After many and long conversations among colleagues within and beyond the Scholarly Kitchen
about what researchers need to know about scholarly publishing, Alice Meadows and Karin Wulf compiled a list of what we think to be the most urgent issues.
At the recent PSP conference there was a panel on the cost of complying with the many new open access mandates from funding bodies. The panel explored the cost of compliance and how to reduce those costs. The current regulatory regime is complicated and administratively expensive, but the mandates will continue to be promulgated because the people calling for them are not the ones that have to implement them.
SAGE recently announced that it has taken a minority stake in peer review start-up Publons. Charlie Rapple asks why publishers are investing in workflow tools, and why start-ups are accepting publishers’ money.
Kent Anderson returns to update his essential list of just what it is that publishers do.
Do we need more metrics, or can some questions be answered more easily?
Historians can and do play a vital role in the public humanities, but there are vital reasons not just why but how we write for one another, too.
After years of tightening its submissions policy, papers contributed by NAS members start resembling direct submissions.
The hidden costs of data availability policies.
How does a differentiation between faculty on separate tracks for research or educational roles will drive change in the reward system? How might it impact scholarly publishing?
Editors are quick to assume that reviewer fatigue is slowing them down; but one journal found that excessive invitations to review was not cited as a major reason why reviewers declined invitations.
Stop thinking of peer review as a concept and start thinking of it as a toolbox.
When journals provide academy members a VIP submission track, do their papers perform any better?
We spend much time these days wondering when the academic journal as we know it will cease to exist. Robert Harington discusses the role of the journal in light of a fascinating new venture in the field of mathematics – the overlay journal Discrete Analysis.
Charlie Rapple reports on “Think. Check. Submit.”, a campaign to help researchers learn who they can trust when they are seeking to publish their work.
Welcome to the first – but hopefully not the last – Peer Review Week: an opportunity to celebrate the fundamental role played by peer review in scholarly communications, and the many diverse efforts to improve and support it.