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 […]
Category Archives: Scholarly publishing
Researchers find citation bias in published papers and evidence that the problem is getting worse
Phys.org June 1, 2022 Citations and text analysis are both used to study the distribution and flow of ideas between researchers, fields, and countries, but the resulting flows are rarely equal. A team of researchers in the US (City University of New York, UCLA, Stanford University) argues that the differences in these two flows capture a growing global inequality in the production of scientific knowledge. They offered a framework called ‘citational lensing’ to identify where citations should appear between countries but are absent given that what is embedded in their published abstract texts is highly similar. This framework also identifies […]
Official measures of research ‘impact’ are failing to keep pace with socially networked academics
Phys.org May 18, 2022 Academics are frequently encouraged to use social media to facilitate public engagement and enhance research impact, as it offers the potential to connect with more diverse, non-academic audiences. However, little is known about the relationship between the use of social media and academics’ own perceptions of research impact and public engagement in practice. Researchers in the UK analyzed the responses from a survey of academics which includes what academics perceive to be examples of high-impact interactions through social media, and how this is mediated by different platforms. The findings have practical implications for social media training […]
Open sharing of biotechnology research: Transparency versus security
Science Daily April 14, 2022 A team of researchers in the UK examines how open science practices and the risks of misuse interface and proposes solutions to the problems identified. They argue that in the context of viral engineering, open code, data, and materials may increase the risk of the release of enhanced pathogens. Openly available machine learning models could reduce the amount of time needed in the laboratory and make pathogen engineering easier. To prevent the misuse of computational tools, controlling access to software and data may be necessary. They highlight that research preregistration, a practice promoted by the […]
Scientists use public databases to leap over scourge of publication bias
Eurekalert June 9, 2021 Due to publication bias, there has been little focus on genes other than well-known signature hypoxia-inducible genes. Therefore, researchers in Japan performed a meta-analysis to identify novel hypoxia-inducible genes. They searched publicly available transcriptome databases to obtain hypoxia-related experimental data, retrieved the metadata, and manually curated it, selected the genes that are differentially expressed by hypoxic stimulation, and evaluated their relevance in hypoxia by performing enrichment analyses. They calculated and evaluated the number of reports and similarity coefficients of each gene to HIF1A, which is a representative gene in hypoxia studies. In this data-driven study, they […]
Publishers try out alternative pathways to open access
Science Magazine March 13, 2020 Article-processing fees (APCs) can run several thousand dollars per paper. Two non-profit publishers, Annual Review and ACM, have debuted new ways to support Open Access journals without shifting the burden entirely to authors. In the Annual Reviews model to make a journal freely available, institutions would be asked for a contribution equivalent to their previous subscription—minus a 5% discount that Annual Reviews to retain a critical mass of paying institutions. It will reimpose paywalls and rescind the discount if not enough subscribers renew each year. ACM is asking the institutions that publish the most papers […]