publications

Send us a link

Subscribe to our newsletter

AI-Assisted Peer Review

AI-Assisted Peer Review

Many platforms have already started to use automated screening tools, to prevent plagiarism and failure to respect format requirements. Some tools even attempt to flag the quality of a study or summarise its content, to reduce reviewers' load.

Universities without walls – A vision for 2030

Universities without walls – A vision for 2030

This seminal document is the result of extensive consultations and deliberations with EUA members and partners over a six-month period in 2020. It sets out a vision of resilient and effective universities, serving Europe's societies towards a better future.

Do Open Access Journal Articles Experience a Citation Advantage? Results and Methodological Reflections of an Application of Multiple Measures to an Analysis by WoS Subject Areas

Do Open Access Journal Articles Experience a Citation Advantage? Results and Methodological Reflections of an Application of Multiple Measures to an Analysis by WoS Subject Areas

Study finds that OA journal articles experience a citation advantage in very few subject areas and, in most of these subject areas, the citation advantage was found on only a single measure of citation advantage, namely whether the article was cited at all.

Analysis of the Evolution and Collaboration Networks of Citizen Science Scientific Publications

Analysis of the Evolution and Collaboration Networks of Citizen Science Scientific Publications

The term citizen science refers to a broad set of practices developed in a growing number of areas of knowledge and characterized by the active citizen participation in some or several stages of the research process. Definitions, classifications and terminology remain open, reflecting that citizen science is an evolving phenomenon, a spectrum of practices whose classification may be useful but never unique or definitive. The aim of this article is to study citizen science publications in journals indexed by WoS, in particular how they have evolved in the last 20 years and the collaboration networks which have been created among the researchers in that time. In principle, the evolution can be analyzed, in a quantitative way, by the usual tools, such as the number of publications, authors, and impact factor of the papers, as well as the set of different research areas including citizen science as an object of study. But as citizen science is a transversal concept which appears in almost all scientific disciplines, this study becomes a multifaceted problem which is only partially modelled with the usual bibliometric magnitudes. It is necessary to consider new tools to parametrize a set of complementary properties. Thus, we address the study of the citizen science expansion and evolution in terms of the properties of the graphs which encode relations between scientists by studying co-authorship and the consequent networks of collaboration. This approach - not used until now in research on citizen science, as far as we know- allows us to analyze the properties of these networks through graph theory, and complement the existing quantitative research. The results obtained lead mainly to: (a) a better understanding of the current state of citizen science in the international academic system-by countries, by areas of knowledge, by interdisciplinary communities-as an increasingly legitimate expanding methodology, and (b) a greater knowledge of collaborative networks and their evolution, within and between research communities, which allows a certain margin of predictability as well as the definition of better cooperation strategies.

How Is Science Clicked on Twitter? Click Metrics for Bitly Short Links to Scientific Publications

How Is Science Clicked on Twitter? Click Metrics for Bitly Short Links to Scientific Publications

Study analyses the click metrics of over 1.1 million links referring to Web of Science publications.

Fostering Interdisciplinary Data Cultures through Early Career Development: The RDA/US Data Share Fellowship

Fostering Interdisciplinary Data Cultures through Early Career Development: The RDA/US Data Share Fellowship

In this paper we discuss interdisciplinarity through data as a way to create research environments that are more flexible and, as a result, more amenable to change. We report our findings from facilitating and evaluating a data-oriented early-career fellowship program that was administered as part of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), a global organization that aims to enable open sharing and re-use of data. 

Support for Self-Isolation is Critical in Covid-19 Response

Support for Self-Isolation is Critical in Covid-19 Response

Government action needed now to reduce infections and deaths The resurgence of covid-19 in the autumn of 2020 in many northern countries, including the UK, has been associated with tremendous morbidity and mortality. Before vaccination, the public health response focused on testing and population-wide restrictions, with the goal of decreasing contact between susceptible and contagious individuals. Striking and widening disparities in covid-19 related outcomes have highlighted the intersection of socioeconomic disadvantage and health inequalities, enhanced by structural racism.1234 Socioeconomically disadvantaged and many ethnic minority groups have been disproportionately affected, with increased risk of infection, hospital admission, and death.5678 Despite the vaccine rollout, many younger people, particularly those working in high exposure occupations, living in overcrowded housing, or without a home will remain subject to an ongoing burden of quarantine orders, along with a disproportionate risk of infection and onward transmission for the foreseeable future.159 An equitable and effective public health response requires the integration of supportive services to effectively decrease their contact rates and subsequently risk of infection.9 Most countries have used testing as a tool to interrupt transmission chains by encouraging isolation of contacts. However, the ability to quarantine until test results are available, and to …

