Étiquette : scientific communication

Catégories
EN

The need for accelerated change in diversity, equity and inclusion in publishing and learned societies

Author : Jonathan Roscoe

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) is a key priority for many organizations and institutions, including learned societies. With diversity at universities, both in the UK and around the world, being reported as low, it was decided to make DE&I one of the main areas of enquiry for the seventh Wiley Society Member Survey, conducted in May 2021.

We found that satisfaction with levels of representation for gender, race and ethnicity was falling and that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic had disproportionately affected those already most disadvantaged within the academic hierarchy.

In order to fully understand the current status of DE&I in academia, and within societies in particular, this paper also draws on other research undertaken or supported by Wiley, including a survey of journal editors and the Brave New World study, as well as further research in which Wiley was not involved.

What it shows is that academic research, learned societies and publishing all have their own DE&I issues that need to be addressed, but that through improved DE&I can come better research.

URL : The need for accelerated change in diversity, equity and inclusion in publishing and learned societies

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1457

Catégories
EN

Toward openness and transparency to better facilitate knowledge creation

Author : Simon Mahony

Changes in modes of publication over recent decades and moves to publish material freely and openly have resulted in increased amounts of research and scholarly outputs being available online. These include teaching and other material but consist mostly of research publications.

There have been significant UK and European initiatives as part of the Open Agenda that facilitate and indeed mandate the move to open whether that is for educational materials, research output and data, or the mechanisms for ensuring the quality of these materials.

A significant issue is that although making research outputs freely available is praiseworthy, without the data on which that research is based, reproducibility and so verification, which are fundamental principles of scholarly methodology, are not possible.

When discrete datasets are linked openly and freely, are able to interact by using common standards, they become more powerful with extended possibilities for research questions that cross disciplinary divides and knowledge domains.

There are always objections and resistance to new innovations, and open publication is no exception; published research, nevertheless, indicates that publishing material openly is becoming considered to be “good research practice” and that the positives of “new collaborations and higher citation” outweigh any perceived negative effects.

URL : Toward openness and transparency to better facilitate knowledge creation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24652

Catégories
EN

The Rise of Platinum Open Access Journals with Both Impact Factors and Zero Article Processing Charges

Author : Joshua M. Pearce

It appears that open access (OA) academic publishing is better for science because it provides frictionless access to make significant advancements in knowledge. OA also benefits individual researchers by providing the widest possible audience and concomitant increased citation rates.

OA publishing rates are growing fast as increasing numbers of funders demand it and is currently dominated by gold OA (authors pay article processing charges (APCs)). Academics with limited financial resources perceive they must choose between publishing behind pay walls or using research funds for OA publishing.

Worse, many new OA journals with low APCs did not have impact factors, which reduces OA selection for tenure track professors. Such unpleasant choices may be dissolving. This article provides analysis with a free and open source python script to collate all journals with impact factors with the now more than 12,000 OA journals that are truly platinum OA (neither the author nor the readers pay for the peer-reviewed work).

The results found platinum OA is growing faster than both academic publishing and OA publishing. There are now over 350 platinum OA journals with impact factors over a wide variety of academic disciplines, giving most academics options for OA with no APCs.

URL : The Rise of Platinum Open Access Journals with Both Impact Factors and Zero Article Processing Charges

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/knowledge2020013

Catégories
EN

Surveillance Publishing

Author : Jeff Pooley

This essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing, with special attention to the example of Elsevier. A scholarly publisher can be defined as a surveillance publisher if it derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from prediction products, fueled by data extracted from researcher behavior.

The essay begins by tracing the Google search engine’s roots in bibliometrics, alongside a history of the citation analysis company that became, in 2016, Clarivate. The essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing by engaging with the work of Shoshana Zuboff, Jathan Sadowski, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, and Aziz Huq.

The recent history of Elsevier is traced to describe the company’s research-lifecycle data-harvesting strategy, with the aim to develop and sell prediction products to unviersity and other customers.

The essay concludes by considering some of the potential costs of surveillance publishing, as other big commercial publishers increasingly enter the predictive-analytics business. It is likely, I argue, that windfall subscription-and-APC profits in Elsevier’s “legacy” publishing business have financed its decade-long acquisition binge in analytics.

The products’ purpose, moreover, is to streamline the top-down assessment and evaluation practices that have taken hold in recent decades. A final concern is that scholars will internalize an analytics mindset, one already encouraged by citation counts and impact factors.

URL : Surveillance Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.1874

Catégories
EN

Ask the Editors: Assessing the Publishing Needs of Faculty Editors

Authors : Matthew E. Hunter, Liz Dunne, Camille Thomas, Laura Miller, Devin Soper

Introduction

This article reports results from a survey of faculty members with editorial responsibilities. The survey explored what publishing services and platform functionalities respondents found most valuable in their work as editors, how satisfied they were with the services provided by commercial publishers, and to what extent they were aware of alternative publishing practices.

