1. Publishing philosophy open access without a particle collider
Author: Bryan W. Roberts and David Teira
Open Access often appears to be a monolithic concept, covering all fields of research and publication. However, in practice its application is to a large extent determined by the needs and resources available to different academic communities. In this blog, Bryan W. Roberts and David Teira discuss open access publishing in philosophy and how an emerging generation of open publications has developed to meet the needs of an academic discipline where funding for publication is scarce.
The full entry can be read: Here.
2. Open Access and Global South: It is more than a matter of inclusion
Author: Haseeb Irfanullah
In June 2020, the STM Association and the International Center for the Study of Research (ICSR) produced a white paper on how to make an OA transition equitable for the researchers of Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs). The study talks about the Global South’s presence in the academic and OA publishing arenas over the last decade or so, reasons behind the seen trends, and possible actions to improve South’s inclusion in the OA system. The APE panel discussion started with a presentation on the white paper to set the scene. The white paper recommends investing in the capacity of the researchers, reviewers, and editors of the South.
The full entry can be read: Here.
3. Opinion: Peer-review study compromises response to gender bias
Author: Ada Hagan
A recent analysis that claimed no evidence of gender-based peer-review outcomes fails to account for several factors. Just a month earlier, my colleagues and I published in mBio a similar, though smaller-scale, study that analyzed the peer-review outcomes from 108,000 manuscript submissions to 13 American Society for Microbiology (ASM) journals. Our study found a consistent trend for manuscripts submitted by women corresponding authors to receive more negative outcomes than those submitted by men. Both projects analyzed six years’ worth of submission data that are only available to journal publishers but came to different conclusions. Peer-review is most frequently associated with the lengthy, occasionally abusive, feedback provided by two or more fellow academics. Conversely, the role of editors in the process may be overlooked or excluded despite their academic and field-specific expertise. In fact, editors are the first peers whose expectations must be met or exceeded, and frequently their decisions are unilateral. Accordingly, editorial rejections were the greatest source of gender-based outcomes in ASM study. Failing to evaluate the crucial step in the process ignores a large potential source of bias. The authors explained their focus on papers that went to review by stating that these ‘data on desk rejections were not consistently available.’ However, with a data set of more than 300,000 reviewed manuscripts from 145 journals, it is reasonable to conclude that they had sufficient data for a robust analysis of this stage in peer-review.
The full entry can be read: Here.
4. ‘It is all about context’ - using data to co-design digital services
Author: Richard Prowse
Co-design is the idea of bringing people together to identify a challenge, then working together to solve it. Most organisations - including universities - have a lot of data silos, and these tend to be the biggest barrier to collaboration. It is not that people do not recognise that problems exist, but what people tend to get is a lack of shared agreement around what the problem actually is. A great thing about co-design is that it allows space for the contextual education. When assessing how well a product or service is doing, the first step is usually to look at the data. This can provide a quantitative assessment of whether there is a problem or not. It is often possible to make a very well-informed guess based on the information provided by the data, but a lot of the time there are user behaviours that would not be explainable through data.
The full entry can be read: Here.
5. Publishers still do not prioritise researchers
Author: Roger C. Schonfeld
While not all authors or reviewers have multiple manuscripts active in their workflow at any one time, active researchers and reviewers face a real management challenge, which the most productive ones surely find overwhelming. Manuscript submission and management systems are designed with publishers as the target customers and are geared to their strategic and operating priorities, which include data ownership, peer-reviewer management, and the complex web of journal ownership. A common application model stands in direct opposition to publisher-managed cascades. Still, it is clear that the end result is an author and review experience that can in no way be framed as ‘user centric.’
The full entry can be read: Here.
6. What is not being taught to new chemistry researchers (hint: information literacy and scholarly publishing)
Author: Joshua Borycz
The key information that many graduate students are missing when they begin looking for jobs are proper information seeking and organisation skills, as well as methods of effectively communicating their work. The Chemical Literature course also covered basic research communication by familiarising students with scientific publication. This blog covers the history and purpose of scientific journals, the types of information provided in patents, protocols, reviews, and articles, as well as how the modern publishing process works. The students were given the opportunity to speak with the long-time editor of a well-known chemistry journal to learn how the writing of submitted publications is judged for quality and relevance. By implementing training sessions for new researchers that bridge the gaps in their information literacy skills, corporate librarians can have a substantial impact on the success not only of the new researcher, but the whole organisation.
The full entry can be read: Here.
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