Students at the University of Twente are largely satisfied with the courses they are taking. That picture comes from the National Student Survey (NSE), the results of which were announced today. In the overall rating of the programme, UT scored an average of 3.97 on a scale of 1 to 5, putting UT in second place of all (full-time) universities. Only the university in Wageningen scores higher.
We invite you to participate in the 2023 Workplace Equity Survey. What has changed since the last (2018) Survey? Is DEIA still a priority, or are we seeing organizations take a step back?
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“Publicly funded research outputs should be immediately and openly available to all without barriers such as subscription fees or paywalls, say European scientific community leaders who welcomed a recent 20-point plan agreed by the Council of the European Union to encourage open science.
The Council, as it is informally known, represents government ministers from the 27 EU member states and is one of the key European Union decision-making bodies, along with the European Parliament and the European Commission.
After years of deliberations, which continued throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the Council’s Competitiveness Council (Research) agreed the text for 20 conclusions to encourage high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing, including cracking down on unsustainable author fees that currently prop up open science publishing….”
Abstract: Author attitudes towards Open Access (OA) remains an important area of investigation in academic publishing. The successful implementation of new OA infrastructure and business models depend on their reception within scholarly communities. This paper proposes “Open Access Culture” — the set of beliefs, practices, and attitudes towards OA publishing shared by members of an academic field — as a framework to understand how OA innovations are and will be received by different scholarly communities. The investigation of OA culture helps identify the needs of individual academic fields (e.g., the importance of print publishing for a particular field), thus foregrounding author preferences in the publishing process. The University of Michigan Press (UMP) is drawing upon the OA Culture framework to aid the implementation of its OA monograph initiative. UMP has undertaken research (author survey as well as editor, author, and librarian interviews) to understand how the monograph initiative will integrate different fields. This paper presents results of this research demonstrating the application of the OA Culture framework to several fields, as well the Humanities, Arts, and Humanistic Social Sciences (HSS) more broadly. This is one way that University Presses may take an author-centered approach to OA publishing programs, one that foregrounds the needs of individual authors and considers their unique disciplinary context. Moreover, the paper offers a recent view of sentiments towards OA in the HSS and thus helps to contextualize the current OA landscape.
Abstract: Who benefits from open access (OA) publishing? For whom does it present additional hurdles? We seek to understand the impact of the move to OA publishing models on scholars as producers of articles for academic journals. Specifically, we examine whether research funding, author gender and number, (location of) institutional affiliation, and the European or US origin of the journal affect the likelihood that an article is published OA. Our empirical analysis focuses on twelve well-respected journals. We find that research funding is consistently and positively associated with OA publishing, but also that relatively few articles are published OA. In addition, articles authored by scholars with European institutional affiliations are more likely than those with US institutional affiliations to be published OA. We discuss the implications of our findings and point to avenues for further work to better understand how OA affects scholars’ ability to publish their research in academic journals.
We’re off for Memorial Day. Please allow Shonen Knife to get your summer started.
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“This issue of the Nordic Journal of Criminology marks an important shift in the journal’s publication policy. In this issue, and in those to come, all articles will be published under Diamond Open Access, which means that they are distributed and preserved online with no fees to either reader or author. The hope is that this will broaden the journal’s readership and facilitate knowledge exchange on criminological issues across the Nordics and beyond. As described in previous editorials, the Nordic Journal of Criminology is a cross-disciplinary forum with a long history, which prioritizes research of Nordic relevance, and which cultivates diversity and international collaboration (Aromaa 2000; Tutenges 2022). With Diamond Open Access, we have a powerful tool to further solidify this forum.
This issue marks another important shift for the journal. We have a new publisher, Scandinavian University Press, along with a new website that you can visit here: https://www.idunn.no/journal/njc. We hope you will like it! On the website, new articles will be published on a rolling basis, meaning that they are made accessible as soon as the review and editing process is completed. We will continue the tradition of assembling articles in two annual volumes, but these will only appear online. Like so many other journals, we are switching to online only publishing and will no longer print and snail mail journal issues to subscribers, authors, and other key stakeholders….”
Abstract: In this research paper, we analyzed the bibliographic data of the research publications issued by the Moroccan Journal of Chemistry between 2013 and 2021. As an open-access country-based research journal with a narrow area of interest and international online exposure, it will be interesting to see how it affects the local chemical research community through the comparison of the characteristics of the research outputs of the journal as retrieved from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) with the features of Moroccan chemical research from 2014 to 2021 in the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS). In this context, we generated scientometric networks using Gephi, a tool for large-scale data visualization, to reveal the patterns of the publications in the Moroccan Journal of Chemistry. When performing our analysis, we found a significant alignment between the research topics featured in the Moroccan Journal of Chemistry and the main research areas of the Moroccan chemical scholarly outputs, particularly Multidisciplinary Chemistry, Physical Chemistry, and Analytical Chemistry. We also identified that the Moroccan Journal of Chemistry functions as an incubator for establishing new traditions of research collaboration between Moroccan institutions and target nations such as Asian and African countries. As well, it is clear that the Moroccan Journal of Chemistry is an interesting venue for the most productive chemical researchers in Morocco for sharing preliminary research findings and discussing trendy topics.
Abstract: Objective To evaluate whether a citation advantage exists for open access (OA) publications in gynecologic oncology.
Method A cross-sectional study of research and review articles published in the International Journal of Gynecological Cancer (IJGC) and in Gynecologic Oncology during 1980–2022. Bibliometric measures were compared between OA publications and non-OA publications. The role of authors in low/middle-income countries was assessed. We analyzed article characteristics associated with a high citations per year (CPY) score.
