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50 news posts in Scholarly publishing

Open science and peer review

01 Sep 2015

Publishers stand together in the fight against fraudulent peer review

In recent months, several academic publishers have been forced to retract a combined total of over 250 published articles across a number of disciplines due to irregularities and outright fraudulence in the peer-review process. As a result of this, the stringency of checks carried out by publishers during the submission and review process of manuscripts has come under the spotlight. Here, we give  some background to this ongoing issue and discuss the various practices by which it can be contained. At the beginning of 2014, several journals under the aegis of a major publishing house were forced to retract 100+ papers when it was revealed that these papers had been “created” by SCIgen, a computer program that generates ‘random Computer Science research’ using context-free grammar. Later that year, a piece in Nature by retractionwatch.com activists Ivan Oransky, Cat Ferguson and Adam Marcus warned of the increasing danger of authors surreptitiously reviewing their own papers; an issue taken up by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) in a statement on 19 December 2014. Although ostensibly different issues, they both pointed towards problems residing at the core of academic publication – the soundness of peer-review. In March of this year, a Web of […]

Open science and peer review

20 Jul 2015

EC endorses Gold Open Access with new pilot project

The European Commission (EC) recently announced a new pilot project that supports publishing with Gold Open Access publishers like Frontiers.  The pilot, entitled OpenAIRE, will help fund Open Access publications for FP7 projects finished within the last two years which have been accepted and peer-reviewed. Only publications in recognized Open Access journals listed in the DOAJ, Scopus, Web of Science and PubMed  are eligible for post-publication funding with as much as €2,000 per article to help cover publishing costs for research and review article types and as much as €6,000 for monographs. “This announcement is very important to the industry as it not only shows that the EC recognizes Gold Open Access publishing as one of the key solutions to unlocking research knowledge, it is also important as they have expressed their appreciation for the costs involved in providing a high quality Open Access publishing service,” said Kamila Markram, CEO of Frontiers. Frontiers provides a premier Gold Open Access solution with a novel enhanced interactive peer-review process that helps authors and reviewers enhance the quality of published articles. In as little as 7 years, Frontiers has became one of the top 5 Gold Open Access publishers in the world with over 34,000 articles published in 54 journals covering 411 specialties across all academia.  Articles published with Frontiers qualify for funding through […]

Open science and peer review

29 May 2015

Open Science and scholarly publishing roundup – May 29, 2015

Selected news, views and information on Open Science and scholarly publishing from the past week Discover Magazine Blog What to do about a slow peer reviewer? The Guardian How has publishing changed in the last 50 years, and what has this meant to scientists? The Guardian How can we stop big science hoovering up all the research funding? Science 2.0 Editorial independence or extortion? Frontiers sacks 31 editors The Independent Long author-lists on research papers are threatening the academic work system Research Information Open-access books slowly on the rise, says PCG LSE Incentives for open science: New prizes to encourage research integrity and transparency in social science PLOS Blog Support Open Access publishing with the click of a button PLOS Blog Once more, fraud in Science: the retracted study on attitudes toward gay marriage The Conversation The ‘train wreck’ continues: another social science retraction ABC News Elsevier clashes with researchers over open access publishing for academic texts The Australian Open access lobby attacks Elsevier Times Higher Education The peer review drugs don’t work