ScienceGeist

While research data support units now exist in many universities, these are typically not able to provide discipline-specific expertise or resources. This article focuses on the Data Champion Programme at the University of Cambridge, which empowers discipline-specific expertise already embedded within each unit to advocate for good RDM and to deliver support locally.

Article shows that the Citation-Ratio is more consistent across disciplines than total numbers of citations.

Preprint examines whether having a preprint on bioRxiv.org was associated with the Altmetric Attention Score and number of citations of the corresponding peer-reviewed article.

Article postulates that a clear definition of use and reuse is needed to establish better metrics for a comprehensive scholarly record of individuals, institutions, organizations, etc. Hence, this article presents a first definition of reuse of research data.

The classification of science into disciplines is at the heart of bibliometric analyses. While most classifications systems are implemented at the journal level, their accuracy has been questioned, and paper-level classifications have been considered by many to be more precise.

Efforts to make research results open and reproducible are increasingly reflected by journal policies encouraging authors to provide data availability statements. As a consequence of this, there has been a strong recent uptake of data availability statements, but it is still unclear what proportion of these statements actually contain well-formed links to data, and if there is an added value in providing them.

The authors explore the extent to which universities are functioning as effective open knowledge institutions; as well as the types of information that universities, funders, and communities might need to understand an institution's open knowledge performance and how it might be improved. The challenges of data collection on open knowledge practices at scale, and across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries are also discussed.

The authors provide recommendations for a highly open and participatory interactive process of collaboration using digital tools and environments, discuss potential issues that come with working with large and diverse authoring communities, and provide possible solutions should these arise.

OpenCitations is a scholarly infrastructure organization dedicated to open scholarship and the publication of open bibliographic and citation data as Linked Open Data using Semantic Web technologies, to the development of software tools and services that enable convenient access to these open data, and to community advocacy for open citations. This paper describes OpenCitations and its datasets, tools, services and activities.

After near-death experience, top scientists seek a long-term home in the U.S. government.

Here's a 12 point guide to blockchain. Written for non-technically minded scholarly publishing folk.

A comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of Computer Science literature reveals that, if current trends continue, parity between the number of male and female authors will not be reached in this century.

Article finds that bioRxiv-deposited journal articles received a sizeable citation and altmetric advantage over non-deposited articles.

The prices for open access publishing are high and are rising well beyond inflation. What has been missing from the public discussion so far is a quantitative approach to determine the actual costs of efficiently publishing a scholarly article using state-of-the-art technologies, such that informed decisions can be made as to appropriate price levels. 

Study finds high Journal Impact Factor (JIF) volatilities for hundreds of journals annually due to their top-cited paper.

A global Springer Nature survey of more than 2,500 academic book authors provides in-depth insights into attitudes towards open access.

Exploratory study presenting a new systematic way of looking at ‘university-business interactions’ in the UK university system.

Spin in health news stories reporting studies of pharmacologic treatments affects patients’/caregivers’ interpretation.

This paper analyses usage statistics, citation data and altmetrics from a university press publishing open access monographs. The data suggests, despite the small sample, that authors can to a greater extent influence how their book is discovered by the readership.

Article concludes that the Citation Ratio is a useful and promising tool for comparing scientific impact of publications across disciplines and potentially for interdisciplinary works.

According to the latest research results, the presence of simple hyphens in the titles of academic papers adversely affects the citation statistics, regardless of the quality of the articles.

Analysis of survey results and publication data from Scopus suggests that the following factors led authors to choose OA venues: ability to pay publishing charges, disciplinary colleagues’ positive attitudes toward OA, and personal feelings such as altruism and desire to reach a wide audience. Tenure status was not an apparent factor.

There has recently been a significant amount of media concern surrounding the poor mental health of academics. This extended paper sets out the scale of the problem and examines the factors which academics have identified as key causes of stress.

Misleading news claims can be detrimental to public health. We aimed to improve the alignment between causal claims and evidence, without losing news interest (counter to assumptions that news is not interested in communicating caution). We tested two interventions in press releases, which are the main sources for science and health news: (a) aligning the headlines and main causal claims with the underlying evidence (strong for experimental, cautious for correlational) and (b) inserting explicit statements/caveats about inferring causality. The 'participants' were press releases on health-related topics (N = 312; control = 89, claim alignment = 64, causality statement = 79, both = 80) from nine press offices (journals, universities, funders). Outcomes were news content (headlines, causal claims, caveats) in English-language international and national media (newspapers, websites, broadcast; N = 2257), news uptake (% press releases gaining news coverage) and feasibility (% press releases implementing cautious statements). News headlines showed better alignment to evidence when press releases were aligned (intention-to-treat analysis (ITT) 56% vs 52%, OR = 1.2 to 1.9; as-treated analysis (AT) 60% vs 32%, OR = 1.3 to 4.4). News claims also followed press releases, significant only for AT (ITT 62% vs 60%, OR = 0.7 to 1.6; AT, 67% vs 39%, OR = 1.4 to 5.7). The same was true for causality statements/caveats (ITT 15% vs 10%, OR = 0.9 to 2.6; AT 20% vs 0%, OR 16 to 156). There was no evidence of lost news uptake for press releases with aligned headlines and claims (ITT 55% vs 55%, OR = 0.7 to 1.3, AT 58% vs 60%, OR = 0.7 to 1.7), or causality statements/caveats (ITT 53% vs 56%, OR = 0.8 to 1.0, AT 66% vs 52%, OR = 1.3 to 2.7). Feasibility was demonstrated by a spontaneous increase in cautious headlines, claims and caveats in press releases compared to the pre-trial period (OR = 1.01 to 2.6, 1.3 to 3.4, 1.1 to 26, respectively). News claims-even headlines-can become better aligned with evidence. Cautious claims and explicit caveats about correlational findings may penetrate into news without harming news interest. Findings from AT analysis are correlational and may not imply cause, although here the linking mechanism between press releases and news is known. ITT analysis was insensitive due to spontaneous adoption of interventions across conditions. ISRCTN10492618 (20 August 2015)

Diversity, transparency, and reliability are essential principles to ensure that a proliferation of metrics does not distort the scholarly communication system, but leads to more granular and transparent assessments

This article provides a baseline evidence framework for ten of the most contested topics in scholarly publishing, in order to help frame and move forward discussions, practices, and policies.

New study of computer scientists says that when it comes to research output, where Ph.D.s get hired matters more than where they trained.

Increases in APCs is proceeding at a rate three times that which would be expected if APCs were indexed according to inflation. As increasingly ambitious funder mandates are proposed, such as Plan S, it is important to evaluate whether authors show signs of price sensitivity in journal selection by avoiding journals that introduce or increase their APCs.