1. Scholarly Publishing Demographic Survey Reveals Major Diversity Challenges In Scholarly Publishing #STMchallenges
Laura Wheeler, in her post in the Digital Science Blog, discusses an analysis conducted by Digital Science, Fordham University School of Business, SSP, ALPSP, STM and CSE, which ran from December 2014 to January 2015. The survey shows that although there is a majority of women in scholarly publishing, there are proportionately fewer women in management roles. Findings also reveal, there is a lack of ethnic diversity in the scholarly publishing industry, which showed 87% of workers as caucasian.
The blog post says (quote): Scholarly publishing plays a pivotal role in the dissemination of research. While a great deal is known about the companies active in this sector, very little in known about the employees of the firms that edit, produce, market, and distribute today's scholarly books and journals. Based on an international survey of scholarly publishing employees that was conducted in late 2014, the authors present detailed demographic information about the employees of scholarly publishing firms that illustrates the considerable strengths and challenges confronting the scholarly publishing sector in the 21st Century..........(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. Should post-publication peer review be anonymous?
Among the criticisms that are frequently made of peer review is that referees' anonymity allows laziness, discourtesy and conflicts of interest to flourish. Editors do their best to broker honestly, but grievances were not in short supply when Times Higher Education asked around earlier this year for particularly egregious examples of reviewer comments that people had received. In their post in the Times Higher Education Blog, Philip Moriarty, Paul Benneworth and Contributors argue the merits and pitfalls of anonymity in peer review.
The blog post says (quote): Many advocates of open review believe that it should be carried out post-publication. But if that model took off, I predict that a new class of specialist "star reviewers" would emerge. They would acquire the power to make or break papers in the same way that influential bloggers can make or break new products, and authors and editors would respond by mechanically writing and selecting only those papers that they believed would attract the star reviewers' praise. This is hardly a recipe for fostering the creation of challenging new ideas..........(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. Letting Out Steam: Reproducibility Problems
During the first week of December, a series of seminars and events were held in London that made up STM week. While attendance may have been a little down from previous years for the Innovations seminar, there seems to be an increasing number of events and dinners surrounding the week, including Digital Science's Shaking It Up Event. In his post in the Perspectives Blog, Phill Jones discusses the STM innovations seminar, which focused on the problems of reproducibility in science.
The blog post says (quote): The presence of too many unreproducible results in the basic literature is a difficult one to approach. One problem was highlighted by Kent Anderson, publisher of Science magazine at AAAS. Anderson made the valuable point that sometimes research is unreproducible because experiments are difficult; just because the second dataset disagrees with the first, doesn't mean that the first is wrong. He also noted that experimental error is often unintended and often not material to the conclusions. There is undoubtedly validity to this and there is a risk that good work may get caught up in some manner of scientific fraud witch hunt..........(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. PubMed Central Boosts Citations, Study Claims
PubMed Central (PMC), a digital archive of biomedical articles, increases the citation impact of deposited papers, a recent study suggests. In his post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, Phil Davis discusses the paper "Examining the Impact of the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy on the Citation Rates of Journal Articles" published on October 8 in PLOS ONE. Its lead author, Sandra De Groote, is a Professor & Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
The blog post says (quote): Federal policies based on funding sources are likely to create heterogeneous groups. Add that the NIH deposit requirement was adhered by less than three-quarters (72 percent) of 2009 authors and it would be safe to assume that the comparison groups are not comparable. I reported recently on a similar control group problem with the Academia.edu citation boost paper. For retrospective observational research, the researchers should have assumed, a priori, that their groups were unequal and attempted to convince us otherwise, not the reverse. Where does this leave us? There has been little empirical work on the effect of publicly accessible repositories, meaning that this paper, despite its methodological and analytical weaknesses, will have an outsized effect on steering public policy..........(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
5. Solving discovery with better content marketing
Ask a publisher to tell you the biggest challenge they face today and you'll get a variety of answers. Although the answers vary there are a small number of popular responses. One of the most common ones is simply "discovery". Publishers are concerned that their content will never rise above all the marketplace noise, notes Joe Wikert, in his post in the Digital Content Strategies Blog.
The blog post says (quote): Rather than asking visitors to jump to another site or go through a multi-step process to download her sample, Valorie now lets them experience it right there on her Facebook page. And thanks to Olive's SmartLayers capabilities, we were able to quickly add a call-to-action at the end of the sample where readers can buy the book from their favorite retailer. I mentioned this capability isn't limited to Facebook. Olive's platform presents content directly in the browser, so there's no app to download and no plug-in to install..........(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
6. The Dissertation Mess: Balancing Rights and Responsibilities
The broad online availability of theses and dissertations creates difficult tensions between the individual rights of authors, the rights of educational institutions, and the responsibilities that both have to global scholarship and the collective good. Rick Anderson, in his post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, looks at how can we resolve these tensions.
The blog post says (quote): In the current information environment, obviously, things are very different. Dissertations that would, in the past, have languished in obscurity on local library shelves (and, more recently, been available digitally only behind a Digital Dissertations paywall) are now routinely made publicly and freely available online, in institutional repositories. I don't know anyone who objects to this in principle. I think most of us agree that the practice of making theses and dissertations freely available online provides significant benefits to the student author, to the degree-granting institution, and to scholars generally...........(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
7. Can social science still be used as a foundation for public policy? On improving the reliability of evidence
John Jerrim and Robert de Vries, in their post in The Impact Blog, argue a radical overhaul is needed of how social science is published and produced for it to provide a helpful basis for public policy. More progress is needed in particular over the lack of transparency of the research process, publication bias for positive findings and improved quality assurance mechanisms for peer review.
The blog post says (quote): If 'boring' negative findings are less likely to be published, the evidence base becomes dominated by positive results. This creates a serious problem for a policymaker trying to assess the scientific evidence on any given topic. They will end up getting a highly distorted picture of the real world; one in which the extent and severity of social problems is probably exaggerated, as is the extent to which policy interventions can change things. This might leave policymakers too active in public policy investing in potentially ineffective solutions to social problems that might not even exist..........(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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