1. Transitioning to a More Unified Platform
Combining most if not all of a publisher's scholarly content on a single publisher platform has not always been the norm. Oxford University Press's transition to a new platform represents not just a one-to-one platform shift but in fact a consolidation from more to fewer platforms. This is a trend worth understanding and watching, notes Roger C. Schonfeld in his post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog.
The blog post says (quote): The shift towards a single platform combining the full spectrum of content types should be seen as a small step forward in online platform rationalization. But it is not necessarily a shift towards a single platform for all content and for all customer populations, given the changing roles of aggregators and open access content. Still, these shifts are part of savvy publishers' broader strategic examination of their utilization of the various channels available to them......(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. What's so Wrong with the Impact Factor? Part 1
The need to publish articles in journals with high impact factors sometimes punishes those who are doing work that is no less important but has a narrower audience because it is more specialized or more challenging to understand. You can't get too far into a conversation about research assessment without somebody mentioning the Impact Factor (IF), notes Phill Jones in his post in the Perspectives.
The blog post says (quote): Arguably, it's not all that important because, generally speaking, the IF correlates very well with the median 5 year citation rate for the journal. Perhaps that's to be expected. In a recent conversation I had with Digital Science's Jonathan Adams, he told me that the current thinking is that citation distributions are most likely a negative binomial, because well cited papers tend to go on to be better cited in the future......(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. Troubling Noises – Why Scientific Peer Review Is not Broken but Needs to Be Fixed
Scientific publishing stands on a pedestal – society views scientific reports as the closest approximation to Truth that we have. Scientists themselves know that science is an attempt to converge, over decades, at an interpretation that is measured and proven to be the least wrong. Truth is out there, but we can only hope to see its shadow, notes Janne-Tuomas Seppänen, in his post in the ORCiD Blog.
The blog post says (quote): There is a clear dissonance in the academic community: on the one hand, surveys show that there's a broad consensus among scientists that peer review is the cornerstone of academic publishing; on the other, there's also a widespread perception that peer review does not fulfil what is expected from it, and can actually sometimes cause problems. The ability of the traditional peer review system to deliver what is expected from it today is increasingly being challenged....(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. The Politics of Data: The rising prominence of a data-centric approach to scientific research
This post is the first in a series of posts on the politics of data. Big data, small data and data sharing will be critically examined by a range of experts, each exploring the implications of the changing data landscape for research and society. In this post in The Impact Blog, Sabina Leonelli and Louise Bezuidenhout argue the study of data itself is an excellent entry point to reflect on the activities and claims associated to the idea of scientific knowledge.
The blog post says (quote): Scientific research is often presented as the most systematic set of efforts in the contemporary world aimed to critically explore and debate what constitutes acceptable and sufficient evidence for any given belief about reality. The very term 'data' comes from the Latin 'given', and indeed data are meant to document as faithfully and objectively as possible whatever entities or processes are being investigated. And yet, data collection is always steeped in a specific way of understanding the world and constrained by given material and social conditions, and the resulting data are therefore marked by the historical circumstances through which they were generated......(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
5. What is an Academic Journal?
We spend much time these days wondering when the academic journal as we know it will cease to exist. Robert Harington, in his post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, discusses the role of the journal in light of a fascinating new venture in the field of mathematics – the overlay journal Discrete Analysis.
The blog post says (quote): What is an overlay journal? It is really the word "overlay" that matters. Whether we are talking about a journal is arguable, and I discuss this a little later. The basic idea is that an overlay journal does not produce its own content. Rather, it links to already available content, most likely residing in a preprint server. One such server is arXiv, a preprint server in mathematics, physics, astronomy, some computer science, and other related fields......(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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