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Reporting results from a comprehensive survey of publishers in the German-speaking world, Christian Kaier and Karin Lackner explore the attitudes of smaller publishers towards open access, finding …
When the year began, the world's largest academic publisher, Elsevier, had increased their annual profits, with an operating profit approaching US$1.2 billion in science, technology, and medicine - a profit margin of over 36%. By year's end, a hefty chunk of the world's research community was walking away from big subscription deals with Elsevier and others.
Despite the position being billed as a stepping stone on the way to tenure-track academic employment, many postdocs, discouraged by their poor prospects, are questioning their career choices and instead looking to non-academic jobs as an alternative. However, as Chris Hayter and Marla A. Parker reveal, making this transition is not as easy as it might first appear.
Getting the most out of your Google Scholar profile, creating some old-fashioned table of contents alerts, and simply setting aside time to periodically review key journal titles will ensure you rarely miss out on important research.
Ensuring we focus our definition of success around valuable contributions - instead of around the final output - would recognise and reward good research and researchers.
When you look ahead on your career path, do you see nothing but open road to be traveled, or is there a big brick wall in your way that feels insurmountable?
The spate of high-profile cases of fraudulent publications has revealed a widening replication, or outright deception, crisis in the social sciences. To Marc Spooner, researchers “cooking up” findings and the deliberate faking of science is a result of extreme pressures to publish, brought about by an increasingly pervasive audit culture within the academy.
The active use of metrics in everyday research activities suggests academics have accepted them as standards of evaluation, that they are “thinking with indicators”. Yet when asked, many academics profess concern about the limitations of evaluative metrics and the extent of their use.
Social media can promote openness in research as international partnerships and collaborations are jeopardised, while increased adoption by scientists can also redress the balance that has shifted towards ill-evidenced news on some platforms.
Sarah Quarmby takes a look inside a knowledge broker organisation, the Wales Centre for Public Policy, to see how its day-to-day workings tally with the body of knowledge about evidence use in policymaking.
One way to push back against the pressure to “publish or perish” is to randomly audit a small proportion of researchers and take time to assess their research in detail. Auditors could examine complex measures of quality which no metric could ever capture such as originality, reproducibility, and research translation.
A short list of seven functionalities that academic publishers looking to modernize their operations might invest in; from unencumbered access and improved social components, to dynamic data visualisations and more precise hyperlinking.
Some thoughts on how to approach writing manuscripts based on original biomedical research.
Research impact is often talked about, but how clear is it what this term really means? The authors highlight four core elements that comprise most research impact definitions and propose a new conceptualisation of research impact relevant to health policy.
In a profession rewarding productivity in the form of papers and grants, sitting down to deeply read journal articles can feel like wasted time. Professor logs every paper she read over multiple years to gain insight on personal research practices.
The Neuroskeptic commentary on a new paper by Chris Drummond about the ‘reproducibility movement’. Assuming that what really matters is the testability of a given hypothesis, how fundamental is reproducibility to science?
Incentives for “Open”, perception as additional work and lack of training, and diversity and inclusivity.
The San Francisco Declaration of Research Assessment moves into a global phase of action with community support.
Text and data mining made easy with the allofPLOS project. Parsing tools together with the entire corpus of PLOS research articles for download.
Of all 956,050,193 references from journal articles stored at Crossref, 32.00% are from journal articles published by Elsevier, none of which are in the Crossref “Open” category, freely available for others to use.
SciComm: Why it is essential, and how we can do it better.
Comparing Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Mendeley, and ResearcherID.
Like many others in the scholarly community, we were very disappointed to learn about the recent acquisition by Elsevier of bepress, the provider of the popular Digital Commons repository platform.
The profit motive is fundamentally misaligned with core values of academic life, potentially corroding ideals like unfettered inquiry, knowledge-sharing, and cooperative progress.
The bibliometric system and the rules which accompany it have created an environment in which many if not most researchers can be identified as transgressors.
Between August 2014 and September 2016, the Academic Book of the Future Project, initiated by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Library, explored the current and future status of the traditional academic monograph.
Authors from western, individualist cultures are more likely to use many self-citations than authors from more collectivist cultures.
Liz Allen looks into what peer review actually tells us and how we use expert opinion.
