Archives des mots-clés : scientific communication

Prevalence of Potentially Predatory Publishing in Scopus on the Country Level

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Authors : Tatiana Savina, Ivan Sterligov

We present the results of a large-scale study of potentially predatory journals (PPJ) represented in the Scopus database, which is widely used for research evaluation. Both journal metrics and country, disciplinary data have been evaluated for different groups of PPJ: those listed by Jeffrey Beall and those delisted by Scopus because of “publication concerns”.

Our results show that even after years of delisting, PPJ are still highly visible in the Scopus database with hundreds of active potentially predatory journals. PPJ papers are continuously produced by all major countries, but with different shares. All major subject areas are affected. The largest number of PPJ papers are in engineering and medicine.

On average, PPJ have much lower citation metrics than other Scopus-indexed journals. We conclude with a brief survey of the case of Kazakhstan where the share of PPJ papers at one time amounted to almost a half of all Kazakhstan papers in Scopus, and propose a link between PPJ share and national research evaluation policies (in particular, rules of awarding academic degrees).

The progress of potentially predatory journal research will be increasingly important because such evaluation methods are becoming more widespread in times of the Metric Tide.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.08283

Publications numériques scientifiques universitaires internationales : Disruption, quels acteurs,quels projets ?

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Auteur/Author : Appoline Romanens

Les enseignants-chercheurs d’aujourd’hui se heurtent à des APC, ont besoin de logiciels de PAO, avec un DMP pour apparaître dans la base de données du DOAJ, ou espérer rentrer dans celle duWoS.

Tous ces termes nous semblent éloignés du jargon du Journal des Sçavans, première manifestation de la compilation des pensées de la recherche scientifique.

Pourtant ils sont le signe d’une évolution du médium qui porte l’article académique scientifique aujourd’hui, le web de données, dans lequel toute publication scientifique se doit d’être réticulée pour survivre au publish or perish.

Afin de comprendre ce nouveau jargon de la recherche scientifique, qui témoigne de profonds changements dans le rapport qu’entretient l’enseignant-chercheur, l’éditeur puis le lecteur par rapport au texte, ce mémoire explore la notion de disruption dans le processus de création, relecture et édition puis publication et diffusion d’un article.

Outre un développement basé sur les théories de l’économie du document et de l’article scientifique, ce mémoire apporte deux études de cas qui rendent compte du phénomène de disruption dans les publications scientifiques, et propose à partir de ce corpus une ouverture sur ses enjeux actuels et futurs.

URL : Publications numériques scientifiques universitaires internationales : Disruption, quels acteurs,quels projets ?

Original location : https://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/69398-publications-numeriques-scientifiques-universitaires-internationales-disruption-quels-acteurs-quels-projets

Why we publish where we do: Faculty publishing values and their relationship to review, promotion and tenure expectations

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Authors : Meredith T. Niles, Lesley A. Schimanski, Erin C. McKiernan, Juan Pablo Alperin

Using an online survey of academics at 55 randomly selected institutions across the US and Canada, we explore priorities for publishing decisions and their perceived importance within review, promotion, and tenure (RPT).

We find that respondents most value journal readership, while they believe their peers most value prestige and related metrics such as impact factor when submitting their work for publication.

Respondents indicated that total number of publications, number of publications per year, and journal name recognition were the most valued factors in RPT.

Older and tenured respondents (most likely to serve on RPT committees) were less likely to value journal prestige and metrics for publishing, while untenured respondents were more likely to value these factors.

These results suggest disconnects between what academics value versus what they think their peers value, and between the importance of journal prestige and metrics for tenured versus untenured faculty in publishing and RPT perceptions.

URL : Why we publish where we do: Faculty publishing values and their relationship to review, promotion and tenure expectations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228914

Open Access+ Service: reframing library support to take research outputs to non-academic audiences

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Author: Scott Taylor

The University of Manchester Library has established a key role in facilitating scholarly discourse through its mediated open access (OA) services, but has little track record in intentionally taking OA research outputs to non-academic audiences.

This article outlines recent exploratory steps the Library has taken to convince researchers to fully exploit this part of the scholarly communication chain. Driving developments within this service category is a belief that despite the recent rise in OA, the full public benefit of research outputs is often not being realized as many papers are written in inaccessibly technical language.

