The InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) – the global network of over 140 science, engineering and medical academies – announces the release of its new report, which is the culmination of a two-year study, Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences. The IAP report builds on current definitions and offers a spectrum of journal and conference practices: a broad set of dynamic predatory behaviours and characteristics that distinguish between outright fraud, low-quality, questionable and unethical practices, and best practice. Learn more about the systemic drivers of all predatory practices and the report’s recommendations. The full report ‘Combatting Predatory Academic Journals and Conferences’ and the summary report available in seven languages.

In this presentation to attendees of the Academic Publishing in Europe event held on January 11-13, 2022, Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director, talks about the ever increasing demand for interoperability and interaction with content. How can the information community develop the practices and the systems that are better able to support the needs of researchers in an increasingly sophisticated and complex network of digital native scholarly output?

ScienceDirect is collaborating with the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Taylor & Francis and Wiley on a six-month pilot project. Over 15 million researchers worldwide use the platform and customer feedback was that research would be easier if more publishers collaborated and shared content. During the pilot, researchers will be able to search and browse more than 70,000 articles in 35 journals from these participating publishers, alongside Elsevier’s content on ScienceDirect. All ScienceDirect users will be able to view abstracts of the new pilot content.

The author provides a summary of the latest edition of the conference Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) held online in January 2022. Among many subjects addressed, Todd Carpenter, Executive Director, NISO (National Information Standards Organisation), Washington, DC, has drawn attention to the importance of persistent identifiers, such as those for books (ISBN), journals (ISSN), and digital publications (DOI), for metadata infrastructures, content discoverability and dissemination channels. This also directly relates to the focus that Martyn Rittman, Product Manager, Crossref, has placed on the metadata quality, which is especially relevant for Open Access infrastructures that need to constantly adapt to be able to handle a wide variety of content formats, such as empirical datasets, methodology protocols,  and digital contributions.

You can find another report of the event here and there.

The recordings will be available until long after the conference as part of the Permanent Record.

The post summarises the findings of two recently completed studies by a group of scholars collaborating in the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) .
One is a review of existing review articles of peer review innovations which identifies three high-level categories: approaches to peer review, reviewer focussed initiatives and technology to support peer review.
The other is an empirical paper analyzing the results of a survey about ongoing innovation projects among publishers, academic journal editors, and other organizations in the scholarly communication ecosystem which resulted in a dataset of 95 self-defined innovations.

La piratería y más directamente la estafa de los editores depredadores va creciendo en el mundo y es una preocupación creciente en la publicación académica que ha llamado la atención a los editores más serios. Este problema no es tan grave en la publicación científica de América Latina. Basado en  el informe Predatory publishers’ latest scam: bootlegged and rebranded paper publicado por Nature en octubre 2021, el autor muestra los procedimientos engañosos usados, explica porqué las revistas depredadoras son usadas por los autores y propone soluciones para evitar y/o contrarrestar el daño.

A SCIELO altmetric study was carried out to assess the presence of scientific research output in Latin America on the social web using the collection of journals and articles indexed in SciELO. The conclusion was that 58% of journals and 13% of articles represent the penetration of altmetrics in Latin America. Mentions predominate in Health and Biological Sciences journals and in articles published in English, with Twitter being the highlight among the sources of mention. Additionally, based on insertion, dissemination and internationalization indicators, it was possible to identify groups of countries with different profiles.

See also this article in Spanish and Portuguese.

This 2nd Edition of International Directory Organizations in Grey Literature (IDGL) includes the organization’s URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and its ROR (Research Organization Registry) ID. The ROR-ID record further contains other persistent identifiers such as the organization’s GRID (Global Research Identifier), ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier), Crossref Funder ID, and Wikidata. Organizations are listed under the country in which they reside and appear in alphabetical order based on their name.

In the early days of the pandemic, the Wellcome Foundation issued a statement calling for a global commitment to sharing of all scientific data and information pertaining to COVID-19 for the duration of the health crisis. The Research on Research Institute conducted a follow-up study to report on the success of that call to action. The full text of the report is worth a review and may be found here.

This chapter has been invited to appear in Predatory Practices in Scholarly Communication and Publishing: Causes, Forms, Implications, and Solutions, published by Routledge.

It presents a three-phase analysis of 521 journals that use the open source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS) while appearing on Beall’s list of predatory publishers and journals and/or in Cabells Predatory Reports. The study revealed a misanalysis as “predatory”. PKP’s new technical strategy aims to verify and communicate standards adherence to the public. Work has begun on systems involving trade organizations, such ORCiD and Crossref, for authenticating journal practices. The goal is to provide a publicly accessible industry standard for more reliably assessing journal quality.