Largest-Ever Survey Exposes Career Obstacles for LGBTQ Scientists

Largest-Ever Survey Exposes Career Obstacles for LGBTQ Scientists

Study of thousands of US-based researchers finds those from sexual and gender minorities are more likely to experience workplace prejudice and harassment.

Model-Informed COVID-19 Vaccine Prioritization Strategies by Age and Serostatus

Model-Informed COVID-19 Vaccine Prioritization Strategies by Age and Serostatus

Limited initial supply of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine raises the question of how to prioritize available doses. The authors used a mathematical model to compare five age-stratified prioritization strategies.

Raincloud Plots: a Multi-Platform Tool For Robust Data Visualization

Raincloud Plots: a Multi-Platform Tool For Robust Data Visualization

These “raincloud plots” can visualize raw data, probability density, and key summary statistics such as median, mean, and relevant confidence intervals in an appealing and flexible format with minimal redundancy.

Advancing Open Access in the Netherlands After 2020: From Quantity to Quality

Advancing Open Access in the Netherlands After 2020: From Quantity to Quality

The paper explores options to further open access in the Netherlands from 2021. Its premise is that there is a need to look at qualitative aspects of open access, alongside quantitative ones.

Academia in Motion: a Different Form of Recognition and Reward

Academia in Motion: a Different Form of Recognition and Reward

A better balance between teaching and research duties, greater recognition of team performances and the elimination of simplistic assessment criteria would improve the systems of recognition and rewards in academia.

Decolonizing Scholarly Communications Through Bibliodiversity

Decolonizing Scholarly Communications Through Bibliodiversity

This short form article was originally accepted to be published in a Special Open Access Collection in the journal, Development and Change, however, was withdrawn by the authors due to unacceptable licensing conditions proposed by the publisher. Diversity is an important characteristic of any healthy ecosystem. In the field of scholarly communications, diversity in services and platforms, funding mechanisms and evaluation measures will allow the ecosystem to accommodate the different workflows, languages, publication outputs and research topics that support the needs of different research communities. Diversity also reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, which leads to monopolization and high prices. Yet this 'bibliodiversity' is undermined by the fact that researchers around the world are evaluated according to journal-based citation measures, which have become the major currency of academic research. Journals seek to maximize their bibliometric measures by adopting editorial policies that increase citation counts, resulting in the predominance of Northern/Western research priorities and perspectives in the literature, and an increasing marginalization of research topics of more narrow or local nature. This contribution examines the distinctive, non-commercial approach to open access (OA) found in Latin America and reflects on how greater diversity in OA infrastructures helps to address inequalities in global knowledge production as well as knowledge access. The authors argue that bibliodiversity, rather than adoption of standardized models of OA, is central to the development of a more equitable system of knowledge production.

Large-scale Comparison of Bibliographic Data Sources: Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic

Large-scale Comparison of Bibliographic Data Sources: Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic

We present a large-scale comparison of five multidisciplinary bibliographic data sources: Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, Crossref, and Microsoft Academic. The comparison considers scientific documents from the period 2008-2017 covered by these data sources. Scopus is compared in a pairwise manner with each of the other data sources. We first analyze differences between the data sources in the coverage of documents, focusing for instance on differences over time, differences per document type, and differences per discipline. We then study differences in the completeness and accuracy of citation links. Based on our analysis, we discuss strengths and weaknesses of the different data sources. We emphasize the importance of combining a comprehensive coverage of the scientific literature with a flexible set of filters for making selections of the literature.

Herd Immunity by Infection is Not an Option

Herd Immunity by Infection is Not an Option

Herd immunity is expected to arise when a virus cannot spread readily. However, Manaus provides a cautionary example that herd immunity is likely not achieved even at high levels of infection and that it comes with unacceptably high costs.

Current Market Rates for Scholarly Publishing Services

Current Market Rates for Scholarly Publishing Services

This article provides a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving.