1. Interdisciplinary research may lead to increased visibility but also depresses scholarly productivity
Interdisciplinarity has grown in recent years. But how does interdisciplinary research influence scholarship and scholarly careers? In her post in The Impact Blog, Erin Leahey found that while interdisciplinary research has its benefits, such as increased visibility as indicated by citations, it also comes at a cost, as it depresses scholarly productivity. Although peer review of interdisciplinary work is less of a problem than anticipated, the learning of new concepts, literatures, and techniques, and communication difficulties within interdisciplinary teams, all contribute to the 'productivity penalty.'
The blog post says (quote): IDR could also stifle productivity because the process of producing interdisciplinary scholarship - learning new concepts, literatures, and techniques, working with a diverse group of collaborators - is challenging. IDR projects do indeed face these hurdles. Scholars who engage in 'repeat collaborations' with the same set (or subset) of authors experience a smaller productivity penalty than the overall, so scholars do become accustomed to working with their coauthors (regardless of field). Survey responses from a small sub-sample of these scholars reveal that interdisciplinary teams have more difficulty generating ideas, and their communication is less clear, more difficult, and lower quality. Last, because the theory suggests that it is challenging to incorporate different ideas into a single paper, multidisciplinary scholars (who publish separate papers on distinct topics) likely do not face production penalties.............(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. Enhanced services for publishers and editors
ScienceOpen is constantly upgrading and adapting their platform to meet the needs of the different stakeholders in scholarly publishing. They work with a range of publishers (e.g., Brill, Open Library of Humanities, Higher Education Press PeerJ, Cold Spring Harbor) and listen to the needs of researchers, together building solutions to help enhance the global research process. With the re-launch of ScienceOpen, they are pushing forward to create a multi-purpose, solution-oriented platform that aligns with ongoing trends in scholarly publishing, notes Jon Tennant, in his post in the ScienceOpen Blog.
The blog post says (quote): Published content can be filtered by journal, discipline, and which collections articles appear in. Along with this, they all have the next-generation sorting functionality, so articles can be arranged by citations, Altmetric score, relevance, date of publication, and readership. This makes it easier for researchers to discover your research, greatly increasing its value for you. Publishers can see how much content is in collections and being re-used and enhanced by researchers, and gain insight into a whole new dimension of how communities are engaging with the content they publish. They also display additional related collections and journals, to really add an extra dimension of context to research articles.............(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. Publishing's Prestige Bias
Research suggests that academic jobs in a variety of fields overwhelming go to graduates of elite academic departments, and that those graduates don't necessarily end up being the most productive researchers. Colleen Flaherty, in her post in the Inside Higher ED Blog, discusses a new study, according to which, academic publishing - at a least in the humanities - is guilty of the same bias, choosing papers based on where they come from over what they say.
The blog post says (quote): Beyond prestige bias, Piper and Wellmon also examined gender bias. They found that PMLA and Representations have made "strides" toward gender parity. Yet the other two journals have not shown a single year in which female authors have outnumbered men. And in a larger sample of 20 humanities journals taken over the past five years, they say, about three-quarters had average rates of authorship well below parity, even as the numbers of female graduate students in humanities programs has grown substantially in recent generations. The paper asks but does not explicitly answer whether intellectual equity in publishing is something to aspire to. What is clear, it says, is that elite institutions "continue to be the locus of the practices, techniques, virtues and values that have come to define modern academic knowledge. They diffuse it, whether in the form of academic labor (personnel) or ideas (publication), from a concentrated center to a broader periphery.".............(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. Altmetrics linked to 3* and 4* impact scores in REF2014 impact case studies
Though altmetrics' ability to directly predict "real world" impact is still very much under debate, one research team has found that the presence of altmetrics is related to the broader impacts of their REF2014-submitted research. In her post in the Altmetric Blog, Stacy Konkiel discusses with Jenny Wooldridge, a member of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) Impact Evaluation team, to learn more about her team's research that uses expert peer review, citations, and altmetrics to understand the attention and related impacts that UK research has received.
The blog post says (quote): Each UK university department's research outputs and impact case studies were scored by REF2014 assessment units according to the REF2014 "star" system for quality and impact. The Impact Evaluation team associated peer review scores with individual research outputs in two ways: scores related to research quality were associated with the lists of papers provided as evidence for departmental excellence, and scores for impact case studies were related to references extracted from each case study's cited references lists. 3* and 4* NPL research outputs and impact case studies were then evaluated with respect to the presence (or lack thereof) of Altmetric attention scores, with controls applied for citation rates (the average number of traditional bibliometric citations accrued per year post publication), the age of the publications, and the research subject areas.............(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
5. Journals Seek Out Preprints
It's no different than approaching a scientist who has just given a riveting talk on unpublished work at a conference, according to Christopher "Casey" Brown, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania. Because part of an editor’s job is to pursue the latest and greatest research for potential publication (whether presented at a meeting or submitted online), those at plugged-in journals are prospecting preprint servers, seeking standouts among the scads of non-peer–reviewed manuscripts posted for perusal by all, notes Tracy Vence, in her post in The Scientist Blog.
The blog post says (quote): Brown said that the quality of the science and topical suitability are the two most important factors he and his colleagues are evaluating when determining which preprints to solicit. But they’re also observing other criteria, such as comments and tweets. "We certainly are paying attention to altmetric-type data-the amount of attention that a preprint is receiving on Twitter, the number of comments and informal reviews that get posted along with it," he said. Editors at Genome Biology-an open-access journal published by BioMed Central, which, like PLOS Genetics, participates in bioRxiv's B2J-have been soliciting preprints for around a year. Chief Editor Louisa Flintoft told The Scientist that she and her colleagues flag preprints of potential interest "at least weekly.".............(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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