Innovator Story: Wrestling the Octopus
Alex Freeman describes how her love for storytelling propelled her from producing TV programmes to reinventing science publishing.
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Alex Freeman describes how her love for storytelling propelled her from producing TV programmes to reinventing science publishing.
Colleagues, funders and institutions can support pregnant researchers in a variety of ways.
Open access has always been promoted for its reputational benefits. The OA citation advantage is one way in which advocates try to convince researchers of the benefits of publicly sharing their work. But researchers are also motivated by the need to publish in prestigious and ‘high-impact’ venues, which often precludes the possibility of open access forms of publication.
A small body of evidence suggests that when it comes to decision making, indoor air may matter more than we have realized.
A team of researchers led by RIT Professor Casey Miller discovered that traditional admissions metrics for physics Ph.D. programs such as the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) do not predict completion and hurt the growth of diversity in physics.
Two years after its initial entry into the marketplace, Cabell's Blacklist has matured into a carefully crafted and highly useful directory of predatory and deceptive journals.
Grant reviewers favour 'broad' words used more often by men, but proposals using those terms don't produce better research.
The dominant academic publishers are busy positioning themselves to monetize not only on content, but increasingly on data analytics and predictive products on research assessment and funding trends. Their growing investment and control over the entire knowledge production workflow, from article submissions, to metrics to reputation management and global rankings means that researchers and their institutions are increasingly locked into the publishers' "value chain".
Matthew Cobb asks who owns research. Scientists, publishers or the public?
Analysis of 30 leading institutions found that just 17% of study results had been posted online as required by EU rules.
Analysis commissioned by advocacy group documents how major companies' business strategies could help them lock up research and learning data that colleges and scholars need.
A new survey reveals the alarming extent of a practice that is universally considered unethical.
There’s a new publishing trend in town, says Mario Biagioli: Faking co-authors’ names. Biagioli, distinguished professor of law and science and technology studies and director of the Center for Innovation Studies at the University of California, Davis, writes that it’s “the emergence of a new form of plagiarism that reflects the new metrics-based economy of scholarly publishing.” We asked him a few questions about what he’s found, and why authors might do this.
Conference talks are a key element in scholarly communication. It is the primary mechanism for sharing research results and getting feedback. However, conferences in most disciplines never reached the same level of maturity as traditional journal publications in terms of quality management, which led to challenges like fraudulent conferences. There is need for a better control mechanism that can deliver credible information about conferences.
Threats to reproducibility, recognized but unaddressed for decades, might finally be brought under control. The four horsemen of the reproducibility apocalypse being: publication bias, low statistical power, P-value hacking and HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known).
Transcript of a debate held at the 2019 Researcher to Reader Conference, on the resolution 'Sci-Hub Does More Good Than Harm to Scholarly Communication.'
On Friday, Ithaka S+R released the latest cycle of our long-standing US Faculty Survey which has tracked the changing research, teaching, and publishing practices of higher education faculty members on a triennial basis since 2000. Here, some of the key findings around open access are higlighted. Especially among early career researchers, real-world incentives remain misaligned — and indeed appear to be moving further out of alignment — with the drive towards open access.
Modern data science requires reproducible and functional work environments, not just ephemeral re-execution for validation.
In more than a dozen academic fields-largely STEM related-not a single black student earned a doctoral degree in the US in 2017.
Networking is a crucial skill for all scientists. Ruth Gotian offers tips for those who struggle to make it work.
Debate around embargo periods heightens as Plan S deadline draws near. "Embargoes are just there to serve the interests of the publishers” says Robert-Jan Smits, the former lead architect of Plan S who is now president of Eindhoven University of Technology.
Is it every day or just every week that we see an announcement of a new “transformative agreement” between a publisher and a library or library consortium? Or, if not a press release announcing such an agreement, a statement that such is the goal of a newly opened — or perhaps faltering — set of negotiations? What makes an agreement transformative anyway?
Jonathan and Chris interview Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology and the co-founder and director of the Center for Open Science. They discuss problems and solutions in modern scientific research, such as committing scientists.
As journals, societies, and funders have engaged with the reproducibility movement, we are starting to see early signs that university policies are moving in the right direction as well.
A workshop run by DORA identified a number of ways to reduce bias in hiring and funding decisions.
The authors of the preprint "Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations" discuss their investigation and their findings on how the flawed metric is currently used in tenure and promotion decisions in universities across North America.
When social scientists think about big data, they often think in terms of quantitative number crunching. However, the growing availability of ‘big’ qualitative datasets presents new opportunities for qualitative research.