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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. To address this shortcoming, the project Open Editors collects data about academic journal editors on a large scale and structures them into a single dataset. It does so by scraping the websites of 6.090 journals from 17 publishers, thereby structuring publicly available information (names, affiliations, editorial roles etc.) about 478.563 researchers. The project will iterate this webscraping procedure annually to enable insights into the changes of editorial boards over time. All codes and data are made available at GitHub, while the result is browsable at a dedicated website (https://openeditors.ooir.org). This dataset carries wide-ranging implications for meta-scientific investigations into the landscape of scholarly publications, including for bibliometric analyses, and allows for critical inquiries into the representation of diversity and inclusivity. It also contributes to the goal of expanding linked open data within science to evaluate and reflect on the scholarly publication process.

PurposeThe study aims to provide an analytical overview of current innovations in peer review and their potential impacts on scholarly communication.Design/methodology/approachThe authors created a survey that was disseminated among publishers, academic journal editors and other organizations in the scholarly communication ecosystem, resulting in a data set of 95 self-defined innovations. The authors ordered the material using a taxonomy that compares innovation projects according to five dimensions. For example, what is the object of review? How are reviewers recruited, and does the innovation entail specific review foci?FindingsPeer review innovations partly pull in mutually opposed directions. Several initiatives aim to make peer review more efficient and less costly, while other initiatives aim to promote its rigor, which is likely to increase costs; innovations based on a singular notion of “good scientific practice” are at odds with more pluralistic understandings of scientific quality; and the idea of transparency in peer review is the antithesis to the notion that objectivity requires anonymization. These fault lines suggest a need for better coordination.Originality/valueThis paper presents original data that were analyzed using a novel, inductively developed, taxonomy. Contrary to earlier research, the authors do not attempt to gauge the extent to which peer review innovations increase the “reliability” or “quality” of reviews (as defined according to often implicit normative criteria), nor are they trying to measure the uptake of innovations in the routines of academic journals. Instead, they focus on peer review innovation activities as a distinct object of analysis.

Der Artikel untersucht die Begriffe und Konzepte, die in der ersten Dekade des Erscheinens der Zeitschrift für Politische Theorie (ZPTh) diskutiert wurden. Dafür wurden die Schlagworte aller Forschungsartikel gesammelt und aufbereitet, um eine Netzwerkanalyse durchzuführen. Der Fokus der Analyse liegt auf der Rekonstruktion des diskursiven Feldes der politischen Theorie. Zwei zentrale Ergebnisse wurden identifiziert: Erstens bildet das Schlagwortnetzwerk ein fast vollständig zusammenhängendes Netzwerk, welches jedoch an den diskursiven Rändern 'ausfranst', sodass Sub-Diskurse entstehen. Zweitens sind die Schlagworte 'Demokratie' und 'Freiheit' besonders zentral im Netzwerk und bilden den Kern der Debatte. Nichtsdestoweniger finden sich ebenso Diskussionen um Populismus und poststrukturalistische Ansätze im Netzwerk und zeigen damit das Aufkommen neuerer Begriffe und theoretischer Konzepte. Die politische Theoriedebatte in der ZPTh weist demnach eine gewisse Zentrum-Peripherie-Struktur auf und verdeutlicht gleichzeitig einen hohen Grad an Pluralismus in der deutsch-sprachigen Politischen Theorie. Der Artikel trägt zur Selbstreflexion und -verständigung im Fach Politische Theorie bei und bietet erste empirische Erkenntnisse über den Forschungs- und Publikationsstand der deutsch-sprachigen Politischen Theorie. The article examines the terms and concepts discussed in the first decade of the publication of the Zeitschrift für Politische Theorie (ZPTh). For this purpose, the keywords of all research articles have been collected and edited to conduct a network analysis. The analysis focuses on the reconstruction of the discursive field of political theory. Two central results were identified: First, the keyword network forms an almost completely connected network, which, however, 'frays' at the discursive margins, so that sub-discourses emerge. Second, the keywords 'democracy' and 'freedom' are particularly central to the network and form the core of the political theory debate. Nevertheless, discussions on populism and post-structuralist approaches are also found in the network, thus demonstrating the emergence of new concepts and themes. The political theory debate in the ZPTh partially exhibits a center-periphery structure and at the same time illustrates a high degree of pluralism in German-based political theory. The article contributes to self-reflection and understanding in the field of political theory and offers first empirical insights into the state of research and publication of German-based political theory.

Research on Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications has spread over many scientific disciplines. Scientists have tested the power of intelligent algorithms developed to predict (or learn from) natural, physical and social phenomena. This also applies to crime-related research problems. Nonetheless, studies that map the current state of the art at the intersection between AI and crime are lacking. What are the current research trends in terms of topics in this area? What is the structure of scientific collaboration when considering works investigating criminal issues using machine learning, deep learning, and AI in general? What are the most active countries in this specific scientific sphere? Using data retrieved from the Scopus database, this work quantitatively analyzes 692 published works at the intersection between AI and crime employing network science to respond to these questions. Results show that researchers are mainly focusing on cyber-related criminal topics and that relevant themes such as algorithmic discrimination, fairness, and ethics are considerably overlooked. Furthermore, data highlight the extremely disconnected structure of co-authorship networks. Such disconnectedness may represent a substantial obstacle to a more solid community of scientists interested in these topics. Additionally, the graph of scientific collaboration indicates that countries that are more prone to engage in international partnerships are generally less central in the network. This means that scholars working in highly productive countries (e.g. the United States, China) tend to mostly collaborate domestically. Finally, current issues and future developments within this scientific area are also discussed., Comment: 25 pages, 12 figures, pre-print (currently R&R in JCSS)

