Social Science Space

A new report from the Committee on Publication Ethics, or COPE, offers an intriguing way to look at the differences between academic disciplines: what do journal editors routinely identify as struggles?

The academic publishing paradigm is changing, driven in large part by calls for open access to publicly funded research. In this second of two parts, the university librarian for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill explains the thinking behind of a pilot program UNC inked with a major academic publisher.

As the educational reading landscape shifts to digital, Naomi Baron argues we must find proven strategies to help students become more aware of the best ways to read and study online – especially as regular printed textbooks gradually begin to disappear.

The future of the academic monograph has been questioned for over two decades. At the heart of this ‘monograph crisis’ has been a publishing industry centred on the print publication of monographs and a failure and lack of incentives to develop business models that would support a transition to open digital monographs. In this post Mike Taylor argues that if monographs are to be appropriately valued, there is a pressing need to further integrate monographs into the digital infrastructure of scholarly communication. Failing this, the difficulty in tracking the usage and discovery of monographs online, will likely make the case for justifying further investment in monographs harder.

In the wake of Elsevier shuttering access to its current journal articles at the University of California, the university librarian at UC-Davis reviews the context of the dispute and argues open access offers the best path for academia’s future.

If higher fees result in fewer academics wanting to publish with a journal, then it seems likely when a journal introduces or increases its fees, it should see a reduction in the number of articles published. But researcher Shaun Khoo did not find any evidence that this was the case.

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.

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.

The U.S. military’s innovation incubator, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has signed the Center for Open Science to create a research claims database as DARPA’s first step to assign a ‘credibility score’ to social and behavioral science research.

A text analysis of nine years of grant abstracts submitted to the NSF indicated that what researchers say and how we say it can foretell the amount of funding we are awarded. They also show that the writing funders idealize may not always match up with what they actually prefer.

Publishing an article in a reputed academic journal is no mean feat. From the initial grant proposal, through to writing the paper, formatting it to meet journal guidelines and then waiting for peer review to be complete, a huge amount of time and work is required. And that’s assuming you’re accepted first time! Here’s how we counsel people about this at SAGE.

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.