Pluralism vs. Monoculture in Scholarly Communication, Part 2
Calls for a monoculture of scholarly communication keep multiplying. But wouldn’t a continued diversity of models be healthier?
Revisiting: How to Be A Good Peer Reviewer
Revisiting Jasmine Wallace’s 2019 primer on best practices for peer reviewers.
Revisiting: Turning a Critical Eye on Reference Lists
In today’s post, Angela Cochran revisits her call to provide more editorial scrutiny to journal article references. Several new automated tools now available will help editors determine whether references are appropriate for including in scholarly works.
Trust in Science: Views from Three Experts
Today’s guest post is a recap of the recent SSP webinar, Ask the Experts: Trust in Science, with Tracey Brown (Sense About Science), Richard Sever (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press), and Eefke Smith (STM) by the moderator, Anita de Waard (Elsevier).
Revisiting: Challenges for Academics in the Global South — Resource Constraints, Institutional Issues, and Infrastructural Problems
Revisiting a 2018 post discussing that for social science and humanities researchers in many parts of the world there are significant barriers to conducting and sharing research, in some cases more so than for science and medicine. In this revisited guest post, Dr. Naveen Minai provides a perspective as a gender studies researcher in Pakistan.
Revisiting: Governance and the Not-for-profit Publisher
How can not-for-profit organizations outcompete their commercial rivals? Revisiting Joe Esposito’s 2011 post that lays out a blueprint for success.
Guest Post – An Early Look at the Impact of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Journals Warning List
At the end of 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences issued their first “Early Warning List of International Journals”. Christos Petrou takes a look at the early impacts this list has had on the journals and publishers named.
Imposters and Impersonators in Preprints: How do we trust authors in Open Science?
Preprints play a crucial role in open science but offer an opportunity to be gamed. Fictitious authorship in preprints show that open science needs checks and we need to collaborate to govern Open Science.
Guest Post — Putting Publications into Context with the DocMaps Framework for Editorial Metadata
The DocMaps Project offers a machine-readable, interoperable and extensible framework for capturing valuable context about the processes used to create research products such as journal articles.
Guest Post — Unethical Practices in Research and Publishing: Evidence from Russia
Anna Abalkina discusses evidence of widespread academic misconduct in Russia.
Watch Out for the Silent Librarian: An Interview with Crane Hassold
Silent Librarian is an international phishing organization that “angles” for university network credentials on behalf of the Iranian government. Crane Hassold gives us the lowdown on this dangerous scam.
Truth and Lies
How to address lies in the political life of a democracy? Education, information literacy, gatekeeping, and dialogue are not enough. Lisa Hinchliffe and Roger Schonfeld examine the issue.
Journalism, Preprint Servers, and the Truth: Allocating Accountability
Journalists are increasingly flagging unsupported claims and blatant falsehoods–it’s time for preprint platforms to do the same.
What a Mangled Press Conference on COVID Can Tell Us About the Need for Good Data Storytelling
Last week the UK government COVID held a press briefing in an attempt to get the country behind new travel and social restrictions. What lessons can we learn from this bad example of how not to present evidence to support our positions?
There is No Truth, There is Only Workflow
The crisis of information integrity is real. Integrity of workflow — analyses of process, investment in process, transparency of process — is the intervention