This commentary abridges three closely related aspects of scholarly publishing, copyright transfer to publishers in the subscription-based model, posting of author-accepted versions to preprint ...servers, and publishing embargoes, to appreciate how each might impact the dissemination of information. We found no direct evidence showing that either copyright transfer or the posting of early (i.e., author-submitted or journal-accepted) versions of works to preprint servers stifle academics’ ability to share their papers openly. However, some key structural issues and incompatibilities in policies may dampen the wider adoption of preprints despite their widely promoted advantages for scientists. We found a 6- to 36-month embargo period in place by 10 of the world’s top largest publishers, depending on the version of the record. These embargoes may constrain the dissemination of knowledge.
A pandemic of bad science Scheirer, Walter
Bulletin of the atomic scientists,
07/03/2020, 2020-07-03, Letnik:
76, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
What can epidemiological models tell us about our potential exposure to COVID-19? What progress is being made with regard to coronavirus vaccine development? These days, the general public is asking ...these questions and more as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on. That there is an extraordinary level of interest in coronavirus news should come as no surprise, but this elevated interest society now has in pandemic-related science has unintended consequences that shouldn't be ignored. Studies are being rushed to publication even in well-regarded journals. Unvetted articles on so-called preprint servers have received enormous attention. Predatory journals are giving anyone with the ability to pay the opportunity to publish pseudoscience that can be amplified by mainstream news sources. Marketers are exploiting the public's desperation for protection against COVID-19 and adding a scientific sheen to dubious products. And perhaps-well-meaning experts in data science are producing a raft of arguably meaningless research, creating a distraction at best and wasting valuable resources at worst.
Exploring the current dynamics of preprints Malinda, Raj Rajeshwar; Mishra, Dipika; Bajaj, Ruchika ...
Current medical research and opinion,
06/2024, Letnik:
40, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Preprints are non-peer-reviewed and publicly available articles for open and transparent research communication. Preprint servers host the submission of such manuscripts, and despite the presence of ...established preprint servers, their numbers have continued to rise in recent times. A steep increasing pattern in posted preprints and their accommodating servers has been observed over the last decade. In this article, we explored the global trends in the preprint adoption and its involvement in promoting open and transparent research findings across various domains. We further emphasized the importance of preprinting, highlighting its significant impact during the pandemic through effective information sharing, and advocating for its broader integration in scholarly communication.
Abstract In the COVID-19 pandemic, it was much more critical for many life science researchers to rapidly disseminate research results—so they used preprints as upstream publication opportunities. ...This was rather new to the life sciences where preprint servers had only appeared as early as 2013. With a mixed-methods-study we examined this development and investigated whether preprint posting is a temporary phenomenon or the beginning of a cultural shift in publishing behavior in the life sciences. First, we conducted a survey of researchers who have posted COVID-19 related preprints. We investigated experiences with posting preprints during the COVID-19 pandemic, motivations for and concerns about posting preprints, the role of research institutions or funders, and the future of preprint publishing. Answers were grouped to compare differences between respondents’ gender, career stage, region of origin (global south or global north) and experience with posting preprints before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We further analyzed eight popular preprint repositories regarding the number of posted preprints and preprint characteristics, such as the number of authors and citations. Interestingly, survey and preprint server analysis have presented different, if not contradicting results: While the majority of surveyed researchers was willing to continue posting preprints, the numbers of preprints published, especially on servers for the life sciences, have stagnated or declined. Also, while certain preprints garnered substantial citations during the COVID-19 pandemic, this has not resulted in a significant shift in researchers’ publishing behavior, and the posting of preprints has not become a routine. We concluded that the sustainability of preprint publishing practices is more strongly influenced by disciplinary norms and practices than by external shocks as the COVID-19 pandemic.
To assess changes in the reporting of funding and conflicts of interest (COI) in biomedical research between preprint server publications and their corresponding versions in peer-reviewed journals.
