Journal policies continuously evolve to enable knowledge sharing and support reproducible science. However, that change happens within a certain framework. Eight modular standards with three levels ...of increasing stringency make Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines which can be used to evaluate to what extent and with which stringency journals promote open science. Guidelines define standards for data citation, transparency of data, material, code and design and analysis, replication, plan and study pre-registration, and two effective interventions: “Registered reports” and “Open science badges”, and levels of adoption summed up across standards define journal’s TOP Factor. In this paper, we analysed the status of adoption of TOP guidelines across two thousand journals reported in the TOP Factor metrics. We show that the majority of the journals’ policies align with at least one of the TOP’s standards, most likely “Data citation” (70%) followed by “Data transparency” (19%). Two-thirds of adoptions of TOP standard are of the stringency Level 1 (less stringent), whereas only 9% is of the stringency Level 3. Adoption of TOP standards differs across science disciplines and multidisciplinary journals (N = 1505) and journals from social sciences (N = 1077) show the greatest number of adoptions. Improvement of the measures that journals take to implement open science practices could be done: (1) discipline-specific, (2) journals that have not yet adopted TOP guidelines could do so, (3) the stringency of adoptions could be increased.
Attitudes towards open peer review, open data and use of preprints influence scientists' engagement with those practices. Yet there is a lack of validated questionnaires that measure these attitudes. ...The goal of our study was to construct and validate such a questionnaire and use it to assess attitudes of Croatian scientists. We first developed a 21-item questionnaire called Attitudes towards Open data sharing, preprinting, and peer-review (ATOPP), which had a reliable four-factor structure, and measured attitudes towards open data, preprint servers, open peer-review and open peer-review in small scientific communities. We then used the ATOPP to explore attitudes of Croatian scientists (n = 541) towards these topics, and to assess the association of their attitudes with their open science practices and demographic information. Overall, Croatian scientists' attitudes towards these topics were generally neutral, with a median (Md) score of 3.3 out of max 5 on the scale score. We also found no gender (P = 0.995) or field differences (P = 0.523) in their attitudes. However, attitudes of scientist who previously engaged in open peer-review or preprinting were higher than of scientists that did not (Md 3.5 vs. 3.3, P<0.001, and Md 3.6 vs 3.3, P<0.001, respectively). Further research is needed to determine optimal ways of increasing scientists' attitudes and their open science practices.
The current Special Issue of Publications is dedicated to PUBMET2022, The 9th Conference on Scholarly Communication in the Context of Open Science. The PUBMET conference aimed to provide a forum for ...the community involved in scholarly communication and the dissemination of knowledge, inviting researchers, information and communication specialists, librarians, editors, publishers, teachers, students, research funders, policy makers, repository managers, and other stakeholders involved in scholarly communication to discuss the current changes, developments, and advancements in scholarly communication from the perspective of open science. The PUBMET conference is open to individuals who are interested in learning more about and sharing their research results and experiences on the practices in open science. The current Special Issue contains submissions of research that reflect both practical and technical innovations, which serve the implementation of open science. The following topics are addressed in the present publication: Assessing the quality of research processes, research outputs, and publication channels; Re-designing open access—rights-retention strategies and alternatives to paid OA; FAIRness of open science; The potential of public engagement with science and environmental activism; Raising efficiency and effectiveness in scholarly communication.
There is a vibrant Open Access environment in Croatia and several academic and research institutions initiate different activities concerning open access to the scientific information (Ruđer Bošković ...Institute, School of Medicine, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, Faculty of Organization and Informatics at University of Zagreb, University of Zadar, University of Osijek, National and University Library, etc.). It is very important to improve collaboration among different stakeholders, as well as to provide top-down guidance harmonized with EU practices. Important blocks of the existing Open Access research infrastructure are presented in the paper: the Croatian Scientific Bibliography CROSBI, the Croatian portal for Open Access journals HRČAK, and the common infrastructure for digital academic repositories DABAR. Future development of Open Access infrastructure in Croatia is discussed.
Peer Review in Law Journals Stojanovski, Jadranka; Sanz-Casado, Elías; Agnoloni, Tommaso ...
Frontiers in research metrics and analytics,
2021, Letnik:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The field of law has retained its distinctiveness regarding peer review to this day, and reviews are often conducted without following standardized rules and principles. External and independent ...evaluation of submissions has recently become adopted by European law journals, and peer review procedures are still poorly defined, investigated, and attuned to the legal science publishing landscape. The aim of our study was to gain a better insight into current editorial policies on peer review in law journals by exploring editorial documents (instructions, guidelines, policies) issued by 119 Croatian, Italian, and Spanish law journals. We relied on automatic content analysis of 135 publicly available documents collected from the journal websites to analyze the basic features of the peer review processes, manuscript evaluation criteria, and related ethical issues using WordStat8. Differences in covered topics between the countries were compared using the chi-square test. Our findings reveal that most law journals have adopted a traditional approach, in which the editorial board manages mostly anonymized peer review (104, 77%) engaging independent/external reviewers (65, 48%). Submissions are evaluated according to their originality and relevance (113, 84%), quality of writing and presentation (94, 70%), comprehensiveness of literature references (93, 69%), and adequacy of methods (57, 42%). The main ethical issues related to peer review addressed by these journals are reviewer's competing interests (42, 31%), plagiarism (35, 26%), and biases (30, 22%). We observed statistically significant differences between countries in mentioning key concepts such as "Peer review ethics", "Reviewer", "Transparency of identities", "Publication type", and "Research misconduct". Spanish journals favor reviewers' "Independence" and "Competence" and "Anonymized" peer review process. Also, some manuscript types popular in one country are rarely mentioned in other countries. Even though peer review is equally conventional in all three countries, high transparency in Croatian law journals, respect for research integrity in Spanish ones, and diversity and inclusion in Italian are promising indicators of future development.
