Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple’s treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only around 25 per cent of the global corpus of research knowledge is ‘open access’, or accessible to the public for free and without subscription, which is a real impediment to resolving major problems, such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Recently, Springer Nature, one of the largest academic publishers in the world, had to withdraw its European stock market floatation due to a lack of interest. The European Commission is currently letting publishers bid for the development of an EU-wide open-access scholarly publishing platform. A global community to coordinate and regain control – to develop a public open-access infrastructure – of research and scholarly communication for the public good is long overdue. Republish Jon Tennant
How can blogging help research make an impact beyond academia? Illustrative examples from the LSE blogs Previous posts in our series on the Impact of LSE Blogs project examined the effects of blogging on the academic sphere, looking more closely at citations to the original research outputs and also to the blog posts themselves. But what about the effects of blogging beyond academia, on the public sphere? In the final post of the series, Kieran Booluck recounts some examples of how LSE blogs have helped primary academic research to be discovered and used, and also revisits those posts that have demonstrated the blogs’ huge potential to extend the reach of research. Earlier this summer, Carlos Arrebola and Amy Mollett introduced the Impact of LSE Blogs project, which sought to investigate the role of LSE’s public-facing academic blogs as channels of academic communication. With this in mind, we sought out examples of LSE blog posts being directly responsible for research that might otherwise have been overlooked being picked up and used. Copyright © Televisa SA de CV About the author
A self-experiment in fake science: the tricks of predatory journals | ZBW MediaTalk by Athanasios Mazarakis, Kaltrina Nuredini and Isabella Peters In the summer, a piece called „Fake Science – Die Lügenmacher“ (“The Lie Creators”) aired on ARD, and it left a lasting impression on the scientific community. Dr Athanasios Mazarakis had already received one of countless invitations for publications. Journal publication within one week? One week for a journal publication. This procedure, as we describe it here, has already been successfully replicated several times (Simpson et al., 2014 (PDF); Stribling et al., 2015 (PDF); Mazières et al., 2015 (PDF). Like winning the lottery: publication without revision The answer didn’t inspire much confidence, but we wanted to see where it would lead us. Normally, a journal publication without revisions is like winning the lottery. The con is already noticeable when skim reading Even when just skimming through, it is clear that the article has no content. Immediately after that, we received the bill. Next Post Open Science
Evaluate Your Info - Start Your Research - Library Guides at University of California, Santa Cruz Some things to consider in evaluating the quality of research sources: Currency: the timeliness of the information How recent is the information? Reliability: importance of the information What kind of information is included in the Web site? Authority: the source of the information Can you determine who the author/creator is? Accuracy: the reliability, truthfulness, and correctness of the information Is it accurate? Purpose: the reason the information exists What's the intent of the Web site (to persuade, to sell you something, etc.)? The CRAAP Test was developed by librarians at California State University, Chico.
BUCH WIEN For academics, what matters more: journal prestige or readership? With more than 30,000 academic journals now in circulation, academics can have a hard time figuring out where to submit their work for publication. The decision is made all the more difficult by the sky-high pressure of today’s academic environment—including working toward tenure and trying to secure funding, which can depend on a researcher’s publication record. So, what does a researcher prioritize? According to a new study posted on the bioRxiv preprint server, faculty members say they care most about whether the journal is read by the people they most want to reach—but they think their colleagues care most about journal prestige. “I think that it is about the security that comes with being later in your career,” says study co-author Juan Pablo Alperin, an assistant professor in the publishing program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.
Testing AI Academic Search Engines - What to find out and how to test (2) Following my recent talk for the Boston Library Consortium, many of you expressed a strong interest in learning how to test the new generation of AI-powered academic search tools. Specifically, evaluating systems using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) was the top request, surpassing interest in learning more about semantic search or LLMs alone. This is a crucial topic, as these tools are rapidly entering our landscape. This post outlines my current thinking on practical ways librarians can evaluate and understand them through a series of questions with answers you might be able to obtain via reading the documentation, asking the vendor or light-weight testing of the system directly. First, let's clarify the type of tool we're discussing (different types of tools may requre different approaches). 1. 2. Examples include Elicit, Scite Assistant, Consensus, Scopus AI, and the research assistants for Primo and Web of Science. But what should we test and how? 1.
Pseudoscience is taking over social media and putting us all at risk Sign up for a full digest of all the best opinions of the week in our Voices Dispatches email Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter Search for “climate change” on YouTube and before long you’ll likely find a video that denies it exists. In fact, when it comes to shaping the online conversation around climate change, a new study suggests that deniers and conspiracy theorists might hold an edge over those believing in science. Researchers found evidence that most YouTube videos relating to climate change oppose the scientific consensus that it’s primarily caused by human activities. The study highlights the key role of social media use in the spread of scientific misinformation. The recent study by Joachim Allgaier of RWTH Aachen University in Germany analysed the content of a randomised sample of 200 YouTube videos related to climate change. The videos peddling the conspiracy theories received the highest number of views. Health misinformation So how do we tackle this problem?
Pharmaceuticals / Health Products: Background The pharmaceutical and health products industry -- it includes not only drug manufacturers but also dealers of medical products and nutritional and dietary supplements -- is consistently near the top when it comes to federal campaign contributions. (Pharmaceutical manufacturers are a subset of this industry and are profiled in detail within this section). The industry's political generosity increased in the years leading up to Congress' passage in 2003 of a Medicare prescription drug benefit. Since then, industry spending levels have fluctuated, though they have usually hovered around the $30 million range, including during the 2014 cycle when that number was nearly $32 million. 2012 was the cycle when the industry contributed the most -- over $50.7 million. The top contributors during the 2014 cycle were Pfizer Inc. One piece of legislation the industry has lobbied heavily on recently is the 21st Century Cures Act. -- Alex Lazar Updated August 2015 Industries in this Sector:
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