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'Politics Was Always in the Room.' WHO Mission Chief Reflects on China Trip Seeking COVID-19's Origin
It's Good to Be a Reject
Citations, downloads, indexing - a scientific report gets all this, even if it's rejected.
ELife Collaborates with Novel Coronavirus Research Compendium on Manuscript Curation and Review
ELife Collaborates with Novel Coronavirus Research Compendium on Manuscript Curation and Review
The two initiatives have come together in their shared objective to help scientists and the public navigate the high volume of important new research.
'A Million Euro-babies': EU Fetes 30 Years of Student Exchanges
The European Union celebrated 30 years of its Erasmus student exchange scheme on Tuesday, with its chief executive boasting the program had fostered cross-border romances that may have borne a million children.
Pandemic Hit Academic Mothers Especially Hard, New Data Confirm
Policy changes are needed to aid female scientists, emphasized by new data from a global survey of 20,000 Ph.D. holders.
Open Access Books and [in]discoverability: a Library Perspective
Open Access Books and [in]discoverability: a Library Perspective
Utrecht University Presents New Vision on Recognition and Rewards
Utrecht University Presents New Vision on Recognition and Rewards
Open science means action. And the way we offer recognition and reward to academics and staff is key in bringing about the transition that we aim for.
Inside the Making of Facebook's Supreme Court
The company has created a board that can overrule even Mark Zuckerberg. Soon it will decide whether to allow Trump back on Facebook.
Digitisation in Libraries: To What Extent Has Corona Given a Boost?
Digitisation in Libraries: To What Extent Has Corona Given a Boost?
Dramatic Discovery Links Stonehenge to Its Original Site
Find backs theory that bluestones first stood at Waun Mawn before being dragged 140 miles to Wiltshire.
The Broken Promise That Undermines Human Genome Research
Data sharing was a core principle that led to the success of the Human Genome Project 20 years ago. Now scientists are struggling to keep information free.
Physicists Discuss Threats Facing Departments and How Faculty Can Respond
Nearly half of all physics chairs report their department is under some level of threat, ranging from closure to budget cutbacks. Physicists offer perspectives on how faculty can respond proactively.
MIT Libraries Develop Innovative Open Access Agreements with PLOS
The MIT Libraries has negotiated two new open-access publishing agreements with the nonprofit publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS) that allow all MIT authors to publish in all PLOS titles with no publishing fees.
Interpreting Bibliometric Data
The article discusses how the interpretation of 'performance' from a presentation using accurate but summary bibliometrics can change when iterative deconstruction and visualization of the same dataset is applied.
Replicability, Robustness, and Reproducibility in Psychological Science
Replicability, Robustness, and Reproducibility in Psychological Science
Replication, an important, uncommon, and misunderstood practice, is making a comeback in psychology.
Submit Your Lab and Study Protocols to PLOS ONE
Lab and Study Protocols, two new article types at PLOS ONE that provide recognition for methods contributions, are now open for submission.
Transparency to Hybrid Open Access Through Publisher-provided Metadata
Transparency to Hybrid Open Access Through Publisher-provided Metadata
This study addresses the lack of transparency by leveraging Elsevier article metadata and provides the first publisher-level study of hybrid OA uptake and invoicing.
Facebook is Finally Banning Vaccine Misinformation
Nearly a year into the pandemic, Facebook now aims to take down misinformation on vaccines overall - not just COVID-19 vaccines.
Hundreds of 'predatory' Journals Indexed on Leading Scholarly Database
Scopus has stopped adding content from most of the flagged titles, but the analysis highlights how poor-quality science is infiltrating literature.
What Does the Future Hold for Europe's Universities?
We are at a tipping point, a time of transformation for society and universities. A new report highlights some of the issues facing European universities.
'Nepotistic Journals': a Survey of Biomedical Journals
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.
South Africa Halts AstraZeneca Covid Vaccine Rollout As Shot Falters in Study
A new analysis that suggests the shot "provides minimal protection" against mild disease caused by a new variant circulating in South Africa.
Analysis of the Evolution and Collaboration Networks of Citizen Science Scientific Publications
Analysis of the Evolution and Collaboration Networks of Citizen Science Scientific Publications
The term citizen science refers to a broad set of practices developed in a growing number of areas of knowledge and characterized by the active citizen participation in some or several stages of the research process. Definitions, classifications and terminology remain open, reflecting that citizen science is an evolving phenomenon, a spectrum of practices whose classification may be useful but never unique or definitive. The aim of this article is to study citizen science publications in journals indexed by WoS, in particular how they have evolved in the last 20 years and the collaboration networks which have been created among the researchers in that time. In principle, the evolution can be analyzed, in a quantitative way, by the usual tools, such as the number of publications, authors, and impact factor of the papers, as well as the set of different research areas including citizen science as an object of study. But as citizen science is a transversal concept which appears in almost all scientific disciplines, this study becomes a multifaceted problem which is only partially modelled with the usual bibliometric magnitudes. It is necessary to consider new tools to parametrize a set of complementary properties. Thus, we address the study of the citizen science expansion and evolution in terms of the properties of the graphs which encode relations between scientists by studying co-authorship and the consequent networks of collaboration. This approach - not used until now in research on citizen science, as far as we know- allows us to analyze the properties of these networks through graph theory, and complement the existing quantitative research. The results obtained lead mainly to: (a) a better understanding of the current state of citizen science in the international academic system-by countries, by areas of knowledge, by interdisciplinary communities-as an increasingly legitimate expanding methodology, and (b) a greater knowledge of collaborative networks and their evolution, within and between research communities, which allows a certain margin of predictability as well as the definition of better cooperation strategies.
Do Open Access Journal Articles Experience a Citation Advantage? Results and Methodological Reflections of an Application of Multiple Measures to an Analysis by WoS Subject Areas
Do Open Access Journal Articles Experience a Citation Advantage? Results and Methodological Reflections of an Application of Multiple Measures to an Analysis by WoS Subject Areas
Study finds that OA journal articles experience a citation advantage in very few subject areas and, in most of these subject areas, the citation advantage was found on only a single measure of citation advantage, namely whether the article was cited at all.
Quotas to Promote Gender Equality in Research
Gender equality is a prime concern of the Swiss National Science Foundation. To offer additional visibilty to women in academia, it is introducing gender quotas in its evaluation bodies with immediate effect.