Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Transformative agreements: Do they pave the way to open access?

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Authors : Ángel Borrego, Lluís Anglada, Ernest Abadal

Transformative agreements, also known as ‘offsetting’, ‘read and publish’, or ‘publish and read’ agreements, have shifted the focus of scholarly journal licensing from cost containment towards open access publication.

An analysis of 36 full‐text transformative agreements recorded in the ESAC registry shows that ‘transformative agreement’ is an umbrella term that encompasses different kinds of contracts. We differentiate between pre‐transformative, partially transformative, and fully transformative agreements.

Pre‐transformative agreements are traditional subscription licences that grant article processing charge (APC) discounts or vouchers for open access publication of a limited number of articles. Partially transformative agreements differentiate between a read fee and a publish fee to cover the processing charges of a certain number of articles.

Fully transformative agreements allow unlimited open access publication of the scholarly output of the subscribing institution. In all three categories, some agreements restrict open access publication to hybrid journals, whereas others allow publication in both hybrid and gold journals.

Transformative agreements are more transparent than traditional journal licences, allow authors to retain copyright, and make provisions to facilitate the management of open access workflows.

It is hard to assess whether these agreements are just a temporary phase in the transition towards open access or will perpetuate the current structure of the scholarly communication system and its associated high costs.

URL : Transformative agreements: Do they pave the way to open access?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1347

Visibilité et évaluation des revues scientifiques

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Auteur/Author : Françoise Gouzi

Cet article a pour ambition de proposer une approche multicritère et explicitement qualitative pour l’évaluation de la qualité scientifique des revues. Le système d’évaluation des articles scientifiques repose depuis des décennies sur la contribution scientifique et sur le support de publication , donc sur la revue dans laquelle ils sont publiés.

Si la citation (notamment en sciences des techniques et médicales) constitue également un indicateur bibliométrique central de l’évaluation a posteriori des articles scientifiques, aujourd’hui, le lecteur, qu’il fasse partie de la communauté des pairs ou qu’il soit un simple citoyen, prend de plus en plus part à l’évaluation des textes scientifiques par l’intermédiaire de nouvelles fonctionnalités techniques de commentaires associées à certaines plateformes de publication ou de diffusion.

URL : https://hal-univ-tlse2.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03007946

Citations driven by social connections? A multi-layer representation of coauthorship networks

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Authors : Christian Zingg, Vahan Nanumyan, Frank Schweitzer

To what extent is the citation rate of new papers influenced by the past social relations of their authors? To answer this question, we present a data-driven analysis of nine different physics journals.

Our analysis is based on a two-layer network representation constructed from two large-scale data sets, INSPIREHEP and APS. The social layer contains authors as nodes and coauthorship relations as links.

This allows us to quantify the social relations of each author, prior to the publication of a new paper. The publication layer contains papers as nodes and citations between papers as links.

This layer allows us to quantify scientific attention as measured by the change of the citation rate over time. We particularly study how this change correlates with the social relations of their authors, prior to publication.

We find that on average the maximum value of the citation rate is reached sooner for authors who have either published more papers, or who have had more coauthors in previous papers.

We also find that for these authors the decay in the citation rate is faster, meaning that their papers are forgotten sooner.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00092

Swedish researchers’ responses to the cancellation of the big deal with Elsevier

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Authors: Lisa Olsson, Camilla Lindelöw, Lovisa Österlund, Frida Jakobsson

In 2018, the Swedish library consortium, Bibsam, decided to cancel big deal subscriptions with Elsevier. Many researchers (n = 4,221) let their voices be heard in a survey on the consequences of the cancellation.

Almost a third of them (n = 1,241) chose to leave free-text responses to the survey question ‘Is there anything you would like to add?’. A content analysis on these responses resulted in six themes and from these, three main conclusions are drawn.

First, there is no consensus among researchers on whether the cancellation was for good or evil. The most common argument in favour of the cancellation was the principle. The most common argument against cancellation was that it harms researchers and research.

