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91 news posts in Open science and peer review

Open science and peer review

06 Apr 2016

Highlights from Experiences with Open Access Journals

by Sandra Hausmann, Frontiers Business Development Manager On March 31st we brought five high profile Frontiers editors together for a panel discussion at the ICIS hosted event in UC Davis: “ Frontiers in Publishing – Experiences with Open Access Journals”. Mary Christopher, Field Chief Editor for Frontiers in Veterinary Science , Neelima Sinha, Specialty Chief Editor for Plant Evolution and Development, Cecilia Giulivi, Specialty Chief Editor for Cellular Biochemistry, Patrice Koehl, Specialty Chief Editor for Mathematics of Biomolecules, and Arne Ekstrom, Guest Associate Editor Frontiers in Human Neuroscience joined us for a lively discussion on open access and their experience as editors of Frontiers. The event was moderated by MacKenzie Smith, head of the  library  at UC Davis, who challenged the panelists on how their experience as Frontiers editors influenced the way they viewed open access and how well open access was received within their disciplines.  The discussion also touched on article processing fees, quality, and volume of open access publications. In general, open access was well received. Cecilia mentioned the fact that with OA authors can actually re-use their published work e.g. for teaching without infringing the publishers copy right, was a major improvement. Mary even pointed out that […]

Open science and peer review

29 Mar 2016

Frontiers launches new Digital Editorial Office

Frontiers has launched a new innovative service that allows for complete operational independence in academic publishing for their over 60,000 editors around the world. The Frontiers Digital Editorial Office launched this week and was built in-house by Frontiers’ team of IT professionals. It was at first specifically designed to assist Frontiers’ Specialty Chief Editors, who come from the world’s leading institutions,  in their editorial tasks and to assist them in quality assurance, as well as to assess the performance of their specialty area.  Created with  feedback from the editors, the new Digital Editorial Office is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and will help them make editorial decisions and supervise the review process. In 2008, Frontiers was the first publisher to build a Digital Editorial Office that gives editors complete editorial independence and freedom to act in the review process at any time.  The launch of the new Digital Editorial Office is an extension of this original innovation with more advanced usability, features and functions. A  winner of the Gold Prize for the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing, Frontiers was born digital 8 years ago and changed the way publishing is done by custom-building their entire IT ecosystem in-house around collaborative and transparent peer-review and scalable journal management. Frontiers […]

Open science and peer review

24 Mar 2016

Digital repositorian’s vision sets new standards for open access in the Gulf region

By Michelle Ponto, Frontiers science writer The Open Access movement is becoming a standard for many universities around the world.  But just a few years ago, the concept of an open-access repository was an innovative venture in the Gulf region. Digital Repository Specialist Mohamed Ba-Essa and his team at King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) took on the challenge and were pioneers in creating the University’s open-access repository along with the policies and the procedures that have made it successful. “We were the first University in the Middle East. There was one university in Algeria who adapted the open-access policy one day before us – so they were technically the first in the entire MENA region, but we are proud to say we were the first in the Middle East,” said Ba-Essa. KAUST’s open-access policy officially launched June 30, 2014 and has since helped increase the number of downloads and views of the published research conducted at the university. In addition, it has helped to promote the university beyond the region and build its reputation.   Already, many MENA universities have been in contact with the KAUST digital repository team, asking for advice on how to set up an […]

Open science and peer review

23 Mar 2016

What is Peer Review? It Depends Who is Asking!

Frontiers for Young Minds and Knowing Neurons are excited to share the results of their collaboration on the question, “What is Peer Review?” In creating an infographic to address this question, we ended up with two versions targeted at two unique audiences. The first version – which you can find here – will be useful to undergraduates and other very early career researchers starting to navigate the research world. The second version, found below, is meant for K-12 teachers and students who want to learn about how and why scientists share their findings with each other. Both infographics are published under a Creative Commons 4.0 NC license, so they are free for educators to use and distribute! We will be sharing the second version with our Frontiers for Young Minds team soon! Thank you again to Knowing Neurons for their work on this!

Open science and peer review

04 Mar 2016

New Data Debunks Old Beliefs: Part 2

Our original New data debunks old beliefs blog post plotted the impact factors of 570 randomly selected journals indexed in the 2014 Journal Citation Reports (Thomson Reuters, 2015), against their publicly stated rejection rates. The goal was to understand the relationship between rejection rates and journal quality. Despite a widespread belief that high rejection rates secure high impact factors, no significant correlation was found. This study was preliminary, to start a discussion, because it suggests that such an entrenched belief may be wrong. This blog post is going one step further by removing what could be the main reason why we could not find any correlation: varying citation rates across academic fields. It is widely known that articles in some fields typically get more citations than in other fields. Perhaps a correlation would become evident once we removed this variable. In Figures 1-7 below, we normalized the impact factors by field, thus effectively removing this variable from the results (data accessible here). We have done this by calculating the ranking of each journal within its own Journal Citation Reports category (or field). As an example, a journal that has the 4th largest IF among 200 journals in its category will […]

Open science and peer review

16 Feb 2016

SciComm meet-up in San Francisco March 9

Part of the Frontiers Communication team will be in San Francisco on March 9, and together with swissnex San Francisco, we are hosting a Science Communication Meet-Up at Terroir, one of our favorite wine bars in the city. Whether you are a journalist who writes about the new discoveries or a scientist trying to let the media and other researchers know that you have just published a new exciting discovery, communicating science can be challenging. Let’s break down the boundaries and get to know each other so we can share information. WHO YOU’LL MEET: On March 9, you’ll meet Sandra Hausmann and myself (Michelle Ponto) from Frontiers, an academic publishing company based out Switzerland, and Benjamin Bollmann from swissnex. Sandra is Frontier’s Business Development Manager. She works out of our San Francisco Bureau and can fill you in on the latest innovations in academic publishing, what type of research Frontiers publishes and some of the interesting Research Topics we are excited about. These topics pool the research of scientists around the world and can cover big issues like Alzheimer’s, Zika virus research, climate change adaption, E.coli tracking, robotics and more.  She’s also your go-to person if you are looking for a researcher in your area to interview on a specific topic. […]