Recognizing our unique position to help authors reach broader audiences with simpler expressions of their work, we have evolved our existing managed OA services to systematically share plain-English summaries of OA papers via Twitter.

In parallel, we have taken steps to ensure that our commercial analytics tools work harder to identify and reach the networked communities that form around academic disciplines in the hope that these simpler expressions of research will be more likely to diffuse beyond these networks.

URL : Open Access+ Service: reframing library support to take research outputs to non-academic audiences

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.499

Demarcating Spectrums of Predatory Publishing: Economic and Institutional Sources of Academic Legitimacy

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Author : Kyle Sile

The emergence of Open Access (OA) publishing has altered incentives and opportunities for academic stakeholders and publishers. These changes have yielded a variety of new economic and academic niches, including journals with questionable peer review systems and business models, commonly dubbed ‘predatory publishing.’ Empirical analysis of the Cabell’s Journal Blacklist reveals substantial diversity in types and degrees of predatory publishing.

While some blacklisted publishers produce journals with many severe violations of academic norms, ‘grey’ journals and publishers occupy borderline or ambiguous niches between predation and legitimacy.

Predation in academic publishing is not a simple binary phenomenon and should instead be perceived as a spectrum with varying types and degrees of illegitimacy. Conceptions of predation are based on overlapping evaluations of academic and economic legitimacy.

High institutional status benefits publishers by reducing conflicts between – if not aligning – professional and market institutional logics, which are more likely to conflict and create illegitimacy concerns in downmarket niches.

High rejection rates imbue high-status journals with value and pricing power, while low-status OA journals face ‘predatory’ incentives to optimize revenue via low selectivity.

Status influences the social acceptability of profit-seeking in academic publishing, rendering lower-status publishers vulnerable to being perceived and stigmatized as illegitimate.

URL : https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/6r274/

Scopus as a curated, high-quality bibliometric data source for academic research in quantitative science studies

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Authors : Jeroen Baas, Michiel Schotten, Andrew Plume, Grégoire Côté, Reza Karimi

Scopus is among the largest curated abstract and citation databases, with a wide global and regional coverage of scientific journals, conference proceedings, and books, while ensuring only the highest quality data are indexed through rigorous content selection and re-evaluation by an independent Content Selection and Advisory Board.

Additionally, extensive quality assurance processes continuously monitor and improve all data elements in Scopus. Besides enriched metadata records of scientific articles, Scopus offers comprehensive author and institution profiles, obtained from advanced profiling algorithms and manual curation, ensuring high precision and recall.

The trustworthiness of Scopus has led to its use as bibliometric data source for large-scale analyses in research assessments, research landscape studies, science policy evaluations, and university rankings.

Scopus data have been offered for free for selected studies by the academic research community, such as through application programming interfaces, which have led to many publications employing Scopus data to investigate topics such as researcher mobility, network visualizations, and spatial bibliometrics.

In June 2019, the International Center for the Study of Research was launched, with an advisory board consisting of bibliometricians, aiming to work with the scientometric research community and offering a virtual laboratory where researchers will be able to utilize Scopus data.

URL : Scopus as a curated, high-quality bibliometric data source for academic research in quantitative science studies

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00019

Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata

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Authors : Ginny Hendricks, Dominika Tkaczyk, Jennifer Lin, Patricia Feeney

This paper describes the scholarly metadata collected and made available by Crossref, as well as its importance in the scholarly research ecosystem. Containing over 106 million records and expanding at an average rate of 11% a year, Crossref’s metadata has become one of the major sources of scholarly data for publishers, authors, librarians, funders, and researchers.

The metadata set consists of 13 content types, including not only traditional types, such as journals and conference papers, but also data sets, reports, preprints, peer reviews, and grants.

The metadata is not limited to basic publication metadata, but can also include abstracts and links to full text, funding and license information, citation links, and the information about corrections, updates, retractions, etc.

This scale and breadth make Crossref a valuable source for research in scientometrics, including measuring the growth and impact of science and understanding new trends in scholarly communications. The metadata is available through a number of APIs, including REST API and OAI-PMH.

In this paper, we describe the kind of metadata that Crossref provides and how it is collected and curated. We also look at Crossref’s role in the research ecosystem and trends in metadata curation over the years, including the evolution of its citation data provision.

We summarize the research used in Crossref’s metadata and describe plans that will improve metadata quality and retrieval in the future.

URL : Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00022