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 […]
NAS Creates Council to Address Research Integrity and Trust
A new blue-ribbon council convened by the United States’ National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine aims to tackle questions about nettlesome issues like conflict of interest, measuring impact and handling retractions.
Gearing Up or Burning Out? Survey Findings Show Wellbeing is Top Concern for Higher Ed Faculty
Academic staff have been working harder than ever, and after an incredibly tough 18 months they are now prioritizing their wellbeing as a top concern. What can academic publishers learn from this?
Does Research Being in a Review Article Cannibalize Your Citations?
Review papers play a significant role in curating the scholarly record. Drawing on a study of close to six million research articles, Peter McMahan, shows how review papers not only focus and shift attention onto particular papers, but also serve to shape entire research domains by linking them together and outlining core concepts. As such, the constitutive role of review papers and those who write them warrant further attention.
Should We Mandate a Course in Ethics for All Research-Based PhD Candidates?
The Indian University Grants Commission (UGC) has introduced a number of policies aimed at addressing issues around the robustness and quality of Indian research. One focus of these policies has been the introduction of mandatory publishing ethics training for Indian PhD students aimed at reducing unethical or predatory research and publishing practices. In this blogpost, Santosh C. Hulagabali, reflects on the successful development of this course in his own institution and how ethical training may influence scholarly communication more broadly in India.
Publishers: Changing the Names of Trans People in Their Own Work is Not Enough
Theresa Jane Tanenbaum argues that publishers must commit to correcting all of their records when a scholar changes their name and not just the ones that are easy to correct.
Journal Reviewers Can Help Ensure Indigenous Scholars Are Heard
Volunteer reviewers are one key obstacle – or ally – in seeing scholarship from indigenous authors makes into mainstream academic journals. Here are some tips to remove obstacles.
NIH: Exploring the Publication Gap Between Social/Behavioral and Biomedical Research
Behavioral and social science grant recipients from America’s National Institutes of Health appear to have not published their results within five years at a greater rate than for their non-behavioral peers. An NIH director investigated …
I Published a Fake Paper in a ‘Peer-Reviewed’ Journal
I claimed that New Mexico is part of the Galapagos Islands, that craniotomy is a legitimate means of assessing student learning, and that all my figures were made in Microsoft Paint. Any legitimate peer reviewer who bothered to read just the abstract would’ve tossed the paper in the garbage (or maybe called the police).
