1. There are new frontiers for academic publishing but scholarly associations and faculty must seize the opportunities
Scholarly publishing faces daunting challenges. Rising journal costs have seen many universities have to make strategic cuts to library collections. Kyle Siler, in his post in the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, discusses that the digital world has opened new niches and frontiers for academic publishing, offering many innovative and diverse possibilities.
The blog post says (quote): Digital communication and open access publishing are changing the multi-billion dollar field of scientific publishing. These changes and innovations have the potential to disrupt or exacerbate current access and cost problems in publishing. The digital world opens new niches and frontiers for publishing; it is up to scientists to make the most of these opportunities. Scientific stakeholders should consider new economic and organisational models for publishing, although this may be difficult in an inertial and tradition-bound field such as academia. As a start, science would be well-served to develop the technical and institutional infrastructure (such as the Public Knowledge Project) to incentivise journals to flip from usurious corporate control, such as with Glossa and Sociologie du travail……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. BMC Ecology is now accepting Registered Reports!
BMC Ecology is accepting a new type of article: Registered Reports. BMC Ecology is the first ecology journal to consider this innovative article format. In his post in the BioMed Central Blog, Christopher Foote discusses what benefits it can offer to ecologists.
The blog post says (quote): The field of ecology is perhaps especially prone to such conscious or unconscious 'harking'; ecological research often involves an initial explorative approach leading to observational and correlational evidence that can be potentially tweaked to support multiple hypotheses. There is of course also a benefit to researchers in receiving feedback on their methodology while it is still possible to make adjustments. In the traditional review process, when researchers are presented with that overlooked weakness in their methodology it is all too late; their time (and limited funding) has been wasted on a flawed project. With Registered Reports, researchers can fine-tune their protocols with the benefit of expert feedback before setting out to gather the data……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. Analysing online mentions on a massive scale!
Euan introduced Altmetric’s new ‘export mentions' feature, and showed some examples of how pivot tables in Excel can be used to analyse the data that you export. This new feature isn't designed to help analyse massive datasets, but it does allow you to download up to 1 million mentions at a time, notes Josh Clark, in his post in the Altmetric Blog.
The blog post says (quote): Altmetric tracks citations in Policy Documents (freely-available grey literature publications from around 50 different bodies, including government departments, NGOs, and charities) and they are a key source of information for institutions that are looking for solid evidence of policy impact. Because these are freely-available policy documents, it is possible to judge for yourself whether each mention (citation) is notable enough to record as evidence of impact, was the cited article a key influencer in the document, or just one of hundreds of articles found in a literature review? The 'export mentions' functionality makes it much easier to process and record each document……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. Revisiting: The Arms Race in Journals Publishing Heats Up
The trends toward consolidation, mergers and acquisitions in the scholarly publishing sphere have continued apace, and publishers are widening their scope, branching out into services impacting every aspect of the research process. In his post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, Joe Esposito discussed the effects this market consolidation is having on libraries as well as on publishers themselves, as they compete for partnerships with research societies.
The blog post says (quote): A library cannot pay whatever the cost even for the finest material if the money has run out. So it's a big fight for a pie of finite, and perhaps shrinking, size. And if a library has limits on what it can spend, that imposes limits on the publishers that service libraries on what they can invest. It is sometimes asserted in the world of scholarly communications that big companies can afford to pay more than little companies. If that's the case, Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley could simply take out their checkbooks and sign up any journal that wanders into their gravitational field. But it's not really true that Elsevier can pay more than, say, a university press. It's not a matter of how much you can spend; it's not a matter of cost: it's a matter of what kind of return you can get on your investment……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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