Method

The authors used data collected from a survey instrument that was distributed to a sample (n = 515) of faculty members with editorial responsibilities at their institution.

Results

Collected data suggest that faculty editors value specific publishing services (e.g., coordination of peer review and copyediting) and platform functionality (e.g., submission and peer-review management) more than others, recognize several challenges facing academic publishing in their disciplines (including the transition to open access publishing models), and are mostly aware of common forms of open access research dissemination such as open access journals and institutional repositories.

Discussion

The survey results may be helpful to library publishers in making decisions about what publishing services and platform functionalities to prioritize in the development of their publishing programs. In addition to utilizing the survey data to assess the needs of editors, the authors also identified a number of expanded uses of the survey related to marketing and outreach.

Conclusion

Insofar as faculty editors are key stakeholders that library publishers seek to build partnerships with, it is important to understand their needs and preferences as editors. This article provides some insight into these questions that may prove helpful to library publishers.

URL : Ask the Editors: Assessing the Publishing Needs of Faculty Editors

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.12912

Catégories
FR

L’écriture inclusive et ses usages dans les revues de sciences humaines et sociales

Auteur.e.s/Authors : Marie Loison–Leruste, Olivia Samuel, François Théron

Le langage inclusif est depuis quelques années en débat dans l’espace public. L’écriture scientifique n’échappe pas aux questions soulevées par ces nouvelles formes d’écriture qui s’inscrivent dans un mouvement de visibilisation des femmes, de remise en question du masculin « neutre » et de lutte contre le sexisme et les inégalités de genre.

L’article présente les résultats d’une enquête exploratoire auprès de revues de SHS, dont l’objectif est de rendre compte des usages actuels de l’écriture inclusive dans ces revues.

L’enquête indique que l’écriture inclusive (EI) est d’un usage largement accepté sur le principe par les revues étudiées, mais celles-ci communiquent peu sur leurs règles éditoriales en matière d’EI et publient des textes utilisant des formes variables et non stabilisées de cette nouvelle forme d’écriture.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03542374/

Catégories
FR

Les podcasts de sciences en SHS et STS. Formes expressives, objectifs et acteurs

Auteure/Author : Clara Perissat

Ce mémoire traite des podcasts comme un genre à part entière. En effet, le podcast est un média en vogue ces dernières années. L’accessibilité des nouvelles technologies et des plateformes de diffusion ainsi que la forme intimiste du podcast font que de plus en plus de monde, professionnels ou non, s’approprie ce nouvel outil. Il est ainsi possible de trouver des podcasts sur des sujets très divers allant de la science à la politique en passant par l’érotisme ou le militantisme.

Ce mémoire s’intéresse aux podcasts de vulgarisation scientifique en sciences humaines et sociales (SHS) et en sciences et technologie santé (STS). L’intérêt a été porté sur les différences existantes entre les podcasts de SHS et les podcasts de STS à travers la problématique suivante : Les podcasts de sciences en SHS et STS ont-ils les mêmes formes expressives, les mêmes objectifs et les mêmes acteurs ?

Le développement de ce mémoire, s’est basé sur un corpus de huit podcasts, quatre podcasts de vulgarisation en Histoire et quatre podcasts de vulgarisation en santé. De nombreux podcasts étrangers traitent d’une discipline des STS alors qu’en France les podcasts ne sont pas spécialisés, un véritable manque de podcasts de STS français spécialisés dans une discipline a ainsi été observé.

Au contraire, les podcasts d’histoire sont très nombreux et révèlent l’engouement de cette discipline pour les français. Cela amené l’étude à s’intéresser à des podcasts de santé traitant parfois de sujets peu scientifiques comme le développement personnel. La question des créateurs et de la légitimité sont ainsi évoquées dans cette étude.

L’analyse des deux types de podcasts de science révèle qu’ils ont un enjeu similaire de prime abord : vulgariser leur discipline et diffuser des connaissances de manière informelle. En revanche, leur deuxième enjeu diffère. Les créateurs de podcasts d’histoire ont tendance a vouloir montrer la recherche en train de se faire, les nouvelles réflexions des chercheurs et de mettre ces derniers en valeur.

Les créateurs de podcasts de santé ont, quant à eux, tendance à vouloir faire agir leurs auditeurs grâce à des podcasts de conseils. La deuxième partie de l’analyse portent sur les méthodes différentes pour diffuser des connaissances. Les podcasts d’histoire se servent d’avantage des codes du roman pour transmettre du savoir.

Le récit, l’emploi d’un personnage principal, d’un narrateur, ou d’atmosphères travaillées servent à donner à l’auditeur l’impression qu’une histoire lui est racontée. De plus les outils de vulgarisation sont le plus souvent implicites, ce qui permet une diffusion non formelle des connaissances.

Au contraire, les podcasts de santé s’appuient sur de nombreux outils de vulgarisation explicites comme les synthèses, définitions, résumés et références scientifiques. Ils ne suivent pas les codes du roman et ont tendance à utiliser une écriture assez scolaire.

URL : https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-03472403