Peer review is embedded in the core of our knowledge generation systems, perceived as a method for establishing quality or scholarly legitimacy for research, while also often distributing academic prestige and standing on individuals. Despite its critical importance, it curiously remains poorly understood in a number of dimensions. In order to address this, we have analysed peer review to assess where the major gaps in our theoretical and empirical understanding of it lie. We identify core themes including editorial responsibility, the subjectivity and bias of reviewers, the function and quality of peer review, and the social and epistemic implications of peer review. The high-priority gaps are focused around increased accountability and justification in decision-making processes for editors and developing a deeper, empirical understanding of the social impact of peer review. Addressing this at the bare minimum will require the design of a consensus for a minimal set of standards for what constitutes peer review, and the development of a shared data infrastructure to support this. Such a field requires sustained funding and commitment from publishers and research funders, who both have a commitment to uphold the integrity of the published scholarly record. We use this to present a guide for the future of peer review, and the development of a new research discipline based on the study of peer review.

Peer review of scientific manuscripts before publication is essential in scholarly publishing, and most active researchers hold relationships with a number of journals as both an author and a reviewer. There have been several studies focusing on gender balance in academic research and authorship, but fewer studies on our role as reviewers. Publons is a commercial website run by Clarivate Analytics that allows researchers to track and verify their peer review activities and be recognized for it. The platform features over 2 million researchers and 6.9 million reviews for more than 5,000 partnered journals, listing the most active reviewers as “top reviewers”. Our study focuses on gender representation in this ‘top reviewer’ group while also looking at the countries, regions and research fields they represent, as well as the relationship between their roles as authors and reviewers. The results show that male reviewers dominate in almost all countries, regions, and research fields. Male reviewers generally contribute to review work more frequently than females; however, female reviewers write longer reviews. The correlations between reviewing activity and research activity are generally weak overall and within specific research fields. This may reflect that active reviewers are not necessarily the most productive researchers in their fields. What clearly emerges from our results is the need for more concern over gender representation in the quality assurance and gatekeeping functions of scholarly publishing.

The paper is focused on practical advice for the use of bibliometrics in research assessment in the social sciences. Guidelines are presented from three official sources of advice with a particular focus on individual-level assessments of applications for positions, promotions, and external funding. General problems with applying bibliometrics in evaluations of the social sciences are also discussed, as well as the specific problems with using the Journal Impact Factor and the H-Index. The conclusion is not that bibliometrics should be avoided in research assessment of social scientists. Used with care and competence, bibliometrics can be a valuable extra source of information, but not replace judgement in research evaluation.

This research focuses on examining the availability of Virtual Reference Services in academic libraries in the Middle East. Virtual Reference Services could be provided in several ways, for example: by telephone, email, live chat, video conferencing, texting, and recently using social media applications like Twitter. This research will explore the presence of Virtual Reference Services in Middle Eastern academic libraries, and the ways in which they are presented. 55 academic libraries’ websites have been examined with a checklist that includes: the nature of reference services available, the time it took to locate the Virtual Reference Services, the text included in the link to describe the services, and the number of links navigated on the webpage to find the reference services. The main objective of this research is to examine the use of Virtual Reference Services in Middle Eastern university libraries and to increase the awareness of the libraries’ resources and services. Findings of this study showed that live chat as a Virtual Reference Service in the Middle East is not very prevalent. In addition, it was found that email as a means of virtual communication is used most commonly by the academic libraries that provided Virtual Reference Services.

In this paper, we analyze a relatively recent commercial strategy devised by large academic publishers, consisting in the branding of their most prestigious scientific journals. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s model of capital conversion, we show how publishers transfer the symbolic capital of an already prestigious journal to derivative journals that capture part of the prestige of the original brand and transform it into new economic capital. As shown by their high impact factors, these new journals, bearing the mark of the original journal in their titles, are rapidly adopted by researchers. Through manuscript transfer mechanisms, publishers also use part of the papers rejected by their flagship and highly selective journals to recycle and monetize them in lower impact or open access derivative journals of their lists.

This essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing, with special attention to the example of Elsevier. A scholarly publisher can be defined as a surveillance publisher if it derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from prediction products, fueled by data extracted from researcher behavior. The essay begins by tracing the Google search engine’s roots in bibliometrics, alongside a history of the citation analysis company that became, in 2016, Clarivate. The point is to show the co-evolution of scholarly communication and the surveillance advertising economy. The essay then refines the idea of surveillance publishing by engaging with the work of Shoshana Zuboff, Jathan Sadowski, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, and Aziz Huq. The recent history of Elsevier is traced to describe the company’s research-lifecycle data-harvesting strategy, with the aim to develop and sell prediction products to universities and other customers. The essay concludes by considering some of the potential costs of surveillance publishing, as other big commercial publishers increasingly enter the predictive-analytics mark. It is likely, I argue, that windfall subscription-and-APC profits in Elsevier’s “legacy” publishing business have financed its decade-long acquisition binge in analytics, with the implication that university customers are budgetary victims twice over. The products’ purpose, I stress, is to streamline the top-down assessment and evaluation practices that have taken hold in recent decades, in tandem with the view that the university’s main purpose is to grow regional and national economies. A final pair of concerns is that publishers’ prediction projects may camouflage and perpetuate existing biases in the system—and that scholars may internalize an analytics mindset, one already encouraged by citation counts and impact factors.

