Although peer review is crucial for innovation and experimental discoveries in science, it is poorly understood in scientific terms. Discovering its true dynamics and exploring adjustments which improve the commitment of everyone involved could benefit scientific development for all disciplines and consequently increase innovation in the economy and the society.

This paper investigates the impact of referee behaviour on the quality and efficiency of peer review. We focused on the importance of reciprocity motives in ensuring cooperation between all involved parties. We modelled peer review as a process based on knowledge asymmetries and subject to evaluation bias. We built various simulation scenarios in which we tested different interaction conditions and author and referee behaviour. We found that reciprocity cannot always have per se a positive effect on the quality of peer review, as it may tend to increase evaluation bias. It can have a positive effect only when reciprocity motives are inspired by disinterested standards of fairness.

This paper investigates the fate of manuscripts that were rejected from JASSS- The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, the flagship journal of social simulation. We tracked 456 manuscripts that were rejected from 1997 to 2011 and traced their subsequent publication as journal articles, conference papers or working papers.

This paper looks at peer review as a cooperation dilemma through a game-theory framework. We built an agent-based model to estimate how much the quality of peer review is influenced by different resource allocation strategies followed by scientists dealing with multiple tasks, i.e., publishing and reviewing.

This paper presents an index that measures reviewer contribution to editorial processes of scholarly journals. Following a metaphor of ranking algorit…

Peer review is not only a quality screening mechanism for scholarly journals. It also connects authors and referees either directly or indirectly. Thi…

A review of the challenges and lessons learned in managing the development of Libero Reviewer.

The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) was originally designed to aid libraries in deciding which journals to index and purchase for their collections. Over the past few decades, however, it has become a relied upon metric used to evaluate research articles based on journal rank. Surveyed faculty often report feeling pressure to publish in journals with high JIFs and mention reliance on the JIF as one problem with current academic evaluation systems.

By forming a pool of funding applicants who have minimal qualification levels and then selecting randomly within that pool, funding agencies could avoid biases, disagreement and other limitations of peer review.

Paper provides new evidence on gender bias in teaching evaluations. Despite the fact that neither students’ grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor’s gender, it was found that women receive systematically lower teaching evaluations than their male colleagues.

JetFighter screens preprints to improve data representation and colour-blind accessibility.

This landscape analysis studies the growing trend of commercial acquisition of critical research infrastructure. It intends to provide a comprehensive look at the current players in this arena, their strategies and potential actions. They conclude that key stakeholders such as libraries must be able to prioritize their own infrastructure funding.

In STEM fields, students with an unplanned pregnancy need mentors who will guide rather than dictate the way forward.

As Open access is often perceived as the end goal of scholarly publishing, much research has focused on flipping subscription journals to an OA model. Focusing on what can happen after the presumed finish line, this study identifies journals that have converted from OA to a subscription model, and places these “reverse flips” within the greater context of scholarly publishing.

Closed and proprietary infrastructures limit the accessibility of research, often putting paywalls in front of scientific knowledge. But they also severely limit reuse, preventing other tools from building on top of their software, data, and content. The presentation demonstrates how open infrastructures can help us move beyond this issue and create an ecosystem that is community-driven and community-owned.

Study shows that peer review of grant applications at the SNSF may be prone to biases stemming from different applicant and reviewer characteristics. Based on this study, the SNSF abandoned nomination of reviewers by applicants, and made members of panels aware of the other systematic differences in scores.

The article explores the conceptual frameworks, methods, and data sources used in bibliometrics to study the nature of the humanities, and its differences and similarities in comparison with other scientific domains.

The changing world of scholarly communication and the emergence of 'Open Science' or 'Open Research' has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly-debated topics. Yet, evidence-based rational debate is regularly drowned out by misinformed or exaggerated rhetoric, which does not benefit the evolving system of scholarly communication.

The data in this report summarises the responses gathered from 365 principle investigators of academic laboratories, who started their independent positions in the UK within the last 6 years up to 2018. We find that too many new investigators express frustration and poor optimism for the future. These data also reveal, that many of these individuals lack the support required to make a successful transition to independence and that simple measures could be put in place by both funders and universities in order to better support these early career researchers. We use these data to make both recommendations of good practice and for changes to policies that would make significant improvements to those currently finding independence challenging. We find that some new investigators face significant obstacles when building momentum and hiring a research team. In particular, access to PhD students. We also find some important areas such as starting salaries where significant gender differences persist, which cannot be explained by seniority. Our data also underlines the importance of support networks, within and outside the department, and the positive influence of good mentorship through this difficult career stage.

New study of NIH funding says women overall get smaller grants than men, even when controlling for research potential. The findings have implications for their long-term success in academic science.

Using a structured systematic comparative approach, this study analyses differences in basic research grant funding between the main academic research funding agency of Germany and the main agencies of five other countries, including the Swiss National Science Foundation. 

Implications for the scholarly publishing landscape

The Open Access Escape Room resulted in great engagement from students, academic staff and professional services staff, some of whom reported that they never knew how relevant OA was for them. It increased engagement and provided a positive environment for conversations around OA. 

Open peer review (OPR) is moving into the mainstream, but it is often poorly understood and surveys of researcher attitudes show important barriers to implementation. There is a clear need for best practice guidelines for implementation.

Women are underrepresented relative to men as colloquium speakers, yet women neither decline talk invitations at greater rates nor question the importance of talks more than men do.

An analysis of review, promotion and tenure documents from 129 US and Canadian universities suggests institutions could better fulfill their public missions by changing how they incentivize the public dimensions of faculty work.

This article in The Lancet suggests that a traditional, project-based grant review process outperforms the increasingly popular people-not-project funding schemes.

Research puts a number on the proportion of people leaving full-time careers in science after the birth of their first child.

Many academics have strong incentives to influence policymaking, but may not know where to start. Recent research has examined the ‘how to’ advice in the academic peer-reviewed and grey literatures.

No formal investigations have been conducted into the efficacy or potential influence of reviewer recommendations on editorial decisions, and the impact of this on the expectations and behaviour of authors, reviewers and journal editors. This article addresses key questions about this critical aspect of the peer review submission process.