It? Ensuring Usability of a Scientific Code Base

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Authors : Klaus Rechert, Jurek Oberhauser, Rafael Gieschke

Software and in particular source code became an important component of scientific publications and henceforth is now subject of research data management. Maintaining source code such that it remains a usable and a valuable scientific contribution is and remains a huge task.

Not all code contributions can be actively maintained forever. Eventually, there will be a significant backlog of legacy source-code. In this article we analyse the requirements for applying the concept of long-term reusability to source code.

We use simple case study to identify gaps and provide a technical infrastructure based on emulator to support automated builds of historic software in form of source code.

URL : How Long Can We Build It? Ensuring Usability of a Scientific Code Base

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v16i1.770

Why Open Access: Economics and Business Researchers’ Perspectives

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Authors : Carmen López-Vergara, Pilar Flores Asenjo, Alfonso Rosa-García

Public research policies have been promoting open-access publication in recent years as an adequate model for the dissemination of scientific knowledge. However, depending on the disciplines, its use is very diverse.

This study explores the determinants of open-access publication among academic researchers of economics and business, as well as their assessment of different economic measures focused on publication stimulus.

To do so, a survey of Spanish business and economics researchers was conducted. They reported an average of 19% of their publications in open-access journals, hybrids or fully Gold Route open access. Almost 80% of the researchers foresee a future increase in the volume of open-access publications.

When determining where to publish their research results, the main criterion for the selection of a scientific journal is the impact factor. Regarding open access, the most valued aspect is the visibility and dissemination it provides.

Although the cost of publication is not the most relevant criterion in the choice of a journal, three out of four researchers consider that a reduction in fees and an increase in funding are measures that would boost the open-access model.

URL : Why Open Access: Economics and Business Researchers’ Perspectives

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9030037

Preprints in times of COVID19: the time is ripe for agreeing on terminology and good practices

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Authors : Raffaella Ravinetto, Céline Caillet, Muhammad H. Zaman, Jerome Amir Singh, Philippe J. Guerin, Aasim Ahmad, Carlos E. Durán, Amar Jesani, Ana Palmero, Laura Merson, Peter W. Horby, E. Bottieau, Tammy Hoffmann, Paul N. Newton

Over recent years, the research community has been increasingly using preprint servers to share manuscripts that are not yet peer-reviewed. Even if it enables quick dissemination of research findings, this practice raises several challenges in publication ethics and integrity.

In particular, preprints have become an important source of information for stakeholders interested in COVID19 research developments, including traditional media, social media, and policy makers.

Despite caveats about their nature, many users can still confuse pre-prints with peer-reviewed manuscripts. If unconfirmed but already widely shared first-draft results later prove wrong or misinterpreted, it can be very difficult to “unlearn” what we thought was true. Complexity further increases if unconfirmed findings have been used to inform guidelines.

To help achieve a balance between early access to research findings and its negative consequences, we formulated five recommendations: (a) consensus should be sought on a term clearer than ‘pre-print’, such as ‘Unrefereed manuscript’, “Manuscript awaiting peer review” or ‘’Non-reviewed manuscript”; (b) Caveats about unrefereed manuscripts should be prominent on their first page, and each page should include a red watermark stating ‘Caution—Not Peer Reviewed’; (c) pre-print authors should certify that their manuscript will be submitted to a peer-review journal, and should regularly update the manuscript status; (d) high level consultations should be convened, to formulate clear principles and policies for the publication and dissemination of non-peer reviewed research results; (e) in the longer term, an international initiative to certify servers that comply with good practices could be envisaged.

URL : Preprints in times of COVID19: the time is ripe for agreeing on terminology and good practices

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-021-00667-7