Peer review is a constituent part of scholarly communication. It has many modalities: simple blind, double blind, open, and now, also partial reviews. Partial reviews, which only validates the technical soundness of a document, is a feature of open access mega-journals such as PLoS ONE and several others. … Read More →
What will peer review be like in 2030?
Although the scientific literature has always been reviewed before it was published, current forms of peer review are only a few decades old and from the outset have been subjected to criticism and limitations. Open review and preprints servers have emerged in recent years as possible solutions in a world of growing communication in scientific research. Open reviews, artificial intelligence, collaborative and “cloud” reviews… what will peer review be like in 2030? … Read More →
Editorial ethics – other types of plagiarism… and counting
Plagiarism and fraud multiply in a variety of ways. Recently two less frequent types have come up – accidental plagiarism and referee plagiarism. In any case, plagiarism is an ethical breach that erodes public confidence and we must prevent it. … Read More →
How to find articles in open access – tips from my favorite nerd
Scholarly communication available online, whether in journals or repositories, adds up to millions, and this figure grows every year. What browser efficient tools are available to researchers, librarians, students, and the like to find the open-access versions of the articles that interest them? … Read More →
Are we in the GSM Radar?
Google Scholar Metrics (GSM) offers alternative metrics to the JCR Impact Factor and the SJR, namely the h-5 index. To enter this world ranking that covers more than 40,000 journals it is only necessary to publish an average of 20 articles per year and be cited. However, there are hundreds of journals (our journals) that are not being indexed in GSM. They’re off Radar. … Read More →
I wrote this… I did not write this… now I write something else…
The emerging system of online scholarly communication incorporates a technological and ideologically approach different from the traditional one, where the articles initially appear as preprints versions and are modified until reaching the final version. In case of errors, these same technologies provide efficient opportunities to make partial or total corrections and even retractions, associating to the path of a document the history of its versions. It is time, therefore, to establish methodologies that allow to obtain the maximum of more updated information to support the scientific undertakings. … Read More →
In memoriam: Eugene Garfield – 1925-2017
The father of Scientometrics died at 91 years old on February 27, 2017 leaving a production of more than 1.000 papers and communications over 60 years of research. … Read More →
What’s the deal with preprints?
Preprints enable scholarly communication more quickly, complement traditional publication in academic journals and determine priorities. This procedure may change the peer review system and focus on the role of academic journals. … Read More →
eBooks – global market and trends – Part III – Final: The publication of printed and digital books in the global context
The e-book Global report shows that the traditional model based on large publishing houses was insufficient to incorporate the possibilities of technological advances. On the one hand, the new reading models through smartphones and subscription platforms and on the other hand, self-publishing of ebooks open opportunities to both individual authors and non-profit organizations in the educational field to produce and distribute their own works at low cost and minimal infrastructure requirements. … Read More →
eBooks – global market and trends – Part II: The publication of printed and digital books in the world context
The Global report on ebooks shows that after several years of growth, commercial companies find a decelerated market, where two lines of action strongly emerge: (a) the digitizing of educational books; and (b) books self-publishing initiatives. In this market stands out the ‘four horsemen’ initiatives that shape the digital ecology, integrated by Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook. … Read More →
eBooks – global market and trends – Part I: Print and digital publication in the global context
In recent years, a global industry of electronic books (ebooks) has emerged, with great force in the English language market and remarkable strength in the United States. There are indicators showing a race between traditional publishing industries and also global players such as Amazon and non-traditional ones, such as authors publishing individually and independently. A recent report published last April, divided into four major sections, presents detailed statistics on the production and market of ebooks from large and medium companies throughout the world, which are the debates and key factors that are shaping the legal and pirate markets, and it also includes a “yellow pages” section, with more than 350 companies dedicated to various services and components in the electronic book chain edition. … Read More →
Will your paper be more cited if published in Open Access?
Is there any positive relationship between open access and the amount of citations? Last year Academia.edu announced in its website that citations to papers in its repository could raise in percentages much higher than other repositories. Is it truth or exaggeration? … Read More →
Ethics in research: how to improve the integrity of scientists in their work
Scientific activity as a social enterprise must maintain its credibility. The Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines are presented as a recent and innovative initiative for scientific journals, and as one of the ways to guard this social value. … Read More →
Editorial ethics – the geography of plagiarism
A recent study published in PNAS on 757,000 arXiv.org documents about the reuse of text (text overlap) shows that this practice is more common in some countries than others, but the results seem to show that the authors who extensively copy texts from others are also the less cited. … Read More →
Editorial ethics: fraudulent arbitration
In recent months there have been a significant amount of retractions of scientific papers due to fraudulent arbitration processes. Apparently “paper mills” are appearing on the market that offer researchers, for a price, the possibility that their name appear in an article in a high Impact Factor journal (although not being the author). … Read More →
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