PLOS partners with Einstein Foundation Berlin on Award for Promoting Quality in Research – The Official PLOS Blog

“We are delighted to once again partner with the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research.  PLOS is a longtime advocate for quality in research, and we are especially thrilled that the Einstein Foundation Berlin honors researchers who reflect rigor, reliability, robustness, and transparency in their work. Enhancing the quality and reliability of research is essential for trust in research….”

PLOS partners with Einstein Foundation Berlin on Award for Promoting Quality in Research – The Official PLOS Blog

“We are delighted to once again partner with the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research.  PLOS is a longtime advocate for quality in research, and we are especially thrilled that the Einstein Foundation Berlin honors researchers who reflect rigor, reliability, robustness, and transparency in their work. Enhancing the quality and reliability of research is essential for trust in research….”

PLOS partners with Einstein Foundation Berlin on Award for Promoting Quality in Research – The Official PLOS Blog

“We are delighted to once again partner with the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research.  PLOS is a longtime advocate for quality in research, and we are especially thrilled that the Einstein Foundation Berlin honors researchers who reflect rigor, reliability, robustness, and transparency in their work. Enhancing the quality and reliability of research is essential for trust in research….”

PLOS Price Transparency Update 2021

We encourage researchers to give transparent insight into their work for the benefit of community understanding and assessment and we want to give you the same insight into ours. 

One of the ways we do this is through the Plan S Price & Service Transparency Framework. PLOS has participated in the framework since its pilot phase in 20201 and we’re pleased to once again share our reporting here to give our community insight into how our publication fees are used to support journal activities and operational costs. 

Toward Equitable Open Research: Stakeholder Co-Created Recommendations for Research Institutions, Funders and Researchers

Open Research aims to make research more accessible, transparent, reproducible, shared and collaborative. Doing so is meant to democratize and diversify access to knowledge and knowledge production, and ensure that research is useful outside of academic contexts. Increasing equity is therefore a key aim of the Open Research movement, yet mounting evidence demonstrates that the practices of Open Research are implemented in ways that undermine this. In response, we convened a diverse community of researchers, research managers and funders to co-create actionable recommendations for supporting the equitable implementation of Open Research. Using a co-creative modified Delphi method, we generated consensus-driven recommendations that address three key problem areas: the resource-intensive nature of Open Research, the high cost of article processing charges, and obstructive reward and recognition practices at funders and research institutions that undermine the implementation of Open Research. In this paper, we provide an overview of these issues, a detailed description of the co-creative process, and present the recommendations and the debates that surrounded them. We discuss these recommendations in relation to other recently published ones and conclude that implementing ours requires ‘global thinking’ to ensure that a systemic and inclusive approach to change is taken. 

Let peer review be transparent | Communications Earth & Environment

“For all peer reviewed articles submitted from 23rd January 2023, we will publish the editor decision letters, reviewer reports and author responses, together with the published paper. Reviewers can choose to remain anonymous or reveal their identity….

At Communications Earth & Environment, we are convinced that opening up the scholarly discussions that precede publication of our articles will deepen understanding of the scientific process and help spark trust in science. We are enormously grateful for the time and effort our reviewers put into elaborating on the merits and shortcomings of papers with the aim to improve them. We are impressed by the detailed and positive letters our authors send back along with their revisions in response to the points raised by the reviewers. And we are proud to put care and thought into our editorial decisions and give constructive guidance to our authors by explaining our take on the reviewer comments….”

MetaArXiv Preprints | Reproducible research practices and transparency across linguistics

Abstract:  Scientific studies of language span across many disciplines and provide evidence for social, cultural, cognitive, technological, and biomedical studies of human nature and behavior. By becoming increasingly empirical and quantitative, linguistics has been facing challenges and limitations of the scientific practices that pose barriers to reproducibility and replicability. One of the proposed solutions to the widely acknowledged reproducibility and replicability crisis has been the implementation of transparency practices, e.g. open access publishing, preregistrations, sharing study materials, data, and analyses, performing study replications and declaring conflicts of interest. Here, we have assessed the prevalence of these practices in randomly sampled 600 journal articles from linguistics across two time points. In line with similar studies in other disciplines, we found a moderate amount of articles published open access, but overall low rates of sharing materials, data, and protocols, no preregistrations, very few replications and low rates of conflict of interest reports. These low rates have not increased noticeably between 2008/2009 and 2018/2019, pointing to remaining barriers and slow adoption of open and reproducible research practices in linguistics. As linguistics has not yet firmly established transparency and reproducibility as guiding principles in research, we provide recommendations and solutions for facilitating the adoption of these practices.

