ScienceGeist

This year's open access week will be talking to a number of researchers.

Publishers have retracted more than 20 COVID-related papers. Are they learning from their mistakes and fixing process failures?

The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP), initiated in 2009, is a crowd-sourced social-tagging project that runs on open-source software. It captures news and comment on open access (OA) to research in every academic field and region of the world.

New report published by Springer Nature analyses usage patterns across open access and closed books.The results show higher geographic diversity of usage, higher numbers of downloads and more citations for open access books.

Most open access journals lack the technical means and plans to preserve their articles, despite a mandate from some funders that they do so. Specialists worry about a potential loss to scholarship.

Author affiliations, and the ability to link them to publications and other scholarly outputs, are vital for numerous stakeholders across the research landscape. With the launch of the Research Organization Registry (ROR) in 2019 (which Crossref has helped to develop), the landscape is changing. ROR IDs are an opportunity to make affiliation details easier for publishers to use and easier for those who rely on this data.

Women's journal submission rates fell as their caring responsibilities jumped due to COVID-19. Without meaningful interventions, the trend is likely to continue.

Kaoru Sakabe is academic publishing’s version of an in-house detective. In 2017, she and editors at the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) conducted a pilot study looking for image manipulation in accepted papers. When 10% of papers came back with a possible issue, the team was shocked.

This paper presents a state-of-the-art analysis of the presence of 12 kinds of altmetric events for nearly 12.3 million Web of Science publications published between 2012 and 2018.

Hong Kong Principles seek to replace 'publish or perish' culture.

While a growing awareness of racial disparities has resulted in a groundswell of support for inclusivity in scholarly publishing, the resulting initiatives would be more effective if professional associations were able to provide training materials to help transform organizational cultures.

Preprint servers have existed for decades, but the fight against the coronavirus has seen their use soar. They're changing how science is done-but need important guardrails.

Scientists and science publishers are sharing information as fast as they can during the COVID-19 pandemic. Speed and openness bring new challenges, but they are the way forward for research.

The COVID-19 pandemic is significantly impacting universities and higher education institutions, reducing budgets and presenting new design challenges.

The coronavirus pandemic has posed a special challenge for scientists: Figuring out how to make sense of a flood of scientific papers from labs and scientists unfamiliar to them.

The citation count of journals discontinued for publication concerns increases despite discontinuation and predatory behaviors seemed common. This paradoxical trend can inflate scholars’ metrics prompting artificial career advancements, bonus systems and promotion. Countermeasures should be taken urgently to ensure the reliability of Scopus metrics both at the journal- and author-level for the purpose of scientific assessment of scholarly publishing.

The prestige ranking of scholarly journals is costly to science and to society.

Two major study retractions in one month have left researchers wondering if the peer review process is broken.

The push for rapid and open publishing could take off - although financial pressures lie ahead: part 4 in a series on science after the pandemic.

Published scientific research, like any piece of writing, is a peculiar literary genre.

Easy-to-understand comic explains how rigorous science is peer-reviewed and published.  Hint: it's not via YouTube.

VSNU, NFU, NWO and Elsevier have agreed publishing, reading and open science services to support Dutch research and innovation ambitions.

The hunt is on for better ways to collect and search pandemic studies

Artificial-intelligence tool aims to reveal whether research findings are supported or contradicted by subsequent studies.

Peer review is embedded in the core of our knowledge generation systems. Despite its critical importance, it curiously remains poorly understood in a number of dimensions. In order to address this, this paper assesses where the major gaps in the theoretical and empirical understanding of peer review lie. 

Experts say the pandemic is letting bad science slip through the cracks.

Scholarly publishers are working together to maximize the efficiency of peer review, ensuring that key work related to COVID-19 is reviewed and published as quickly and openly as possible. The group of publishers and scholarly communications organizations - initially comprising eLife, Hindawi, PeerJ, PLOS, Royal Society, F1000 Research, FAIRsharing, Outbreak Science, and PREreview - is... Read full article >

Editors of academic journals have started noticing a trend: Women - who inevitably shoulder a greater share of family responsibilities - seem to be submitting fewer papers, while men are submitting up to 50 percent more than they usually would.

Early journal submission data suggest COVID-19 is tanking women's research productivity.

For Elizabeth Gadd, the Covid-19 pandemic makes it clear that long standing issues with academic publications need to be addressed quickly and definitively.