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91 news posts in Open science and peer review

Open science and peer review

06 Mar 2017

160-million Papers and Counting: The World’s Information Deluge

Academic output has exploded over the last 100 years but how can the most relevant research be found? — by Melissa Cochrane In 2009, it’s estimated there were at least 50 million research publications floating around the coves of the internet. If you printed all of them out and put them side by side, you could go all the way around the earth. Based on the recent data, however, it appears the number of publications are at least 3 times larger than previously thought, at around 160 million, and the growth rate has increased to 0.8% per month, doubling in just over 7 years. It’s clear that the scientific world is booming with information, but how do researchers find out who, what and where is relevant to their specific fields? How on earth can we navigate all this? Kicked off two years ago, Microsoft Academic is a research project inside Microsoft Research. At its core is an artificial intelligence agent that reads all academic publications on the web to learn and automatically create a massive knowledge base, going far beyond a simple keyword-matching search to provide an overall benchmark and the context of what you’re looking for. A goal of […]

Open science and peer review

20 Dec 2016

Germany setting a precedent for Open Access

Frontiers was very pleased to announce a new publishing agreement with Universität Tübingen. Established in 1477, not only is the university one of Europe’s oldest universities, but also a German excellence institution, one of only eleven to have been awarded this top “Excellent” class. There has been a growing trend toward open access in Germany for quite some time, with a recent analysis indicating that German expenditure on APCs is growing rapidly year on year. This trend is reflected at Frontiers too, with more than half of our publishing agreements being with German institutions alone. Universität Tübingen now joins The Technical University of Munich (TUM), University of Bremen and University of Konstanz on our list of Institutional Members, making that four German excellence institutions who are contributing to a new precedent for Open Access and Open Science.

Open science and peer review

15 Sep 2016

A History of Academic Peer Review

Although peer review is now a fundamental quality control measure implemented during the publishing process, the practice as we know it today is quite different from how it was envisioned almost two centuries ago.   PDF version available here: A Succinct History of Academic Peer Review References Csiszar, A. (2016) Peer review: Troubled from the start. Nature 532:306-8 doi:10.1038/532306a Spier, R. (2002) The history of the peer-review process. Trends in Biotechnology 20(8):357-8 doi: 10.1016/S0167-7799(02)01985-6

Open science and peer review

15 Sep 2016

Podcast: Peer Review Recognition

  Peer review recognition provides transparency and accountability which are key to achieving high quality research. In this Frontiers podcast, guest host Pamela Valdes, President of EPFL’s Postdoc Association and postdoc for EPFL’s Life Sciences Faculty, talks to Frontiers’ Mirjam Curno and Tobias Preuten on what makes Frontiers Peer Review different and what Frontiers is doing to recognize researchers for their peer reviews.

Open science and peer review

14 Sep 2016

Why peer review needs to be recognized

Peer review plays a pivotal role in the advancement of scholarly literature. Around 2 million research papers are currently published every year, all assessed by expert colleagues to analyse the authors’ results and conclusions, provide detailed feedback and help shape the manuscripts. But it is a largely thankless task. In most cases, the hours spent conducting a peer review at the service of the community go unrecognized. The First Step in Peer Review Recognition Frontiers believes in recognizing and rewarding peer review contributions, which we’ve pioneered since 2007. We consider transparency and accountability key to achieving high quality research. For this reason, we list the names of reviewers and handling editors on published articles as a certification of accuracy and validity. Featuring the reviewers’ names alongside the authors not only provides credibility to the quality of the peer review, but is a way of recognizing their dedication and contribution to improving the paper and ensuring its accuracy. Beyond the Paper: Why Volunteer to Peer Review There are many reasons why researchers participate and volunteer to peer review papers. These range from ensuring the rigorous standards of the research published in the field are met, to fulfilling a sense of responsibility to the community […]

Open science and peer review

16 Aug 2016

Reject or publish? Kids discuss peer-review

Is the paper fact or fiction? Is the paper boring? These are all things this panel of children look for when reviewing a paper for our journal for kids, Frontiers for Young Minds. Watch the panel of kids explain  what criteria should be used when deciding whether a paper should be accepted or not. Learn how to submit your paper to Frontiers for Young Minds.  The open-access journal for kids is free to access and free to publish, which means that there are no publishing fees.

Open science and peer review

23 May 2016

Everything You Need to Know About Plagiarism

By Chloe Schmidt and Daisy Hessenberger Plagiarism is a serious issue in the world of academic publishing. Publishers must take great care to ensure content is original, referenced appropriately, or reused with permission. Plagiarism is not only taking someone else’s work and using it as your own: there are different circumstances under which reproduced content can be considered “plagiarized”. To shed some light on this issue, and explain the process Frontiers uses to detect and handle plagiarism, we’ve created the guide below. We use a tool called iThenticate to scan every submission. You can download an example of an iThenticate report here: Sample_iThenticate_report Some guidelines and resources for further reading: Frontiers author guidelines (see ‘Original Content’): http://home.frontiersin.org/about/author-guidelines Committee on Publication Ethics: http://publicationethics.org/ Office of Research Integrity (US): http://ori.hhs.gov/avoiding-plagiarism-self-plagiarism-and-other-questionable-writing-practices-guide-ethical-writing iThenticate: http://www.ithenticate.com/resources/papers/ethics-of-self-plagiarism Happy writing! PDF version available here: Plagiarism