Group items tagged

"Open peer review (OPR) is a cornerstone of the emergent Open Science agenda. Yet to date no large-scale survey of attitudes towards OPR amongst academic editors, authors, reviewers and publishers has been undertaken. This paper presents the findings of an online survey, conducted for the OpenAIRE2020 project during September and October 2016 that sought to bridge this information gap in order to aid the development of appropriate OPR approaches by providing evidence about attitudes towards and levels of experience with OPR. The results of this cross-disciplinary survey, which received 3,062 full responses, show the majority of respondents to be in favour of OPR becoming mainstream scholarly practice, as they also are for other areas of Open Science, like Open Access and Open Data. We also observe surprisingly high levels of experience with OPR, with three out of four (76.2%) respondents reporting having taken part in an OPR process as author, reviewer or editor. There were also high levels of support for most of the traits of OPR, particularly open interaction, open reports and final-version commenting. Respondents were against opening reviewer identities to authors, however, with more than half believing it would make peer review worse. Overall satisfaction with the peer review system used by scholarly journals seems to strongly vary across disciplines. Taken together, these findings are very encouraging for OPR's prospects for moving mainstream but indicate that due care must be taken to avoid a "one-size fits all" solution and to tailor such systems to differing (especially disciplinary) contexts. More research is also needed. OPR is an evolving phenomenon and hence future studies are to be encouraged, especially to further explore differences between disciplines and monitor the evolution of attitudes. "

"A number of our members have asked if they can register their peer reviews with us. They believe that discussions around scholarly works should have DOIs and be citable to provide further context and provenance for researchers reading the article. To that end, we can announce some pertinent news as we enter Peer Review Week 2017: Crossref infrastructure is soon to be extended to manage DOIs for peer reviews. Launching next month will be support for this new content type, with schema specifically dedicated to the reviews and discussions of scholarly content."

"The unique authority of scholarly publishing arises from the rigorous evaluation and assessment works must go through before they are published-known as the peer review process. Peer Review Transparency is an initiative of scholarly publishers, academic librarians, technology innovators, and thought leaders in scholarly communication, with support from the Open Society Foundations, to create agreed definitions of how peer review is conducted, and to disclose clearly and efficiently to readers the kind of review a published work has undergone. "

"Citizen science (CS) terms the active participation of the general public in scientific research activities. With increasing amounts of information generated by citizen scientists, best practices to go beyond science communication and publish these findings to the scientific community are needed. This letter is a synopsis of authors' personal experiences when publishing results from citizen science projects in peer-reviewed journals, as presented at the Austrian Citizen Science Conference 2018. Here, we address authors' selection criteria for publishing CS data in open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journals as well as barriers encountered during the publishing process. We also outline factors that influence the probability of publication using CS data, including 1) funding to cover publication costs; 2) quality, quantity and scientific novelty of CS data; 3) recommendations to acknowledge contributions of citizen scientists in scientific, peer-reviewed publications; 4) citizen scientists' preference of the hands-on experience over the product (publication) and 5) bias among scientists for certain data sources and the scientific jargon. These experiences show that addressing these barriers could greatly increase the rate of CS data included in scientific publications."

"With Open Access and the Humanities, Martin Paul Eve offers a slender, but surprisingly thorough, volume engaging many of the major preoccupations of the open access movement in scholarly communication. In fact, the book's strongest virtue may be the clarity and economy with which Professor Eve gathers and presents the benefits, risks, and feasible means of adapting Humanities disciplines to open access licensing, distribution, and funding models. Much of this gathering and presenting can feel fairly familiar to anyone already immersed in the slightly more mature conversation associated with STEM publishing (many of the "contexts" and "controversies" to which the book's subtitle alludes). There really is much to review, however, and as a primer for the open-access curious humanist, Eve's review should come across as congenial, convenient, and in many cases even demystifying."

"Peer review is often thought of as ancient and unchanging, but it is neither - and it shouldn't be treated as a sacred cow, argues Aileen Fyfe"

"Why aren't articles on arXiv -or any other open access repository- formally credited as publications? What is it exactly that separates open access repositories from publishers? The simple answer is that publications in journals come with an amorphous quality indicator associated with the journal's perceived prestige. Articles posted on a repository on the other hand, are considered to be "provided at the reader's own risk", as they are not accompanied by any measurable guarantee of their scientific merit. We think the time has come to change all that."

"The Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management was set up in April 2014 to investigate the current and potential future roles that quantitative indicators can play in the assessment and management of research. Its report, 'The Metric Tide', was published in July 2015 and is available below. "

"SciPost is a complete scientific publication portal. It is purely online-based, and offers freely, openly, globally and perpetually accessible science. Being managed by professional scientists, and making use of editor-solicited and contributed reviews, its Journals aim at the highest achievable standards of refereeing. SciPost Commentaries allow Contributors to seamlessly comment on all existing literature."

"In the past decade, a number of initiatives have been taken to provide new sources of information on scholarly book publishing. Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate Analytics) has supplemented the Web of Science with a Book Citation Index (BCI), while Elsevier has extended Scopus to include books from a selection of scholarly publishers. More complete metadata on scholarly book publishing can be derived at the national level from non-commercial databases such as Current Research Information System in Norway and the VIRTA (Higher Education Achievement Register, Finland) publication information service, including the Finnish Publication Forum (JUFO) lists (Finland). The Spanish Scholarly Publishers Indicators provides survey-based information on the prestige, specialization profiles from metadata, and manuscript selection processes of national and international publishers that are particularly relevant for the social sciences and humanities (SSH). In the present work, the five information sources mentioned above are compared in a quantitative analysis identifying overlaps and uniqueness as well as differences in the degrees and profiles of coverage. In a second-stage analysis, the geographical origin of the university presses (UPs) is given a particular focus. We find that selection criteria strongly differ, ranging from a set of a priori criteria combined with expert-panel review in the case of commercial databases to in principle comprehensive coverage within a definition in the Nordic countries and an open survey methodology combined with metadata from the book industry database and questionnaires to publishers in Spain. Larger sets of distinct book publishers are found in the non-commercial databases, and greater geographical diversity is observable among the UPs in these information systems. While a more locally oriented set of publishers which are relevant to researchers in the SSH is present in non-commercial databases, the commercial databases seem to focus on high

"On the 22nd August 2017 - some nine months after the platform was first launched - Wellcome Open Research published its 100th article. To mark this milestone, we provide an overview of the type of research that has been published since launch including how it has been used; give an analysis of the datasets underlying these publications; and provide information about the speed of publication and volume of peer review activity. We conclude by looking at how the number of publications on this platform compared with other journals used by Wellcome-funded researchers."