The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced that it will no longer fund APCs for open access journals and is prioritizing the adoption of preprints. A series of recent posts discusses how the Gates Foundation’s announcement has resonated with the scientific community, prompting considerations about open access and its forms of funding, peer review and ultimately, how these changes influence the evaluation and integrity of research. … Read More →
Is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s new OA policy the start of a shift towards preprints? [Originally published in the LSE Impact blog in April/2024]
Following the announcement of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s new open access policy, Richard Sever assesses whether this change signals the beginning of a wider preprint-led open access transition. … Read More →
Open Access and Closed Research. Who benefits from the APC?
Recent research published in Scientometrics raises questions about unforeseen consequences of the spread of Open Access scientific publishing that have to do with the growth of total expenditures and who would be the economic beneficiaries of this paradigm shift. … Read More →
Publishers and FAIR data
In this post a proposal is introduced for academic publishing outfits to encourage and enable authors to make their articles — and where possible the underlying datasets — semantically unambiguous so that they can be communicated as FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). The proposal is described in-depth in a published open access article, to which a link is provided in the post. … Read More →
How effective are funding mandate for open access?
Plan S, launched in Europe late 2018 to accelerate the transition to open access starting in January 2020, imposes open access mandates to all publicly funded research. But would such mandates really be effective in promoting open access? A study showed that the results vary greatly among disciplines and funders. However, between the gold route and the green route, two-thirds of the articles are, in fact, available for reading. … Read More →
Notice to mariners – times have changed
Open access… and everything. Finally, what happened 20 years ago and felt like a utopia of copyright pirates is becoming irreversible, like a tsunami. Publishers and scientific information cannot ignore the theme of open access, so that they can compete and don’t stay out of this market. Things are changing and there’s no going back. … 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 →
Discussing indicators in research funding: What role do altmetrics play? [Originally published in Europe of Knowledge blog in December/2017]
At any rate, altmetrics, or alternative metrics, are gaining momentum in higher education. This post is based on my master’s thesis that explores the usage of altmetrics with a focus on research funding. Altmetrics track down and count the mentions of scholarly outputs in social media, news sites, policy papers, and social bookmarking sites. Then altmetrics data providers aggregate the number of mentions. This allows an observation of how many times research has been viewed, discussed, followed, shared, and downloaded. … Read More →
Authorship criteria preserve scholarly communication integrity
The increasing demand for transparency and openness in research and its communication aims to increase the reliability and reproducibility of published results. The attribution of authorship, due to its relevance in the academic processes of evaluation and reward, requires commitment, transparency and clearly defined rules. A group of researchers comprised of scholars, research institutions, funding agencies, publishers and scientific societies developed a taxonomy with 14 categories to classify authors’ contributions. Linking the categories of this taxonomy to the author’s persistent digital identifier (ORCID) and article metadata allows to track authors’ contributions through their publications and their careers. … Read More →
The Qualis system: a perspective from a multidisciplinary journal [Originally published as the editorial in Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências vol. 89 no. 3]
The CAPES journal evaluation system Qualis penalizes the progress of multidisciplinary journals such as the Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências (AABC). Present in 39 of the 40 assessment areas, the Anais’ ranking varies from strata A2 to B5. When Qualis lowers its ranking in a given discipline, there is an immediate decrease in papers submission, affecting the journal’s evolution and its editorial management in the medium and long term. An editorial written by AABC Editor-in-Chief claims affirmative actions to qualify Brazil’s research with a quality multidisciplinary journal. … Read More →
The myopia of bibliometric indicators
The use of bibliometric indicators in science evaluation is a ubiquitous practice, despite the fact that there is no unequivocal relationship between citations and scientific quality, impact or merit. A recent study showed that the indiscriminate use of these indicators may hinder the publication of innovative research results, delaying the development of science. … Read More →
Grant applications submitted to the NIH can cite preprints
The use of preprints as a means of accelerating research communication has become a frequent practice in many areas of knowledge also as a way to improve peer review. The U.S. National Institutes of Health, a renowned research and development agency, recently announced that grant applications and reports are entitled to cite preprints, “to speed the dissemination and enhance the rigor of their work”. … Read More →
Editors of Brazilian journals – a hard life that is getting harder! [Originally published as the editorial in Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências vol. 89 no. 1]
The financing of journals of Brazil can be improved by extending the validity period of research grants, in order to allow publishers a better plan for articles publication. An editorial written by Alexander Kellner in the first issue of 2017 of Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências examines the challenge faced by editors of journals of Brazil and highlights their hard work in attracting relevant manuscripts, seeking to achieve ever greater levels of excellence and internationalization. … Read More →
Study assesses financing sources of open-access article processing charge
Is there a correlation between article processing charge (APC) and the journals’ Impact Factor? What are the funding sources for payment and how do they influence the choice of journals for publication? These and other questions were investigated by authors from Nanjing University, China and the results explain the peculiarity of open access in different countries. … Read More →
Open Access article processing charges: a new serial publication crisis?
The financial and ethical implications that emerge from open access publishing through article processing fees in India are analyzed in a study that proposes the creation of a national open access journal platform such as SciELO in order to reduce costs, increase efficiency and facilitate the sharing of metadata among repositories. … Read More →
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