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Peer review is an important part of the scientific process, but traditional peer review at journals is coming under increased scrutiny for its inefficiency and lack of transparency. As preprints become more widely used and accepted, they raise the possibility of rethinking the peer-review process. Preprints are enabling new forms of peer review that have the potential to be more thorough, inclusive, and collegial than traditional journal peer review, and to thus fundamentally shift the culture of peer review toward constructive collaboration. In this Consensus View, we make a call to action to stakeholders in the community to accelerate the growing momentum of preprint sharing and provide recommendations to empower researchers to provide open and constructive peer review for preprints.

Detailed method descriptions are essential for reproducibility, research evaluation, and effective data reuse. We summarize the key recommendations for life sciences researchers and research institutions described in the European Commission PRO-MaP report. Essential details about study methods are often missing from academic research papers in the life sciences, which can adversely affect reproducibility, undermine trust and impair researchers' ability to reuse methods and data. This Perspective article describes PRO-MaP (Promoting Reusable and Open Methods And Protocols), which aims to increase and improve the reporting of detailed, structured and open methods and reusable step-by-step protocols in the life sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars across disciplines increasingly hear calls for more open and collaborative approaches to scientific research. The concept of Open Innovation in Science (OIS) provides a framework that integrates dispersed research efforts aiming to understand the antecedents, contingencies, and consequences of applying open and collaborative research practices. While the OIS framework has already been taken up by science of science scholars, its conceptual underpinnings require further specification. In this essay, we critically examine the OIS concept and bring to light two key aspects: 1) how OIS builds upon Open Innovation (OI) research by adopting its attention to boundary-crossing knowledge flows and by adapting other concepts developed and researched in OI to the science context, as exemplified by two OIS cases in the area of research funding; 2) how OIS conceptualises knowledge flows across boundaries. While OI typically focuses on well-defined organisational boundaries, we argue that blurry and even invisible boundaries between communities of practice may more strongly constrain flows of knowledge related to openness and collaboration in science. Given the uptake of this concept, this essay brings needed clarity to the meaning of OIS, which has no particular normative orientation towards a close coupling between science and industry. We end by outlining the essay's contributions to OI and the science of science, as well as to science practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable resources are being invested in strategies to facilitate the sharing of data across domains, with the aim of addressing inefficiencies and biases in scientific research and unlocking potential for science-based innovation. Still, we know too little about what determines whether scientific researchers actually make use of the unprecedented volume of data being shared. This study characterizes the factors influencing researcher data reuse in terms of their relationship to a specific research project, and introduces subjectification as the mechanism by which these influencing factors are activated. Based on our analysis of semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 24 data reusers and intermediaries, we find that while both project-independent and project-dependent factors may have a direct effect on a single instance of data reuse, they have an indirect effect on recurring data reuse as mediated by subjectification. We integrate our findings into a model of recurring data reuse behavior that presents subjectification as the mechanism by which influencing factors are activated in a propensity to engage in data reuse. Our findings hold scientific implications for the theorization of researcher data reuse, as well as practical implications around the role of settings for subjectification in bringing about and sustaining changes in researcher behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles (EV) has triggered an unprecedented interest in this metal. Although there is asignificant history in the scientific literature regarding lithium mining in Quebec between 1950–1980, very few studies document the current state of the art and address the possibility of the province integrating alocal production chain oriented towards the EV battery market. This paper presents Quebec's position and analyses its needs and potential market through aliterature review focusing on the main opportunities to produce domestic spodumene concentrates, as well as the major challenges the province will have to face to make the most of its competitive advantages. Furthermore, it provides an updated list of lithium mineral resources and reserves in Quebec, in compliance with NI 43–101. The results show that Quebec holds 94.1% and 85.8% of all Canadian mineral reserves and resources, respectively. The paper also provides an overview of the lithium industry in the province and compares its status with other Canadian jurisdictions. Quebec lithium mines would benefit if their production could be directly integrated with other local or nearby partners, generating ajoint benefit throughout the manufacturing chain of lithium-ion batteries for the EV market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid caps on federal research funding, lingering worries over a reproducibility crisis, and an uptick in antiscience attitudes coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, social scientists in the United States might be forgiven for feeling a bit glum. Accordingly, I How Social Science Got Better i opens with a positionality statement, in which Grossmann reflects on how his own biography and the preoccupations of his field shape the kinds of questions he is inclined to ask and the answers he finds satisfying. While a majority of his survey respondents perceived that social science research is becoming more empirical, quantitative, and causal in nature, "cultural anthropologists were the only major subfield in any discipline to perceive research as becoming more theoretical, qualitative, and descriptive" (p. 61). [Extracted from the article]