In 2016, the United Nations officially launched the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to address urgent global challenges over the next 15 years. Among the seventeen SDGs, Gender Equality (SDG5) is recognized as important for the achievement of the other sixteen goals because gender inequality exists across education, employment opportunities, healthcare facilities, life expectancy, family life, and political participation, thereby holding back the capacity of half of the world’s population to contribute to solutions to the global challenges. This bibliometric study explores gender balance and differences within SDG5 oriented research during the first five years after the implementation of SDG5 in 2016. Unlike most research oriented at other SDGs, this field of research has low activity and a dominance of female researchers. Within the field, male and female researchers focus on partly different topics. Publications by male researchers tend to be more cited while potential readers show more interest in publications by female researchers. This investigation highlights the importance of increasing gender diversity in SDG5-related studies, which is helpful for the achievement of sustainable development.

This paper examined the Indian interest in Sc-hub and LibGen Lawsuit for infringing the copyright of Elsevier Inc, Wiley and ACS. The lawsuit has a potential impact on Indian researchers in freely accessing scholarly publications through Sci-hub and LibGen and thus has raised considerable interest in Indian scientific community. This has been studied through Google Trends and found that there was a constant increased interest in Sci-hub and LibGen search term after the case was taken up for hearing in the Delhi High Court.

The social sciences involve multiple literatures, including journals with a more international and those with a more local orientation. Quality standards in research assessment have largely been borrowed from STEM fields and generally favour internationally oriented journals with high international visibility and scientific impact, to the detriment of other quality dimensions, such as relevance to local communities and researchers or openness of research.In journal lists, this complex spectrum of quality standards is simplified into a one-dimensional arrangement. We provide a typology to characterize journal lists and discuss the usage of journal lists in research assessment, arguing that their values and criteria deserve careful scrutiny and can be studied through systematic comparison.

On December 31, 2020, The National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) released a list of 65 international scientific journals, all of them indexed by the Web of Science, that were said to be potentially in conflict with academic rigor. The list immediately influenced the publication patterns of Chinese researchers. A year later, on December 31, 2021, CAS released a revised and reduced list of 35 questionable journals and said the publishers in the meantime had reacted constructively and improved the procedures of their journals. This study aims to provide an understanding of the motivations and criteria behind the list, partly by reviewing Chinese policy documents and public debates, partly with a quantitative analysis to detect the relative importance of the criteria used to select the journals for the list.

Over the past decade, megajournals have expanded in popularity and established a legitimate niche in academic publishing. Leveraging advantages of digital publishing, megajournals are characterized by large publication volume, broad interdisciplinary scope, and peer review filters that select primarily on scientific soundness as opposed to novelty or originality. These publishing innovations are complementary and/or competitive vis-à-vis traditional journals. We analyze how megajournals (PLOS ONE, Scientific Reports) are represented in different fields relative to prominent generalist journals (Nature, PNAS, Science) and ‘quasi-megajournals’ (Nature Communications, PeerJ). Our results show that both megajournals and prominent traditional journals have distinctive niches, despite the similar interdisciplinary scopes of such journals. These niches – defined by publishing volume and disciplinary diversity – are dynamic and varied over the relatively brief histories of the analyzed megajournals. Although the life sciences are the predominant contributor to megajournals, there is variation in the disciplinary composition of different megajournals. The growth trajectories and disciplinary composition of generalist journals – including megajournals – reflect changing knowledge dissemination and reward structures in science.

Over the past few years, the rate of journal article publication has increased in most academic disciplines - in some cases more than doubling in the past decade. While journal articles are the de facto currency of knowledge production in many science disciplines, social science scholars routinely publish books as well as journal articles. The social sciences have also undergone a rapid transformation towards more quantitative methodologies, thus representing a unique opportunity to study the increased rate of journal article publication in an area where books are also an important mode of dissemination. We studied the publishing activity of social sciences faculty members in 12 disciplines at 290 Ph.D. granting institutions in the United States between 2011 and 2019. In all disciplines, journal articles per person increased between 2011 and 2019 by between 3% and 64%, while books per person decreased by at least 31% and as much as 54%. Overall, early career researchers show the largest increase in rates of journal article production, while senior scholars show the greatest increase in participation in journal article production. Younger scholars appear to have greater publication output, while growing numbers of older scholars turn towards journal articles as a means of disseminating their work in the social sciences. We observe growing uniformity in the disciplinary literatures of the social sciences, which increasingly resemble the physical and biological sciences in terms of publication practices.

In the tables presented here (https://osf.io/myaut/), we show data pertaining to publication rates and publication venues across 170 academic disciplines. We model the publication patterns of faculty members at U.S. research universities at different career stages, and in so doing we hope to provide a nuanced and up-to-date reference for faculty members, administrators, and staff charged with interpreting publication outputs across disciplines and in a comparative context. Not all active scholars in any field will follow the same pattern of publication, and not all articles or books are of equal value: these data do not reflect quality measures. Our goal is not to establish a template against which individual scholars should be measured, but to contextualize a general picture of publication patterns representative of each discipline, with the knowledge that there will be notable individual variations.

