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The Royal Society of Biology Research Dissemination Committee Research Communication Newsletter

March 2016

Publishing Policy and Debate

Emerging Topics in Life Sciences: new journal launches The Royal Society of Biology is delighted to announce the launch of a new journal, Emerging Topics in Life Sciences, jointly owned with the Biochemical Society.

Wellcome Trust and COAF Open Access Spend, 2014-15 In the “Reckoning” blog post last year – which provided data on how much the Trust spent on open access (OA) publishing and to what extent publishers provided the service we paid for – Robert Kiley, Head of Digital Services at the Wellcome Library concluded that “there are significant problems –in terms of depositing content in PMC and licensing this in accordance with our requirements – and the first class service called for still seems to be some way off”. One year on Robert Kiley and Cecy Marden provide an analysis on what the 2014-15 data reveals.

Europe's Open Access Champions

PhDs: should you publish while you study? Study suggests there may be long-term benefits from publishing, but critics warn of ‘too much, too soon’.

Co-opting “Official” Channels through Infrastructures for Openness Last week, the news broke about a new service called DOAI that is designed to support open access.

The open research value proposition: How sharing can help researchers succeed

ScienceOpen - Public Post-Publication Peer Review We believe that the best guarantee for scientific quality is a fully transparent review process and the feedback of the whole scientific community. That's why we have Public Post-Publication Peer Review at ScienceOpen.

More women publishing top medical papers Female researchers now account for 37 per cent of first authors in medicine’s top journals, says US study.

Enabling authors to pay for open access – The Gold Open Access market and the role of an institutional central fund Having tracked and analysed the usage data of one university’s central open access fund over an eight year period, Stephen Pinfield shares findings from a detailed case study of the paid-for Gold Open Access market.

Addressing bias in peer review How can we address bias in peer review? How can we make the system more effective? How can early career researchers get involved? These are just some of the topics discussed at the recent Academic Career Development Event at the 2016 Alzheimer’s Research UK Conference.

Peer review admin takes ‘less than an hour’ But peer review processing firm must deal with author comments like those on ‘consenting mole rats’.

Open Access, can you afford not to?

Open access: four ways it could enhance academic freedom The power of funding alone should not be enough to override academic freedom, argues Curt Rice, nor does open access automatically skew the world of scholarship.

Comment: The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship

Students say textbooks are too expensive – could an open access model be the answer? For university students, textbooks have been both a saviour and a bane. Having most of the essential readings in a single volume enables students to access resources easily. Despite mostly being used for short periods of time, they come with a hefty price tag – and weight.

Putting down roots: securing the future of open access policies

The Downside of Scale for Journal Publishers: Quality Control and Filtration Scale remains a defining factor in the current age of scholarly publishing. Economies of scale are driving the consolidation of the industry under a few large players and pushing toward an end to the small, independent publisher.

Open Data

How can data improve our health? NESTA’s John Loder explains why 2016 will be the breakthrough year for patient-led research, enabled by technology. Data will catapult healthcare into the future.

International Publishing

Zimbabwe Plans Open Access Policy, Part Of Efforts Across Africa Zimbabwe has kicked off a new project to support adoption of research data management and sharing services among government, universities and research institutions as part of its plans to pave the way for a nationwide open access mandate. Meanwhile, similar efforts are sweeping across Africa.

Science & Engineering Indicators

Metrics

Can Scopus Deliver A Better Journal Impact Metric? Every metric, like every Greek hero, has its weakness. For the mighty Impact Factor, its Achilles heel can be found in the way citable items are defined and counted. Here, one discovers how the poison arrow of inconsistency plays favorites with some journals while penalizing others.

The Open Citation Index Eugene Garfield, one of the founders of biliometrics and scientometrics, once claimed that “Citation indexes resolve semantic problems associated with traditional subject indexes by using citation symbology rather than words to describe the content of a document.”

Accounting for Impact? How the Impact Factor is shaping research and what this means for knowledge production Why does the impact factor continue to play such a consequential role in academia? Alex Rushforth and Sarah de Rijcke look at how considerations of the metric enter in from early stages of research planning to the later stages of publication.

The role of ego in academic profile services: Comparing Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Mendeley, and ResearcherID Academic profiling services are a pervasive feature of scholarly life. Alberto Martín- Martín, Enrique Orduna-Malea and Emilio Delgado López-Cózar discuss the advantages and disadvantages of major profile platforms and look at the role of ego in how these services are built and used.

Addicted to the brand: The hypocrisy of a publishing academic Academics generally recognise that the scholarly publishing business model is flawed, the impact factor does not point to quality, and open access is a good idea. And yet, academics continue to submit their work to the same for-profit journals. Philip Moriarty looks at what is keeping academics from practicing what they preach.

Publication Ethics

Junior doctor is suspended for citing colleagues on falsified research without their knowledge A junior doctor who cited her senior colleagues without their knowledge as coauthors in papers that were later retracted for faulty or fabricated data has been suspended for 12 months by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service in Manchester.

This renowned mathematician is bent on proving academic journals can cost nothing Timothy Gowers's first big assault on academic publishing started almost by accident.

Publish ideas from scholarly articles early, event told Jisc Digifest hears openness could bring benefits, but some cite plagiarism risks.

Academics ‘regularly lie to get research grants’ Scholars in the UK and Australia contemptuous of impact statements and often exaggerate them, study suggests.

Should All Research Papers Be Free? DRAWING comparisons to Edward Snowden, a graduate student from Kazakhstan named Alexandra Elbakyan is believed to be hiding out in Russia after illegally leaking millions of documents. While she didn’t reveal state secrets, she took a stand for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just about every scientific paper ever published, on topics ranging from acoustics to zymology.

High prices to access scholarly research could drive developing country researchers to use pirate sites like SciHub Developing countries are investing more in research and higher education and it should be no surprise that publishers are building commercial relationships to expand access and services. But prices are often still too high. Jonathan Harle argues now is a good time for the research community to reflect on what we can do to bring the cost of access down.

Sci-Hub: research piracy and the public good The release of millions of journal papers online reflects impatience with an outdated publishing model, says John Willinsky.

Sci-Hub and the Four Horsemen of the Internet Sci-Hub has been part of the background radiation for many years, but about a month ago it jumped front and center on my radar screen.

Some radical thoughts about Sci-Hub Radical, as I like to remind folks, means to get to the root of an issue (same derivation as radish). So when I say I am offering some radical thoughts about Sci-Hub and the controversy it has generated, I mean that I hope to use the discussion to ask some very basic, “at the roots,” questions about copyright, not that I intend to shock anyone.

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