Data broker RELX is represented on Twitter by their Chief Communications Officer Paul Abrahams. Due to RELX subsidiary Elsevier being one of the largest publishers of academic journals, Dr. Abrahams frequently engages with academics on the social media platform. On their official pages, Elsevier tries to emphasize that they really, really can be trusted, honestly […]
Scholars need to be able to trust each other, because other – wise they cannot collaborate and use each other’s findings. Similarly trust is essential for research to be applied for individuals, society or the natural environment. The trustworthiness is threatened when researchers engage in questionable research practices or worse. By adopting open science practices, research becomes transparent and accountable. Only then it is possible to verify whether trust in research findings is justified. The magnitude of the issue is substantial with a prevalence of four percent for both fabrication and falsification, and more than 50% for questionable research practices. This implies that researchers regularly engage in behaviors that harm the validity and trustworthiness of their work. What is good for the quality and reliability of research is not always good for a scholarly career. Navigating this dilemma depends on how virtuous the researcher at issue is, but also on the local research climate and the perverse incentives in the way the research system functions. Research institutes, funding agencies and scholarly journals can do a lot to foster research integrity, first and foremost by improving the quality of peer review and reforming researcher assessment
“The Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute invites you to participate in SCI 2023, its eighth year in North Carolina’s Research Triangle region.
This year’s theme is Trust, and the program will take place from October 8 to 12, 2023, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.
TriangleSCI is not your typical academic conference – it’s four days of concentrated but relaxed time with a diverse cohort of individuals who have come to start new projects they have proposed, in teams they have built and with advice and contributions from participants on other teams and a set of interlocutors and experts who work across teams.
You set the agenda, and you define the deliverables – TriangleSCI provides the scaffolding for your team to develop its project. If your team’s proposal is selected, SCI will cover all the costs for team members to participate, including travel, meals, and accommodations, including for international participants – so this is a great opportunity for potential participants who might normally find traveling to such a program cost-prohibitive. Your team can use TriangleSCI to launch a new project, have some concentrated time to further develop an existing project with a broader set of collaborators, or just to begin to explore and experiment with ideas that are difficult to pursue in your usual work context….”
“The Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute invites you to participate in SCI 2023, its eighth year in North Carolina’s Research Triangle region.
This year’s theme is Trust, and the program will take place from October 8 to 12, 2023, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.
TriangleSCI is not your typical academic conference – it’s four days of concentrated but relaxed time with a diverse cohort of individuals who have come to start new projects they have proposed, in teams they have built and with advice and contributions from participants on other teams and a set of interlocutors and experts who work across teams.
You set the agenda, and you define the deliverables – TriangleSCI provides the scaffolding for your team to develop its project. If your team’s proposal is selected, SCI will cover all the costs for team members to participate, including travel, meals, and accommodations, including for international participants – so this is a great opportunity for potential participants who might normally find traveling to such a program cost-prohibitive. Your team can use TriangleSCI to launch a new project, have some concentrated time to further develop an existing project with a broader set of collaborators, or just to begin to explore and experiment with ideas that are difficult to pursue in your usual work context….”
“To increase the quality and impact of research, research results need to be timely disseminated and easily reused, both within the scientific community and to society in general….
Research results made open access immediately upon publication leads to more researchers being able to validate and build on previous results, which contributes to maintaining and promoting a high quality of research, and to strengthen trust in research. Open access to research results also strengthens the use and impact of research in society at large, e.g. for industry and the public sector….
The potential of the digital revolution for scholarly publishing has not yet been fully realized, notably in relation to the expanding range of increasingly important research outcomes such as datasets and software….”
“To increase the quality and impact of research, research results need to be timely disseminated and easily reused, both within the scientific community and to society in general….
Research results made open access immediately upon publication leads to more researchers being able to validate and build on previous results, which contributes to maintaining and promoting a high quality of research, and to strengthen trust in research. Open access to research results also strengthens the use and impact of research in society at large, e.g. for industry and the public sector….
The potential of the digital revolution for scholarly publishing has not yet been fully realized, notably in relation to the expanding range of increasingly important research outcomes such as datasets and software….”
“Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) are of vital importance to modern day digital information-based research. They ensure that all elements of research are uniquely identifiable and discoverable. They support the integrity of scientific information and its reproducibility. Most importantly they make possible automated computer processing of a staggering and ever-growing amount of diverse digital objects, hosted by multitudes of actors across the planet. Hence, the pursuit of a well-functioning PID infrastructure for research is of paramount strategic importance.
However, there can be significant risks of failure if the PID implementation process is not properly managed on an international scale.
As part of the work around Risks and Trust in pursuit of a well-functioning PID infrastructure for research, this Knowledge Exchange report examines the complex PID landscape within its six partner countries and beyond. The benefits of an efficient PID infrastructure and how this is a precondition for research communities impending research agendas, are explained. The report provides an in-depth look at what can go wrong with an unreliable PID service….”
“As the Open Science movement produces increasingly complex scientific analyses and rich research outputs that include not only articles but also data, models, physical samples, software, media, and more, those outputs also need to meet the FAIR criteria (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable). Developing shared storehouses for data, submissions, and images — a direction that STM publishers are heading in — could be key to making AI tools better trained, and thus more useful, allowing detection of integrity issues such as duplication and image manipulation across, as well as within, publications….”
