ScienceGeist

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.

What does it mean for science - and public health - that scientific journals are now publishing research at warp speed?

Preprint servers and peer-reviewed journals are seeing surging audiences, with many new readers not well versed in the limitations of the latest research findings.

While some libraries seek transformative agreements, others are unbundling the Big Deal: a look at licensing models and revenue pressures for publishers.

With help from Fox News and Elon Musk, a misleading French study prompted a wave of misinformation that made its way to the president

A systematic focus on governance – instead of, or at least alongside, open access – is vital for the future of publishing. Even if the for-profit publishing model is not going to be ‘killed’ any time soon, governance may still allow us to assert some control over it. Coupled with the publishing futures already being created and nurtured by library publishers, university presses and scholar-led collectives, we may be able to imagine a world that isn’t trapped in the logic of COVID-19.

Revised ‘Transformative Journal’ criteria from cOAlition S are “challenging” but Springer Nature commits to transition majority of journals, including Nature. Approach means Plan S-funded authors will be able to continue to submit research to these journals.

A growing suite of tools allows teams of researchers to work collectively to edit scientific documents.

eLife is making changes to its policies on peer review in response to the impact of COVID-19 on the scientific community.

Bioscience publishing, from preprint servers to established medical journals, is finding new and faster ways to publish Covid-19 research results.

As the Board of Reviewing Editors reaches 500, we reflect on recent recruitment efforts.

But can they overcome free riders and concerns about higher prices?

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.