OPEN SCIENCE
MedRxiv has officially launched and submissions are open.
Open Science and Climate Change. This is the title of a theme launched within the Generation R online platform, and aims to highlight efforts and projects around climate change. An example mentioned is the Open Energy Modelling Initiative.
The Open Knowledge Foundation is looking for champions of open, reproducible research as part of the Frictionless Data Reproducible Research Fellows Program. These are $5k fellowships for early career researchers. Deadline is 30 July 2019.
PUBLISHING
Anne Hobert and Najko Jahn have posted a comprehensive analysis of open access articles indexed in Unpaywall on their blog Scholarly Communication Analytics. They find that around 37% of the literature is available as open access in some form. See the image below on Unpaywall’s sources. The R scripts are included in the blog post.
RESEARCH
I have been quoted in a Nature news item by David Cyranoski featuring concerns over organ transplants in mainland China. According to these reports, prior to 2010 almost all organs procured in China are claimed to be from prisoners, and some of these transplants have been the basis for research published in the scientific literature. Amongst a number of journals this also affects PLOS ONE. I have taken a clear and firm stance against this practice, and we will retract studies where international ethical standards around organ transplants have been violated.
PLOS
Peer reviewers of PLOS papers are now able to claim credit through their ORCID iD and have their peer review activity uploaded automatically to their ORCID profile.
PLOS ONE and PLOS Biology will be implementing stronger blot and gel reporting requirements, where authors are required to supply original, uncropped and minimally adjusted images supporting all blot and gel results reported in an article’s figures and supporting information files. This strengthens similar existing industry standards around reproducibility in the life sciences.
EVENTS
Peer Review Week is celebrating its fifth anniversary. The motto for this year’s week from September 16-20 is quality in peer review. A blog post in Scholarly Kitchen by Alice Meadows provides an overview of the initiative’s history.
The Library Services for Open Science meeting will take place in Klosterneuburg, Austria on August 21, 2019.
OTHER
Creative Commons is looking for a Director of Product on a remote working basis.
Number of open access articles indexed in Unpaywall, by location where Unpaywall discovered an article. Shown in blue are those within each class where that location is considered to be the best available.
Credit (CC-BY): Jahn & Hobert (2019, May 7). Scholarly Communication Analytics: Open Access Evidence in Unpaywall. Retrieved from https://subugoe.github.io/scholcomm_analytics/posts/unpaywall_evidence/