Category Archives: oa.editorials

Making data sharing the norm in medical research | The BMJ

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“The benefits to patients, science, and society are undeniable

Reuse of medical research data—which is conditional on access to individual participant data—is expected to maximise the value of medical research. It enables alternative hypothesis testing, validation of claims, exploration of controversies, restoration of unpublished trials, avoidance of duplicated efforts, and production of new knowledge from existing datasets. Given these benefits, politicians,123 funders,4 and publishers5 now support and implement data sharing policies. However, converging evidence indicates that current policies are unlikely to reach their goal of achieving data sharing. In a linked paper at The BMJ, Hamilton and colleagues (doi:10.1136/bmj-2023-075767) synthesised 105 meta-research studies examining 2?121?580 articles across 31 medical specialties and found that, despite some heterogeneity, data sharing rates are consistently low across medical research.6 Intention-to-share data have increased with time but are not associated with any increase in actual data sharing….”

Open Access Is No Longer “If” but “When” for IEEE [President’s Corner] | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore

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Abstract:  The Journal of Solid-State Circuits ( JSSC ) is one of IEEE’s most widely read and successful publications. Most IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) members read the JSSC using an institutional subscription purchased from IEEE by their employer. This publishing and revenue model is about to change dramatically as we move to open access (OA) in the near future.

 

Frontiers | Editorial: Open science in Africa

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“The ongoing transition toward Open Science (OS) is increasing transparency and collaboration in the research enterprise. This Research Topic aims to investigate the transition to OS in Africa, including the concerns and advantages of OS for researchers and stakeholders. It also explores the role of new technologies and infrastructure in implementing OA and bridging the knowledge divide between countries. In this editorial, we provide an overview of eight articles that shed light on various aspects of open science, data sharing, and the challenges and opportunities they present in the African context. These articles highlight the importance of policymakers, institutions, and researchers working together to foster a culture of open science and to address the existing barriers to data accessibility on the African continent….”

Journal impact factors and the future of open access publishing – Richardson – Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics – Wiley Online Library

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“There are many challenges faced by publishers and scientific journals by the wide-spread use of the internet and the development of open access. It is not a perfect system, and many criticisms are valid. Reviews take a long time and are subject to bias. Reviewers are unrewarded for their efforts. Journal impact factors are becoming archaic, but no metric is perfect. New tools are being developed but editors are not yet sure how to incorporate them into the process. All of these challenges will be faced by the JACMP and other open access journals. On an aspirational note, in 2018, the European Commission and European Research Council launched “cOAlition S,” an initiative (Plan S) that supports worldwide open access for research funded by public grants.41 Among others, the World Health Organization and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are funders of Plan S. If enough entities agree that this is the correct path forward, we may see all journal platforms becoming open access and solve some of the financial problems therein.”

Open Access Publishing in CMI – Clinical Microbiology and Infection

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Abstract:  Open access is a publishing model for academic texts that makes articles freely and permanently available to readers, and assigns the copyright to the author. This differs from the traditional subscription model in which readers must pay a subscription in order to have access to scholarly information. Articles that are published open access benefit by having greater visibility and impact, including access in developing countries.

 

Editorial: The push toward open access – el?Azhary – 2023 – International Journal of Dermatology – Wiley Online Library

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“Although not new, OA is being pushed vigorously now. The aim is to allow free access to articles, all over the world. The subscription model above would be pushed aside. And who pays for this? The authors pay. Ironically, readers cannot get a magazine or a book for free, even online, but they could get a medical article for free online. The author though would pay an article processing charge (APC), maybe as high as $3,500, to the publisher in order to get their article published. Imagine, a manuscript detailing and summarizing 3–4?years of hard work, and then the author pays to publish….”

Preprinting and Data Sharing in a New Normal? | Journal of the ASEAN Federation of Endocrine Societies

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“JAFES [Journal of the ASEAN Federation of Endocrine Societies] should carefully consider the details in adopting data sharing as a policy. What will be the form and format of the data to be archived and shared? How will it impact or change a participant’s informed consent? How do these policies relate with the prevailing regulations on Data Privacy? How should data be organized, presented, and framed, to prevent misinterpretation or misanalysis?Another development is the emergence of preprints, which may become the norm in future publications. Preprints are scientific articles that are already published online despite not having undergone or completed full peer review–a seemingly unusual concept in a research world where peer review is the most critical requirement and standard for scholarly publications. What preprints make up for despite the lack of peer review, is the swiftness of publication, which may be particularly helpful in the setting of a novel disease or public health emergency, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Issues such as article quality, ethics, citations and retractions need to be considered. JAFES will need to weigh the value of preprints as a platform for sharing knowledge, or for sharing of data for that matter. Sharing data and using preprints are two new publication trends. JAFES continues to thoroughly review these strategies to determine how these will be useful for our journal and its readers. We expect more innovations to come. Indeed, the learning continues.”

