In the past few years there has been an ongoing debate as to whether the proliferation of open access (OA) publishing would damage the peer review system and put the quality of scientific journal ...publishing at risk. Our aim was to inform this debate by comparing the scientific impact of OA journals with subscription journals, controlling for journal age, the country of the publisher, discipline and (for OA publishers) their business model.
The 2-year impact factors (the average number of citations to the articles in a journal) were used as a proxy for scientific impact. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was used to identify OA journals as well as their business model. Journal age and discipline were obtained from the Ulrich's periodicals directory. Comparisons were performed on the journal level as well as on the article level where the results were weighted by the number of articles published in a journal. A total of 610 OA journals were compared with 7,609 subscription journals using Web of Science citation data while an overlapping set of 1,327 OA journals were compared with 11,124 subscription journals using Scopus data.
Overall, average citation rates, both unweighted and weighted for the number of articles per journal, were about 30% higher for subscription journals. However, after controlling for discipline (medicine and health versus other), age of the journal (three time periods) and the location of the publisher (four largest publishing countries versus other countries) the differences largely disappeared in most subcategories except for journals that had been launched prior to 1996. OA journals that fund publishing with article processing charges (APCs) are on average cited more than other OA journals. In medicine and health, OA journals founded in the last 10 years are receiving about as many citations as subscription journals launched during the same period.
Our results indicate that OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges.
While scientific researchers often aim for high productivity, prioritizing the quantity of publications may come at the cost of time and effort dedicated to individual research. It is thus important ...to examine the relationship between productivity and disruption for individual researchers. Here, we show that with the increase in the number of published papers, the average citation per paper will be higher yet the mean disruption of papers will be lower. In addition, we find that the disruption of scientists' papers may decrease when they are highly productive in a given year. The disruption of papers in each year is not determined by the total number of papers published in the author's career, but rather by the productivity of that particular year. Besides, more productive authors also tend to give references to recent and high-impact research. Our findings highlight the potential risks of pursuing productivity and aim to encourage more thoughtful career planning among scientists.
Almost 30 years ago, a distinguished soil physical‐chemist, Grant W. Thomas, voiced serious concern about what he saw in the soil science literature as more a preoccupation with style than with ...substance. The present article argues that, similarly, there are reasons to be worried at the moment because of a tendency in much of the literature on soils, both within and outwith soil science, to systematically ignore certain bodies of “old” literature, even when they are extremely relevant, and also to unduly inflate the potential significance of research achievements. These two practices, referred to as “bypass” and “hyperbole”, are illustrated by several examples dealing, respectively, with soil “aggregates”, soil quality/health, soil “contributions to ecosystem services” and whole‐soil metagenomics, in the case of bypass, and with biochar, the “4 per 1000” initiative, and the role of soils in achieving Sustainable Development Goals, in the case of hyperbole. It is hoped that the present review article will lead to a healthy debate on where our discipline stands at the moment in terms of how we build on the achievements of our predecessors and how accurately we describe the significance of our work. This debate should allow soil science to evolve to meet the daunting challenges it faces in the years ahead.
Highlights
The literature on soils seems characterized by a significant amount of bypass and hyperbole
Bypass is described, related to soil “aggregates”, soil quality/health, soil “contributions to ecosystem services” and whole‐soil metagenomics
Hyperbole is described in connection with the research on biochar, the “4 per 1000” initiative, and the role of soils in achieving Sustainable Development Goals.
The need to curb these deviances is stressed.
The journal Deep-Sea Research was first published in October 1953 directed by the Joint Commission on Oceanography to focus on the deep-sea floor as the main theme. Here we review the history of the ...journal through 12 editors and two publishers, Pergamon (1953–1991) and Elsevier (1991-present). From 1962 to 1991 abstracts and bibliographies as well as original research papers were published. From 1992 the journal has focussed on original papers, in two series; Part I for individual submissions and Part II for topical collections of papers compiled by guest editors. The scope of the journal has grown to encompass the entire open ocean from the air-sea interface to beneath the sea floor. From over 10,000 papers, 70 have been selected and are reviewed by the present editors.
Despite 50% of biology Ph.D. graduates being women, the number of women that advance in academia decreases at each level (e.g., from graduate to postdoctorate to tenure track). Recently, scientific ...societies and publishers have begun examining internal submissions data to evaluate representation and evaluation of women in their peer review processes; however, representation and attitudes differ by scientific field, and to date, no studies have investigated academic publishing in the field of microbiology. Using manuscripts submitted between January 2012 and August 2018 to the 15 journals published by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), we describe the representation of women at ASM journals and the outcomes of their manuscripts. Senior women authors at ASM journals were underrepresented compared to global and society estimates of microbiology researchers. Additionally, manuscripts submitted by corresponding authors that were women received more negative outcomes than those submitted by men. These negative outcomes were somewhat mediated by whether or not the corresponding author was based in the United States and by the type of institution for United States-based authors. Nonetheless, the pattern for women corresponding authors to receive more negative outcomes on their submitted manuscripts held. We conclude with suggestions to improve the representation of women and decrease structural penalties against women.
