Swiss Consortium Pledges 216,000 Eur to DOAJ and SHERPA/RoMEO
The Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries, comprising sixteen libraries and the Swiss National Science Foundation, is the third national consortium to commit to the SCOSS initiative.
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New Preprint: Scholar-Led Publishing and the Pre-History of the Open Access Movement
New Preprint: Scholar-Led Publishing and the Pre-History of the Open Access Movement
There is an often-neglected pre-history of open access that can be found in the early DIY publishers of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, including involvement of the humanities and social sciences. Policymakers are advised to keep in mind this separate lineage in the history of open access as the movement goes mainstream.
What a Deleted Profile Tells Us About Wikipedia's Diversity Problem
What a Deleted Profile Tells Us About Wikipedia's Diversity Problem
Clarice Phelps may have been the first African-American woman to help discover a chemical element. For Wikipedia, that wasn't enough.
Elsevier Agrees to First Read-and-Publish Deal
A Norwegian consortium has signed a new kind of subscription deal with Elsevier that includes open-access publishing - a first for the publisher. But the new rights come at a cost.
Meta-Research: Tracking the Popularity and Outcomes of All BioRxiv Preprints
Meta-Research: Tracking the Popularity and Outcomes of All BioRxiv Preprints
The growth of preprints in the life sciences has been reported widely and is driving policy changes for journals and funders, but little quantitative information has been published about preprint usage. Here, we report how we collected and analyzed data on all 37,648 preprints uploaded to bioRxiv.org, the largest biology-focused preprint server, in its first five years.
Plagiarizing Names?
A new trend in scientific misconduct involves listing fake coauthors on one’s publication. I trace some of the incentives behind faking coauthors, using them to highlight important changes in global science publishing like the increasingly important source of credibility provided by institutional affiliations, which may begin to function like ‘brands’.
EU Students Could Face Higher Fees to Study in UK from 2020
Higher education groups call on government to clarify its policy on tuition costs
Rein in the Four Horsemen of Irreproducibility
Threats to reproducibility, recognized but unaddressed for decades, might finally be brought under control. The four horsemen of the reproducibility apocalypse being: publication bias, low statistical power, P-value hacking and HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known).
It's 2019. Academic Papers Should Be Free.
Libraries and funding agencies are finally flexing their muscles against journal paywalls. Authors should follow suit.
Towards Persistent Identification of Conferences
Conference talks are a key element in scholarly communication. It is the primary mechanism for sharing research results and getting feedback. However, conferences in most disciplines never reached the same level of maturity as traditional journal publications in terms of quality management, which led to challenges like fraudulent conferences. There is need for a better control mechanism that can deliver credible information about conferences.
"A New Form of Plagiarism:" When Researchers Fake Co-Authors' Names
There’s a new publishing trend in town, says Mario Biagioli: Faking co-authors’ names. Biagioli, distinguished professor of law and science and technology studies and director of the Center for Innovation Studies at the University of California, Davis, writes that it’s “the emergence of a new form of plagiarism that reflects the new metrics-based economy of scholarly publishing.” We asked him a few questions about what he’s found, and why authors might do this.
Open Access: 'no Evidence' That Zero Embargo Periods Harm Publishers
Debate around embargo periods heightens as Plan S deadline draws near. "Embargoes are just there to serve the interests of the publishers” says Robert-Jan Smits, the former lead architect of Plan S who is now president of Eindhoven University of Technology.
Sexual Harassment is Pervasive in US Physics Programmes
Survey of undergraduate women finds that most experienced some type of unwanted sexual attention during their physics studies. "A lot of times, people study how women can change to better fit in a field or be more successful. Perhaps physics needs to think about changing itself.”
Opinion: Toward an International Definition of Citizen Science
What exactly qualifies as "citizen science" (CS)? It is interpreted in various ways and takes different forms with different degrees of participation. In fact, the label CS is currently assigned to research activities either by project principal investigators themselves or by research funding agencies.
Networking for Introverted Scientists
Networking is a crucial skill for all scientists. Ruth Gotian offers tips for those who struggle to make it work.
