(Dec 2023) NASA has released its free Open Science 101 curriculum to empower researchers, early career scientists, and underrepresented communities with the knowledge and tools to embrace open science practices. The five-module program is designed to equip researchers, students and citizen scientists with the skills to navigate the principles and practices of open science. NASA’s…
(5 Dec 2023) Scopus, a widely used database of scientific papers operated by publishing giant Elsevier, plays an important role as an arbiter of scholarly legitimacy, with many institutions around the world expecting their researchers to publish in journals indexed on the platform. But users beware, a new study warns. As of September, the database listed…
(7 Dec 2023) The UK’s next Research Excellence Framework has been delayed until 2029 amid concerns over plans to fully break the link between individual staff and university submissions. The exercise, whose results were due to be published in December 2028, will now conclude in the final month of 2029, it was announced on 7 December. …
(24 Nov 2023) This blog post draws insights from a recent installment of Highwire’s Best Practice Webinar Series, featuring a distinguished panel of experts: Fiona Hutton, Head of Publishing at eLife Sciences, Monica Granados from PREreview; and Boris Barbour from PubPeer. The webinar delved into the future of peer review by exploring community and third-party…
New tools show promise, but technical and legal barriers may hinder widespread use (21 Nov 2023) In today’s world, where scientific research is rapidly growing, new AI tools like Elicit or Scim are being developed to help researchers sort through and understand large numbers of academic papers. However, these tools are not perfect yet.…
More rigorous checking targets hyper-authorship, excessive self-citation and unusual patterns of group citation activity (18 Nov 2023) The Highly Cited Researchers list for 2023 recognizes 6,849 influential researchers at universities, research institutes and commercial organizations around the world who have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their research. However, Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)…
(8 Nov 2023) Elisabeth Bik has made a career of being a data vigilante. What should mainstream scientific journals learn from her? Vox talked with Bik about her work, but also discussed what academic journals should do to make sure these problems aren’t published in the first place. Read the article in full…
(14 Nov 2023) A report released today aimed to provide a better understanding of how research assessment affects research in Australia. More than 1,000 Australian researchers and more than 50 research organisations participated in the survey. This included universities, research institutes, industry bodies, government and not-for-profit organisations. The majority of researchers (74%) were in academic roles.…
(30 Oct 2023) A key trend, obvious to any publishing consultant or acquisitions editor buried in a seemingly endless (and seemingly rising) stream of independent journals seeking a partnership with a larger publisher, is the ongoing and ever-increasing market consolidation that has been accelerated by the move to open access (OA). We all know this…
Pilot program will detect duplicate submissions that may indicate paper mill activity (12 Oct 2023) STM Solutions today announced the launch of a pilot program to detect duplicate submissions to scholarly publications. Submitting the same manuscript to multiple journals simultaneously is, in most cases, against publisher policies and often indicates the work of paper mills,…