“In preparation for the Recognizing Preprint Peer Review workshop, ASAPbio integrated input from two working groups to prepare a survey for researchers, funders, and journal editors and publishing organization employees. The survey sought to gather views and experience with preprint feedback and review from a broad range of stakeholders, to help inform the conversations at the workshop.
The survey garnered 230 responses, and we share here summaries of the two largest categories of respondents: 161 responses from researchers and 51 responses from journal editors and publishing organization employees. You can view the results on Google Sheets and on Zenodo….
Most respondents had received no feedback on preprints, which, for the purpose of this survey, we defined as any public commentary on preprints. Of those who had received some feedback, only a small fraction indicated that the feedback came in the form of detailed reviews.
With few researchers having received feedback, perhaps it’s unsurprising that a significant number of them expressed concerns with the prospect: the most significant concerns related to hesitancy about the quality or fairness of the feedback and about the commenter’s motivations for providing it.
However, more than half of respondents said they’d be likely or very likely to request feedback on their preprints if journals incorporated preprint reviews into editorial decisions or treated them like reviews transferred from another journal. Other potential incentives, such as funders recognizing preprint peer reviews in various ways, were not far behind….”
“Enhancing Trust, Integrity and Efficiency in Research through next-level Reproducibility…
TIER2 aims to boost knowledge on reproducibility, create tools, engage communities, implement interventions and policy across different contexts to increase re-use and overall quality of research results….”
“After multiple years of data collection, the Research team at the Center for Open Science (COS) is preparing for the end of its participation in DARPA’s Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) program and the transition to the work that follows. SCORE has been a significant undertaking spanning multiple research teams and thousands of researchers and participants throughout the world – all collaborating to answer a single question: Can we create rapid, scalable, and valid methods for assessing confidence in research claims?…
How do you believe the objectives of SCORE contribute to Open Science more generally?
KU: The scale and rigor behind SCORE are unlike anything that was achieved so far in the open science research space. Each step of the project has been carefully planned to ensure that we can reach decisive conclusions regarding the current state of social and behavioral science research which makes me confident in SCORE’s ability to transform our understanding of the state of the field….”
“Imagine if the integrity of the publishing process didn’t rely purely on publishers’ ability to detect fraud, malpractice, or mistakes based on the limited information available in a submitted manuscript. Instead, what if this responsibility were spread throughout the ecosystem, from funder grant management system, to data management plan, to data center, to lab notebook, to preprint, to published version of record, making use of trusted assertions to build an open, verifiable research environment that also leverages transparency so that publishers, funders, institutions, and other researchers could all trace findings and claims back through the whole research process?
The vision I laid out above may sound utopian, but much of the technology and tools required already exist. As well as the TREs [Trusted Research Environments], which can be seen as a model for traceability, and ORCID trust markers, which illustrate how the same thing can be done securely in the open, initiatives like Center for Open Science, and Octopus show how a range of outputs and activities can be used to document the entire research process.
The problem is not technology, it’s a wicked mix of perverse incentives, network effects, business model inertia, and sustainability challenges that lock us all into the same restrictive ideas about what constitutes a research publication, and what counts for prestige and career advancement. To address the range of challenges from poor research practice to industrial-scale fraud by paper mills, we need a whole-sector approach that involves funders, institutional research management and libraries, researchers, and publishers. As fellow Chef Alice Meadows and I wrote in a previous post, it really does take a village, and cross-sector collaboration is vital to building the interoperable research information infrastructure needed to connect the people, places, and things of the scholarly ecosystem in a way that is verifiable and trusted.”
Abstract: In recent years, the scientific community has called for improvements in the credibility, robustness, and reproducibility of research, characterized by higher standards of scientific evidence, increased interest in open practices, and promotion of transparency. While progress has been positive, there is a lack of consideration about how this approach can be embedded into undergraduate and postgraduate research training. Currently, the impact of integrating an open and reproducible approach into the curriculum on student outcomes is not well articulated in the literature. Therefore, in this paper, we provide the first comprehensive review of how integrating open and reproducible scholarship into teaching and learning may impact students, using a large-scale, collaborative, team-science approach. Our review highlighted how embedding open and reproducible scholarship may impact: (1) students’ scientific literacies (i.e., students’ understanding of open research, consumption of science, and the development of transferable skills); (2) student engagement (i.e., motivation and engagement with learning, collaboration, and engagement in open research), and (3) students’ attitudes towards science (i.e., trust in science and confidence in research findings). Our review also identified a need for more robust and rigorous methods within evaluations of teaching practice. We discuss implications for teaching and learning scholarship in this area.
“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….”
This interactive session will explore the central role of open access to publications, data, instruments, protocols, code and/or scripts in fostering a culture of research integrity and public trust in research. Through discussion of contemporary investigations into misconduct, we will consider the interconnectedness of good data practices and open access with principles of research integrity. In particular, we will discuss concrete practices related to project management, data management, and training that enable validation, foster a culture of research integrity, and support greater openness in the conduct of research and dissemination of research outputs.