1. Why India is striking back against predatory journals
According to 2015 estimates, more than 8,000 predatory journals churn out more than 400,000 items a year, and India — which has also seen a spurt in high-quality scientific publications — contributes more than one-third of the articles in predatory publications. Last month, India launched its latest salvo against the ‘pay and publish trash’ culture that sustains predatory journals. Fending off the attack of trash science will be a long battle. Predatory journals have severely compromised scientific scholarship. India’s experience so far shows both what makes an academic enterprise vulnerable to predatory publishers, and the coordinated efforts necessary to thwart them, notes Bhushan Patwardhan in his post in the natureresearch.
The Blog post says (quote): Last month, India launched its latest salvo against the ‘pay and publish trash’ culture that sustains predatory journals. Over several months, more than 30 organizations representing universities and academic disciplines have vetted journals to release a reference list of respectable titles. Predators sabotaged there last attempt. They hope this better-curated list will help to cut off the supply of manuscripts to the unscrupulous operators that profit financially by undercutting academic quality.…….(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. Evidence matters, but ideas shape policy in more fundamental ways than we might realise
Evidence-based policy-making can be problematic in practice, especially if the evidence is uncertain. Based on a case study concerning the formation of a national-level policy position in Ireland in response to an EU initiative, Niamh Hardiman and Saliha Metinsoy in there post in the LSE Impact Blog suggest that policy makers’ decisions may well be guided by beliefs that go beyond the direct evidence available. Ideas can be so deep-rooted that they guide policy decisions implicitly.
The Blog post says (quote): The politics of ideas matters more than we might realise in making policy choices. There is a growing acceptance by governments that good decision-making should be as fully informed as possible by high-quality research evidence, and Ireland is no exception. But policy analysts rightly caution that research evidence is mediated by ideas and politics, in the way evidence percolates into policy debate and in the uses to which it is put. The EU’s own Scientific Advice Mechanism (SAM) is sensitive as to how best to conduct the dialogue between scientific advice and policy-making practice……….(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. The Academy Mobilizes – Unizin Tackles Learning Analytics
As platforms for online learning expanded following the introduction of MOOCs, universities were challenged by a model in which vendors controlled the content and the data generated by student activity. Individual institutions lacked the scale to influence platform development or to achieve cost savings. Last year the Library Publishing Coalition had a preconference titled “Owned by the Academy” on Open Source Publishing Software. Judy Luther in her post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, notes that a similar sentiment toward ownership was expressed by university provosts and CIOs when they founded the Unizin Consortium to address issues related to control of their content in digital learning systems.
The Blog post says (quote): As platforms for online learning expanded following the introduction of MOOCs, universities were challenged by a model in which vendors controlled the content and the data generated by student activity. Individual institutions lacked the scale to influence platform development or to achieve cost savings. Founding members of the Unizin Consortium saw the opportunity to collaborate as a way to leverage scale to build a shared infrastructure for learning systems. The goal is to improve learner success by making access to course content more affordable, creating interoperable systems and developing a learning laboratory that uses data to enhance learning outcomes……..(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. They Know We Know They Know: Does Sci-Hub Affect Library Subscriptions?
The question of whether — and, if so, to what degree — Sci-Hub and similar pirate portals will lead (or are already leading) libraries to cancel journal subscriptions has been a fraught one for some time, and the debate doesn’t seem likely to settle down anytime soon. Whatever one’s opinion of Sci-Hub may be, its continued existence will have a significant mitigating effect on the real-world impact of journal subscription cancellations, notes Rick Anderson in his post in the Scholarly Kitchen.
The blog post says (quote): One recent case in point: on the LIBLICENSE listserv , librarian and consultant Danny Kingsley made mention of a recent story in the Times Higher Education in which it was argued that universities in Europe are finding it “easier… to ditch their journal subscription contracts because so many articles are now available for free.” Furthermore, the article observed that academic library consortia, in particular, “have in recent years struck a much more assertive line with publishers over cost and open access,” with the result that, for example, “Germany’s consortium is currently without a contract with Elsevier… in part because librarians believe that academics can access free papers through sites such as ResearchGate” ……..(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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