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?
A publication strategy should include carefully-defined goals, a purposeful timeline, and actionable steps for proposing and writing the kinds of pieces large or small that allow others to access what we’ve learned, produce impact, and propel our careers forward.
Last month the webinar “Battling Bannings- Authors discuss intellectual freedom and the freedom to read” saw Index on Censorship’s Vicky Baker moderate a discussion between historian Wendy Doniger and children’s book authors Christine Baldacchino and Jessica Herthel.
As part of our series on academic freedom, Dylan Kerrigan discusses the wider implications of the financialisation of academic knowledge production by considering academic book publishing. He asks if the success of academic books is best measured by economic or non-economic criteria, by its impact on the business sector or its veracity, by ideological myth-making or evidence.
A culture of bad science can evolve as a result of institutional incentives that prioritize simple quantitative metrics as measures of success, argues Paul Smaldino. But, he adds, not all is lost as new initiatives such as open data and replication are making a positive difference.
Novel breakthroughs in research can have a dramatic impact on scientific discovery but face some distinct disadvantages in getting wider recognition and are often cited as a plus in getting published. But new findings suggest an inherent bias in bibliometric measures against novel research.
Recent findings suggest interdisciplinary research is less likely to be funded than discipline-based research proposals, reports Gabriele Bammer, who argues different review processes may well be required to do justice to these different kinds of interdisciplinarity.
Many academics still operate under the flawed logic that good writing must be complex writing (or vice versa).
