1. The Shrinking Mega-Journal
The world's largest scholarly journal, PLOS ONE, is seeing fewer and fewer researchers publish their work in it as the open-access publishing market evolves, notes Carl Straumsheim, in the Inside Higher ED post. Joerg Heber, who became PLOS ONE’s new editor in chief in September, addressed the decline in a blog post last month. Reflecting on the journal’s first 10 years, he noted that many other publishers are now using similar models for their own publications.
The blog post says (quote): PLOS’s net revenue has fallen as its output has declined and its expenses increased. According to tax documents, the publisher last year reported net revenue of $566,229, down from $10 million two years before. Davis, a former science librarian, has for years followed PLOS ONE’s growth and how PLOS has managed it. He pointed to a number of possible reasons why the journal is receiving fewer submissions and publishing fewer articles. Competition is one of them. The open-access publishing market has grown dramatically since PLOS ONE began publishing in 2006, as Heber noted. Scientific Reports, an open-access mega-journal launched by Springer Nature not even six years ago, last year published 20,541 scholarly articles - nearly twice as many as the 10,720 it published in 2015. And while Scientific Reports' Journal Impact Factor - a metric commonly used to gauge the quality of a journal - has risen, PLOS ONE's has declined.............(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. The Price of Silicon Valley’s “Disruption” - Is It Possible to Now Have Responsible Information Economics?
As we’ve absorbed and adopted the information economy assumptions peddled by Silicon Valley, social isolation has increased, the definition of “fact” has become slippery, and the scientific record has become more superficial, less reliable, and more transitory. In fact, confirmation bias seems to have become our main operating principle. Maybe a change in economic incentives and greater skepticism across the board could help - all driven by more humans at the controls, notes Kent Anderson, in his post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog.
The blog post says (quote): Instead of disrupting the big players, modern information economics have disrupted the mid-tier, leading to haves and have-nots. One example of Silicon Valley economics in our market is open access (OA), which was born inside the first Internet bubble economy. As in other parts of the information economy (books, television, movies, newspapers), OA has disrupted the middle of our market, while feeding the trends outlined above - consolidation, conservatism, and stagnation. The Internet once represented exciting potential for online publication when the economics were more demand-side. Now, it has become tainted by a grim grind of article processing and journal proliferation in the service of supply-side economics in publishing - more focus on authors than on readers, and more focus on quantity over quality. The recent battle over APC prices and efforts by Elsevier and Springer to prevent their disclosure show how unimaginative, consolidated, and conservative OA publishing has become.............(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. Does Peer Review Help Weed Out Bad Science?
Peer-review had a role to play when journals were all in print and competing for subscription real estate, but today it may be little more than a vestige of the print era, notes Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee, in his post in The Wire Blog.
The blog post says (quote): Among the many nuanced arguments against the present model of journal-mediated peer review is limited sampling and inconsistencies among referee reports. Often, a manuscript is looked at by two or three referees. Would their verdict be a good enough judgement of the work? This may be fine to an extent – as long as referee reports agree with one another and editorial judgements based on referee reports can be fair and justified. But this is not straightforward. Often, referee reports conflict with one another and a decision to publish or not is the editor(s)’s call, much like the ‘umpire’s call’ in cricket’s DRS. Again, the editor’s worldview of what constitutes a valid publication can determine the paper’s fate.............(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. Is language barrier still a problem for science?
Language is the most important mode of communication. However, even today, the language barrier is considered as the biggest drawback for science. As we have always seen, most of the journals papers or research documents that we read, are all written in English. However, English, even though is a global language, does not prevail in many countries, discusses Swarnali Saha, in her post in The TeCake Blog.
The blog post says (quote): Scientific knowledge and discoveries put forward to the world to read by English-speaking science contributors are remarkable. However, that remarkable discovery cannot set a default language for publishing scientific journals. Though, a lot of native English scientists have held their contribution towards science, that clearly doesn’t give science contributors an authenticity to use only English Language. The best results that have been found in recent surveys, is a little increase in the amount of Non-English language journals. Almost 12% of the entire journal collections, which were published in last three years, were found in Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese language.............(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
5. Fake Medical Journals Are Spreading, And They Are Filled With Bad Science
Fake news has been in the news a lot lately. Fake news proliferated wildly during the 2016 U.S. election, much of it completely fabricated, usually with an extreme partisan bias. Fake news is corrosive. It mis-informs the public, divides people against one another, leads to bad policy decisions, and can even induce people to take action against imaginary threats, notes Steven Salzberg, in his post in the Forbes Blog.
The blog post says (quote): Imagine for a moment that a publisher created a Journal of Magical Medicine under the rubric of a large, respectable publisher–for example, Elsevier. After assembling an editorial board of academics from legitimate universities who believed in magical medicine, the journal started soliciting and reviewing papers. The editors would send any submissions for review to other academics who believed in magic, and over time a steady stream of peer-reviewed papers would emerge. A large network of magical medicine "experts" would develop, reviewing and citing each others' papers, and occasionally writing review articles about the state of the art in magical medicine.............(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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