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Politicians and R&D Funders 'Finally Pushing in Same Direction' on Science Publishing

Politicians and R&D Funders 'Finally Pushing in Same Direction' on Science Publishing

A major push by science funding agencies in Europe to make the research they back freely available at the point of publication is the world's best chance of fundamentally altering scientific publishing, says the new coordinator of Plan S, Johan Rooryck.

Citecorp: Working with Open Citations - ROpenSci - Open Tools for Open Science

Citecorp: Working with Open Citations - ROpenSci - Open Tools for Open Science

citecorp is a new (hit CRAN in late August) R package for working with data from the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC). OpenCitations, run by David Shotton and Silvio Peroni, houses the OCC, an open repository of scholarly citation data under the very open CC0 license. The I4OC (Initiative for Open Citations) is a collaboration between many parties, with the aim of promoting "unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data". Citation data is available through Crossref, and available in R via our packages rcrossref, fulltext and crminer.

Elsevier Investigates Hundreds of Peer Reviewers for Manipulating Citations

Elsevier Investigates Hundreds of Peer Reviewers for Manipulating Citations

The publisher is scrutinizing researchers who might be inappropriately using the review process to promote their own work.

Giving Credit: Gender and the Hidden Labour Behind Academic Prestige

Giving Credit: Gender and the Hidden Labour Behind Academic Prestige

This blog post highlights the historical precedent of Mary Quayle Innis and the unrecognised impact she had on her husband Harold Adams Innis’ career and suggests that the social sciences and humanities would benefit from a wider interpretation of scholarly attribution than is currently practiced.

Funding of Platinum Open Access Journals in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Funding of Platinum Open Access Journals in the Social Sciences and Humanities

The Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences SAHS proposes the establishment of a Platinum Open Access Fund. The funding would allow to flip and operate 15-20 scientific journals in the humanities and social sciences that are not depending on article processing charges and that are immediately open for everyone.

Sweden's New Read & Publish Agre­e­ment

Sweden's New Read & Publish Agre­e­ment

The Bibsam Consortium in Sweden signed a new tranformative Read & Publish agreement with academic publisher Springer Nature. It covers rights to publish in over 1,800 hybrid journals at no extra cost for the author as well as reading rights for over 2,100 journals since 1997.

Quality in Peer Review: An Interview with Tracey Brown, Sense About Science

Quality in Peer Review: An Interview with Tracey Brown, Sense About Science

Continuing our celebration of Peer Review Week 2019, today Alice Meadows interviews Tracey Brown, OBE, Director of Sense about Science, which has been involved in Peer Review Week from the start.

A Standardized Citation Metrics Author Database Annotated for Scientific Field

A Standardized Citation Metrics Author Database Annotated for Scientific Field

Citation metrics are widely used and misused. This Community Page article presents a publicly available database that provides standardized information on multiple citation indicators and a composite thereof, annotating each author according to his/her main scientific field(s).

Quality is Multi-Dimensional: How Many Ways Can You Define Quality in Peer Review?

Quality is Multi-Dimensional: How Many Ways Can You Define Quality in Peer Review?

Alice Meadows and Karin Wulf kick off the fifth annual Peer Review Week with their thoughts on defining quality in peer review principles and practices.

Artificial Intelligence Confronts a 'Reproducibility' Crisis

Artificial Intelligence Confronts a 'Reproducibility' Crisis

Machine-learning systems are black boxes even to the researchers that build them. That makes it hard for others to assess the results.

Seven Steps to Make Travel to Scientific Conferences More Sustainable

Seven Steps to Make Travel to Scientific Conferences More Sustainable

Researchers should learn to travel better to mitigate their climate impacts. Institutions can help by facilitating and rewarding sustainable travel behaviour, rather than fuelling the pressure to attend conferences, say Olivier Hamant, Timothy Saunders and Virgile Viasnoff.

The Silenced: Meet the Climate Whistleblowers Muzzled by Trump

The Silenced: Meet the Climate Whistleblowers Muzzled by Trump

Six whistleblowers and ex-government scientists describe how the Trump administration made them bury climate science - and why they won't stay quiet.

Comparison of Bibliographic Data Sources: Implications for the Robustness of University Rankings

Comparison of Bibliographic Data Sources: Implications for the Robustness of University Rankings

Universities are increasingly evaluated, both internally and externally on the basis of their outputs. Often these are converted to simple, and frequently contested, rankings based on quantitative analysis of those outputs. These rankings can have substantial implications for student and staff recruitment, research income and perceived prestige of a university. Both internal and external analyses usually rely on a single data source to define the set of outputs assigned to a specific university.

Lessons from the History of UK Science Policy

Lessons from the History of UK Science Policy

Reflecting on historical analyses of the developments in British science policy over the last 100 years to identify insights, trends, and implications for policymakers today.

The Hong Kong Principles for Assessing Researchers: Fostering Research Integrity

The Hong Kong Principles for Assessing Researchers: Fostering Research Integrity

The primary goal of research is to advance knowledge. For that knowledge to benefit research and society, it must be trustworthy. Trustworthy research is robust, rigorous and transparent at all stages of design, execution and reporting. The authors developed the Hong Kong Principles (HKP) with a specific focus on the need to drive research improvement through ensuring that researchers are explicitly recognized and rewarded for behavior that leads to trustworthy research. 

All the Ways Student Debt Exacerbates Racial Inequality - 'It's Like Landing in Quick Sand'

All the Ways Student Debt Exacerbates Racial Inequality - 'It's Like Landing in Quick Sand'

The factors are complicated, but they tie broadly back to America's history of systemic racism. 

One in Five Genetics Papers Contains Errors Thanks to Microsoft Excel

One in Five Genetics Papers Contains Errors Thanks to Microsoft Excel

Autoformatting in Microsoft Excel has caused many a headache—but now, a new study shows that one in five genetics papers in top scientific journals contains errors from the program.

Top 10 FAIR Data & Software Things

Top 10 FAIR Data & Software Things

The Top 10 FAIR Data & Software Global Sprint was held online over the course of two-days (29-30 November 2018), where participants from around the world were invited to develop brief guides (stand alone, self paced training materials), called "Things", that can be used by the research community to understand FAIR in different contexts as well as some initial steps to consider.

Italy's Rise in Research Impact Pinned on 'citation Doping'

Italy's Rise in Research Impact Pinned on 'citation Doping'

Citation of Italian-authored papers by Italian researchers rose after the introduction of metrics-based thresholds for promotions.

Bulgaria's Mariya Gabriel Picked to Run Horizon Europe

Bulgaria's Mariya Gabriel Picked to Run Horizon Europe

The incoming president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, nominated Bulgaria's Mariya Gabriel to take charge of research, innovation and education, but has scotched research from the name of the brief for the first time, relabelling it the 'Innovation and Youth' portfolio.

Science-Graphic Art Partnerships to Increase Research Impact

Science-Graphic Art Partnerships to Increase Research Impact

Graphics are becoming increasingly important for scientists to effectively communicate their findings to broad audiences, but most researchers lack expertise in visual media.