Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
How Learned Societies and Open Access Will Learn to Co-Exist
Plan S, a funder led initiative to drive open access to research will influence how learned societies, the organizations tasked with representing academics in particular disciplines, operate, as many currently depend on revenues from journal subscriptions to cross-subsidise their activities. Here, Alicia Wise and Lorraine Estelle update the first phase of the SPA-OPS project assessing the options available for learned societies to make the transition to open access.
Graphical & Video Abstracts: An Interview with Tullio Rossi
It goes without saying that research has greater impact when more people have access to it. In a distracted, multilingual world we often struggle to get important research findings into the hands of those who can use what we’ve learned. As Dr. Tullio Rossi of Animate Your Science points out, visuals help us reach across disciplines.
A Tool that Detects the Strength of Hate Speech on Twitter
A new machine learning tool can detect and classify different strengths of Islamophobic hate speech on Twitter. Bertie Vidgen and Taha Yasseri explain their processes in creating a new tool that detects Islamophobic hate speech on Twitter.
Science Communication and ‘Knowing Thy Audience’
Researchers asked science communicators what they need to know about their audiences. Age, education, gender and economic, educational, cultural and ideological background were typical answers. But to really know your audience, those are just a starting place.
The Practice-Research Bridge: Do Marketing Practitioners Read Academic Research?
At the Winter Academic Conference of the American Marketing Association, four Austin, Texas-based marketing professionals discussed how they stay up-to-date on the latest marketing strategies and research, the place of research-based recommendations over others, and tips for researchers who want to make an impact in practice.
How Journal Impact Factor Affects Your Career
A new preprint was recently shared on PeerJ Preprints on the Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations. Alice Fleerackers, Juan Pablo Alperin, and Erin McKiernan discuss the investigation and the findings on how the flawed metric is currently used in tenure and promotion decisions in universities across North America.
What’s the Best Day to Submit an Academic Article?
Large data sets can now be quickly analyzed to assess whether or not certain features, previously deemed unimportant, can actually affect the chances of a research paper being accepted for publication. In this post, James Hartley looks at new research on weekly submission dates.
Library Collections a Treasure Trove for Social Science Research
WorldCat, an aggregate database of library catalogs worldwide, was primarily set up to aid libraries in carrying out their work in areas such as cataloging or resource sharing. Brian Lavoie offers an insight into the types of questions WorldCat data can provide answers to, and how research of this kind also amplifies the value and impact of library collections.