This study uses mixed methods – classical citation analysis, altmetric analysis, a survey with researchers as respondents, and text analysis of the abstracts of scientific articles – to investigate gender differences in the aims and impacts of research. We find that male researchers more often value and engage in research mainly aimed at scientific progress, which is more cited. Female researchers more often value and engage in research mainly aimed at contributing to societal progress, which has more abstract views (usage). The gender differences are observed among researchers who work in the same field of research and have the same age and academic position. Our findings have implications for evaluation and funding policies and practices. A critical discussion of how societal engagement versus citation impact is valued, and how funding criteria reflect gender differences, is warranted.

When Covid-19 rushed into our lives, it sent shockwaves across the globe – suddenly we faced “lockdown” – we said goodbye to the way it was but did not understand what this brave new world of isolation and separation would mean and how it would the impact life as we knew it – our identity, relationships and freedoms we enjoyed, and wondered what daily routine post-Covid-19 would look like, while the experiences defining life itself were up for grabs. With social distancing, masks and work from home mandates, the arts and performing arts from theatres, museums, galleries and the public square were shuttered – their very existence challenged and spiralling out of control as staff were laid-off, exhibitions cancelled while concurrently creating an urgency to go online to dwell in cyberspace, the new daily destination.

The goal of this paper is to document how labour is divided and compensated (both monetarily and non-monetarily) in Canadian non-commercial scholarly journals. This study informs future research on sustainability in non-commercial academic publishing. As labour is essential for the continued success of these journals, understanding the extent (i.e., how many positions, how many hours per position), scope (i.e., which tasks are undertaken and who is responsible for them), and cost (monetary or non-monetary) of this labour will be critical in ensuring the sustainability of non-commercial academic journals in Canada. To investigate current practices, the authors distributed a survey to 484 Canadian journals meeting the above inclusion criteria. The survey was composed of two sections: how labour is divided at a journal (i.e., how many positions are there, what are the responsibilities of these positions, and how many work hours per week are dedicated to these positions) and compensation (i.e., does the journal provide monetary or non-monetary compensation to members of its editorial team, which positions receive compensation, and what is the source of these funds). The authors received 119 responses, for a 25 percent response rate. Among the main findings are that the majority of respondents compensate at least one journal position and that the source of these funds comes primarily from sponsoring organizations (i.e., affiliated institutional/university departments and scholarly associations). Additional findings include that the top three most commonly compensated positions are copyeditor, editorial assistant, and managing editor. Compensated positions such as translator, graphic designer, and copyeditor are often contracted out. Task distribution amongst editorial team members varies; however, editors-in-chief and managing editors are responsible for the greatest variety of tasks. Editorial assistants and managing editors tend to work more hours than other positions. Additionally, journal production was related to editorial team size, with larger teams producing more volumes on average than smaller ones. Recurring themes in free-text comments were large workloads, lack of compensation, and lack of recognition. This paper provides empirical evidence of the extent and variation of labour and compensation in Canadian non-commercial scholarly publishing. It provides data on current non-commercial journal practices which will be of interest to library publishers, journal editors, and other stakeholders in Canadian scholarly publishing.

In this article, we analyse a relatively recent commercial strategy used by large academic publishers to capitalize on the brand names of their most prestigious scientific journals. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s model of capital conversion, we explain how publishers transfer the symbolic capital of an already prestigious journal to derivative journals that share in the prestige of the original brand and transform it into new economic capital. As shown by their high impact factors, these newly created journals benefit from the name recognition and reputation of the originals after which they are named. Plus, through a manuscript routing mechanism, the publishers recycle some of the submissions rejected by their highly selective flagship journal by redirecting those manuscripts, along with their reviews, to derivative journals or to one of the lower-impact journals on their list, which may require an article processing charge for publication.

The opening of government in a number of countries has implications for innovation processes and the potential for inclusive development outcomes. After unpacking some of the key thinking around openness proffered by Karl Popper and others, we explore the adoption of open government practices in innovation by considering four important instruments: the opening of innovation and technology policy processes, co-creation and collaborative solution development by civil servants, government entities acting as innovation brokers, and public sector procurement of innovation. Through a case study of South Africa, we highlight how innovation actors prioritise particular values of openness over others. For example, in pushing for more open interaction between state and non-state actors as a more effective way of addressing social challenges, values of legality and impartiality are often minimised. This oversight leads to project failures, legitimacy crises and exploitation of relationships by powerful entities. In response, we suggest that public sector innovation programmes and platforms can more explicitly recognise different values, especially from emergent grassroots innovation networks, and thereby enable sustainable application of open government practices.

Open government has come to be closely associated with innovation for inclusive development (IID). These two areas of practice and research have converged around similar mechanisms aimed at achieving inclusive development outcomes including; open interaction between government, technologists and end-users in the design of policies and services; open, market-oriented approaches to delivering public services and meeting the needs of citizens; and a central role for information and communication technologies (ICTs) in policy development and innovation activities. We argue, however, that an uncritical adoption of open, ICT-oriented practices risks shifting responsibility and trust for governance and development outcomes to largely unaccountable global and national network enterprises. Taking South Africa as our primary focus, including its new White Paper on Science, Technology and Innovation (STI), we note a renewed interest in adopting open government practices in relation to IID. More significant, we suggest, is the emergence of ‘grassroots’, hybrid civic-technology innovation networks at the fringes of formal open government initiatives. This article considers new questions that arise around how these grassroots movements sustain meaningful interaction with mainstream STI processes, how public officials may engage with such movements in order to meet national development outcomes, and the role of ICT in these spaces.