Barriers in science and academia have prevented women from becoming researchers and experts that are viewed as equivalent to their colleagues who are men. We evaluated the participation and success of women researchers at ASM journals to better understand their success in the field of microbiology. We found that women are underrepresented as expert scientists at ASM journals. This is, in part, due to a combination of both low submissions from senior women authors and more negative outcomes on submitted manuscripts for women compared to men.
Nature Index analysis 2014 rates India at the 13th place for its high-quality scientific publications. Despite this achievement, several studies have revealed that India is also among the major ...contributors of articles published in poor-quality predatory open access journals. Therefore, the objective of the present study was to estimate which category of educational and research institutes predominately publishes in predatory open access journals in India and to understand whether academicians in India are aware of predatory journals. It was found that private/government colleges contribute to about 51% of predatory publications, followed by private universities, state universities, national institutes, central universities and industries, for research articles published from September 2015 to mid-February 2016. The publication pressure among researchers and lack of monitoring the research being conducted are the major factors contributing to articles published in poor-quality predatory open access journals from India.
Preprints in biology are becoming more popular, but only a small fraction of the articles published in peer-reviewed journals have previously been released as preprints. To examine whether releasing ...a preprint on bioRxiv was associated with the attention and citations received by the corresponding peer-reviewed article, we assembled a dataset of 74,239 articles, 5,405 of which had a preprint, published in 39 journals. Using log-linear regression and random-effects meta-analysis, we found that articles with a preprint had, on average, a 49% higher Altmetric Attention Score and 36% more citations than articles without a preprint. These associations were independent of several other article- and author-level variables (such as scientific subfield and number of authors), and were unrelated to journal-level variables such as access model and Impact Factor. This observational study can help researchers and publishers make informed decisions about how to incorporate preprints into their work.
Open access (OA) has emerged as an important movement worldwide during the last decade. There are several calls now that not only persuade researchers to publish in OA journals, to archive their pre- ...or post-print versions of papers in repositories, but also institutions and funding agencies to promote OA of research publications. This article examines OA levels and patterns in research output by computationally analysing research publication data obtained from the Web of Science for India during the last five years (2014–2018). Results obtained show that about 24% of research output from India, during the last five years, is available in OA compared to world average of about 30%. More articles are available in gold OA compared to green and bronze OA. Furthermore, OA levels vary in different disciplines, with medical science, physics and biology having higher percentage of their articles available as OA as compared to those like arts and humanities, social science and (surprisingly) information science.
This article presents an ongoing research project aiming at innovating the modalities and formats of scientific and academic publication of design research.
The digital transformation and the open ...access paradigm have a considerable impact on the circulation of high-quality scientific production at global level: the challenge is to achieve innovative forms of authoritative, high-impact and effective scholarly communication, pursued with a multiscale and mixed media strategy, in order to guarantee an extended impact, while maintaining rigour and authority.
In this context the scientific publication of design is taking on new forms and objectives too, so the design discipline can be a pivotal field for the experimentation and discussion of new scientific publication formats for scientific research.
The article presents the proposal of Living Publications, that, stemming from a case studies research, supports the envisioning of future scenarios of scientific publishing and the development of the features of an experimental prototype in the design domain.
Scientific publishing systems (SPS) provides platforms to authors, reviewers, and editors to express research for the betterment of the community. Traditionally, the research databases are assigned ...electronic identifiers, and manuscripts are preserved in electronic form. Owing to the large scale of submissions in the databases, it becomes difficult for the repositories to manage their electronic volumes. The search queries and retrievals are complex, and the publishing process takes a lot of time, which defeats the purpose of the contribution in many cases by the author. Moreover, the process is non-transparent, and is limited due to ineffective article tracking policies. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), the libraries have transitioned towards smart objects that process academic repositories with low-powered computations. In the same way, meta-information passes through lightweight IoT protocols to distributed servers. Coupled with blockchain (BC), a secured and trusted publishing platform is assured in SPS, with transparency among all academic stakeholders. Traditional SPS platforms do not provide any rewarding method for peer review and do not support and store unsuccessful articles. Besides, published works are not verified thoroughly, and this can lead to misconduct in scientific publishing. Motivated by these facts, in this paper, we present a survey on the fusion of BC and IoT for SPS, which serves the dual purpose of low-powered computational tagging of manuscripts as smart objects, and that also supports rewarding and completing the verification of transactions by peers without involving a third party. A case study of a hyperledger driven IoT-enabled scientific publishing system (SPS) is proposed to address the limitations of the traditional SPS. Lastly, we present open issues and challenges concerning the current SPSs and the proposed BC-driven SPS.
•First comprehensive survey and tutorial paper on the fusion of blockchain and IoT in scientific publishing systems (SPS).•The advantages of fusion of IoT-driven blockchain in SPS are highlighted and based on relative comparison of existing gaps, a solution taxonomy for SPS is presented.•A case-study of blockchain-driven IoT enabled SPS depicting the entire information workflow of the proposed fusion is presented.•Hyperledger fabric-based simulations are presented for record maintenance, tagging, retrieval, and cost of storing archival records.
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