Earlier this year, a study of the effects of heterologous boost immunization against COVID-19 was published in I PLOS Medicine i [[1]]. There is also clear evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic led to an uptick in preprint sharing by health science researchers, with as many as 5,000 COVID-19 preprints posted in a single month at its peak [[6]]. PLOS and medRxiv In 2019, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) launched medRxiv, a dedicated preprint server for manuscripts in the medical, clinical, and related health sciences. [Extracted from the article]

Critically cued to a political moment at which "the rural" across diverse North American locales is taken to be a singular, homogeneous place, this introduction to the special issue explores the value of comparative inquiry into settings and subject positions that index the rural in markedly different ways. It does so through the conceit of an anthropological almanac: a genre of forecasting through brief, necessarily ephemeral provocations, which both register the uneven production of space and value across their contexts and illuminate social transformations that extend well beyond the rural. Like other almanacs, ours is marked by a commitment to formal and epistemological pluralism, featuring contributions from scholars across the career cycle and presenting creative narrative selections side by side with more conventionally ethnographic ones. Asserting in the face of widespread precarity that rurality has a consequential future, it looks ahead to ask what the study of rural North America might yet become. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems of control and communication endemic to powered flight have given rise to a range of media forms, which this article proposes to designate aviation media. Today, the maturation and proliferation of unmanned aircraft or drones is reconfiguring the media technologies, infrastructures, and practices on which pilots have previously relied. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with drone pilots and other airspace users in North Dakota, a US state that has courted the unmanned aircraft industry in a bid for economic diversification, this article describes the mundane forms of media labor that underpin the operation of unmanned systems. It also shows how contemporary efforts to achieve an integrated airspace in which both manned and unmanned aircraft can fly depend on the widespread adoption of transmissive media technologies. This demand defines the current media practices of rural airspace users as impediments to progress. By highlighting the politics of aviation media at a moment when drones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, this article reveals how changes in what it means to be a pilot hinge on shifting claims about which media matter most. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comments on an instrument called community needs assessment for documenting and analyzing the information needs of the populations served by a library. The author says that the practice of community needs assessment has evolved over time. It is also mentioned by the author that this practice has got the power to offer valuable insight into the information needs of the populations.

The article presents a report of activities of Simmons chapter of the Progressive Librarians Guild (PLG) in Boston, Massachusetts. The chapter celebrated its first anniversary on May 1, 2007. It conducted film screenings about immigration and a lecture by a founding member of the Boston's Women's Health Book Collective Sally Whelan. Simmons chapter of the PLG has partnered with the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) to offer workshop on making libraries safe spaces for gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) patrons.

Even though large numbers of Americans identify as evangelical Christians, the public library profession in the United States has been reluctant to reach out to evangelicals as a population with distinct information needs. This essay explores some of the possible reasons for this reluctance. The author takes stock of research indicating that evangelical publishers are well-represented in the collections of American public libraries, but calls for the library profession to ramp up its commitment to programming and outreach—even as it refuses to compromise on core values of religious neutrality and intellectual freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Missing or inaccessible information about the methods used in scientific research slows the pace of discovery and hampers reproducibility. Yet little is known about how, why, and under what conditions researchers share detailed methods information, or about how such practices vary across social categories like career stage, field, and region. In this exploratory study, we surveyed 997 active researchers about their attitudes and behaviors with respect to methods sharing. The most common approach reported by respondents was private sharing upon request, but a substantial minority (33%) had publicly shared detailed methods information independently of their research findings. The most widely used channels for public sharing were connected to peer-reviewed publications, while the most significant barriers to public sharing were found to be lack of time and lack of awareness about how or where to share. Insofar as respondents were moderately satisfied with their ability to accomplish various goals associated with methods sharing, we conclude that efforts to increase public sharing may wish to focus on enhancing and building awareness of existing solutions-even as future research should seek to understand the needs of methods users and the extent to which they align with prevailing practices of sharing., Competing Interests: Marcel LaFlamme, James Harney, and Iain Hrynaszkiewicz are employees of PLOS., (© 2024 LaFlamme et al.)