This chapter argues that the benefits of data sharing will accrue more quickly, and will be more significant and more enduring, if researchers make their data “meaningfully accessible.” Data are meaningfully accessible when they can be interpreted and analyzed by scholars far beyond those who generated them. Making data meaningfully accessible requires that scholars take the appropriate steps to prepare their data for sharing, and avail themselves of the increasingly sophisticated infrastructure for publishing and preserving research data. The better other researchers can understand shared data and the more researchers who can access them, the more those data will be re-used for secondary analysis, producing knowledge. Likewise, the richer an understanding an instructor and her students can gain of the shared data being used to teach and learn a particular research method, the more useful those data are for that pedagogical purpose. And the more a scholar who is evaluating the work of another can learn about the evidence that underpins its claims and conclusions, the better their ability to identify problems and biases in data generation and analysis, and the better informed and thus stronger an endorsement of the work they can offer.

In recent decades, another metric has come to the fore that takes a fundamentally different approach to evaluation. This approach measures impact, inferred from the citations accrued by a study. Like reputation, impact may be measured at any level. An individual may be evaluated according to the citations accruing to her publications; a department may be evaluated according to the citations accrued by studies produced by all its faculty; a journal or press may be evaluated according to the citations accrued by all its publications; and so forth. Naturally, there is some inter-dependence among impact measures. A study’s citation-count is apt to be influenced by a journal’s citation-count, for example. Nonetheless, there is a much greater degree of independence among the units being assessed. An implication is that impact-based metrics are more meritocratic than reputational metrics

Meta-scientific surveys at the publisher- and journal-level cannot attain comprehensiveness if they omit large and middle-sized publishers. To hedge against this risk of biased omissions, one would need an exhaustive list of major scientific presses and their journals. Such an inclusive catalogue, however, does not exist yet. This paper explores whether webscraping multiple heterogeneous research-related platforms could fill this gap. In a first step, the project draws from the content coverages of Scopus, Publons, DOAJ and SherpaRomeo to extract a preliminary list of publishers that supposedly possess at least 30 journals. In a second step, the project scrapes each of the publisher’s website to fetch their respective journal portfolios. The outcome is a list of 137 publishers comprising 25.816 journals. Many of the publishers, especially those that operate outside the U.S. and Western Europe, would have been overlooked if one had drawn from merely one or two sources. The catalogue can thus be deemed comprehensive, inclusive and diverse. Despite a few limitations (e.g., the non-uniform distribution of the data, or the difficulty of disambiguating publisher names and their imprints), the dataset can serve as a useful basis for large-scale scientometrics analyses investigating the landscape of academic publishers and scholarly journals.

Sci-Hub a pirated website for scholarly articles have been heavily used in India and other parts of the world. Alexandra Elbakyan, a computer geek and a native of Kazakhstan has created this Sci-hub for providing free access to scholarly publications in 2011. India being one of the top countries in downloading research papers from this website, there was not much literature available on this site to understand its use and popularity. In this study, a survey has been conducted to understand the use and perception of Sci-hub from Indian librarians’ perspective. Lack of institutional access to scholarly articles, journals escalating cost, and easy & free access to paywalled content were the primary reasons for using this site, the study found. Another interesting result was that 30% of the survey respondents opined that it was morally and legally wrong to download articles from Sci-Hub.

Both Web of Science and Scopus are critical components of the current research ecosystem, providing the basis for university and global rankings as well as for bibliometric research. However, both platforms are structurally biased against research produced in non-Western countries, non-English language research, and research from the arts, humanities, and social sciences. This viewpoint emphasizes the damage that these systematic inequities inflict upon global knowledge production systems and the need for research funders to unite to form a more globally representative, non-profit, community-controlled infrastructure for the global pool of research knowledge.

Background: The researcher’s need to construct the state-of-the-art of a topic in Earth sciences is the only plausible reason to use scientific databases. However, nowadays, the primary function of such databases is often mixed up, confused with functions that are not intended for it, such as to select content based on language (e.g. English vs. Non-English issue), as well as to rank publications based on certain metrics. It is urgent to prove the fallacy of the trending use of the indexation.Objectives: This study aims to describe empirically whether there are differences in document distribution, openly accessible documents, and geographical coverages of Earth sciences topics based on searched scientific databases, as the basis for proposing new perspectives in Earth sciences research assessment.Methods: Document selection using ‘Earth sciences’ keywords in English and native languages was done on ten databases. Quantitative-descriptive design with a frequency analysis technique was employed. Results: (1) The number of English-written articles in international databases significantly exceeded the number of those written in native languages that were detected in national-level databases; (2) The sum of open access (OA) articles in national databases is higher than in other databases; (3) The geographical coverages of Earth sciences documents are unbalanced between countries when comparing retrievals from closed-commercial databases with the other databases. Conclusions: Earth sciences is one of the geographical sensitive field sciences that is closely needed to solve local problems with local physical and social settings. A combination of quantitative and qualitative measurements are very much needed in research performance assessment. Keywords: database bias; indexation; national database; Earth Science; Indonesia

The emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic has led to the publication of many scientific papers. The goal of the present research was to analyse these papers using the Altmetric Attention Score (AAS). Statistics for 100 publications with high AAS scores were selected and exported from the Dimension database on May 22nd 2020. The major findings were that these publications were published in 34 different journals or preprint repositories. More than one-third of the total of 657, 350 posts were collected from the Twitter platform. The top contributing countries were China, followed by the USA. The paper “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” by Andersen, Kristian G., etal., 2020 had the highest AAS (33 514. These findings may help others to design studies of the AAS in Covid-19 literature and compare them with traditional citations.