Results Overall, 18 515 articles were included, of which 2398 (13.0%) articles were published OA. The rate of OA has increased since 2007. During 2018–2022, the average proportion of articles published OA was 34.0% (range 28.5%–41.4%). OA articles had higher CPY (median (IQR), 3.0 (1.5–5.3) vs 1.3 (0.6–2.7), p<0.001). There was a strong positive correlation between OA proportion and impact factor; IJGC – r(23)=0.90, p<0.001, Gynecologic Oncology – r(23)=0.89, p<0.001. Articles by authors from low/middle-income countries were less common among OA articles than among non-OA articles (5.5% vs 10.7%, p<0.001). Articles by authors from low/middle-income countries were less common in the high CPY group than for articles without a high CPY score (8.0% vs 10.2%, p=0.003). The following article characteristics were found to be independently associated with a high CPY: publication after 2007, (adjusted odds ratio (aOR)=4.9, 95% CI 4.3 to 5.7), research funding reported (aOR=1.6, 95% CI 1.4 to 1.8), and being published OA (aOR=1.5, 95% CI 1.3–1.7). Articles written by authors in Central/South America or Asia had lower odds of having high CPY (Central/South America, aOR=0.5, 95% CI 0.3 to 0.8; Asia, aOR=0.6, 95% CI 0.5 to 0.7).
Conclusion OA articles have a higher CPY, with a strong positive correlation between OA proportion and impact factor. OA publishing has increased since 2007, but articles written by authors in low/middle-income countries are under-represented among OA publications.
“OSC-NL is a network of coordinators of Dutch Open Science Communities (OSC). We stimulate collaboration amongst Dutch OSCs and provide input to research policy, infrastructure and services.
By the same token, OSC-NL is the Dutch national chapter of the International Network of Open Science Communities (INOSC)….”
“Academic publishing is on the move. Dissatisfaction with the dominant publishing paradigm has given rise to a manifold of new ideas, projects and services. The time is ripe for consolidation of the most promising developments.
Imagine academic publishing that is fast, transparent, and free. Is that a pipe dream or something within reach? We already have preprint publishing (fast), open peer review (transparent), and diamond/overlay journals (free). If we could connect these disparate initiatives, would that make our dream come true? And how could this best be done? These are questions that are currently being discussed by us and others at Leiden University….”
“Traditionally, research results were first shared within the scientific community, and then ‘translated’ into lay language for policymakers and other audiences via the media, policy briefs, lobbying. Today, preprints6 and press releases7 often come first. Dissemination of research findings to research participants and communities requires contextualised approaches and have been explored elsewhere.4 Similarly, trial registries8 and data sharing are explored elsewhere in this series. Here, we navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by dissemination through peer-review publications, abstracts, preprints, press release, media coverage and social media…”
Abstract: Academic research dissemination has evolved tremendously throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. With the advent of new technology and remote communication, the fast and efficient sharing of ideas has spread worldwide and has been appropriately embraced by academic surgical researchers. The use of social media by surgeons has expanded our ability to share hypotheses and published works that lead to higher degrees of collaboration than previously possible. The strengths of social media use for research dissemination in surgery include immediate collaboration on a global scale, faster dissemination of results previously hindered by the publishing process, open peer review from a wider audience, and enhancing the experience of academic meetings. However, social media use for research dissemination is not perfect and is hindered by lack of author verification, public misinterpretation, and lack of standardized enforceable professional guidelines. To combat these potential pitfalls, surgical societies should prioritize specific and intervenable guidelines for surgeons regarding the appropriate use of social media for research dissemination.
Abstract: A spectrum of measuring tools are available to evaluate the impact of published literature and the journals they are published in. Journal Level Metrics (JLM) such as Journal Impact Factor (JIF) or CiteScore assess the reputation of peer-reviewed journals based on citation analysis. Whereas, Article Level Metrics (ALM) quantify the importance, reach and impact of a particular article, and are a new approach to quantifying the reach and impact of published research. Traditionally JLM has served as a proxy for an individual publication’s significance, however, the introduction of contemporary and evolution of Alternative metrics measuring digital or societal influence of a particular article has gained popularity in recent times. These metrics help in rapid dissemination of research, development of newer research strategies and individual academic progress. We highlight the characteristics and importance of currently available ALM, and the newer ones influenced by social media, digital media and Open Access publishing models.
Abstract: Supervision is one important way to socialize Ph.D. candidates into open and responsible research. We hypothesized that one should be more likely to identify open science practices (here publishing open access and sharing data) in empirical publications that were part of a Ph.D. thesis when the Ph.D. candidates’ supervisors engaged in these practices compared to those whose supervisors did not or less often did. Departing from thesis repositories at four Dutch University Medical centers, we included 211 pairs of supervisors and Ph.D. candidates, resulting in a sample of 2062 publications. We determined open access status using UnpaywallR and Open Data using Oddpub, where we also manually screened publications with potential open data statements. Eighty-three percent of our sample was published openly, and 9% had open data statements. Having a supervisor who published open access more often than the national average was associated with an odds of 1.99 to publish open access. However, this effect became nonsignificant when correcting for institutions. Having a supervisor who shared data was associated with 2.22 (CI:1.19–4.12) times the odds to share data compared to having a supervisor that did not. This odds ratio increased to 4.6 (CI:1.86–11.35) after removing false positives. The prevalence of open data in our sample was comparable to international studies; open access rates were higher. Whilst Ph.D. candidates spearhead initiatives to promote open science, this study adds value by investigating the role of supervisors in promoting open science.