Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Individuation through infrastructure: Get Full Text Research, data extraction and the academic publishing oligopoly

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Author : Samuel Moore

This article explores the recent turn within academic publishing towards ‘seamless access’, an approach to content provision that ensures users do not have to continually authenticate in order to access journal content.

Through a critical exploration of Get Full Text Research, a service developed collaboratively by five of the world’s largest academic publishers to provide such seamless access to academic research, the article shows how publishers are seeking to control the ways in which readers access publications in order to trace, control and ultimately monetise user interactions on their platforms.

Theorised as a process of individuation through infrastructure, the article reveals how publishers are attempting an ontological shift to position the individual, quantifiable researcher, rather than the published content, at the centre of the scholarly communication universe.

The implications of the shift towards individuation are revealed as part of a broader trend in scholarly communication infrastructure towards data extraction, mirroring a trend within digital capitalism more generally.

URL : Individuation through infrastructure: Get Full Text Research, data extraction and the academic publishing oligopoly

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/3pez-w041

Researcher’s Perceptions on Publishing “Negative” Results and Open Access

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Authors : Lucía Echevarría, Alberto Malerba, Virginia Arechavala-Gomeza

Scientific advance is based on reproducibility, corroboration, and availability of research results. However, large numbers of experimental results that contradict previous work do not get published and many research results are not freely available as they are hidden behind paywalls.

As part of COST Action “DARTER”, a network of researchers in the field of RNA therapeutics, we have performed a small survey among our members and their colleagues to assess their opinion on the subject of publishing contradictory or ambiguous results and their attitude to open access (OA) publishing.

Our survey indicates that, although researchers highly value publication of “negative” results, they often do not publish their own, citing lack of time and the perception that those results may not be as highly cited. OA, on the other hand, seems to be widely accepted, but in many cases not actively sought by researchers due to higher costs associated with it.

URL : Researcher’s Perceptions on Publishing “Negative” Results and Open Access

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1089/nat.2020.0865

International authorship and collaboration across bioRxiv preprints

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Authors : Richard J Abdill, Elizabeth M Adamowicz, Ran Blekhman

Preprints are becoming well established in the life sciences, but relatively little is known about the demographics of the researchers who post preprints and those who do not, or about the collaborations between preprint authors.

Here, based on an analysis of 67,885 preprints posted on bioRxiv, we find that some countries, notably the United States and the United Kingdom, are overrepresented on bioRxiv relative to their overall scientific output, while other countries (including China, Russia, and Turkey) show lower levels of bioRxiv adoption.

We also describe a set of ‘contributor countries’ (including Uganda, Croatia and Thailand): researchers from these countries appear almost exclusively as non-senior authors on international collaborations.

Lastly, we find multiple journals that publish a disproportionate number of preprints from some countries, a dynamic that almost always benefits manuscripts from the US.

URL :  International authorship and collaboration across bioRxiv preprints

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.58496

Our Study is Published, But the Journey is Not Finished!

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Authors : Olivier Pourret, Katsuhiko Suzuki, Yoshio Takahashi

Each June, we receive e-mails from publishers welcoming the evolution of their journals’ journal impact factor (JIF). The JIF is a controversial metric (Callaway 2016), and it is worth asking, “What’s behind it?”

In this age of “publish or perish” (Harzing 2007), we take much time and effort to write our papers and get them published. But how much time and effort do we put into finding readers or ensuring that we are reaching the right audience? Are metrics, such as the JIF, good guides for how well we are doing at reaching our target audience?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2138/gselements.16.4.229

A typology of scientific breakthroughs

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Authors : Mignon Wuestman, Jarno Hoekman, Koen Frenken

Scientific breakthroughs are commonly understood as discoveries that transform the knowledge frontier and have a major impact on science, technology, and society. Prior literature studying breakthroughs generally treats them as a homogeneous group in attempts to identify supportive conditions for their occurrence.

In this paper, we argue that there are different types of scientific breakthroughs, which differ in their disciplinary occurrence and are associated with different considerations of use and citation impact patterns.

We develop a typology of scientific breakthroughs based on three binary dimensions of scientific discoveries and use this typology to analyze qualitatively the content of 335 scientific articles that report on breakthroughs.

For each dimension, we test associations with scientific disciplines, reported use considerations, and scientific impact. We find that most scientific breakthroughs are driven by a question and in line with literature, and that paradigm shifting discoveries are rare.

Regarding the scientific impact of breakthrough as measured by citations, we find that an article that answers an unanswered question receives more citations compared to articles that were not motivated by an unanswered question.

We conclude that earlier research in which breakthroughs were operationalized as highly cited scientific articles may thus be biased against the latter.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00079

Low availability of code in ecology: A call for urgent action

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Authors : Antica Culina, Ilona van den Berg, Simon Evans, Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar

Access to analytical code is essential for transparent and reproducible research. We review the state of code availability in ecology using a random sample of 346 nonmolecular articles published between 2015 and 2019 under mandatory or encouraged code-sharing policies.

Our results call for urgent action to increase code availability: only 27% of eligible articles were accompanied by code. In contrast, data were available for 79% of eligible articles, highlighting that code availability is an important limiting factor for computational reproducibility in ecology.

Although the percentage of ecological journals with mandatory or encouraged code-sharing policies has increased considerably, from 15% in 2015 to 75% in 2020, our results show that code-sharing policies are not adhered to by most authors.

We hope these results will encourage journals, institutions, funding agencies, and researchers to address this alarming situation.

URL : Low availability of code in ecology: A call for urgent action

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000763

Concevoir un living book en sciences humaines et sociales : retour d’expérience

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Auteurs/Authors : Martine Clouzot, Marie-José Gasse-Grandjean

Le living book, nouveau format venu des sciences de la vie, nous a permis de faire le point sur un sujet, de mettre en valeur un corpus d’images, une recherche avancée et une bibliographie. Ce format hybride, tourné vers le Web, fait une nouvelle place au producteur, à l’utilisateur et à la technique.

Dans un appareillage simple, sobre et rigoureux, il permet d’organiser une masse de documentation croissante et variée (textes, images, audio, sites Web). Il propose de nouvelles manières d’écrire (collaboration, textes courts, résumés) et de structurer les contenus.

Il favorise le travail en réseau et les contacts avec les bibliothèques et les musées, tout en attirant l’attention sur les formats, les licences et les droits. Il suggère des parcours de lecture personnalisés, touche des publics diversifiés. Nous souhaitons témoigner de cette expérimentation, car le living book est un dispositif éditorial et intellectuel hybride, collaboratif, créatif, agrégatif, accessible, ouvert, qui a modifié la production, la valorisation et diffusion de notre recherche.

URL : https://journals.openedition.org/revuehn/394