Preprints em CSP

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From Google’s English:  “CSP [Cad Saúde Pública] is a journal that guarantees public and free access to its entire collection for the reading public, an essential part of the principles of Open Science. In addition, CSP recognizes the importance of preprints in today’s scientific publishing scenario and, since 2020, accepts articles previously deposited in non-commercial preprint repositories (eg: arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, Zenodo and SciELO Preprints), before submission to the journal or during the peer review process.

 

In these two situations, it is necessary for the author to notify the journal’s editorial team and inform the name of the preprints server and the DOI assigned to the article.two?? However, the practice of publishing preprints of an article already approved in CSP on a server is not recommended. In this case, the participation of the scientific community debating with the author will not contribute to the improvement of the article and the duplicate DOI can harm the authors and the journal….

It is emphasized that the deposit of the article in the preprints server is a decision of the author. It is worth noting, however, the implications for the double-blind peer review system adopted by CSP, since it makes it possible to identify authorship.”

Open research: Enhancing transparency in peer review – Langley?Evans – 2022 – Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics – Wiley Online Library

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“Unfortunately, the ideas that underpin open science meet most resistance within universities at the level of individual researchers. This is because cultural shifts in non-commercial environments take some time to accomplish and academia is notorious for its lack of change agility and inertia….

Some journals have now adopted a model of open review in which the authors and the reviewers are made known to each other from the start. This is proposed to encourage a civil debate about the work and improve its quality, as well as to enhance reviewer performance. However, there is a risk that a relatively junior reviewer may feel too intimidated to openly criticise the work of a senior researcher in the field (and who they may want to work with in future) and there are concerns that reviewers may not wish to review on those terms, making life difficult for editors to secure the necessary level of scrutiny for papers. Transparent peer review removes some of this concern. With this approach, anonymity can be preserved during the review process but, after the paper is accepted, the reviews and author responses are published along with the paper, for open scrutiny. The identity of the reviewer can remain concealed during the review process but, in a fully transparent review, their identity would be made public after paper acceptance….

The Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics has operated with double-blind peer review for many years. Recently, the journal has joined the Wiley Transparent Peer Review pilot scheme. This brings together the publisher with Publons and ScholarOne (part of Clarivate Web of Science) and enables the entire peer review process associated with a paper to be published alongside the accepted paper. Our papers now have an Open Research section, which provides a link to the digital object identifier and allow readers to see the peer review content. The peer review and author responses are in themselves citable materials. Our transparent peer review is a voluntary process for both authors and reviewers. Authors can opt to keep the peer review comments unpublished and reviewers can remain anonymous but still have their comments published….

Despite our push for openness through the transparent peer review scheme, there seems to be a reluctance to participate….

I would like to finish this editorial with an exhortation to take part in the revolution. Let us make research in the area of nutrition and dietetics more open! The advantages are clear. Open science is more interesting science, more collaborative science and kinder science. Transparent peer review is not something to be feared and should instead prompt constructive dialogues between authors, editors and peer reviewers. If there are some dinosaurs out there who still want to use peer review as a platform for bullying their junior colleagues, they will be in for a shock as the growth of more healthy research environments and communities leaves them behind. Transparent peer review is certainly not a panacea, but it is a great step forward to put right some of the historical problems that lie in the peer review system.”

Nursing Reports | Free Full-Text | Introducing Nursing Reports: An Open Access Nursing Journal That’s a Little Bit Different | HTML

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“The purpose of this editorial is to introduce a new publisher and a new editor-in-chief of Nursing Reports and set out a mission for the journal. On the 13 July 2020, MDPI took over from PAGEPress as the publisher of Nursing Reports. I, Prof. Dr. Richard Gray, became the new Editor-in-Chief on 20 July 2020, taking over from Dr. Colleen E. Marzilli Tyler. I would like to thank Dr. Tyler for her valuable and important contribution to the journal.

