This post introduces the development of an open accessible registry of data sources for scientometric information envisaging to get feedback and collaboration of the information science communities towards a global coverage. … Read More →
Open Access Plans — S, T, U, so far
Things do seem to be moving in Open Access (OA). First there was Plan S, proposed by science funders in the European Union, then a proposal to fund OA from submission fees rather than article processing charges, (perhaps flippantly) called Plan T, and now, in alphabetical sequence, Plan U. All three have strong merits, but Plan U has the best chance of succeeding and offers the most to the scientific community. … Read More →
What is Plan U: Universal access to scientific research via preprints?
Plan U proposes that funding agencies require recipients of research funds to publish scholarly communications on preprints servers, regardless of the alternative publication forms that researchers may subsequently make. The initiative could be carried out with a fraction of the current costs and would produce a significant acceleration of the pace of discoveries in the forthcoming years. … Read More →
Promoting and accelerating research data sharing
The State of Open Data 2018 report surveyed researchers from all continents on the motives, habits, knowledge, and practices of data sharing. The results, compared to the 2016 and 2017 reports, provide relevant information on the evolution of open research data around the world as well as how to strengthen this practice in academia so that it achieves the expected results. … Read More →
Web presence and social media metrics from articles shared on Twitter – Interview with Stefanie Haustein
Knowing how and by whom articles are shared on social media can help the challenging task of qualifying alternative metrics indicators. In this interview, Stefanie Haustein, assistant professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Information Studies in Canada and co-director of the ScholCommLab, addresses the role of social networks such as Twitter as a data source for altmetrics. She also looks at the role journals play in the dissemination of their articles on Twitter and investigates how scholarly articles from Brazil and Brazilian Twitter users tweet about scholarly outputs. … Read More →
The gold rush: Why open access will boost publisher profits [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in June/2019]
An important justification for transitioning from a subscription based journal publishing system to an open access journal publishing system, has been that whereas printing and distributing physical copies of journals is an expensive process, the cost of digital publication and dissemination are marginal. In this post Shaun Khoo argues that whilst a shift to gold (pay to publish) open access would deliver wider access to research, the lack of price sensitivity amongst academics presents a risk that they will be locked into a new escalating pay to publish system that could potentially be more costly to researchers than the previous subscription model. … Read More →
Journals that increased their APC value received more submissions
One of the expected contributions of Open Access (OA) was to resolve the disproportionate increase of scholarly journals’ subscriptions. Nevertheless, one of the major business models for commercial journal publishing is to charge authors a publication fee known as Article Processing Charge (APC). This rate, in the last five years, has risen more than inflation. However, counterintuitively, it seems that the authors are far from reducing their submissions due to increase of APC values, rather, submissions are increasing, and the more expensive the APC, the more articles the journals have been receiving. … Read More →
Perspectives on the open access discovery landscape [Originally published in the Jisc Scholarly Communications blog in April/2019]
Open access discovery tools enable users to find scholarly articles that are available in open form, whether on a publisher’s website or elsewhere. This is a technically-challenging endeavour and also requires a deep understanding of the scholarly communications landscape, the underpinning infrastructure and the needs of widely different stakeholder groups such as researchers, publishers, service providers and the general public. … Read More →
Mapping the impact of UN Sustainable Development Goals on global research [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in May/2019]
The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent one of the largest and most sustained influences on global research to date. However, charting the effect of these 17 goals on the global research community is a complex task. In this post, Martin Szomszor draws on the findings of a recent bibliometric study to produce a ‘citation map’ of sustainability research, which highlights how the UN SDGs have enabled the development of new areas of transdisciplinary and international collaboration in research. … Read More →
Potential advantages and disadvantages in the publication of reviews
Publishing peer reviews is a growing trend in scholarly communication, for the sake of transparency and as a practice associated to open science. There are, however, advantages and disadvantages that should be considered by journal editors when adopting this peer review modality. … Read More →
Launch of the Global Alliance of Open Access Scholarly Communication Platforms to democratize knowledge [Originally published in UNESCO’s website in April/2019]
Open access to scientific knowledge gained significant momentum with the alliance of 6 web-based journal publishing platforms from four continents – AJOL from Africa, AmeliCA from Latin America and Global South, Érudit from Canada, J-STAGE from Japan, OpenEdition from France and the SciELO Network that operates in Latin America, South Africa, Spain and Portugal. The Global Alliance of Open Access Scholarly Communication (GLOALL) was conceived during the SciELO 20 Years Week and formally launched on April 8 in the session dedicated to the dissemination of scientific information of the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS). The session and the launching of the GLOALL were promoted by UNESCO. The alliance defends geographic, thematic and cultural bibliodiversity in the development of the global flow of scientific information. … Read More →
Open peer review: Publishing peer review reports influences referee behavior?
A pilot study was conducted with five Elsevier journals in different areas of knowledge on the effects of publishing peer review reports of 9,220 articles submitted between 2010 and 2017. The main findings of the study suggest that the publication of reviews does not influence or compromise the peer review work. The authors were unable to detect any significant effect on the readiness to perform the evaluation, content and outcome of the recommendations, nor on the time taken to perform the evaluation. However, only 8.1% of the referees agreed to disclose their identity as authors of the review reports. … Read More →
Wellcome Open Research, the future of scholarly communication? [Originally published in LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog in February/2019]
In this blog, Robert Kiley and Michael Markie, discuss the ambition behind creating Wellcome Open Research, an innovative funder led publishing platform, and assess the success of the platform over its first two years. Going on to imagine a future, in which all research is published using the principles behind Wellcome Open Research, they suggest the potential benefits such a publishing system would have for research and research assessment. … Read More →
Is a dramatic boost to open access imminent? I think so!
Recent developments, such as Plan S, a funder mandate for grantees to publish their findings with open access, as well as the growth in preprints – in terms of number of articles posted as well as preprint services becoming available – are bound to have a major impact on the amount of new scientific journal literature being openly and freely accessible by anyone, anywhere. … Read More →
From star peer reviewers to ghost peer reviewers – Part II
Open reviews and the emergence of platforms such as Publons, which publish these activities and integrate them into other academic tasks, open the possibility of the emergence of a new aspect of bibliometrics and certainly a new and prestigious market. … Read More →
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