The spirit and philosophy of Open Access are in sync with FAIFE owing to its visible role in sharing intellectual freedom for building information democracy. But with the exponential increase of cost of scholarly research publication and capture of a huge portion of publication industry by for-profit publishers create a void between the research and researcher, information and seeker, educator and learner, query and the solutions. This paper illustrates the hidden cause of this crisis in scholarly communication and gives a brief understanding of total open access movement, from past initiative to future plans. Additionally, this paper thoroughly pointed out the tools and platforms which can be used by educators and researchers to promote this open access movement with great success. The paper reflects the value of open access movement in the way to eliminate the communication gap in terms of scholarly research work.

Disasters, either natural and man-made, adversely affect humanity including human lives and, the knowledge creation, as a standard of the progress of civilization. The development of education of a country depends upon the present economics, academic structure, research facilities, health issues and involvement of government ministry. The outbreak of present pandemic Coronavirus (official designation COVID-19 or 2019-nCov) has a clear negative impact on academic and research activities. It creates a global threat and people keep themselves at home to maintain social distancing for reducing the outbreak of community transmission. This COVID-19 epidemic is neither the first and confidently nor the last epidemic that will pose a threat to the conventional education system. Both the effects of education i.e. direct and indirect effects are a subject risk to such pandemic and other disaster vulnerability. Instead, efforts should be made to find measures which can ensure the continuation of the education system for posterity. This requirement of an alternate way of learning proves us for the transformation of the learning process from conventional to digital. The primary requirement of this transformation is the availability of a sophisticated and multitasking platform for online learning, which conforms A5 solutions. This A5 implies the 5A���s of access, i.e. Availability, Adequacy, Accessibility, Affordability and Appropriateness; which bridges the digital divide by ensuring the equal access of web for all. In this paper, the authors have discussed the tool FCC (Free Conference Call), after evaluation and comparison which can use by learners and educators as an alternative solution of the physical classroom. This is a dissemination or sharing platform and most versatile and comprehensive free web-conferencing solution which can be used by academic institutions and educators for online classes. In addition, this paper also go through the comparative study of FCC and other known web conferencing tools to clarify the judgement of its acceptance., {"references":["Alolod, G. ., Gardiner, H., Agu, C., Turner, J. ., Kelly, P. ., Siminoff, L. ., Gordon, E. ., Norden, R., Daly, T. ., Benitez, A., Hernandez, I., Guinansaca, N., Winther, L. ., Bergeron, C. ., Montalvo, A., & Gonzalez, T. (2020). A culturally targeted eLearning module on organ donation (promotoras de Donación): Design and development. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22, Article 1. https://doi.org/10.2196/15793","Ansong-Gyimah, K. (2020). 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Commercial publishing houses continue to make unbounded profits while exploiting the free labour of researchers through peer review. If publishers are to be compensated financially for the value that they add within a capitalist system, then all others who add value should be similarly, including reviewers. I propose that peer review should be included as a professional service by research institutes in their contracts with commercial publishers. This would help to recognise the value of peer review, and begin to shape it into a functional form of quality control.

This is an early-stage working paper where I share ideas, thoughts, and results from an ongoing project about research data publishing at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. In this initial draft, I’m sharing the results from a small study of how common data publishing is among researchers affiliated with UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

University Libraries play a crucial role in moving towards Open Science, contributing to more transparent, reproducible and reusable research. The Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) at Leiden University (LU) library is a scholarly lab that promotes open science literacy among Leiden’s scholars by two complementary strategies: existing top-down structures are used to provide training and services, while bottom-up initiatives from the research community are actively supported by offering the CDS’s expertise and facilities. An example of how bottom-up initiatives can blossom with the help of library structures such as the CDS is ReproHack. ReproHack – a reproducibility hackathon – is a grass-root initiative by young scholars with the goal of improving research reproducibility in three ways. First, hackathon attendees learn about reproducibility tools and challenges by reproducing published results and providing feedback to authors on their attempt. Second, authors can nominate their work and receive feedback on their reproducibility efforts. Third, the collaborative atmosphere helps building a community interested in making their own research reproducible. A first ReproHack in the Netherlands took place on November 30th, 2019, co-organised by the CDS at the LU Library with 44 participants from the fields of psychology, engineering, biomedicine, and computer science. For 19 papers, 24 feedback forms were returned and five papers were reported as successfully reproduced. Besides the researchers’ learning experience, the event led to recommendations on how to enhance research reproducibility. The ReproHack format therefore provides an opportunity for libraries to improve scientific reproducibility through community engagement.

Our scientific evaluation system is in a state of crisis. Every researcher has heard of the “publish and/or perish” culture: the fact that individual researchers are evaluated primarily based on the journals that we publish in, rather than any intrinsic merit or quality of our work. Countless pages in newspapers, blogs, and journals have been written criticising this evaluation system, and in particular, the pernicious use of journal brands and metrics like the Journal Impact Factor. Here, we discuss how the unholy trinity of Web of Science, New Public Management, and citation metrics combined to create this dysfunction. We propose three potential solutions to simultaneously combating its threat: policing the police; opening up peer review; and starting from scratch. We believe that through systemic evaluation reform, science can begin to break free from the 'tyranny of metrics', and begin to adopt a new functional role within society, particularly in the context of the United Nations Sustainable Agenda 2030.