Open science and peer review

27 Jan 2016

Peer-reviewing Frontiers

Surveys among thousands of our authors, editors, reviewers show high overall satisfaction with Frontiers,  but also yield constructive criticisms which help us to improve our processes and platform. Frontiers is determined to let researchers shape scholarly publishing. It is therefore important that we listen to you, the researchers. Send us your suggestions, your criticisms, your requests – we welcome them. We don’t claim to be perfect, but we are constantly evolving, based on feedback from the scientific community. It is particularly easy for Frontiers to make improvements, because we are the first and only publisher to have built our IT platform in-house and from scratch, ensuring maximum flexibility of our system and processes. Every day, Frontiers actively looks for such feedback, for example through conference calls and meetings with our editorial boards, through discussions with researchers at conferences around the world, and by tracking comments on social media. Another way is through continuous user satisfaction surveys. Here, we give a summary of results from two such surveys, with a combined response of over 11,000 Frontiers authors, editors, and reviewers. These surveys point to considerable satisfaction with Frontiers, but also yield constructive criticisms which allow us to improve further. The surveys in brief […]

Open science and peer review

24 Dec 2015

Article Processing Charges: Open Access could save global research

The total number of peer-reviewed research articles published each year increases by approximately 4% [Scopus]. In 2014, nearly 400,000 published research articles were Gold open-access papers. This results in approximately 20% of all research articles — and the number is growing at an astonishing rate of 20% per year (Lewis, 2013).  If the rate continues, open-access papers will exceed subscription papers in just a few years from now. This, and similar observations, have led some commentators to predict that traditional subscription journals will soon be a thing of the past (Lewis, 2012). But is this a credible prediction? Is open access capable of disrupting the entire scholarly publishing industry? Can it replace traditional publishing or force it to adopt new business models? The answers depend on whether open access satisfies two fundamental criteria for disruption: an increase in efficiency and a decrease in costs. The new generation of open-access publishers are “born digital” which is undoubtedly far more efficient, but how much will universities, institutes and scientists save by switching to open access ? Brief history of the evolution of open access From the 1950s to the 1990s, nearly all scientific papers were published in subscription journals that were paid for by individual readers or […]

Open science and peer review

22 Dec 2015

Born Digital: building the ultimate open-access publisher

By Pascal Rocha da Silva, Frontiers The digital disruption for analog film started in 1975 with the invention of the digital camera by Steven Sasson and ended with the bankruptcy of Kodak in 2012 (40 years later). The digital disruption in publishing started in the late 1990s with the first online archiving of articles, but it is still far from complete (~30 years into the transition). However, as over 30% of peer-reviewed papers are now published in some form of open-access1, the industry has technically crossed the tipping point for disruption. This is the point where more than just the innovators and early adopters begin using a product or service. Figure 1: Projection of open access versus subscription articles: 2000-2021. Disruptions are driven by economic models that lower costs, and process models that increase efficiency. In 2014, the revenue per subscription article was around $7,000 (calculated from $14 billion revenue for about 2 million articles2 – see article on the cost of publishing), while the average Article Processing Charge (APC) for an open-access article was estimated in our sample at $2,700. This means that, as open-access articles grow to dominate the market, the cost of publishing will eventually drop 2-3 fold, saving libraries and research departments $5 to 10 […]

Open science and peer review

21 Dec 2015

Selecting for impact: new data debunks old beliefs

One of the strongest beliefs in scholarly publishing is that journals seeking a high impact factor (IF) should be highly selective, accepting only papers predicted to become highly significant and novel, and hence likely to attract a large number of citations. The result is that so-called top journals reject as many of 90-95% of the manuscripts they receive, forcing the authors of these papers to resubmit in more “specialized”, lower impact factor journals where they may find a more receptive home. Unfortunately, most of the 20,000 or so journals in the scholarly publishing world follow their example. All of which raises the question: does the strategy work? There is evidence that proves it doesn’t. In Figure 1, we plotted the impact factors of 570 randomly selected journals indexed in the 2014 Journal Citation Reports (Thomson Reuters, 2015), against their publicly stated rejection rates.    Figure 1: 570 journals with publicly stated rejection rates (for sources, see below and to see complete data, click here). Impact factors from Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports (2014). (Y-axis is on a Log scale). As you can see, Figure 1 shows there is absolutely no correlation between rejection rates and impact factor (r2 = 0.0023; we assume the sample of 570 journals is sufficiently random to represent the […]

Open science and peer review

03 Nov 2015

FLOWCHART: Should I take on this review assignment?

By Chloe Schmidt and Katherine Lawson You’ve just received an invitation to review a manuscript. Coincidentally, your expertise matches perfectly with its content! But before you go ahead and accept the invitation, there are a few other things to consider: for one, is there something that could interfere with your objectivity as a reviewer? For that matter, what’s considered a conflict of interest at Frontiers? Here’s a fun flowchart to help clarify whether you, as a reviewer, have any potential conflicts of interest with the authors (or editor) of a manuscript. If you find yourself in a situation where you answer yes to any of the questions below, do us a favor and drop the Editorial Office an email. Otherwise, happy reviewing!