ScienceGeist

The thesis argues that the UK governmental policy framework promotes a form of OA that intends to minimise disruption to the publishing industry. The scholar-led ecosystem of presses, in contrast, reflects a diversity of values and struggles that represent a counter-hegemonic alternative to the dominant cultures of OA and publishing more generally.

Past studies have shown that faculty at prestigious universities tend to be more productive and prominent than faculty at less prestigious universities. This pattern is usually attributed to a competitive job market that selects inherently productive faculty into prestigious positions. Here, we test the extent to which, instead, faculty's work environments drive their productivity. Using comprehensive data on an entire field of research, we use a matched-pair experimental design to isolate the effects of training at, versus working in, prestigious environments.

League tables predominantly reward measures of research output, such as publications and citations, and may therefore be promoting poor research practices by encouraging the “publish or perish” mentality. The authors examined whether a league table could be created based on good research practice. 

An open toolkit to guide and facilitate data collection about Open Science (OS) and non-OS collaborations with the aim of measuring the implementation and impact of OS partnership across these organizations.

There is an often-neglected pre-history of open access that can be found in the early DIY publishers of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, including involvement of the humanities and social sciences. Policymakers are advised to keep in mind this separate lineage in the history of open access as the movement goes mainstream.

The growth of preprints in the life sciences has been reported widely and is driving policy changes for journals and funders, but little quantitative information has been published about preprint usage. Here, we report how we collected and analyzed data on all 37,648 preprints uploaded to bioRxiv.org, the largest biology-focused preprint server, in its first five years.

A new trend in scientific misconduct involves listing fake coauthors on one’s publication. I trace some of the incentives behind faking coauthors, using them to highlight important changes in global science publishing like the increasingly important source of credibility provided by institutional affiliations, which may begin to function like ‘brands’.

Survey of undergraduate women finds that most experienced some type of unwanted sexual attention during their physics studies. "A lot of times, people study how women can change to better fit in a field or be more successful. Perhaps physics needs to think about changing itself.”

The results of this study strongly suggest that when male and female authors publish articles that are comparably positioned to receive citations, their publications do in fact accrue citations at the same rate. This raises the question: Why would gender matter “everywhere but here”? 

Recent reports suggest that there has been an increase in the number of retractions and corrections of published articles due to post-publication detection of problematic data. Moreover, fraudulent data and sloppy science have long-term effects on the scientific literature and subsequent projects based on false and unreproducible claims. The JCI introduced several data screening checks for manuscripts prior to acceptance in an attempt to reduce the number of post-publication corrections and retractions, with the ultimate goal of increasing confidence in the published papers.

Can word patterns from grant abstracts predict National Science Foundation (NSF) funding? The data describe a clear relationship between word patterns and funding magnitude: Grant abstracts that are longer than the average abstract, contain fewer common words, and are written with more verbal certainty receive more money. 

Blinded review is an increasingly popular approach to reducing bias and increasing diversity in the selection of people and projects. We explore the impact of blinded review on gender inclusion in research grant proposals submitted to the Gates Foundation from 2008-2017. Despite blinded review, female applicants receive significantly lower scores.

The National Institutes of Health uses small groups of scientists to judge the quality of the grant proposals that they receive, and these quality judgments form the basis of its funding decisions.  In order for this system to fund the best science, the subject experts must, at a minimum, agree as to what counts as a “quality”proposal.  We investigated the degree of agreement by leveraging data from a recent experiment with 412 scientists.

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 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 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.

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 reliability on the quality and efficiency of peer review. We modeled peer review as a process based on knowledge asymmetries and subject to evaluation bias.

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

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

Although there is growing concern about the urgent need for a better life-work balance when doing science, there are not many examples about how this could be achieved in practice. In this article, 10 simple rules are introduced to make the working environment of research labs more nurturing, collaborative, and people-centered.

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 finds that the disciplinary background and the academic status of the referee have an influence on their reviewing tasks.  Articles that had been recommended by a multidisciplinary set of referees were found to receive subsequently more citations than those that had been reviewed by referees from the same discipline.

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

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.

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.

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.

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