Nature: Huge peer-review study reveals lack of women and non-Westerners. “Women are inadequately represented as peer reviewers, journal editors and last authors of studies, according to an analysis of manuscript submissions to an influential biomedical journal. The study looked at all submissions made to the open-access title eLife from its launch in 2012 to 2017 — nearly 24,000 in total. It found that women worldwide, and researchers outside North America and Europe, were less likely to be peer reviewers, editors and last authors. The paper — which hasn’t itself yet been peer-reviewed — was posted on the preprint server bioRxiv1 on 29 August.”
academic journals
The Turnbull Library Record: Past and Future (National Library of New Zealand)
National Library of New Zealand: The Turnbull Library Record: Past and Future. “Unscrupulous scholars, courtship and marriage in colonial New Zealand, women photographers, pirates, Joan of Arc, a 17th-century Persian manuscript, Earp’s bee library, the library and the cosmos – the intriguing and wide-ranging scope of articles in the Turnbull Library Record (TLR) reflects the richness of the Turnbull collections. I’ve been involved with the TLR for 10 years; eight of those as Managing Editor. It has been a real privilege to have helped bring each issue into the light of day, to work with contributors and designers to help shape its content and aesthetic impact – the stratospheric improvement of the latter having been a bar raised by its previous editor, Peter Ireland. It has also been a privilege to have been involved with the journal at this exciting time in the trajectory of its history – the moment of its digitisation.”
LITA Blog: Finding Open Access Articles – Tools & Tips
LITA Blog: Finding Open Access Articles – Tools & Tips. “Open access can come in a rainbow of colors – gold, green, platinum – and determining what this means can often be confusing. The good news is that generally, this means there are open copies of articles available – whether they are a pre-print or an author’s accepted manuscript. You just need to know how to dig these copies up.”
The Official PLOS Blog: PLOS Update
The Official PLOS Blog: PLOS Update. “In 2009, we launched PLOS Currents as an experimental platform for rapid communication of non-standard publications. A few communities embraced the experiment enthusiastically from the start, and the contributions of researchers who volunteered as editors and reviewers was fantastic. Over the years, we have seen important applications, for example, in small communities collaborating on rare diseases research in PLOS Currents Huntington Disease, and in rapid communication of preliminary results in the context of disease outbreaks in PLOS Currents Outbreaks. In particular, there was a surge of submissions during the 2014 Ebola outbreak and the 2015-2016 Zika virus outbreak. However, in recent years the technology supporting this platform has aged rapidly, the user experience has been subpar, and submissions have substantially decreased.”
Motherboard: Hundreds of Researchers From Harvard, Yale and Stanford Were Published in Fake Academic Journals
Motherboard: Hundreds of Researchers From Harvard, Yale and Stanford Were Published in Fake Academic Journals. “In the so-called ‘post-truth era,’ science seems like one of the last bastions of objective knowledge, but what if science itself were to succumb to fake news? Over the past year, German journalist Svea Eckert and a small team of journalists went undercover to investigate a massive underground network of fake science journals and conferences.”
Offsetting as a path to full Open Access: MIT and the Royal Society of Chemistry sign first North American ‘read and publish’ agreement (In the Open)
In the Open: Offsetting as a path to full Open Access: MIT and the Royal Society of Chemistry sign first North American ‘read and publish’ agreement. “Over the past few years the MIT Libraries – like many US research libraries– have been watching with interest the development of ‘offsetting’ agreements in Europe and the UK. In offsetting agreements, a single license incorporates costs associated with access to paywalled articles and costs associated with open access publication. This type of agreement has emerged in Europe and the UK and been the source of both new deals and broken deals.”
LSE Impact Blog: Introducing the Free Journal Network – community-controlled open access publishing
LSE Impact Blog: Introducing the Free Journal Network – community-controlled open access publishing. “Discontent with the scholarly publishing industry continues to grow, as the prevailing subscription model appears increasingly unsustainable and open access big deals, one mooted alternative, unlikely to lead to optimal outcomes either. The Free Journal Network was established earlier this year in order to nurture and promote journals that are free to both authors and readers, and run according to the Fair Open Access Principles. Mark C. Wilson describes the progress the network has made so far, why community ownership is a crucial and underappreciated issue, and what research libraries can do to help.”