One problem with any strategy is that it must be agreed upon, and if not this creates a first-mover tension between engaged stakeholder groups. Therefore, understanding the potential risks associated with a move to open scholarship at a combined individual and institutional level can help to mitigate them and overcome the collective action problem. This research proposal is based upon the Foundations for Open Scholarship Strategy Development, which aimed to agree on a broad, international strategy for the implementation of open scholarship that meets the needs of different national and regional communities, but also works globally. As part of this project, we summarised key internal and external conditions that open scholarship faces, which represent potential focal points of future discussion, research, and policy development. Here, we distill this into key limitations to investigate.

Article 27 of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights states that:(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

When the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak began on January 31, 2020, no-one could have anticipated the impact that it would have on our scholarly communication and publishing systems. That is, perhaps, unless you work on open source software. Right now, global research communities are united to collaborate on solving the threat of the pandemic, sharing resources and knowledge more efficiently and effective than ever before, a process broadly described as ‘open scholarship’ (Dunleavy, 2020). This is essentially akin to how free and open source software (FOSS) communities have been operating now for decades (Willinsky, 2005). Recently, we participated in a “massively open online paper”, or MOOP, that explored the intersections between FOSS and open scholarship (Tennant, Agarwal, et al., 2020). Here, we want to summarise our key findings from that project, and place them in the context of the current outbreak. Critically, this pandemic shows us that many of the pervasive and systemic issues surrounding the evaluation, valuation, use and operationalisation of “openness” in scholarship can be extremely easily bypassed when the social demand and urgency is there, thus showing that the primary barriers towards open scholarship are inherently political and not technical.

Traditional methods of scholarly publishing and communication are ineffective in meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has demonstrated that, in times of need, the global research community can activate and pool its knowledge and resources to collaborate on solving problems. The use of innovative Web-based technologies, including open source software, data-sharing archives, open collaboration methods, and the liberation of thousands of relevant research articles from proprietary sources show us that the fundamental components of a fully open system are readily available, technologically efficient and cost-effective. If we are to achieve the SDGs by 2030, systematic reform and explicit adoption of open scholarship strategies at scale is necessary. We propose that the United Nations and parallel entities take a position of leadership by creating or funding an organisation or federated alliance of organisations to implement these reforms.

The open access (OA) publication movement aims to present research literature to the public at no cost and with no restrictions. While the democratization of access to scholarly literature is a primary focus of the movement, it remains unclear whether OA has uniformly democratized the corpus of freely available research, or whether authors who choose to publish in OA venues represent a particular subset of scholars - those with access to resources enabling them to afford article processing charges (APCs). We investigated the number of OA articles with article processing charges (APC OA) authored by 182,320 scholars with known demographic and institutional characteristics at American research universities across 11 broad fields of study. Results show, in general, that the likelihood for a scholar to author an APC OA article increases with male gender, employment at a prestigious institution (AAU member universities), association with a STEM discipline, greater federal research funding, and more advanced career stage (i.e., higher professorial rank). Participation in APC OA publishing appears to be skewed toward scholars with greater access to resources and job security.

Open Science has become commonly understood in terms of its practices. Open Access, Open Data, and Open Source software are all becoming commonplace in academia. However, unlike the Free and Open Source Software movement, Open Science seems to have become largely divorced from its pluralistic philosophical and ethical foundations, which seem to have reignited from the humanities at the turn of the Millennium. To close this gap, I propose a new value-based proposition for Open Science, that is akin to the “four fundamental freedoms” of Richard Stallman that catalysed the Free Software movement. In doing so, I hope to provide a more common, unified, and human understanding to notions of openness in science.

It is time for a new type of mandate. Plan S has catalysed all sorts of action, and confusion, in the world of scholarly publishing. But it lacks teeth. Instead of encouraging libraries and research institutes to continue to prop up a dysfunctional and out-dated system with taxpayer money, research funders should mandate institutes to create a fully open, modern, technical scholarly infrastructure. This would help to overcome so much of the inertia behind the adoption of open research practices, while simultaneously resolving outstanding issues with reliability, affordability, and functionality in scholarly communication.

There is no clear-cut boundary between Free and Open Source Software and Open Scholarship, and the histories, practices, and fundamental principles between the two remain complex. In this study, we critically appraise the intersections and differences between the two movements. Based on our thematic comparison here, we conclude several key things. First, there is substantial scope for new communities of practice to form within scholarly communities that place sharing and collaboration/open participation at their focus. Second, Both the principles and practices of FOSS can be more deeply ingrained within scholarship, asserting a balance between pragmatism and social ideology. Third, at the present, Open Scholarship risks being subverted and compromised by commercial players. Fourth, the shift and acceleration towards a system of Open Scholarship will be greatly enhanced by a concurrent shift in recognising a broader range of practices and outputs beyond traditional peer review and research articles. In order to achieve this, we propose the formulation of a new type of institutional mandate. We believe that there is substantial need for research funders to invest in sustainable open scholarly infrastructure, and the communities that support them, to avoid the capture and enclosure of key research services that would prevent optimal researcher behaviours. Such a shift could ultimately lead to a healthier scientific culture, and a system where competition is replaced by collaboration, resources (including time and people) are shared and acknowledged more efficiently, and the research becomes inherently more rigorous, verified, and reproducible.

