OPEN SCIENCE
The Problems of Unit Costs Per Article. Martin Eve on the problems of the article processing charge (APC) model in open access publishing. Institutions supporting deals where anyone can publish and anyone can read research outputs is the proposed solution.
Essential Open Source Software for Science. Back in May, a group of authors from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) wrote about the importance of open source software in biology research, and how CZI is supporting open source solutions.
Open Science is for Aging Research, Too. Writing in Innovation in Aging, Derek Isaacowitz and Majse Lind argue that open science practices such as registered reports may improve the reproducibility of research in gerontology.
Learned Societies, Open Access and Budgetary Cross-Subsidy. A counterpoint by Martin Eve on a news report in Science by Jeffrey Brainard on how the activities of learned societies can be funded in an open access scenario: New deals could help scientific societies survive open access.
PUBLISHING
It was Peer Review Week last week, on the topic of quality in peer review. Amongst the coverage this year:
- Alice Meadows and Karin Wulff in Scholarly Kitchen on kicking off this year’s week
- The Lancet Group’s commitments to gender equity and diversity
- Springer Nature’s Stavroula Kousta, Erika Pastrana, and Sowmya Swaminathan on Three Approaches to Support Reproducible Research, in Science Editor
- What to Do about Reviewer #2: Advice for Handling a Difficult Peer Review. By Duke University Press’ Courtney Berger
- How Do Researchers Feel About Open Peer Review? Wiley’s Elizabeth Moylan with interesting preliminary survey data on open peer review models
- An editorial in Communications Physics on ghost-written reviewer reports, and a plea to disclose the identity of those contributing to a review to editorial staff so that these reviewers can receive due credit
- PLOS ONE’s Kaelyn Lemon, Erika Mann and Anna Simonin on improving the quality of peer review for interdisciplinary research
RESEARCH
Trust in Research. A researcher survey by Elsevier and Sense About Science. The survey asked researchers about their own trust in research outputs, about the perceived problems around the public confidence of research results, and about the time they spend on search and discovery of new research outputs — which is significant.
Although the next Peer Review Congress on September 12 – 14, 2021, is still a little while off, any research to be presented may take time to complete. Therefore, a Call for Research has been launched to study processes “to improve the conduct, reporting, quality, integrity, and dissemination of scientific research and academic commentary.”
EVENTS
The SpotOn19 meeting on 21 November 2019 will simultaneously take place in London, UK, and in Cairo, Egypt.
The Public Knowledge Project is having its PKP BCN 2019 conference on 20 – 22 November 2019 in Barcelona. The topic will be around open access research and open source publishing technologies.
The 2019 Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) Annual Meeting is on 10 December 2019 in Berkeley, CA. The call for papers is open until 20 October 2019.
OTHER
New Google policy bars ads for unproven stem cell therapies. As reported in the Washington Post, some of these treatments are not just costly and ineffective, but also harmful.