1. Towards minimal reporting standards for life scientists
Transparency in reporting benefits scientific communication on many levels. A group of journal editors and experts in reproducibility and transparent reporting are putting together a framework for minimal reporting standards in the life sciences. This framework could both inform the TOP statement and serve in other contexts where better reporting can improve reproducibility, discusses Veronique Kiermer, in her post in the PLOS Blog.
The blog post says (quote): An advantage of aligning on minimal standards is consistency in policies and expectations across journals, which is beneficial for authors as they prepare papers for publication and for reviewers as they assess them. Other major stakeholders engaged in the research cycle, including institutional review bodies and funders, will see the value of agreeing on this type of reporting standard as a minimal expectation, as broad-based endorsement from an early stage in the research life cycle would provide important support for overall adoption and implementation. The working group will provide three key deliverables. While all three outputs are intended to provide tools to help journals, researchers and other stakeholders with adoption of the minimal standards framework, they do not intend to be prescriptive about the precise mechanism of implementation and anticipate that in many cases they will be used as a yardstick within the context of an existing reporting system. Nevertheless, they hope these tools will provide a consolidated view to help raise reporting standards across the life sciences………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. Are Mirror Journals a Better Path to the Open Access Flip?
Mixing subscription content and open access content in hybrid journals has done little to accelerate the flip from subscription to OA. Angela Cochran, in her post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, explores the creation of mirror journals to comply with new OA mandates and supply a more sustainable model for moving toward OA.
The blog post says (quote): According to the list of principles provided by cOAlition S, the funding agencies participating in Plan S intend to disallow publication in hybrid journals. While there may be some sort of "transition" period allowed - a transition from the transition - for journals that have been offering hybrid and have not seen enough uptake of OA to flip their journals, this is certainly a concern. The size of the concern over losing hybrid depends on a lot of factors for any given publisher or journal. The biggest factor is how many papers a journal is currently receiving from the small number of funding agencies signed on to Plan S. A publisher with only a handful of papers from Plan S agencies may decide to walk away from those authors entirely instead of starting a new OA journal or flipping a subscription journal that has little hope of attracting enough OA submissions to keep it alive………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. ScholarLed collaboration: a powerful engine to grow open access publishing
The rise of open access publishing has created an opportunity for the scholarly community to have greater influence over how the research it produces is disseminated, by enabling the growth of a diverse group of publishers beyond the handful of large, powerful, commercial players currently dominating the academic landscape. Lucy Barnes, in her post in the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, outlines the vision of ScholarLed, a consortium of six academic-led, not-for-profit, open access book publishers, whose members have come together to build open infrastructure, share knowledge and resources, and communicate collectively with institutions, while maintaining independent operations and publishing programmes.
The blog post says (quote): The consortium is sourcing funding to resolve some of the most pressing barriers preventing small publishers from interfacing with large-scale organisations and processes. Existing infrastructures for the discovery, distribution, and archiving of scholarly books have been designed primarily for commercial, large, non-open access publishers. This often renders them fundamentally inappropriate for open access content and for small scholar-led publishing initiatives operating independently. Building up from a shared catalogue, they are therefore working to streamline processes for the creation of metadata for the consortium and enable better integration of open access titles into library catalogues, drawing on funding secured from OpenAIRE. This has also fed into the creation of an open source collaborative conference presence and bookstand and they are actively exploring how they can better archive multimodal monograph content. The strength of ScholarLed lies in this collaborative rather than competitive approach, which can support academic-led presses to scale their work both horizontally and vertically, as described by Janneke Adema and Sam Moore in their recent Insights article………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. Introducing a new, open publishing outlet for research on research
Posted by Liz Allen in the F1000Research Blog, this post discusses the arrival of the Science Policy Research (SPR) publishing gateway on F1000's open research publishing platform. Following a notable increase in science policy-related articles submitted for publication, F1000Research has built the gateway to bring together research on all aspects of the research system, building an evidence base for the science of science.
The blog post says (quote): To move beyond the criticism, and to develop ways to support science and research that takes advantage of emerging technologies and the policy context for science, requires robust evidence. The range of academic approaches required to explore how research works is necessarily diverse, however much of the output from the field has traditionally been locked up in policy reports with limited dissemination. The gateway aims to provide a place to build the evidence base around what works and what does not in science policy and research practices across all its dimensions – and to improve the cross talk between academia and policy and practice. They want models of scholarly publishing - and that includes the approaches developed by F1000 - to be subject to scrutiny and studied as part of the discourse………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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