1. Ask The Chefs: Peer Review Quality
Quality means different things to different people. How do you think different stakeholders would define quality in peer review? This week is Peer Review Week 2019. Asking the Chefs a peer review question has become a tradition. This year the theme is quality in peer review. In this post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, Ann Michael, Chief Digital Officer at PLOS, reviews the responses of the chefs for the question: How do different stakeholders – authors, editors, readers, publishers, the public – value peer review quality?
The blog post says (quote): The public wants and needs solid, reliable scientific information (even if, in too many cases, we want only solid and reliable scientific information that fits our preconceived political and social agendas). Quality peer review — as distinct from shoddy or halfhearted peer review — has an important role to play in both making such information available and in weeding out scholarship that isn’t accurate or honest. The general public may not know how this filtering process is accomplished, and may not spend much time thinking about it, but I think they generally assume that the process is happening — and want it to be done rigorously and well..................(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. Open-access mega journals lose momentum as the publishing model matures
Megajournal publishers clearly have yet to persuade many researchers that their approach adds significant value to the scholarly communications ecosystem. While megajournals still occupy a unique and important niche in scientific publishing, they have lost one source of their appeal: rapid publication. In this post in Science, Jeffrey Brainard, an associate news editor with Science, looks at how megajournals continue to remain relevant as an option for European authors whose funders plan to require that their papers be free to read on publication.
The blog post says (quote): Perhaps more worrying: As publishing volumes have declined, so have megajournals’ connections to the frontiers of science, according to a study by Petr Heneberg of Charles University in Prague. It looked at how often papers in 11 megajournals cited recently published papers in each of three highly ranked selective journals—Nature, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science. It also analyzed the converse: how often papers in the three selective journals cited papers in the megajournals...............(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. Open Syllabus Explorer: evidencing research-based teaching?
Research impact is often equated with the way in which research articles are cited and used by other researchers and non-academics. An often less appreciated aspect of research impact is the impact that the ideas contained within research papers and books have when used to teach students. In this re-post in the LSE Impact Blog, Anne-Wil Harzing, presents the The Open Syllabus Explorer, an online tool that enables users to discover, amongst other things, the texts most commonly set in academic syllabi and suggests that the tool will prove to be highly valuable for researchers seeking to evidence the impact of their research on teaching and for new studies into the different formations of knowledge taught in universities..
The blog post says (quote): The Open Syllabus Explorer also has an authors section. Of course I was vain enough to search for my own name and was pleasantly surprised: my IHRM textbook and 18 of my academic articles were shown to appear in syllabi, with a total of nearly 380 appearances. Clicking through, I was also able to generate a full report for my IHRM textbook which showed in which countries and universities it was used. Adding a discipline filter, I was even able to figure out that my body of work was in the top-450 most used in Business syllabi worldwide and in the top-200 in the UK................(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. What Do Statements of Support for California Tell Us About the Big Deal?
The financial pressures inherent in Big Deal agreements are often combined with an interest in using them to fund open access publishing. So while some libraries have cancelled their Big Deal contracts outright and changed to title-level subscriptions, others have sought to have them re-born as “transformative agreements” with publishers, with libraries funding both reading and publishing. In this post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Professor as well as Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction in the University Library and Affiliate Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, looks at what do statements of support for UC reveal about open access publishing, institutional priorities, and the role of library-publisher contracts?
The blog post says (quote): In the aftermath of the recently publicized breakups between academic libraries and academic journal publishers over renewal of “big deal” journal contracts, are academic libraries consciously planning for, or already making the pivot, to supporting open access initiatives as an alternative to traditional scholarly publishing practices?.................(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
Leave a Reply