A grievance expressed by some PhD students and Postdocs is that science works like a pyramid scheme: Young scientists are encouraged to invest into building scientific careers although the chances at remaining in science are extremely slim. This issue is investigated quantitatively by connecting it with the way authorship on papers is distributed. I analyzed a large bibliographic dataset made available by Microsoft under the name Academic Graph to create a histogram with the number of articles an author produces per year. The histogram has the shape of a pyramid, and different layers in it correlate with positions in the academic hierarchy. The super-prolific authors at the top of the pyramid with more than 40 publications per year are usually heads of large institutes with many subgroups and large numbers of PhD students, while the bottom of the pyramid is populated by PhD students and Postdocs with less than 5 publications per year. The mechanism that allows 'manager scientists' to appropriate publications generated in their sphere of influence is related to other issues, such as the evaluation of scientific performance based on scientometric indicators and the lenient enforcement of authorship rules. A new index, the Ponzi factor, is proposed to quantify this phenomenon.

Journal evaluation systems reflect how new insights are critically reviewed and published, and the prestige and impact of a discipline’s journals is a key metric in many research assessment, performance evaluation, and funding systems. With the expansion of China’s research and innovation systems and its rise as a major contributor to global innovation, journal evaluation has become an especially important issue. In this paper, we first describe the history and background of journal evaluation in China and then systematically introduce and compare the most currently influential journal lists and indexing services. These are the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD), the Journal Partition Table (JPT), the AMI Comprehensive Evaluation Report (AMI), the Chinese S&T Journal Citation Report (CJCR), “A Guide to the Core Journals of China” (GCJC), the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI), and the World Academic Journal Clout Index (WAJCI). Some other influential lists produced by government agencies, professional associations, and universities are also briefly introduced. Through the lens of these systems, we provide comprehensive coverage of the tradition and landscape of the journal evaluation system in China and the methods and practices of journal evaluation in China with some comparisons to how other countries assess and rank journals.

The objective of this Research Perspectives article is to promote policy change amongst journals, scholars and students with a vested interest in hypothetico-deductive information systems (IS) research. We are concerned about the design, analysis, reporting and reviewing of quantitative IS studies that draw on null hypothesis significance testing (NHST). We observe that debates about misinterpretations, abuse, and issues with NHST, while having persisted for about half a century, remain largely absent in IS. We find this an untenable position for a discipline with a proud quantitative tradition. We discuss traditional and emergent threats associated with the application of NHST and examine how they manifest in recent IS scholarship. To encourage the development of new standards for NHST in hypothetico-deductive IS research, we develop a balanced account of possible actions that are implementable short-term or long-term and that incentivize or penalize specific practices. To promote an immediate push for change, we also develop two sets of guidelines that IS scholars can adopt right away.

In the past few decades, there has been increasing interest in public-private collaboration, which has motivated lengthy discussion of the implications of collaboration in general, and co-authorship in particular, for the scientific impact of research. However, despite this strong interest in the topic, there is little systematic knowledge on the relation between public-private collaboration and citation impact. This paper examines the citation impact of papers involving public-private collaboration in comparison with academic research papers. We examine the role of a variety of factors, such as international collaboration, the number of co-authors, academic disciplines, and whether the research is mainly basic or applied. We first examine citation impact for a comprehensive dataset covering all Web of Science journal articles with at least one Danish author in the period 1995–2013. Thereafter, we examine whether citation impact for individual researchers differs when collaborating with industry compared to work only involving academic researchers, by looking at a fixed group of researchers that have both engaged in public-private collaborations and university-only publications. For national collaboration papers, we find no significant difference in citation impact for public-only and public-private collaborations. For international collaboration, we observe much higher citation impact for papers involving public-private collaboration.

This study presents the first bibliometric analysis of the subject of Digital Transformation (DT) in Latin America (LATAM). Social network analysis and text-mining was implemented. It was found that the co-authorship network is geographically diverse and influenced by Brazil and Mexico, yet disconnected from the majority of LATAM countries. Research output and impact are increasing but still far from global dynamics and not yet permeated by the open access agenda. Finally, the most consolidated research topics associated with DT are “Industry 4.0”, “smart manufacturing” and the “Internet of Things”.

Bibliometric links between scientific publications may exhibit redundancy (i.e. expectable co-occurrences between publications) or variety (i.e. unique and original reference patterns). The roots of aggregate redundant or variety-prone citation interlinkages may lie in the way how researchers find relevant publications. But how can we make sense of the potential landscape of all such research discovery tools? This paper conceptualizes a typology based on the common variable of bibliometric redundancy/variety. On the redundancy-reproducing end of the spectrum are machines that draw from co-citations or keyword queries (such as academic search engines and paper recommender systems). The variety-end harbours services that enable categorial browsing or that suggest publications randomly (such as journals’ tables of contents or random paper bots on Twitter). Currently, redundancy-reproducing research discovery tools proliferate. There is, in contrast, little awareness about variety-generating ones. But if the scientific system demands a balance between both redundancy and variety to bring forth innovations, then the designs and discussions of future research discovery tools should better appreciate aspects of variety.