ScienceGeist

Fake publications are corrupting the world of research-  and influencing real news.

Funders should award competitive grants directly to journals to underwrite the costs of open access, urges Adriano Aguzzi.

The Second EUA Big Deals Survey Report is an updated mapping of major scholarly publishing contracts in Europe. Conducted in 2017-2018, the report gathers data from 31 consortia covering an unprecedented 167 contracts with five major publishers: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and American Chemical Society.

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.

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.

Published peer review is now an available option for all PLOS journal submissions.

It is undeniable that preprints are a growing force in the scholarly communication landscape - but what does their future look like?

The world's first and longest-running scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society began publishing in 1665, and it…

The Series of Unsurprising Results in Economics (SURE) is an e-journal of high-quality research with "unsurprising" findings. We publish scientifically important and carefully-executed studies with statistically insignificant or otherwise unsurprising results. Studies from all fields of Economics will be considered. SURE is an open-access journal and there are no submission charges. SURE benefits readers by: Mitigating the … Continue reading Aim and Scope →

Almost every academic article starts with a literature review. However, although these short research summaries can be beneficial they also introduce opportunities for unverifiable misrepresentation and self-aggrandizement.

Recognizing the benefits, we move from merely supporting the use of preprint servers to promoting it.

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.

Some university presses rely on subsidies because their mission is to expand knowledge - not to publish blockbusters.

Alex Freeman describes how her love for storytelling propelled her from producing TV programmes to reinventing science publishing.

It is well established that administrators and decision-makers use journal prestige and impact factors as a shortcut to assess research. But it is not enough to recognize the problem. Identifying specific approaches that publishers can take to address these concerns really is key.

The dominant academic publishers are busy positioning themselves to monetize not only on content, but increasingly on data analytics and predictive products on research assessment and funding trends. Their growing investment and control over the entire knowledge production workflow, from article submissions, to metrics to reputation management and global rankings means that researchers and their institutions are increasingly locked into the publishers' "value chain".

Analysis commissioned by advocacy group documents how major companies' business strategies could help them lock up research and learning data that colleges and scholars need.

Matthew Cobb asks who owns research. Scientists, publishers or the public?

Libraries and funding agencies are finally flexing their muscles against journal paywalls. Authors should follow suit.

A Norwegian consortium has signed a new kind of subscription deal with Elsevier that includes open-access publishing - a first for the publisher. But the new rights come at a cost.

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’.

Is it every day or just every week that we see an announcement of a new “transformative agreement” between a publisher and a library or library consortium? Or, if not a press release announcing such an agreement, a statement that such is the goal of a newly opened — or perhaps faltering — set of negotiations? What makes an agreement transformative anyway?

On Friday, Ithaka S+R released the latest cycle of our long-standing US Faculty Survey which has tracked the changing research, teaching, and publishing practices of higher education faculty members on a triennial basis since 2000.  Here, some of the key findings around open access are higlighted. Especially among early career researchers, real-world incentives remain misaligned — and indeed appear to be moving further out of alignment — with the drive towards open access.

Transcript of a debate held at the 2019 Researcher to Reader Conference, on the resolution 'Sci-Hub Does More Good Than Harm to Scholarly Communication.'

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.

Thousands of Nature referees have chosen to be publicly acknowledged.

Fourteen universities from five European countries started a collaboration to set up University Journals as an alternative to the current journal system that requires authors to transfer their copyright or charges article processing charges.

UKSG Breakout session: Increasing Engagement with Digital Collections.

As open access Plan S draws closer editors start to re-evaluate the business case of academic publishing, and their role in it. A major investigation reveals that editors at academic journals can make up to five figure salaries.