Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Publication practices during the COVID-19 pandemic: Biomedical preprints and peer-reviewed literature

Posté le par

Authors : Yulia V. Sevryugina, Andrew J. Dicks

The coronavirus pandemic introduced many changes to our society, and deeply affected the established in biomedical sciences publication practices. In this article, we present a comprehensive study of the changes in scholarly publication landscape for biomedical sciences during the COVID-19 pandemic, with special emphasis on preprints posted on bioRxiv and medRxiv servers.

We observe the emergence of a new category of preprint authors working in the fields of immunology, microbiology, infectious diseases, and epidemiology, who extensively used preprint platforms during the pandemic for sharing their immediate findings. The majority of these findings were works-in-progress unfitting for a prompt acceptance by refereed journals.

The COVID-19 preprints that became peer-reviewed journal articles were often submitted to journals concurrently with the posting on a preprint server, and the entire publication cycle, from preprint to the online journal article, took on average 63 days. This included an expedited peer-review process of 43 days and journal’s production stage of 15 days, however there was a wide variation in publication delays between journals. Only one third of COVID-19 preprints posted during the first nine months of the pandemic appeared as peer-reviewed journal articles.

These journal articles display high Altmetric Attention Scores further emphasizing a significance of COVID-19 research during 2020. This article will be relevant to editors, publishers, open science enthusiasts, and anyone interested in changes that the 2020 crisis transpired to publication practices and a culture of preprints in life sciences.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.21.427563

Communicating Scientific Uncertainty in an Age of COVID-19: An Investigation into the Use of Preprints by Digital Media Outlets

Posté le par

Authors : Alice Fleerackers, Michelle Riedlinger, Laura Moorhead, Rukhsana Ahmed, Juan Pablo Alperin

In this article, we investigate the surge in use of COVID-19-related preprints by media outlets. Journalists are a main source of reliable public health information during crises and, until recently, journalists have been reluctant to cover preprints because of the associated scientific uncertainty.

Yet, uploads of COVID-19 preprints and their uptake by online media have outstripped that of preprints about any other topic. Using an innovative approach combining altmetrics methods with content analysis, we identified a diversity of outlets covering COVID-19-related preprints during the early months of the pandemic, including specialist medical news outlets, traditional news media outlets, and aggregators.

We found a ubiquity of hyperlinks as citations and a multiplicity of framing devices for highlighting the scientific uncertainty associated with COVID-19 preprints. These devices were rarely used consistently (e.g., mentioning that the study was a preprint, unreviewed, preliminary, and/or in need of verification).

About half of the stories we analyzed contained framing devices emphasizing uncertainty. Outlets in our sample were much less likely to identify the research they mentioned as preprint research, compared to identifying it as simply “research.” This work has significant implications for public health communication within the changing media landscape.

While current best practices in public health risk communication promote identifying and promoting trustworthy sources of information, the uptake of preprint research by online media presents new challenges.

At the same time, it provides new opportunities for fostering greater awareness of the scientific uncertainty associated with health research findings.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2020.1864892

Bibliodiversity at the Centre: Decolonizing Open Access

Posté le par

Author : Monica Berger

The promise of open access for the global South has not been fully met. Publishing is dominated by Northern publishers, which disadvantages Southern authors through platform capitalism and open access models requiring article processing charges to publish.

This article argues that through the employment of bibliodiversity — a sustainable, anticolonial ethos and practice developed in Latin America — the South can reclaim and decolonize open access and nurture scholarly communities.

Self‐determination and locality are at the core of bibliodiversity which rejects the domination of international, English‐language journal publishing. As articulated by the Jussieu Call, wide‐ranging, scholarly‐community‐based, non‐profit and sustainable models for open access are integral to bibliodiversity, as is reform of research evaluation systems.

Predatory publishing exploits open access and perpetuates the marginalization of Southern scholars. Predatory journals are often also conflated with legitimate Southern journals. The article concludes with a discussion of Southern open access initiatives, highlighting large‐scale infrastructure in Latin America and library‐based publishing in Africa, which express the true spirit of open access as a commons for knowledge as a public good.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12634

Citation needed? Wikipedia and the COVID-19 pandemic

Posté le par

Authors : Omer Benjakob, Rona Aviram, Jonathan Sobel

With the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak at the beginning of 2020, millions across the world flocked to Wikipedia to read about the virus. Our study offers an in-depth analysis of the scientific backbone supporting Wikipedia’s COVID-19 articles.

