ScienceGeist

The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak exposes an inconvenient truth about science: the current scholarly communication system does not serve the needs of science and society.

The author argues that for the humanities to successfully adopt digital technologies, they need to develop an independent open humanities discourse.

Opinion piece argues that Plan S deals have streamlined open access provision in the global North while exacerbating existing inequalities in scholarly publishing, by establishing and entrenching a two-tier system of scholarly publishing based on access to funds. 

Academic systems rely on the existence of a supply of "outsiders" ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail.

Responding to an emerging debate around the changing nature of the impact agenda in the UK, the author argues that the current moment presents an opportunity to exorcise the ghosts of previous regimes of incentivising and assessing impact.

Altmetrics have become an increasingly ubiquitous part of scholarly communication, although the value they indicate is contested. A recent study examined the relationship of peer review, altmetrics, and bibliometric analyses with societal and academic impact. Drawing on evidence from REF2014 submissions, it argues altmetrics may provide evidence for wider non-academic debates, but correlate poorly with peer review assessments of societal impact.

 In this post, Mark Hahnel presents findings from the largest continuous survey of academic attitudes to open data and suggests that as well promoting data sharing, it may also have inadvertently fed into the publish or perish culture of research.

Being able to find, assess and place new research within a field of knowledge, is integral to any research project.

Concerns about the threat from the Global North to Latin America's exemplary tradition of open access publishing are understandable but ultimately misplaced.

University researchers outside the EU who may not otherwise have access to research articles should not be excluded based on the actions of their government.

Mark Israel explores the ethics of self-plagiarism and asks, when is it right to reproduce social research?

One of the foundational aims of the open access movement, set out in the Budapest Open Access Initiative, was to provide access to research not only to scholars, but to “teachers, students and other curious minds” and in so doing “enrich education”. However almost two decades on from the declaration access to the research literature for educational purposes remains limited. 

In practice the way in which research impacts and influences policy and society is often thought to be a rational, ordered and linear process. Whilst this might represent a ‘common sense’ understanding of research impact, this post reflects on how upending the primacy of data and embracing complexity can lead to a more nuanced and effective understanding of research impact. 

This article outlines the four principles that give shape to a new, less standardised approach to research assessment called "evaluative inquiry": employing versatile methods; shifting the contextual focus away from the individual; knowledge diplomacy; and favouring ongoing engagement ahead of open-and-shut reporting.

When reading a research paper, can you be certain that the institution the author claims to be affiliated with is actually the institution that was responsible for supporting the research?

The extent to which researchers can assess the impact of their public engagement is often under-analysed and limited to success stories. Drawing on the example of development aid, it is argued that we need to widen the parameters for assessing public engagement.

This blog post highlights the historical precedent of Mary Quayle Innis and the unrecognised impact she had on her husband Harold Adams Innis’ career and suggests that the social sciences and humanities would benefit from a wider interpretation of scholarly attribution than is currently practiced.

Open access is often discussed as a process of flipping the existing closed subscription based model of scholarly communication to an open one. However, in Latin America an open access ecosystem for scholarly publishing has been in place for over a decade.

As flaws in the peer review process are highlighted and calls for reform become more frequent, it may be tempting for some to denigrate and dismiss the contributions of the reviewers themselves.

The future of the academic monograph has been questioned for over two decades. At the heart of this 'monograph crisis' has been a publishing industry centred on the print publication of monographs.

Plan S will also influence how learned societies, the organisations tasked with representing academics in particular disciplines, operate, as many currently depend on revenues from journal subscriptions to cross-subsidise their activities. 

Academic flying is often justified on the basis that international conferences and travel are important to the production of new knowledge. However, there is no clear relationship between the amount of travel undertaken by academics and the quality of their research.

Science historian Aileen Fyfe explores how copyright has become intertwined with scholarly publishing.

Whilst a shift to gold (pay to publish) open access would deliver wider access to research, the lack of price sensitivity amongst academics presents a risk that they will be locked into a new escalating  pay to publish system.

The purpose of peer review is often portrayed as being a simple ‘objective’ test of the soundness or quality of a research paper. However, it also performs other functions primarily through linking and developing relationships between networks of researchers. 

Resolving the question of how to provide an infrastructure for open access books and monographs has remained a persistent problem for researchers, librarians and funders.  The Open Research Library aims at bringing together all available open book content onto one platform, but has been met with mixed responses.

This article presents a new initiative from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden (CWTS), to assess gender inequality in research publication across different institutions internationally and drive further change in the sector.

The progress of Open Access (OA) is often measured by the proportion of journals that have transitioned to OA publication models. However, a number of journals have made the opposite choice and moved from open to closed access.

The development of preprint servers as self-organising peer review platforms could be the future of scholarly publication.

When social scientists think about big data, they often think in terms of quantitative number crunching. However, the growing availability of ‘big’ qualitative datasets presents new opportunities for qualitative research.