A third of the free-text responses expressed ambivalence towards the cancellation, typically as a conflict between wanting to change the current publishing system and simultaneously suffering from the consequences of the cancellation.

The general support for open access in principle reveals a flawed publishing system, as most feel the pressure to publish in prestigious journals behind paywalls in practice. Second, it was difficult for researchers to take a position for or against cancellation due to their limited knowledge of the ongoing work of higher education institutions and library consortia.

Finally, there are indications that the cancellation made researchers reflect on open access and to some extent alter their publication pattern through their choice of copyright licence and publication channel.

URL : Swedish researchers’ responses to the cancellation of the big deal with Elsevier

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.521

Metascience as a scientific social movement

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Authors : David Peterson, Aaron Panofsky

Emerging out of the “reproducibility crisis” in science, metascientists have become central players in debates about research integrity, scholarly communication, and science policy. The goal of this article is to introduce metascience to STS scholars, detail the scientific ideology that is apparent in its articles, strategy statements, and research projects, and discuss its institutional and intellectual future.

Put simply, metascience is a scientific social movement that seeks to use the tools of science- especially, quantification and experimentation- to diagnose problems in research practice and improve efficiency.

It draws together data scientists, experimental and statistical methodologists, and open science activists into a project with both intellectual and policy dimensions. Metascientists have been remarkably successful at winning grants, motivating news coverage, and changing policies at science agencies, journals, and universities.

Moreover, metascience represents the apotheosis of several trends in research practice, scientific communication, and science governance including increased attention to methodological and statistical criticism of scientific practice, the promotion of “open science” by science funders and journals, the growing importance of both preprint and data repositories for scientific communication, and the new prominence of data scientists as research makes a turn toward Big Science.

URL : Metascience as a scientific social movement

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/4dsqa

Quand le discours de savoir se fait technodiscours. Hypertextualité, commentaires et unité textuelle du billet scientifique

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Auteur/Author : Ingrid Mayeur

Le présent article propose des pistes pour déterminer par quels moyens le discours scientifique sur blog fait texte. Nous nous intéressons plus spécifiquement à l’enrichissement hypertextuel des énoncés et aux commentaires qui interrogent les contours du billet scientifique comme forme textuelle cohérente.

À partir de l’analyse d’un corpus de 87 billets extraits de la Une d’Hypothèses, plateforme de carnets de recherche en sciences humaines et sociales, nous identifions les fonctions cognitives assurées par ces deux composantes des écrits de blogs scientifiques ainsi que leur incidence sur le jugement de textualité (Adam 2011) susceptible d’être porté sur les billets.

Nous proposons enfin une lecture de l’enrichissement hypertextuel et des commentaires comme gestes discursifs du savoir (Lttr13 2016) jouant un rôle dans les opérations de textualisation des billets scientifiques.

URL : Quand le discours de savoir se fait technodiscours. Hypertextualité, commentaires et unité textuelle du billet scientifique

DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/corela.11876

How is open access accused of being predatory? The impact of Beall’s lists of predatory journals on academic publishing

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Authors : Franciszek Krawczyk, Emanuel Kulczycki

The aim of this paper is to investigate how predatory journals are characterized by authors who write about such journals. We emphasize the ways in which predatory journals have been conflated with—or distinguished from—open access journals.

We created a list of relevant publications on predatory publishing using four databases: Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, and Microsoft Academic.

We included 280 English-language publications in the review according to their contributions to the discussions on predatory publishing. Then, we coded and qualitatively analyzed these publications.

The findings show the profound influence of Jeffrey Beall, who composed and maintained himself lists of predatory publishers and journals, on the whole discussion on predatory publishing.

The major themes by which Beall has characterized predatory journals are widely present in non-Beall publications. Moreover, 122 papers we reviewed combined predatory publishing with open access using similar strategies as Beall.

The overgeneralization of the flaws of some open access journals to the entire open access movement has led to unjustified prejudices among the academic community toward open access.

This is the first large-scale study that systematically examines how predatory publishing is defined in the literature.

URL : How is open access accused of being predatory? The impact of Beall’s lists of predatory journals on academic publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102271