Apart from issues involved with what can be seen as wasting time and money in rejecting perfectly good research, this apparent relationship has important implications for researchers. They will tend to often submit to higher impact (and therefore apparently more selective) journals in the hope that this confers some sort of prestige on their work, rather than letting their research speak for itself. Upon the relatively high likelihood of rejection, submissions will then continue down the ‘impact ladder’ until a more receptive venue is finally obtained for their research.
Openness in scholarly communication takes many forms. One of the most commonly debated in academic spheres is undoubtedly open access – the free, equal, and unrestricted access to research papers. As well as open access, there are also great pushes being made in the realms of open data and open metrics. Together, these all come under an umbrella of ‘open research’.
One important aspect of open research is peer review. At ScienceOpen, we advocate maximum transparency in the peer review process, based on the concept that research should be an open dialogue and not locked away in the dark. We have two main peer review initiatives for our content: peer review by endorsement, and post-publication peer review.
A new project has been launched recently, the Peer Reviewers Openness Initiative (PROI). Similarly to ScienceOpen, is grounded in the belief that openness and transparency are core values of science. The core of the initiative is to encourage reviewers of research papers to make open practices a pre-condition for a more comprehensive review process. You can read more about the Initiative here in a paper (open access, obviously) published via the Royal Society.
Data should be made publicly available.All data needed for evaluation and reproduction of the published research should be made publicly available, online, hosted by a reliable third party. [I’m an author; help me comply!]
Stimuli and materials should be made publicly available.Stimulus materials, experimental instructions and programs, survey questions, and other similar materials should be made publicly available, hosted by a reliable third party. [I’m an author; help me comply!]
In case some data or materials are not open, clear reasons (e.g., legal, ethical constraints, or severe impracticality) should be given why. These reasons should be outlined in the manuscript.[I’m an author; help me comply!]
Documents containing details for interpreting any files or code, and how to compile and run any software programs should be made available with the above items.In addition, licensing or other restrictions on their use should be made clear. [I’m an author; help me comply!]
The location of all of these files should be advertised in the manuscript, and all files should be hosted by a reliable third party.The choice of online file hosting should be made to maximize the probability that the files will be accessible for many years, and to minimize the probability that they will be lost for trivial reasons (e.g., accidental deletions, moving files). [I’m an author; help me comply!]
Stephanie Dawson, CEO of ScienceOpen, and Jon Tennant, Communications Director, have signed the PROI, both on behalf of ScienceOpen and independently, respectively, joining more than 200 other researchers to date. Joining only takes a few seconds of your time, and would help to solidify a real commitment to making the peer review process more transparent, and helping to realise the wider goal of an open research environment.
Student evaluations in teaching form a core part of our education system. However, there is little evidence to demonstrate that they are effective, or even work as they’re supposed to. This is despite such rating systems being used, studied and debated for almost a century.
A new analysis published in ScienceOpen Research offers evidence against the reliability of student evaluations in teaching, particularly as a measure of teaching effectiveness and for tenure or promotion decisions. In addition, the new study identified a bias against female instructors.
The new study by Anne Boring, Kellie Ottoboni, and Philip Stark (ScienceOpen Board Member) has already been picked up by several major news outlets including Inside Higher Education and Pacific Standard. This gives it an altmetric score of 54 (at the time of writing), which is the highest for any ScienceOpen Research paper to date!
ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a community-based effort to provide a registry of unique and persistent researcher identifiers, and through this links to research activities and outputs. It is a powerful tool for both researchers and institutions, and can be easily integrated with CrossRef, PubMed Central, Scopus, and other data archives to populate researcher records.
At ScienceOpen, we have always supported the use of ORCID within our services. Membership at ScienceOpen can be updated directly using your ORCID profile, providing seamless integration of the two. To comment, review and rate articles, we require an ORCID along with membership at ScienceOpen. If you have more than 5 articles within your ORCID profile, you’ll gain Expert member status with us, and free reign of services!
Hello there, and Happy New Year from the new Communications Director of ScienceOpen!
My name’s Jon, and I’m currently finishing up my PhD at Imperial College London, where I’m a palaeontologist! (think Ross from Friends..) This year, I’ve been fortunate enough to join the ScienceOpen team to help grow their communications and networking abilities, and continue to realise the benefits of their pretty cool open research networking platform.
Those of you who know me will be aware that open access and more broadly, open science and communications, is something that I’ve been quite active in over my short career as a researcher. Some of the more ‘open-related’ projects I’ve been involved with include the writing of the Open Research Glossary, as well as challenging the AAAS on non-optimal publishing practices. For those of you lucky enough not to have met me yet, I’m highly interested in a whole array of factors that influence scholarly communication, including:
Publishing and disruptive technologies and innovation
Access to raw data and reproducibility
Community building and the power of social networks
Social media for researchers
Science communication, public engagement and outreach
Academic assessment and altmetrics
I’ll be taking over the reins from Liz Allen, who will shortly announce her new non-profit role. Rest assured that she will continue to spread the word about the importance of open. On behalf of the ScienceOpen team, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Liz for helping to establish our brand and offering her personal support as I get up to speed with the nuances of the job. Over the next few months (and onwards), I hope to help to raise awareness of what ScienceOpen does, and why it should be part of the essential toolkit for researchers, along with a host of other innovative applications that are bringing research into the digital age.
Why ScienceOpen? Well, apart from the obvious name, I support their ideals that science deserves to be open, transparent, and equal in every way. This essentially is the inverse of the traditional method of scholarly communication of publishing via journals, which are closed, opaque, and beset by inequalities on all fronts, the foremost being financial. ScienceOpen offers a valuable service that doesn’t replace traditional publishing, but compliments it through having a community aspect of driving open peer review, which is still the golden standard of acceptability for published research. Combine this with a hefty archive of both open and non-open research articles, and you have a valuable platform for developing research networks and building upon the published literature in an open, transparent, and community-driven way. For me, this is just one of the many ways in which the way we conduct research and disseminate those results is changing for the better, by harnessing the power of the Web and the opportunities it gives us for greater inter-operability throughout academia.
Alongside my activities here, I’ll be continuing my research and finishing the dreaded thesis, as well my science communication activities, in particular for the PLOS Paleo network which is great fun! So essentially combining my three favourite things: research, science communication, and open science policy and communications. Yay!
You can contact me on Twitter, or drop me an email if you wish. I look forward to working with ScienceOpen, and with them the global research community!
