Scientific Communication

This section deals with scientific communication. In particular, it focuses on the role of publishers, how the publishing industry has changed over the years, and what new opportunities are available for researchers in the modern era.

• 🍪 💬 How to reclaim ownership of scholarly publishing
  • Source of the quote "“I chose to study science because I wanted to publish in Nature,” said no undergraduate student ever."
  • A piece about how the current publishing system is not working for researchers.
• 📝 SIMBA - Value of global scientific publishing
  • Scientific publishing is a 12 billion dollar industry (in 2022).
• 🍪 📑 Rosendaal H. –Geurts P. Forces and functions in scientific communication:an analysis of their interplay, CRISP 1997
  • An overview of the history of scientific communication, what functions it serves, and future prospects of its form in the digital age.
• 💬 Jean-Claude Guedon - Scholarly Communication and Scholarly Publishing
  • How scholarly communication and scholarly publishing have diverged over the years, how scholarly publishing in the digital age currently is and how it could become.
• 📃 101 innovations in scholarly publishing
• 🍪 💬 Open science needs no martyrs
  • An interview with Toma Susi, of the University of Vienna, touching on the need for reform in the publishing industry but that noone should pay for it in terms of career progression.
• 📑 🔻 Disrupting the subscription journal's business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access
  • "This paper makes the strong, fact-based case for a large-scale transformation of the current corpus of scientific subscription journals to an open access business model."
• 📰 Costs, benefits of making all articles free to read, the stance of publishers.
  • This is a controversial piece. On one hand, it provides an overview of open access, Plan S, and coalition S, but on the other hand it shows some of the arguments against open access. Unsure of what it should be tagged with.
• 💬 ACS and author's right retention, :newspaper: ACS news on Green Open Access and 💬 COAR's response of ACS news
  • These articles discuss the American Chemical Society's new policy on Green Open Access, which requires authors to pay a fee to deposit their work in a repository.
• 💬 Jeff Pooley - Large Language Publishing, how LLMs are created on journal data.

The case of Elsevier

These resources discuss in particular the editor Elsevier, as a case-study.

• 💬 Publisher control of all scholarly infrastructure
  • How publishing groups have started to control all aspects of research output: from planning research questions, to literature review, to data collection, to peer review, to publication, to dissemination.
• 📑 Jefferson Pooley - Surveillance Publishing
  • "This essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing, with special attention to the example of Elsevier. A scholarly publisher can be defined as a surveillance publisher if it derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from prediction products, fueled by data extracted from researcher behavior."
• Navigating Risk in vendor data privacy practices, an analysis of Elsevier's ScienceDirect
• 📝 SPARC's 2021 Update
  • SPARC is "a non-profit advocacy organization that supports systems for research and education that are open by default and equitable by design." (https://sparcopen.org/who-we-are/). This document "[...] suggests organizational changes in academic institutions to both (1) manage increasing strategic and ethical challenges and (2) deploy hammers and analyze data to better understand the needs and protect the interests of individuals and communities."
  • 📝 📥 🔻 Direct PDF Link
• 📰 💬 Sci-hub, Elsevier and Wiley declare war on research communities in India

Alternatives to traditional publishing

• 📑 Principles of the self-journal of Science: bringing ethics and freedom to scientific publishing
  • This article discusses the principles of the self-journal of Science, a new publishing model that aims to bring ethics and freedom to scientific publishing.
• 💬 Ten ways to find open access articles and 💬 alternative ways to access journal articles

Open Access

This section includes resources specifically about Open Access.

• 🏢 Berlin declaration on Open Access
  • The founding document of the Open Access movement, it delineates the requirement to move away from paywalled content in the era of the internet towards Open Access. It defines what Open Access is, and how to support the transition to the open paradigm.
• 🍪 ScienceOpen - Open Access Survey results
  • A survey of 60 researchers about Open Access.The low number of respondents makes the results not very reliable.
  • Sampling strategy is also not clear. This may have been a convenience sample, on people who participated in a ScienceOpen event, making the results not generalizable.
• 📑 Shift academic culture through publication, an article discussing how exploitative publishers are a problem, especially discriminating poorer researchers.
• European Commission - 🏢 🔻 Study of scientific publishing in Europe (2024), on the state of scientific publishing in Europe, including publishing costs.
• 🇫🇷 🏢 Barometer of Open Science, data on the progressive shift to open publishing practices in France.
• DoaJ - 🔨 Open Access Journal repository
• Open Science Cafè - 🇮🇹 💁 Attività europee per l'open access

Sherpa helps authors decide where to publish, including services that compile what their rights are after publication. See 🔨 About Sherpa for an overview:

• 🔨 Sherpa Romeo: what are the archiving polices of different journal publishers? An author can go here to learn how to open up their articles, even when publishing in a closed-access journal.
• 🔨 Sherpa Juliet: what are the publishing requirements of funding agencies? Authors can check the publishing requirements based on who funds their research.
• 🔨 Sherpa Fact: combining data from Romeo and Juliet, it shows if journals are compliant with best publishing practices.

Some universities provide open access publishing services. An example is 🇮🇹 Sirio, for the University of Turin.

So called "hybrid journals" provide both open access and closed access articles. They are 🏢 generally regarded are bad for open access.

Preprints

A Preprint is an article ready to be sent for peer reivew. Such versions of the articles :bookmark_tab: usually differ little with their peer-reviewed counterparts, and are therefore a valid open alternative to reading regular articles.

The coronavirus pandemic required immediate action. Preprints were essential for this, as they provided immediate knowledge to the public.

• :bookmark_tab: Tracking changes between preprints and postprints during the coronavirus highlights how not much changes between preprint and published article during peer review.