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The next phase of the Executable Research Article project will focus on reducing barriers to the authoring and publication of reproducible research papers.
The OA Switchboard has started to develop from an initial seed of an idea into an active community initiative with a broad spectrum of stakeholders committed to making it a success.
For many years and increasingly in the last year, the JAMA Network journals have published many important articles addressing disparities and racism in medical education, research, and health care and highlighting initiatives to help address deep-rooted inequities.
The UK Publisher's Association has commissioned a report that seems to be their latest attempt at painting open access to research as economically damaging to the publishing sector.
Citations, downloads, indexing - a scientific report gets all this, even if it's rejected.
Lab and Study Protocols, two new article types at PLOS ONE that provide recognition for methods contributions, are now open for submission.
Context Convergent analyses in different disciplines support the use of the Percentage of Papers by the Most Prolific author (PPMP) as a red flag to identify journals that can be suspected of questionable editorial practices. We examined whether this index, complemented by the Gini index, could be useful for identifying cases of potential editorial bias, using a large sample of biomedical journals. Methods We extracted metadata for all biomedical journals referenced in the National Library of Medicine, with any attributed Broad Subject Terms, and at least 50 authored (i.e. by at least one author) articles between 2015 and 2019, identifying the most prolific author (i.e. the person who signed the most papers in each particular journal). We calculated the PPMP and the 2015-2019 Gini index for the distribution of articles across authors. When the relevant information was reported, we also computed the median publication lag (time between submission and acceptance) for articles authored by any of the most prolific authors and that for articles not authored by prolific authors. For outlier journals, defined as a PPMP or Gini index above the 95th percentile of their respective distributions, a random sample of 100 journals was selected and described in relation to status on the editorial board for the most prolific author. Results 5 468 journals that published 4 986 335 papers between 2015 and 2019 were analysed. The PPMP 95th percentile was 10.6% (median 2.9%). The Gini index 95th percentile was 0.355 (median 0.183). Correlation between the two indices was 0.35 (95CI 0.33 to 0.37). Information on publication lag was available for 2 743 journals. We found that 277 journals (10.2%) had a median time lag to publication for articles by the most prolific author(s) that was shorter than 3 weeks, versus 51 (1.9%) journals with articles not authored by prolific author(s). Among the random sample of outlier journals, 98 provided information about their editorial board. Among these 98, the most prolific author was part of the editorial board in 60 cases (61%), among whom 25 (26% of the 98) were editors-in-chief. Discussion In most journals publications are distributed across a large number of authors. Our results reveal a subset of journals where a few authors, often members of the editorial board, were responsible for a disproportionate number of publications. The papers by these authors were more likely to be accepted for publication within 3 weeks of their submission. To enhance trust in their practices, journals need to be transparent about their editorial and peer review practices.
Most researchers don't intend to cite retracted papers, but it can have serious consequences for science.
Models suggest that the race for quick results and the importance of being the first to publish is leading to lower scientific standards.
Scholarly publishers still do not meet researchers' needs. Doing so would require that they rethink existing businesses and organizational models.
What research caught the public imagination in 2020? Check out Altmetrics' annual list of papers with the most attention.
Open Science is not a finish line, but a means to an end. Widespread adoption of Open Science policies would improve the transparency, reusability and connectivity of scientific outputs.
This article provides a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving.
The open access debate has revealed the complicated and contradictory nature of the academic publishing landscape in which trade unions have a role to play.
Should publishers track the ethnicity of the researchers contributing to their platforms?
This guide wants to inform researchers about the Creative Commons (CC) licence system
This year's open access week will be talking to a number of researchers.
Publishers have retracted more than 20 COVID-related papers. Are they learning from their mistakes and fixing process failures?
The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP), initiated in 2009, is a crowd-sourced social-tagging project that runs on open-source software. It captures news and comment on open access (OA) to research in every academic field and region of the world.
