1. Sharing peer review experiences and knowledge
BMC Medicine has launched a new series of specialised ‘How to’ peer review articles written by experienced members of the journal’s editorial board. Jigisha Patel, in her guest post in the BioMed Central Blog, tells us more about this, explaining why there is a need for such a resource.
The blog post says (quote): While the process of peer review can be made more efficient, as addressed by various innovations in recent years, maintaining the quality of peer review is more challenging. There is a need for more people able to do peer review well. Quality cannot be measured by the number of peer review reports completed, nor can the ability of peer reviewers be judged by how much they have published. Field-specific agreed standards and formal training need to play a major role in addressing the demand for peer reviewers and maintaining peer review quality.......... (unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. When are journal metrics useful? A balanced call for the contextualized and transparent use of all publication metrics
The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) has yet to achieve widespread institutional support in the UK. Elizabeth Gadd, in her post in The Impact Blog, digs further into the slow uptake. Although there is growing acceptance that the Journal Impact Factor is subject to significant limitations, DORA feels rather negative in tone: an anti-journal metric tirade. There may be times when a journal metric, sensibly used, is the right tool for the job. By signing up to DORA, institutions may feel unable to use metrics at all.
The blog post says (quote): The recent Metric Tide report recommended that institutions sign up to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). DORA was initiated by the American Society of Cell Biology and a group of other scholarly publishers and journal editors back in 2012 in order to “improve the ways in which the outputs of scientific research are evaluated”. Principally, it is a backlash against over-use of the Journal Impact Factor to measure the research performance of individual authors or individual papers, although its recommendations reach further than that. Subsequent to the publication of DORA, the bibliometric experts at CWTS in Leiden published the Leiden Manifesto (April 2015). This too is set against the “Impact Factor obsession” and offers “best practice in metrics-based research assessment so that researchers can hold evaluators to account, and evaluators can hold their indicators to account”. There is no option to sign up to this........... (unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. Books, Glorious Books: Explorations in Open Access Monograph Publishing
A range of open access (OA) monograph experiments and studies are upon us, or are about to be, and it’s worth taking a look at what we know now and what we can expect to know in the next year or so as a result. OA poses very different challenges and opportunities for journals and scholarly monographs, notes Karin Wulf, in her post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog.
The blog post says (quote): For Walters and Hilton those “on-the-ground conditions” are serious and the sustainability of academic presses is at stake, given that resources beyond revenues will be dependent on ever more constrained university administrations. When Alison Muddit of the University of California Press recently interviewed Geoffrey Crossick about the HEFCE report, however, she asked him about a claim similar to the impulse of the university faculty, that there is no particular crisis in monograph publishing. His response was pretty interesting: “There has been talk of a crisis of the monograph for the last 25 years and I couldn’t see that the problems that currently exist amounted to a significantly different crisis. This is important because by focusing on open access as the way to resolve a crisis we may end up neglecting the many positive reasons for wanting to move to open access.”............ (unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. Is Reviewer Fatigue a Real Thing?
Without a doubt, the number one complaint at every editorial board meeting is how to find good, qualified reviewers. As more and more manuscripts come in, the pool of tried and true reviewers is being bombarded with requests from multiple journals. Anecdotally, we hear that reviewer fatigue is the main issue with reviews not being completed or invitations being ignored or declined. In her post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, Angela Cochran discusses a recent study took a look at what happens at one journal when a reviewer declines.
The blog post says (quote): Using data from our tracking systems is one way to determine whether reviewer fatigue is real and whether editorial boards are exacerbating the problem. Most, if not all, tracking systems have reports showing the number of reviewers used in a given time period compared to the number of reviewers in the database. Likewise, reports are available to see how many papers per reviewer are being assigned and a “top reviewer” report that shows how frequently the same people are used over and over again............ (unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
5. Publishing in an automated world
There is no arguing we are living in a digital age and for most publishers, the last decade has been one of unprecedented change and upheaval. The rapid proliferation of advertising formats, channels and the evolution to a real-time advertising sales market has changed publishing in ways that even the industry's smartest minds could never have predicted. In this post, Bill Swanson explores the growing challenges for publishers in a programmatic world.
The blog post says (quote): Digital has unmistakably transformed the world of publishing and the way in which publishers need to produce and deliver content. Not only in terms of speed; moving from a day-to-day to an hour-to-hour basis, but also how they produce and place content across platforms, understanding how to use different channels to tailor content strategies and the quality of the content itself. In order to deliver the right advertising content the way in which audiences have come to expect and, as a consequence, to maximise the digital revenue, the publishing industry must re-think what it looks for in the 'ideal employee'........... (unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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