Social Science Space

Plan S represents an exciting example of the scholarly community mobilizing to create funding requirements that could lead to an open access future. However, the plan has also raised a number of legitimate concerns, not least the absence of any incentive for publishers to lower journal costs. Brian Cody suggests how simple adjustments to the proposed article processing charge cap could encourage publishers to reduce costs and so free up funds for other open access projects.

Is scholarship that doesn’t appear in the Social Science Citation Index — a commercial index of ‘internationally leading’ journals in the social sciences, compiled by Clarivate Analytics — worthless? Before you say ‘Of course not,’ know that some universities essentially are saying yes.

Most early career researchers receive little to no training on how to peer review, and it’s not always easy to find consistent or helpful guidance. Here, during Peer Review Week, Katrina Newitt offers some helpful advice on how to get started.

Standards are high and getting an academic article published is not easy, but there are certain things you can do to improve your success rate. A member of the SAGE Journals Author Relations team — SAGE is the parent of Social Science Space — offers five tips on the smartest way to navigate these challenges.

How can the impact of an academic article be measured? It seems that everyone wants to find an answer to this question – from the researcher and author teams that create research articles, to the editors and peer reviewers who curate them, to the societies and publishers who ensure that the articles are released to the world.

The literature review is a staple of the scholarly article. But when reviews misrepresent previous studies or suggest there’s a paucity of information when there isn’t, doesn’t,this degrade the knowledge base? Richard P. Phelps argues that, given the difficulty of verifying an author’s claims during peer review, it is best that journals drop the requirement for a literature review in scholarly articles.

In the latest iteration of a survey series she’s been running for four decades, Carol Tenopir aims to assess the value of access to scholarly journals by examining patterns of use and reading. Your input is sought.

Peer review has become a major editorial challenge for publishers worldwide, but options do exist to help tackle fraudulent peer reviewers. In this post from the Publons blog, some options for what publishers can do are examined.

Since 2004, Renew Publishing Consultants has surveyed researchers, students, teachers, lecturers, professors, journalists, managers, clinicians, medics, librarians, government officials, and engineers, working across all sectors and in all regions to learn about the uptake of academic content.

Many research evaluation systems continue to take a narrow view of excellence, judging the value of work based on the journal in which it is published. Recent research by Diego Chavarro, Ismael Ràfols and colleagues shows how such systems underestimate and prove detrimental to the production of research relevant to important social, economic, and environmental issues and reflect the biases of journal citation databases which focus heavily on English-language research from the US and Western Europe.

The founder of StateReviewer outlines a future where humans are written out of the publication process by artificial intelligence. But is the goal of eradicating bias and other malignancies potentially opening the door to a new set of ills?

University librarian Jeffrey Beall used to write a blog that identified by name what he saw as predatory publishers of academic journals. Since he suddenly shut down the site earlier this month, will –or even should — someone else pick up the baton?