 

The cost of our journal publishing programme

“We strive to publish high-quality journals as efficiently as we can. We have a diverse portfolio of journals and business models, with more than half of the journals we publish being owned and editorially managed by our society partners. This chart shows how our journal revenues are spent across our full journals publishing programme, supporting investment decisions from authors, funders and institutions….”

Mehr Transparenz in der klinischen Forschung: Wie werden die neuen Transparenzvorschriften aus Sicht der pharmazeutischen Industrie bewertet? | SpringerLink

[English-language abstract, article in German.]

Abstract:  The year 2014 was a turning point for transparency in clinical research. Two regulatory innovations comprehensively changed the rules in the EU. For one thing, Regulation (EU) No. 536/2014 on clinical trials of medicinal products for human use (Clinical Trials Regulation – CTR) came into force, and for another thing, Policy 0070 of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) on the publication of and access to clinical data was published. While the policy has been occupying the pharmaceutical industry in practice since 2015, the requirements of the CTR came into effect at the end of January 2022.

The main innovation of the CTR is public access to the majority of documents and records that are created during the application process as well as during the course and after completion of a clinical trial. The special feature of Policy 0070 is the possibility for EU citizens to inspect the essential parts of a marketing authorisation application, such as the Clinical Study Report.

This contribution to the discussion describes the completely new challenges in the area of transparency that the pharmaceutical industry is facing as a result of the new requirements. In principle, transparency is to be welcomed in order to achieve the goals of the EU in the development and availability of medicines and vaccines. However, the protection of trade and business secrets of the pharmaceutical industry would be jeopardised. In the worst case, this could lead to a decline in investment in research and development within the scope of this regulation and to an international shift of clinical trials, including developing or emerging countries. Germany could lose more and more its leading role in conducting clinical trials in the EU.

Journals to trial tool that automatically flags reproducibility and transparency issues in papers | News | Chemistry World

“A tool using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms is being rolled-out on journals to automatically flag reproducibility, transparency and authorship problems in scientific papers.

The tool, Ripeta, has existed since 2017 and has already been run on millions of journal papers following its release, but now the tool’s creators have enabled its latest versions to be run on papers before peer review. In August, Ripeta was integrated with the widekly used manuscript submission system Editorial Manager in a bid to identify shortcomings in papers before they are sent out to peer review at journals. At this stage the tool’s creators won’t disclose which journals are using Ripeta, citing commercial confidentiality.

Ripeta sifts through papers to identify ‘trust markers’ for papers such as whether they contain data and code availability statements, open access statements, as well as ethical approvals, author contributions, repository notices and funding declarations.

From October 2022, the technology behind Ripeta was also integrated in the scholarly database Dimensions, giving users access to metadata about trust markers – for a fee – in 33 million academic papers published since 2010….”

Why price transparency in research publishing is a positive step | Hindawi

“In 2019, Hindawi took part in the price transparency framework pilot run by Information Power on behalf of cOAlition S. Three years later and the coalition’s new Journal Comparison Service (JCS) is up and running. Hindawi is proud to be one of the publishers that has contributed data to this service. Taking part has helped us focus on the rigour of our own reporting system and has enabled us to give researchers greater choice when choosing a journal by giving more visibility to our services in our new and publicly available journal reports.