The Open Science movement is a response to the accumulated problems in scholarly communication, like the "reproducibility crisis", "serials crisis", and "peer review crisis". The European Commission ...defines priorities of Open Science as Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reproducible (FAIR) data, infrastructure and services in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), Next generation metrics, altmetrics and rewards, the future of scientific communication, research integrity and reproducibility, education and skills and citizen science. Open Science Infrastructure is also one of four key components of Open Science defined by UNESCO. Mainly represented among Open Science Infrastructures are institutional and thematic repositories for publications, research data, software and code. Furthermore, the Open Science Infrastructure services range may include discovery, mining, publishing, the peer review process, archiving and preservation, social networking tools, training, high-performance computing, and tools for processing and analysis. Successful Open Science Infrastructure should be based on community values and responsive to needed changes. Preferably the Open Science Infrastructure should be distributed, enabling machine-actionable tools and services, supporting reusability and reproducibility, quality FAIR data, interoperability, sustainability, long-term preservation and funding.
This study provides an analysis of Croatian scholarly open access journals and funding scheme. It presents an integrated approach to the general journal properties, types of publications and applied ...business model, looking at (1) criteria for funding, (2) structure and frequency of different publication types, and (3) the price per peer-reviewed paper. It is based on an analysis of 60 journals from the field of social sciences funded by the Croatian Ministry of Science and Education and included in the repository of Croatian open access journals HRČAK. For each journal information on the title, ISSN (print and online), field, discipline and branch, publisher, DOI, frequency, publication formats, and funding received in 2017 were collected.There are six peer-reviewed publication types (original scientific paper, short communication, preliminary communication, review article, professional paper, conference paper) and 14 additional, non-peer-reviewed publication types (meeting abstract, editorial, curriculum vitae, essay, bibliography, news, reminiscence, obituary, book review, letter to the editor, erratum, acknowledgement, index, other) available on HRČAK to be assigned to each paper. According to HRČAK categorization the attribute „type of publication“ was assigned to each of 8262 papers published during the years 2013-2017. The consistency of the type of publication was checked in different sources (PDF, journal website, Scopus, Web of Science Core Collection). The data was collected in July 2018.Each journal eligible for funding is required to satisfy a set of necessary conditions (peer-review, open access and availability on HRČAK, indexing in international bibliographic databases, the proportion of articles in which at least one author is from Croatia, editorial processes according to international standards, regularity in publishing). All eligible journals are evaluated every year by criteria grouped as general criteria, indexing and citations, peer-review and editorial work.Our findings revealed the consistency in most common publication types: original scientific paper and review article. Analysis of other types of publications, peer-reviewed, and non-peer-reviewed, revealed inconsistency across various sources. Publication type is an essential part of the research assessment criteria, and more consistency is needed at international level. Average price for peer-reviewed papers in 2017 was 445 EUR ranged from 1213 EUR to 162 EUR per paper.
The aim of our study was to investigate the extent to which Instructions to authors of the Croatian open access (OA) journals are addressing ethical issues. Do biomedical journals differ from the ...journals from other disciplines in that respect? Our hypothesis was that biomedical journals maintain much higher publication ethics standards.
This study looked at 197 Croatian OA journals Instructions to authors to address the following groups of ethical issues: general terms; guidelines and recommendations; research approval and registration; funding and conflict of interest; peer review; redundant publications, misconduct and retraction; copyright; timeliness; authorship; and data accessibility. We further compared a subset of 159 non-biomedical journals with a subset of 38 biomedical journals. Content analysis was used to discern the ethical issues representation in the instructions to authors.
The groups of biomedical and non-biomedical journals were similar in terms of originality (χ2=2.183, P=0.140), peer review process (χ2=0.296, P=0.586), patent/grant statement (χ2=2.184, P=0.141), and timeliness of publication (χ2=0.369, P=0.544). We identified significant differences among categories including ethical issues typical for the field of biomedicine, like patients (χ2=47.111, P<0.001), and use of experimental animals (χ2=42.543, P<0.001). Biomedical journals also rely on international editorial guidelines formulated by relevant professional organizations heavily, compared with non-biomedical journals (χ2=42.666, P<0.001).
Low representation or absence of some key ethical issues in author guidelines calls for more attention to the structure and the content of Instructions to authors in Croatian OA journals.
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