Read the full story in Nature..
Eight major publishers have issued joint guidelines for how journal editors can spot and deal with suspicious images or data.
Category: Scientific publishing
COVID’s lessons for climate, sustainability and more from Our World in Data
Read the full story in Nature.
International agencies need the mandate, funds and expertise to connect information — otherwise pandemics, hunger and unsustainability will go unsolved.
NSF-funded project to evaluate open-access educational resources
Read the full story from the University of Nebraska.
Brian Couch, associate professor of biological sciences at Nebraska, is leading a new NSF-funded project to assess the quality and implementation of open educational resources: publicly available lesson plans, lab activities and other course materials designed, in this case, for undergraduate biology courses.
Royal Society of Chemistry launches open access journal Energy Advances
Read the full story from the RSC.
Our new Gold Open Access journal Energy Advances focuses on energy science, and in particular the interdisciplinarity required for exciting breakthroughs in the field.
Energy Advances welcomes research from any related discipline including materials science, engineering, technology, biosciences and chemistry. Our aim is for it to embrace exciting energy science research – particularly at the boundaries where disciplines cross, and where communities collaborate to inspire new thinking.
Preprint ban in grant applications deemed ‘plain ludicrous’
Read the full story from Nature.
The Australian Research Council’s decision to reject early-career funding applications that mention preprints is hopelessly outdated, say scientists.
The push for open access is making science less inclusive
Read the full story at Times Higher Education.
Researchers in developing countries could be frozen out by high article charges unless wider publishing reform is undertaken, say four Brazilian researchers.
Communicating science, Diversity, equity, and inclusion, Publications, Scientific publishing, Workplace issues in STEM
Lack of non-English languages in STEM publications hurts diversity
Read the full story from Northwestern University.
With today’s existing translation tools to overcome language barriers, global collaboration should be no major feat for researchers. Yet throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, articles published in Chinese journals focusing on critical aspects of the disease were often never cited by English journals. As a result, U.S. academics wasted precious time performing research thereby replicating already published results.
Researchers cannot simply push papers through simple translation tools and turn out legible multilingual science. And, in the absence of human translators trained in technical subject matter readily available, most researchers choose to publish science, technology engineering and math (STEM) research in the dominant English language.
Now a team of graduate students at Northwestern University aims to change that.
In a paper published today (Aug. 31) titled “A Call to Diversify the Lingua Franca of Academic STEM Communities” in the Journal of Science Policy & Governance, members of Northwestern’s Science Policy Outreach Taskforce (SPOT) call for new government policy measures to create a path to linguistic diversity in STEM publications.
Fund to Mission open access monograph model
Read the full story from the University of Michigan.
The University of Michigan Press has been taking steps to develop a publishing program that aligns with our mission and commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. This is why the Press is transitioning to an open access monograph model we term “Fund to Mission.”
Fund to Mission demonstrates a return to the origins of the university press movement and moves toward a more open, sustainable infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences.
Why bad science is sometimes more appealing than good science
Read the full story in Scientific American.
A recent paper makes an upsetting claim about the state of science: nonreplicable studies are cited more often than replicable ones. In other words, according to the report in Science Advances, bad science seems to get more attention than good science.
On zombies, struldbrugs, and other horrors of the scientific literature
Read the full story from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
When I signed on as Editor-in-Chief of PNAS, I had no idea that killing zombies would be part of the job. These zombies aren’t the spirits of Haitian mythology doomed to roam the earth in thrall to sorcerers and shamans or the brain-eating undead of contemporary movie and television fame. Rather, in scientific publishing, the phrase “zombie literature” refers to papers, deemed invalid for any number of scientific reasons, that are retracted by the journals that published them yet continue to be cited without any apparent acknowledgment of their lack of validity