Only a few publishers took part in the pilot and the framework remains untested. It’s not yet clear how useful the JCS will be to the institutions who might want to access the service and use the data, or how the JCS will increase transparency about costs as well as pricing across the publishing industry more generally. In part, this is because it’s seen by some to provide an overly simplistic view of publishing. Compartmentalising publishing services into seven or eight different categories  (see page 20 of the JCS guidance for publishers) inevitably constrains the many different and often overlapping services that publishers provide. In addition, limiting the price breakdown of these services into the percentage that each contributes to a journal’s APC also means that the real costs aren’t visible. There are also pragmatic reasons that make it very difficult for some publishers to collect data consistently, especially for those with large portfolios that operate on multiple platforms or have journal-specific workflows. Finally, fully open-access publishers who don’t have an APC business model can’t take part, even if they want to be more transparent. However, we believe the upsides are large. Hindawi has more than 200 journals in our portfolio and the following outlines a few of the ways we, and we hope those who contribute to and access our journals, are benefiting. Our focus is on the ‘Information Power’ framework for the JCS and on the ‘Journal Quality’ information specifically (columns P-Z in the template spreadsheet). This information relates to data on the journal workflow, especially peer review (such as timings and the no of reviewers involved). We know that there is a long way to go to make all publishing services transparent, but we are learning from our participation in the JCS and will continue to explore ways to improve transparency….”

Elsevier absent from journal cost comparison | Times Higher Education (THE)

“Of the 2,070 titles whose information will become accessible under the JCS, although not directly to researchers, 1,000 belong to the US academic publishing giant Wiley, while another 219 journals owned by Hindawi, which was bought by Wiley last year, also appear on the list.

Several other fully open access publishers will also participate on the comparison site including Plos, the Open Library of Humanities, and F1000, while learned society presses and university publishers, including the Royal Society, Rockefeller University Press, and the International Union of Crystallography, are also part of the scheme.

Other notable participants include the prestigious life sciences publisher eLife, EMBO Press and the rapidly growing open access publisher, Frontiers.

However, the two of the world’s largest scholarly publishers – Elsevier and Springer Nature, whose most prestigious titles charge about £8,000 for APCs – are not part of the scheme….

Under the Plan S agreement, scholarly journals are obliged to become ‘transformative journals’ and gradually increase the proportion of non-paywalled content over a number of years. Those titles that do not make their papers free at the point of publication will drop out of the Plan S scheme, meaning authors cannot use funds provided by any of the 17 funding agencies and six foundations now signed up to Plan S. There are, however, no immediate consequences for a publisher who decides not to share their price and service data through the JCS.  …”

MDPI Journals: 2015 -2021 | Dan Brockington

“In this blog I report on growth of MDPI journals and papers from 2015-2021. It updates previous blogs on the same topic (the most recent is here) that looked at growth up to 2020….

By every measure MDPI’s growth continues to be remarkable. The rate of revenue increase has slowed in the last two years, to just over 50%, but even that remains extraordinary.  Note that the proportion of submissions that are published has increased, from around 44% two years ago to over 55% currently (Table 1; Figure 1)….

The growth in publications is partly sustained by lower rejection rates. The journals with the lowest rejection rates used to count for only a minority of publications and fees (Tables 2-4). Now figures for 2021 show that journals with low rejection rates are producing a higher proportion of MDPI publications….

MDPI itself has been aware of the dangers of being too inclusive. In its 2015 annual report it noted that the overall rejection rate had increased since last year (from 52 to 54%). This achievement was listed in one of the key performance indicators as a sign of progress….

Because acceptance and rejection data are no longer available on the MDPI website, we will not know what is happening to rejection rates. We cannot know, at the level of each journal, how inclusive they are, or are becoming. This points to a wider need for all publishing houses to be more transparent with the data of their journals to allow researchers to make informed choices about their journals. MDPI’s transparency had been welcome. It is now, unfortunately, following the standards set by the other publishing houses….”

Transparent peer review for all | Nature Communications

“Starting in 2016, we have offered authors the option to publish the comments received from the reviewers and their responses alongside the paper. As we believe that transparency strengthens the quality of peer review, we are now moving to publish the exchanges between authors and reviewers for all research articles submitted from November 2022 onward. Referees will still have the option to remain completely anonymous, to sign their reports, and/or to choose to be acknowledged by name as part of our reviewer recognition scheme….”