By way of introduction, I originally trained as a Mental Health Nurses at King’s College in London, in the early 1990s. I then did my Master’s degree in public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2000) and my PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London (2001). I was a Medical Research Council Post-Doctoral Research Fellow 2001 through 2005 and got my first Chair in 2008 at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. I moved to La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, in 2017. Over the course of my career, I have published some 220 papers, most of which—to be honest—are rather dull and often contradictory. If, for some peculiar reason, you are interested in reading some of my papers, they are dutifully listed on my Google Scholar page (https://rb.gy/5jennp).

My aim—as Editor-in-Chief—is that, over the next five years, Nursing Reports becomes a leading, innovative and progressive open access nursing science journal that publishes rigorous and impactful research and scholarship. In this editorial, I would like to explain how we—the publisher, the editorial board and editorial team—will work with you, as putative authors, to achieve this vision.”

Getting Over TOP : Epidemiology

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“In May 2015, the Center for Open Science invited Epidemiology to support the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines.1 After consulting our editors and former Editors-in-Chief, I declined this invitation and published an editorial to explain the rationale.2 Nonetheless, the Center for Open Science has assigned a TOP score to the journal and disseminated the score via Clarivate, which also disseminates the Journal Impact Factor. Given that Epidemiology has been scored despite opting not to support the TOP Guidelines, and that our score has been publicized by the Center for Open Science, we here restate and expand our concerns with the TOP Guidelines and emphasize that the guidelines are at odds with Epidemiology’s mission and principles. We declined the invitation to support the TOP Guidelines for three main reasons. First, Epidemiology prefers that authors, reviewers, and editors focus on the quality of the research and the clarity of its presentation over adherence to one-size guidelines. For this reason, among others, the editors of Epidemiology have consistently declined opportunities to endorse or implement endeavors such as the TOP Guidelines.3–5 Second, the TOP Guidelines did not include a concrete plan for program evaluation or revision. Well-meaning guidelines with similar goals sometimes have the opposite of their intended effect.6 Our community would never accept a public health or medical intervention that had little evidence to support its effectiveness (more on that below) and no plan for longitudinal evaluation. We hold publication guidelines to the same standard. Third, we declined the invitation to support the TOP Guidelines because they rest on the untenable premise that each research article’s results are right or wrong, as eventually determined by whether its results are reproducible or not. Too often, and including in the study of reproducibility that was foundational in the promulgation of the TOP Guidelines,7 reproducibility is evaluated by whether results are concordant in terms of statistical significance. This faulty approach has been used frequently, even though the idea that two results—one statistically significant and the other not—are necessarily different from one another is a well-known fallacy.8,9 ”

Open Science – Editorial from ERC Scientific Council

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“Open Science aims to transform current scientific practices into a fully transparent and open system, in which all scientific advances are made available not only to the entire scientific community, but also to society at large. A significant bulk of the scientific knowledge generated worldwide is supported by public money, and in many cases, entails scientific and social collaboration. Thus, it seems obvious that this knowledge should belong to society, with no restriction or cost to its immediate accessibility. …”

Open science practices for eating disorders research

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Abstract:  This editorial seeks to encourage the increased applicationof three open science practices in eating disordersresearch: Preregistration, Registered Reports, and the shar-ing of materials, data, and code. For each of these prac-tices, we introduce updated International Journal of Eating Disorders author and reviewer guidance. Updates include the introduction of open science badges; specific instruc-tions about how to improve transparency; and the intro-duction of Registered Reports of systematic or meta-analytical reviews. The editorial also seeks to encourage the study of open science practices. Open science prac-tices pose considerable time and other resource burdens.Therefore, research is needed to help determine the valueof these added burdens and to identify efficient strategies for implementing open science practices.

What Is the Price of Science? | mBio

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Abstract:  The peer-reviewed scientific literature is the bedrock of science. However, scientific publishing is undergoing dramatic changes, which include the expansion of open access, an increased number of for-profit publication houses, and ready availability of preprint manuscripts that have not been peer reviewed. In this opinion article, we discuss the inequities and concerns that these changes have wrought.

 

The medical journal as an open access multimedia platform for medical communication

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“Medical journals are in the business of communication. Rapid changes in information dissemination mean that some journals, while conscientiously focused on improving the traditional journal model, have slipped out of step with modern communication practice. In keeping with the rest of the communication industry, medical journals will need to become more responsive, open, and accessible, focus on their changing audience, move from passive to active research dissemination, and create content in multiple formats. This is not about the future, it is about catching up with the present.”