More than 2 million research papers have disappeared from the Internet

Nature  March 4, 2024 A researcher at the University of London tested 7,438,037 works labelled with digital object identifiers (DOIs) and found that one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved indicating that systems to preserve papers online have failed to keep pace with the growth of research output. The sample was made up of a random selection of up to 1,000 registered to each member organization. Twenty-eight percent of these works — more than two million articles — did not appear in a major digital archive. Small publishers are at higher risk of failing to preserve […]

EU council’s ‘no pay’ publishing model draws mixed response

Nature  June 2, 2023 The Council of the European Union has recommended a ‘no pay’ academic-publishing model in which neither readers nor authors are billed for academic papers. The recommendations, part of a set of principles on scholarly publishing adopted by the council, are not legally binding and have been welcomed by some members of the academic community. Critics say that the plan could usher in a state-defined system that might stymie academic freedom and abolish an industry without considering who would pay for the alternative. Supporters, such as the German Research Federation, say the principles would lower the barriers […]

Multimillion-dollar trade in paper authorships alarms publishers

Nature  18 January 2023 An international team of researchers (Germany, UK) have uncovered hundreds of online advertisements that offer the chance to buy authorship on research papers to be published in reputable journals. Publishers and journals are investigating the claims and have retracted dozens of articles over suspicions that people have paid to be named as authors, despite not participating in the research. In July 2022, the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning retracted 30 papers linked to adverts on International Publisher. In May 2022, Springer Nature retracted a paper for the first time over suspicions that some of […]

ChatGPT writes convincing fake scientific abstracts that fool reviewers in study

Nanowerk  January 16, 2023 A team of researchers in the US (Northwestern University, University of Chicago) took titles from recent papers from high-impact journals and asked ChatGPT to generate abstracts. They ran these generated abstracts and the original abstracts through a plagiarism detector and AI output detector, and had blinded human reviewers try to differentiate between generated and original abstracts. Each reviewer was given 25 abstracts that were a mixture of the generated and original abstracts and asked them to give a binary score of what they thought the abstract was. They could only spot ChatGPT generated abstracts 68% of […]

Can offering choice to researchers reduce researcher bias?

Phys.org  September 21, 2022 The review process is designed to safeguard high standards, help improve promising work and weed out problematic papers, but a well-documented issue is bias in peer review. Whether conscious or otherwise, it compromises fair judgment based on things like gender, name, nationality, affiliation, or career status. To mitigate this researchers at the Michigan School of Information introduced and tested double-anonymous peer review, where the identities of authors as well as reviewers are concealed. The Institute of Physics was the first STM publisher to offer double-anonymous peer review across all their propriety journals on a voluntary basis […]

The US has ruled all taxpayer-funded research must be free to read. What’s the benefit of open access?

Phys.org  August 31, 2022 As per the guidance, all U.S. federal agencies must put in place policies and plans so anyone anywhere can immediately and freely access the peer-reviewed publications and data arising from research they fund. It may act as a catalyst for more policy changes globally. The new OSTP guidance emphasizes the primary intention is for the US public to have immediate access to research funded by their tax dollars. Even academics at well-funded universities can access only journals for which their universities have subscription. Last year, estimates suggested some 2 million research articles were published. People outside […]

Lack of grants from funding agencies biggest barrier to OA publishing in physical sciences, study finds

Phys.org  August 22, 2022 AIP Publishing, the American Physical Society (APS), IOP Publishing (IOPP) and Optica Publishing Group (formerly OSA) conducted a study on Open Access (OA). Over 3,000 physical science researchers from across the globe participated in the OA in physics. According to the study over half (53%) of physical science researchers want to publish OA but 62% say a lack of monies from funding agencies prevents them from doing so. Over the past 5 years, 14% of respondents have not published OA at all, and over 50% have only published one article per year OA over that period. […]

The peer review system is broken. We asked academics how to fix it

Phys.og  July 25, 2022 Peer review is an essential part of academic publishing, yet many authors, reviewers, and editors have reportedly encountered problems with the review process. Some scholars view peer-review as a necessary process for the advancement of science, while other scholars argue that for many publishers and journals, both authors and reviewers are being exploited. An international team of researchers (Australia, UK, United States) provides a narrative review of current perspectives and available research on the peer-review process to date and, summarizes potential solutions elicited from scholars on Twitter. A review of the literature identified several problems with […]

Online platform designed to improve reproducibility, scientific collaborations

Phys.org  June 24, 2022 Reproducibility is a significant challenge in (epi)genomic research due to the complexity of experiments composed of traditional biochemistry and informatics. Recent advances have exacerbated this as high-throughput sequencing data is generated at an unprecedented pace. A team of researchers in the US (Pennsylvania State University, Cornell University) has developed a Platform for Epi-Genomic Research (PEGR), a web-based project management platform that tracks and quality controls experiments from conception to publication-ready figures, compatible with multiple assays and bioinformatic pipelines. It supports rigor and reproducibility for biochemists working at the bench, while fully supporting reproducibility and reliability for […]

Leading journal Nature will make sex and gender reporting mandatory in research

Phys.org  May 27, 2022 According to Nature journals’ new policy, starting in June, researchers who submit papers to a subset of the Nature Portfolio journals https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/editorial-policies/ethics-and-biosecurity will need to describe whether, and how, sex and gender are considered in study design. If no sex and gender analyses were carried out, authors will need to clarify why. This will apply to work with human participants, as well as other vertebrate animals and cell experimental studies. “Sex” and “gender” are terms that are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Sex refers to biological attributes, including genetics and reproductive […]