What Words Are Worth: National Science Foundation Grant Abstracts Indicate Award Funding
What Words Are Worth: National Science Foundation Grant Abstracts Indicate Award Funding
Can word patterns from grant abstracts predict National Science Foundation (NSF) funding? The data describe a clear relationship between word patterns and funding magnitude: Grant abstracts that are longer than the average abstract, contain fewer common words, and are written with more verbal certainty receive more money.
The Disciplines Where No Black People Earn Ph.D.s
In more than a dozen academic fields-largely STEM related-not a single black student earned a doctoral degree in the US in 2017.
Is Blinded Review Enough? How Gendered Outcomes Arise Even Under Anonymous Evaluation
Is Blinded Review Enough? How Gendered Outcomes Arise Even Under Anonymous Evaluation
Blinded review is an increasingly popular approach to reducing bias and increasing diversity in the selection of people and projects. We explore the impact of blinded review on gender inclusion in research grant proposals submitted to the Gates Foundation from 2008-2017. Despite blinded review, female applicants receive significantly lower scores.
Rare Case of Gender Parity in Academia
The results of this study strongly suggest that when male and female authors publish articles that are comparably positioned to receive citations, their publications do in fact accrue citations at the same rate. This raises the question: Why would gender matter “everywhere but here”?
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) IF/THEN Ambassadors
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) IF/THEN Ambassadors
The AAAS IF/THEN Ambassadors program furthers women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics by empowering current innovators and inspiring the next generation of pioneers.
Making Reproducibility Reproducible
Modern data science requires reproducible and functional work environments, not just ephemeral re-execution for validation.
Congress Wants to Protect You from Biased Algorithms, Deepfakes, and Other Bad AI
Only a few legislators really know what they're talking about, but it's a start.
Open Access Publishing: New Evidence on Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors
On Friday, Ithaka S+R released the latest cycle of our long-standing US Faculty Survey which has tracked the changing research, teaching, and publishing practices of higher education faculty members on a triennial basis since 2000. Here, some of the key findings around open access are higlighted. Especially among early career researchers, real-world incentives remain misaligned — and indeed appear to be moving further out of alignment — with the drive towards open access.
Researcher to Reader (R2R) Debate: Is Sci-Hub Good or Bad for Scholarly Communication?
Researcher to Reader (R2R) Debate: Is Sci-Hub Good or Bad for Scholarly Communication?
Transcript of a debate held at the 2019 Researcher to Reader Conference, on the resolution 'Sci-Hub Does More Good Than Harm to Scholarly Communication.'
Think You Can't Negotiate Your Job Offer or Postdoc Position? Think Again
Think You Can't Negotiate Your Job Offer or Postdoc Position? Think Again
Advice for early-career researchers from a negotiation expert.
Figure Errors, Sloppy Science, and Fraud: Keeping Eyes on Your Data
Figure Errors, Sloppy Science, and Fraud: Keeping Eyes on Your Data
Recent reports suggest that there has been an increase in the number of retractions and corrections of published articles due to post-publication detection of problematic data. Moreover, fraudulent data and sloppy science have long-term effects on the scientific literature and subsequent projects based on false and unreproducible claims. The JCI introduced several data screening checks for manuscripts prior to acceptance in an attempt to reduce the number of post-publication corrections and retractions, with the ultimate goal of increasing confidence in the published papers.
Universities and Research Transparency: Are Times Changing?
As journals, societies, and funders have engaged with the reproducibility movement, we are starting to see early signs that university policies are moving in the right direction as well.
Interview - Brian Nosek on Open Science
Jonathan and Chris interview Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology and the co-founder and director of the Center for Open Science. They discuss problems and solutions in modern scientific research, such as committing scientists.
To Save Life on Earth, Here's the $100 Billion-a-year Solution
There have been five mass extinctions in the history of the Earth. But in the 21st century, scientists now estimate that society must urgently come to grips this coming decade to stop the very first human-made biodiversity catastrophe.
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