Early career researchers appear to be at the vanguard of open research, with them reporting more positive attitudes towards sharing of code compared to more experienced researchers.

This perspective piece on the perceived barriers and ways forward to advance data citation practices was written by members of the Make Data Count team which is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. 

The scientific merit of a paper and its ability to reach broader audiences is essential for scientific impact. Thus, scientific merit measurements are made by scientometric indexes, and journals are increasingly using published papers as open access (OA).

Open Science requires a sustainable, trustworthy and comprehensive network of repositories that can support researchers around the world in managing, sharing and preserving their data, argue Science Europe, COAR, CoreTrustSeal, the European University Association, and the World Data System.

The BMBF project OPTIMETA aims to strengthen the Open Access publishing system by connecting open citations and spatiotemporal metadata from open access journals with openly accessible data sources.

Correcting mistakes and updating findings is often considered to be a key characteristic of scientific research. In practice, self-correction of published research is infrequent, difficult to achieve, and perceived to come with reputational costs. 

The management of research data has become an essential aspect of good scientific practice. Education in research data management is, however, scarce.

Paper analyzes how research contributions are divided across research teams, focusing on the association between division of labor and number of authors, and authors’ position and specific contributions by using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT).

This special issue covers a diversity of topics on Chinese science, ranging from scientometric analyses to studies of the Chinese science system and research assessment in China.

Unreliable research programmes waste funds, time, and even the lives of the organisms we seek to help and understand. Reducing this waste and increasing the value of scientific evidence require changing the actions of both individual researchers and the institutions they depend on for employment and promotion. While ecologists and evolutionary biologists have somewhat improved research transparency over the past decade (e.g. more data sharing), major obstacles remain. In this commentary, we lift our gaze to the horizon to imagine how researchers and institutions can clear the path towards more credible and effective research programmes.

Students in the organizational theory and leadership course taught by Trevor Owe at the University of Maryland’s iSchool worked together to produce this book. 

A preregistered survey experiment spanning six disciplines has found weak evidence of bias in favour of authors from high-status countries and institutions.

An Open Science initiative for the independent execution of computations underlying research articles during peer review to improve reproducibility.

Authorship represents a highly discussed topic in nowadays academia. The share of co-authored papers has increased substantially in recent years allowing scientists to specialize and focus on specific tasks. But what does authorship actually mean in the social sciences?

PubMed Central articles are an important source of COVID-19 datasets, but there is significant heterogeneity in the way these datasets are mentioned, shared, updated and cited.

Article investigates the representativeness of faculty childhood socioeconomic status and whether it may implicitly limit efforts to diversify the professoriate in terms of race, gender, and geography.

Society deserves academic discourse that is civil, cool, unbiased, and objective - but the Covid-19 pandemic has accentuated an erosion in civility in academic discourse, leading to deep divisions being played out in social, mass, and professional media.

Editormetrics analyse the role of editors of academic journals and their impact on the scientific publication system. However, such analyses would best rely on open, structured and machine-readable data on editors and editorial boards, whose availability still remains rare.

From June 2020 to February 2021, a consortium of 10 organisations undertook a large-scale study on open access journals across the world that are free for readers and authors, usually referred to as "OA diamond journals". This study was commissioned by cOAlition S in order to gain a better understanding of the OA diamond landscape.

A responsible research assessment would incentivise, reflect and reward the plural characteristics of high-quality research, in support of diverse and inclusive research cultures.

The ability of researchers to raise funding is central to academic achievement. However, whether success in obtaining research funds correlates with the productivity, quality or impact of a researcher is debated. The study analyses 10 years of grant funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation in Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Parenthood explains most of the gender productivity gap by lowering the average short-term productivity of mothers. However, the size of productivity penalty for mothers appears to have shrunk over time.

Preprints make scholarly communication more efficient by disseminating scientific discoveries more rapidly. The measurements presented in this study can help researchers and policymakers make informed decisions about how to effectively use and responsibly embrace a preprint culture.

Study utilised a combination of automatic and manual annotations to quantify how an article from early 2020 changed between the preprinted and published version.

Paper concludes that metrics were applied chiefly as a screening tool to decrease the number of eligible candidates and not as a replacement for peer review.

The main objective of this paper is to empirically test whether the identification of highly-cited documents through Google Scholar is feasible and reliable.

The article discusses how the interpretation of 'performance' from a presentation using accurate but summary bibliometrics can change when iterative deconstruction and visualization of the same dataset is applied.

Replication, an important, uncommon, and misunderstood practice, is making a comeback in psychology.

This study addresses the lack of transparency by leveraging Elsevier article metadata and provides the first publisher-level study of hybrid OA uptake and invoicing.

Context Convergent analyses in different disciplines support the use of the Percentage of Papers by the Most Prolific author (PPMP) as a red flag to identify journals that can be suspected of questionable editorial practices. We examined whether this index, complemented by the Gini index, could be useful for identifying cases of potential editorial bias, using a large sample of biomedical journals. Methods We extracted metadata for all biomedical journals referenced in the National Library of Medicine, with any attributed Broad Subject Terms, and at least 50 authored (i.e. by at least one author) articles between 2015 and 2019, identifying the most prolific author (i.e. the person who signed the most papers in each particular journal). We calculated the PPMP and the 2015-2019 Gini index for the distribution of articles across authors. When the relevant information was reported, we also computed the median publication lag (time between submission and acceptance) for articles authored by any of the most prolific authors and that for articles not authored by prolific authors. For outlier journals, defined as a PPMP or Gini index above the 95th percentile of their respective distributions, a random sample of 100 journals was selected and described in relation to status on the editorial board for the most prolific author. Results 5 468 journals that published 4 986 335 papers between 2015 and 2019 were analysed. The PPMP 95th percentile was 10.6% (median 2.9%). The Gini index 95th percentile was 0.355 (median 0.183). Correlation between the two indices was 0.35 (95CI 0.33 to 0.37). Information on publication lag was available for 2 743 journals. We found that 277 journals (10.2%) had a median time lag to publication for articles by the most prolific author(s) that was shorter than 3 weeks, versus 51 (1.9%) journals with articles not authored by prolific author(s). Among the random sample of outlier journals, 98 provided information about their editorial board. Among these 98, the most prolific author was part of the editorial board in 60 cases (61%), among whom 25 (26% of the 98) were editors-in-chief. Discussion In most journals publications are distributed across a large number of authors. Our results reveal a subset of journals where a few authors, often members of the editorial board, were responsible for a disproportionate number of publications. The papers by these authors were more likely to be accepted for publication within 3 weeks of their submission. To enhance trust in their practices, journals need to be transparent about their editorial and peer review practices.