Using references as a readout, we asked which sources informed Wikipedia’s growing pool of COVID-19-related articles during the pandemic’s first wave (January-May 2020). We found that coronavirus-related articles referenced trusted media sources and cited high-quality academic research.

Moreover, despite a surge in preprints, Wikipedia’s COVID-19 articles had a clear preference for open-access studies published in respected journals and made little use of non-peer-reviewed research up-loaded independently to academic servers.

Building a timeline of COVID-19 articles on Wikipedia from 2001-2020 revealed a nuanced trade-off between quality and timeliness, with a growth in COVID-19 article creation and citations, from both academic research and popular media.

It further revealed how preexisting articles on key topics related to the virus created a frame-work on Wikipedia for integrating new knowledge. This “scientific infrastructure” helped provide context, and regulated the influx of new information into Wikipedia.

Lastly, we constructed a network of DOI-Wikipedia articles, which showed the landscape of pandemic-related knowledge on Wikipedia and revealed how citations create a web of scientific knowledge to support coverage of scientific topics like COVID-19 vaccine development.

Understanding how scientific research interacts with the digital knowledge-sphere during the pandemic provides insight into how Wikipedia can facilitate access to science. It also sheds light on how Wikipedia successfully fended of disinformation on the COVID-19 and may provide insight into how its unique model may be deployed in other contexts.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.01.433379

PLAN S and other progress for Open Access to knowledge

Posté le par

Authors : Stefano Bianco, Laura Patrizii

The principle of Open Access (OA) is about the breaking of any paywall to the knowledge coming from research funded by public monies. After twenty years of statements not much has changed and the market of scientific journals is still in the hands of oligopolistic companies.

Plan S is a disruptive initiative created by research funders in Europe and US which aims to foster the transition to Open Access by acting against hybrid journals and citation index.

The Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) has signed Plan S and, in close relationship with the Universities, the Conference of Rectors (CRUI), and the National Research Council (CNR), is outreaching the academic communities to discuss strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. In this work both a description of Plan S and a brief status report of other initiatives are given.

URL : PLAN S and other progress for Open Access to knowledge

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.2423/i22394303v10Sp59

Assessing Open Source Journal Management Software

Posté le par

Author : Stewart Baker

The long-term sustainability of Open Source (OS) software depends on its community of developers and core users, as well as that community’s stability. Assessing OS software and the community which creates it is, therefore, an essential step in using OS software for a project.

In this study, surveys of OS journal management systems were reviewed to determine which were still actively maintained. Actively maintained systems were rated using QualiPSo’s Open Maturity Model (OMM), an assessment tool for determining the maturity and robustness of OS software. Of the OS journal management systems mentioned in existing surveys, only Ambra, Lodel, and Open Journal Systems (OJS) are still actively maintained.

Of these, OJS scored the highest OMM rating, followed by Ambra and Lodel. A new system, Janeway, was also assessed. Although OS software can carry risks, it also brings benefits to librarians, readers, and publishers of scholarly journals.

Assessing OS software and getting involved in OS software communities both help ensure the long-term survival of these communities and their work.

The case for an inclusive scholarly communication infrastructure for social sciences and humanities

Posté le par

Authors : Maciej Maryl, Marta Błaszczyńska, Agnieszka Szulińska, Paweł Rams

This article presents a vision for a scholarly communication research infrastructure for social sciences and humanities (SSH). The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the pressing need to access research outputs without the traditional economic and temporal barriers.

This article explores the current scholarly communication landscape, assessing the reasons for the slower uptake of open access in SSH research. The authors discuss such frontiers as commercial interests, sources of academic prestige and discipline-specific genres.

This article defines and discusses the key areas in which a research infrastructure can play a vital role in making open scholarly communication a reality in SSH: (1) providing a federated and easy access to scattered SSH outputs; (2) supporting publication and dissemination of discipline-specific genres (e.g. monographs, critical editions); (3) providing help with evaluation and quality assurance practices in SSH; (4) enabling scholarly work in national languages, which is significant for local communities; (5) being governed by researchers and for researchers as a crucial factor for productive, useful and accessible services; (6) lastly, considering the needs of other stakeholders involved in scholarly communication, such as publishers, libraries, media, non-profit organisations, and companies.

They conclude that a scholarly-driven, inclusive, dedicated infrastructure for the European Research Area is needed in order to advance open science in SSH and to address the issues tackled by SSH researchers at a structural and systemic level.

URL : The case for an inclusive scholarly communication infrastructure for social sciences and humanities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.26545.1