PUBLISHING
Some of the notable items from this past Peer Review Week:
- The Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) has launched with the aim to “promote the unrestricted availability of the abstracts of the world’s scholarly publications, particularly journal articles and book chapters.” It follows on from the earlier Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), and hopefully it will be as popular.
- Transparent Peer Review: What We’ve Learned. Wiley’s Elizabeth Matson and Elizabeth Moylan review their collaboration with Publons and ScholarOne. Wiley operates an opt-out scheme for authors, and found that 86% of authors remained opted-in. The preprint has further data on the implementation.
- What do Chinese researchers think about the peer review process? Elsevier were asking 1,100 researchers. It covers item such as transparent peer review (~50% of researchers appear to be supportive in one way or another), and reviewer recognition.
- Delta Think have released data around “Preprints and COVID-19”, which also explored the issue of trust in preprints. For most respondents the trustworthiness remained the same in light of the pandemic, or increased, but for around a quarter of respondents it did decrease.
- Strengthening trust in peer review through transparency. Sowmya Swaminathan and Maria Hodges describe efforts at Springer Nature. Of note seems that the uptake of transparent peer review at Nature Communications has increased from an initial 60% to now 70% author uptake.
- Transparency and Trust. PLOS’ contribution by Veronique Kiermer commenting on our efforts around trust in peer review.
- Cell Press are launching their model of community peer review, where submissions are assessed with all their journals in mind, so that sequential peer review at different journals is avoided. This appears similar to the cross-publisher Review Commons, albeit locking authors into the offering of one publisher.
- Transparent Peer Review—A Practical Solution to Implement Open Peer Review at Scale: A Case Study. This was published already on 1 September. The article summarizes the experience of a transparent peer review trial at the Institute of Physics Publishing, working with Publons. It is noteworthy also as it suggests a roll-out to all of IOPP’s fully open access journals in the near future.
- Apologies to the many other noteworthy contributions that I undoubtedly missed.
How the Internet Archive is Ensuring Permanent Access to Open Access Journal Articles. Not all open access journals are participating in archive schemes like LOCKSS or CLOCKSS, and a study by Laakso et al. has found that a number of journals have vanished without trace. The Internet Archive is trying to contribute, and has created an editable catalog to identify the relevant literature for archiving.
JATS4R has a consultation on new items for peer review materials in the XML for published papers. Deadline for posting comments is 30 October.
RESEARCH
The US National Academy of Sciences can now kick out harassers. So why hasn’t it? According to this Nature News item, it appears as if there is a reluctance for formal complaints being filed about harassers. Those complaints are essential to the formal workflow that the National Academy has instituted.
The hysteresis of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. This Nature paper is presenting sobering news of sea level rises as the climate changes, based on the melting of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. For temperature changes up to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the forecasted rise in sea level is 1.3 meters per each degree of warming, and considerably more than that for further degrees of warming. Even if temperatures were to drop again the process won’t reverse easily.
EVENTS
The public launch event of the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA) is taking place online on 5 October, 2020, at 10am – 11.30am ET.
The program for the Creative Commons global summit on 19 – 23 October has been released.
Open Data Day 2021 will take place on 6 March, 2021. Facilitated by the Open Knowledge Foundation, this brings together groups from all over the world.
OTHER
Perhaps just for fans like me, but Studio Ghibli has released a library of 400 stills from their movies, free to use. The license terms, according to Google Translate, unfortunately appear to be fairly vague: “Feel free to use it within the bounds of common sense.” Here is an example from Spirited Away:
