Catégories
EN

Peer Community In and Peer Community Journal: A Two-Step Diamond OA Process Giving Research Communities Back Control of Publishing

Authors : Barbara Class , Denis Bourguet, Thomas Guillemaud

The current academic publishing system faces many well-identified issues. Not only is it slow and costly, but it is also an opaque system that produces a substantial amount of non-reproducible results.

Peer Community In (PCI) is a non-profit organisation that allows research communities to organise the open and free peer-review of preprints on different thematic platforms. The authors of preprints that are recommended by these platforms can then choose to submit them to any journal or to Peer Community Journal, a diamond open access journal, which publishes any and only PCI-recommended preprints.

Because PCI follows the highest standards for evaluations and openness, many institutions and journals publicly recognise PCI-recommended preprints as being of similar value to accepted journal articles.

This two-step process hence decouples the evaluation of research articles from their publication, while offering a free open-access publication venue for its recommended preprints. Doing so allows researchers to reappropriate the publishing system, and the increasing number of submissions, publications, and communities shows a growing demand for such alternative publishing models.

Ongoing developments aim to further increase the robustness and reproducibility of published research via increasing requirements and checks at submission and promoting the use of registered reports.

URL : Peer Community In and Peer Community Journal: A Two-Step Diamond OA Process Giving Research Communities Back Control of Publishing

HAL :  https://hal.science/hal-05536120

Catégories
EN

Bibliodiversity at the Centre: Decolonizing Open Access

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

Catégories
EN

Publish or impoverish: An investigation of the monetary reward system of science in China (1999-2016)

Authors : Wei Quan, Bikun Chen, Fei Shu

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to present the landscape of the cash-per-publication reward policy in China and reveal its trend since the late 1990s.

Design/methodology/approach

This study is based on the analysis of 168 university documents regarding the cash-per-publication reward policy at 100 Chinese universities.

Findings

Chinese universities offer cash rewards from 30 to 165,000 USD for papers published in journals indexed by Web of Science (WoS), and the average reward amount has been increasing for the past 10 years.

Originality/value

The cash-per-publication reward policy in China has never been systematically studied and investigated before except for in some case studies. This is the first paper that reveals the landscape of the cash-per-publication reward policy in China.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.01162

Catégories
EN

How do scientists perceive the current publication culture? A qualitative focus group interview study among Dutch biomedical researchers

Design

Qualitative focus group interview study.

Setting

Four university medical centres in the Netherlands.

Participants

Three randomly selected groups of biomedical scientists (PhD, postdoctoral staff members and full professors).

Main outcome measures

Main themes for discussion were selected by participants.

Results

Frequently perceived detrimental effects of contemporary publication culture were the strong focus on citation measures (like the Journal Impact Factor and the H-index), gift and ghost authorships and the order of authors, the peer review process, competition, the funding system and publication bias. These themes were generally associated with detrimental and undesirable effects on publication practices and on the validity of reported results.

Furthermore, senior scientists tended to display a more cynical perception of the publication culture than their junior colleagues. However, even among the PhD students and the postdoctoral fellows, the sentiment was quite negative. Positive perceptions of specific features of contemporary scientific and publication culture were rare.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that the current publication culture leads to negative sentiments, counterproductive stress levels and, most importantly, to questionable research practices among junior and senior biomedical scientists.

URL : How do scientists perceive the current publication culture? A qualitative focus group interview study among Dutch biomedical researchers

Alternative location : http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/6/2/e008681.full

Catégories
Non classé

The Importance of Free and Open Source Software…

The Importance of Free and Open Source Software and Open Standards in Modern Scientific Publishing :

« In this paper we outline the reasons why we believe a reliance on the use of proprietary computer software and proprietary file formats in scientific publication have negative implications for the conduct and reporting of science. There is increasing awareness and interest in the scientific community about the benefits offered by free and open source software. We discuss the present state of scientific publishing and the merits of advocating for a wider adoption of open standards in science, particularly where it concerns the publishing process. »

URL : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/1/2/49

Catégories
FR

Main basse sur la science publique : Le «coût de génie» de l’édition scientifique privée

Imaginez un monde où les chercheurs des établissements publics de recherche et des universités seraient rétribués individuellement en fonction de leur contribution au chiffre d’affaire d’un oligopole de grands groupes privés, et où les moyens humains et financiers affectés à leurs recherches en dépendraient.

Projet d’un think-tank ultra-libéral, voire science-fiction pensez-vous ?… ou alors cas particulier de quelques fraudes liées à l’industrie du médicament ? Non, non, regardez bien autour de vous, c’est déjà le cas, dans l’ensemble du monde scientifique (sciences de la nature, médicales, agronomiques…), et ce à l’insu de la grande majorité des gens, et de trop de chercheurs ! Mais une prise de conscience est en train de s’opérer et une bataille s’engage sur tous les continents. »

URL : http://www.inra.cgt.fr/actions/revendications/Main_basse_sur_la_Science.pdf

Catégories
Non classé

Scientific Publishing in West Africa A Comparison of…

Scientific Publishing in West Africa: A Comparison of Benin with Senegal and Ghana :

« We compared scientific indicators related to Benin, Senegal and Ghana. We collected data from Web of Science and used indicators like the yearly productivity, the language of publication, the type of publication, the citable documents, the publication fields, and the main international partners as well as the percentage of papers in collaboration. Results showed that Benin productivity is the lowest one; Ghana and Senegal competed over the period; depending on the type of documents under consideration, the positions of the three countries vary. Citable documents had an increasing trend for all the countries. There is less cooperation between African countries and Benin, Senegal and Ghana; colonial ties count much in their international partnership. Cooperation among the three countries is negligible. »

URL : http://2012.sticonference.org/Proceedings/vol2/Megnigbeto_Scientific_589.pdf