Kay Cunningham's List: Scholarly Communication

'It appears that Elsevier is making a distinction between an author’s personal website or blog and the repository at the institution where that author works. Authors are, I think, able to post final manuscripts to the former for public access, but posting to the latter must be restricted only to internal users for the duration of the newly-imposed embargo periods. In the four column chart that was included in their original announcement, this disparate treatment of repositories and other sites is illustrated in the “After Acceptance” column, where it says that “author manuscripts can be shared… [o]n personal websites or blogs,” but that sharing must be done “privately” on institutional repositories. I think I missed this at first because the chart is so difficult to understand; it must be read from left to right and understood as cumulative, since by themselves the columns are incomplete and confusing. '

'After typing up 96 citations, researchers from the National Institute for Digestive Diseases, I.R.C.C.S. “S. de Bellis,” in Bari, Italy, apparently ran out of steam for the last five, earning themselves a retraction for plagiarism in a literature review of the effects of probiotics on intestinal cancer.'

'The misbehavior of authors — one of the most intractable problems in scientific and scholarly publishing — reared its ugly head again last week...'

'SAGE Publishers is retracting 60 articles from the Journal of Vibration and Control after an investigation revealed a “peer review and citation ring” involving a professor in Taiwan.'

'According to their calculations, this 1% amounts to about 151,000 scientists. The putative downside of this concentration is two-fold: a lack of opportunity for the vast majority of working scientists, whose contributions are sporadic or drowned out, and a literature dominated by a small group of scientific researchers and hypotheses.'

'Even revised dissertations may be too focused on a specific niche, so they are quite likely to be the first things that get passed over. But it is not open access that is the problem; the problem is that we have less and less money to spend on books because an ever-increasing share of our collection budgets is going to journal packages. Your lunch, Mr. Backus, is being eaten by Elsevier and Wiley, not by ETDs.'

'So the first lesson is obvious — be careful what you sign. More careful than I was. I should have determined who the publisher was and made an intentional decision before I signed that agreement about what would be done with the article that resulted from my talk. It is quite likely that I would have agreed even after that small bit of research, since the article was actually written by someone else (as, I suppose, a derivative work from my original talk), and I had no further plans to use it in any way. What I often tell authors is to consider the agreement they are presented with in light of their own plans and hopes for their work, and transfer or license rights in a way consistent with those plans. If the agreements allow one to meet those goals, well and good; if they do not, negotiation is called for. The decision should rest with the author. '

Blog about scientific publications and retractions.

'The announcement will also be scaring the hell out of those publishers who have a lot of separate, lower tier journals. The problem for publication business models has never been with the top tier, that can be made to work because people want to pay for prestige (whether we can afford it in the long term is a separate question). The problem has been the volume end of the market. I back Dorothea Salo’s prediction [and again] that 2011/12 would see the big publishers looking very closely at their catalogue of 100s or 1000s of low yield, low volume, low prestige journals and see the beginning of mass closures, simply to keep down subscription increases that academic libraries can no longer pay for. Aggregated large scale journals with streamlined operating and peer review procedures, simplified and more objective selection criteria, and APC supported business models make a lot of sense in this market. Elsevier, Wiley, Springer (and to a certain extent BMC) have just lost the start in the race to dominate what may become the only viable market in the medium term.'

'First that the complaint that people “won’t comment on papers” now seems outdated. Sufficiently high profile papers will receive criticism, and woe betide those journals who aren’t able to summon a very comprehensive peer review panel for these papers. Secondly that this review is not happening on journal websites even when journals provide commenting fora. The reasons for this are, in my opinion, reasonably clear. The journal websites are walled gardens, often requiring sign in, often with irritating submission or review policies.'

'So here now are 12 properties of Research Objects - the earlier ones are intrinsic properties of Research Objects and indeed the research they describe, the middle ones pertain to the 'social life' of Research Objects as illuminated by projects like myExperiment, and the latter ones reflect the realities of Research Objects situated in practice:'

'The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.). These indicators can be used to assess and analyze scientific domains. '

Article, doi:10.2481/dsj.Essay-001-Uhlir

'Graduate students especially, I observed, seem to gravitate toward one of two unfortunate oratory personas. One archetype is the perhaps well-prepared but painfully meek presenter who races through her text without pausing to take a breath. Hunched over the lectern, terrified and yet robotic, like a contestant on a game show with no reward but to avoid public humiliation. The other type is the scholar who doesn’t regard the limits -- neither of chronological time nor of the attention span of the audience. Shuffling pages of marked-up drafts, it’s all excess, aggregated thoughts without conclusion. A verbal Pollock painting, some method but mostly mess.'

'For this study, the term "link rot" is used to describe a URL that no longer provides direct access to files matching the content originally harvested from the URL and currently preserved in the Chesapeake Project’s digital archive. In some instances, a 404 or "not found" message indicates link rot at a URL; in others, the URL may direct to a site hosted by the original publishing organization or entity, but the specific resource has been removed or relocated from the original or previous URL. '

'The 2010 analysis reveals that nearly 28 percent of the online publications archived between March 2007 and March 2008 have now disappeared from their original locations on the Web but, due to the project’s preservation efforts, remain accessible via permanent archive URLs. This sample of online publications was first analyzed in 2008 and showed link rot to be present in 8.3 percent of the publications’ original URLs. One year later, in 2009, the same sample showed an increase in link rot to 14.3 percent.'

'Authors and journal editors link to Web-based resources in citations meant to last, but the phenomenon of "link rot"—when links, or URL's, stop working—can undermine the usefulness of those references. If a URL leads nowhere, another researcher might not be able to find the source material. '

'Search the latest Table of Contents (TOCs) of 14,229 journals collected from 607 top publishers. More journals are added continuously. '

'Using Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, Michael Mabe shows that the number of "refereed academic/scholarly" publications grows at a rate of 3.26 percent per year (i.e., doubles about every 20 years). The main cause: the growth in the number of researchers.'

'His paper, "Quality matters: The expulsion of professors and the consequences for Ph.D. student outcomes in Nazi Germany," which will be published in the Journal of Political Economy, shows that the dismissals affected the doctoral candidates' chances of publishing a dissertation, becoming a professor and being highly cited.'