1. Research data should be available long-term…but who is going to pay?
There is now a broad consensus that sharing and preserving data makes research more efficient, reproducible and potentially innovative. As such, most funding bodies now require research data to be stored, preserved, and made available long-term. But who is going to pay for this to happen? In their post in the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, Marta Teperek and Alastair Dunning outline how the costs of long-term data preservation are not eligible for inclusion as part of any funding body's grants.
The blog post says (quote): Funding bodies suggest that long-term data preservation should be offered to researchers as one of the standard institutional support services. The costs of these should be recovered within overhead/indirect funding allocation on grant applications. Grants from the European Commission have a flat 25 percent-rate overhead allocation. Which is already generous compared with some other funding bodies which do not allow any overhead cost allocation at all. The problem is that at larger, research-intensive institutions overhead costs are at around 50 percent of the original grant value. This means that for every €1m researchers receive to spend on their research projects, research institutions need to find an extra €0.5m from elsewhere to support these projects (facilities costs, administration support, IT support, etc.)………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. Guest Post: Open Source and Scholarly Publishing
There are many misconceptions about open source and scholarly publishing that often overshadow the enormous potential it has to lead organisations to be modernised, efficient workflows and to allow them to innovate sustainably. In his guest post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, Adam Hyde answers some commonly asked questions about open source software and its potential for use in scholarly communications.
The blog post says (quote): Open source is a license and, in itself, not commercial or non-commercial. However, there are arguments that try to align open source with the non-profit model and then further muddy the waters by conflating non-profit with amateur offerings. Once you know how to spot these conflations, it becomes apparent what these arguments are trying to achieve (spuriously conflating open source with amateurism is typically an argument of the closed source vendor acting defensively). However, since this misconception is already out there, it is worthwhile pointing out that while open source is neither inherently commercial nor non-commercial, open source software can and does drive many enormously successful commercial businesses. Take a look at WordPress, an open source blogging/content management system. Around 30 percent of the web is hosted in WordPress, it is open source, and is the revenue mechanism for an ecosystem of small and large commercial businesses………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. 6 tips to secure a peer review invitation
It is not easy breaking into the world of peer review. It often requires publishing articles and then waiting for editors to contact you. That is a slow process for early-career researchers, who want to put their foot on the accelerator and benefit from everything peer review has to offer. Luckily, it is not the only approach, as Immunologist Chelsea Qinjie Zhou soon discovered, notes Joanna Wilkinson, in her post in the Publons Blog.
The blog post says (quote): Tips to break into the world of peer review: cold emailing and signing up for journals' paper-submission-database was so far the most effective method to secure peer review invitations: It's a number's game; it is time-consuming so systemise the approach to save some sunk time. Also, continually refine the strategy based on the feedback they receive; customise the email to "associate editors" to include keywords grasping his/her attention; also make sure they can find his/her contact first; ask the colleagues around for co-review and review referring, but don't rely on it; once they have one or two invitations coming in, quality is the key. This is where the Publons Academy helps the most. It's less about the badge or a credential and more about quality control to show they are a qualified and even preferred candidate for peer review. Quality work has compounding factors built-in; be attentive and proactive about accepting and producing quality reviews in a timely manner………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. 30 million downloads of open access book chapters
BioMed Central has now been more than 30 million chapter downloads across its open access (OA) books portfolio. That is for just over 500 OA books published by Springer Nature since they started tracking downloads from their official platform, SpringerLink, in 2013, notes Christina Emery, in her post in the BioMed Central Blog.
The blog post says (quote): They offer open access book and chapter publishing options to researchers of all disciplines, and make this high quality peer-reviewed research as open as possible. It is easy for the authors and readers to see the reach and impact of all the books, providing information on citations, online mentions, reviews and Mendeley readers through Bookmetrix. In 2016, SpringerLink received 127 million unique visitors, making 285 million visits. The high volume of traffic on this platform increases the reach and readership of the open access books. The open access books are also available through third party hosting platforms such as Amazon Kindle, Google Scholar, Apple Books, PubMed's NCBI Bookshelf and funders' own platforms. They work together with these partners to ensure that their open access books are easily discoverable for wider dissemination of the high quality research that the authors publish. From SpringerLink data, they can see that 44 percent of the downloads originated from 151 countries (other downloads were anonymous users)………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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