...We selected preprint servers publishing exclusively biomedical research. From these, we screened articles by order of publication date and identified 200 preprints first published in 2020 with subsequent versions in peer-reviewed journals. We judged eligibility and extracted data about authorship, funding, and COI in duplicate and independently. We performed descriptive statistics.
A quarter of the studies added at least one author to the peer-reviewed version. Most studies reported funding in both versions (87%), and a quarter of these added at least one funder to the peer-reviewed version. Eighteen studies (9%) reported funding only in the peer-reviewed version. A majority of studies reported COI in both versions (69%) and 5% of these had authors reporting more COI in the peer-reviewed version. A minority of studies (23%) reported COI only in the peer-reviewed version. None of the studies justified any changes in authorship, funding, or COI.
Reporting of funding and COI improved in peer-reviewed versions. However, substantive percentages of studies added authors, funders, and COI disclosures in their peer-reviewed versions.
"Classical peer review" has been subject to intense criticism for slowing down the publication process, bias against specific categories of paper and author, unreliability, inability to detect errors ...and fraud, unethical practices, and the lack of recognition for unpaid reviewers. This paper surveys innovative forms of peer review that attempt to address these issues. Based on an initial literature review, we construct a sample of 82 channels of scientific communication covering all forms of review identified by the survey, and analyze the review mechanisms used by each channel. We identify two major trends: the rapidly expanding role of preprint servers (e.g., ArXiv) that dispense with traditional peer review altogether, and the growth of "non-selective review," focusing on papers' scientific quality rather than their perceived importance and novelty. Other potentially important developments include forms of "open review," which remove reviewer anonymity, and interactive review, as well as new mechanisms for post-publication review and out-of-channel reader commentary, especially critical commentary targeting high profile papers. One of the strongest findings of the survey is the persistence of major differences between the peer review processes used by different disciplines. None of these differences is likely to disappear in the foreseeable future. The most likely scenario for the coming years is thus continued diversification, in which different review mechanisms serve different author, reader, and publisher needs. Relatively little is known about the impact of these innovations on the problems they address. These are important questions for future quantitative research.
What Is the Price of Science? Alwine, James C; Enquist, Lynn W; Dermody, Terence S ...
mBio,
03/2021, Letnik:
12, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The peer-reviewed scientific literature is the bedrock of science. However, scientific publishing is undergoing dramatic changes, which include the expansion of open access, an increased number of ...for-profit publication houses, and ready availability of preprint manuscripts that have not been peer reviewed. In this opinion article, we discuss the inequities and concerns that these changes have wrought.
Astronomy papers are most frequently composed and submitted in either Microsoft Word or LaTeX format. While most journals accept submissions in Word format (and some, such as
Meteoritics and ...Planetary Science
, until recently required Word format), the majority of astronomy papers posted to the arXiV are submitted in LaTeX format. The wisdom of using LaTeX is sometimes questioned: for instance, a recent study demonstrated that a set of 40 researchers and graduate students were able to transcribe text and tables more quickly and with fewer errors using Word rather than LaTeX, although LaTeX proved similarly efficient when it came to transcribing equations and was more enjoyable to use. However, the study had all participants reproduce a given source text. We suspect that the use of Word may influence an author to include fewer equations when creating an original work. This is a difficult hypothesis to test directly, so we instead use a subset of arXiV submissions to probe whether the use of LaTeX is correlated with the number of standalone equations in a manuscript. We find that PDF-only manuscripts on the arXiV have roughly half as many equations as those with LaTeX source files.
Preprint servers can enhance the access to scientific literature by bidirectional linkage from published papers (postprints) to their counterpart preprint versions. The current state of linkage is to ...link preprints to their corresponding postprints (peer-reviewed articles published in journals). Here, I suggest an opposite automated linkage, from postprints to preprints wherever and whenever preprints are posted on a preprint server. Such connection from paid postprint versions to free preprint versions makes sense as it removes the barriers to get access to paywalled publications freely and easily.
PDF
