The Open Movement has made impressive strides in the past year, but do these strides stand for reform or are they just symptomatic of the further expansion and entrenchment of neoliberalism? Eric Kansa argues that it is time for the movement to broaden … Continue reading →
Category: Academic Publishing
Improving peer review: Allowing more subjective and objective reviewer insights may help to curb ‘herding’ mentality
As the landscape of scientific publishing looks to change dramatically over the next few years, a key concern will be on the future of peer review. Mike Peacey provides an overview of his team’s recent study that examined how demonstrations of objectivity and … Continue reading →
The Impact of the Social Sciences research book is out this week! Browse the living bibliography, data visualisations and other resources.
The Impact of the Social Sciences: How Academics and Their Research Make a Difference by Simon Bastow, Patrick Dunleavy, and Jane Tinkler. The three-year Impact of Social Sciences Project has culminated in a monograph published by SAGE. The book presents thorough … Continue reading →
Moneyball for Academics: network analysis methods for predicting the future success of papers and researchers.
Drawing from a combination of network analysis measurements, Erik Brynjolfsson and Shachar Reichman present methods from their research on predicting the future success of researchers. The overall vision for this project is to create an academic dashboard that will include a suite of … Continue reading →
The evidence fails to justify publishers’ demand for longer embargo periods on publicly-funded research.
Due to disciplinary differences in the “half-life” or relative demand of a scholarly article, some publishers are looking to enact longer embargo periods before an article can be made openly available on archives and repositories, in order to protect against … Continue reading →
Judging a book by its URLs: accurate and concise digital references are central to academic rigour and credibility.
Central to the quality of academic scholarship is its rigour. Footnote references are integral to this process. If generating accurate and fully comprehensive footnotes is to be maintained in online spaces, coherent and longterm URLs must be part of this … Continue reading →
Academic publishers must sort out their outdated electronic submission and review processes.
With the advent of electronic and online publishing workflows, why is the submission process still so exasperating? Dorothy Bishop finds that with each publisher re-inventing senseless bureaucratic online forms, things appear to be getting worse for academic authors, rather than … Continue reading →
Data Citation and Sharing: What’s in it for me?
Research funders, data managers, librarians, journal editors and researchers themselves are calling for a change in the culture of research to ensure formal data citation is the norm, rather than the exception. Sarah Callaghan looks at the reasons for and against … Continue reading →
Preprint posting, predatory journals and peer review: our top five posts on Open Access
The on-going discussion over open access to scholarly research was a regular feature this year on the Impact of Social Sciences blog. The top posts in this category came from a range of voices in higher education, from researchers and … Continue reading →
The work of Walter Benjamin in the age of digital reproducibility
On the run from the Nazis in 1940, the philosopher, literary critic and essayist Walter Benjamin committed suicide in the Spanish border town of Portbou. In 2011, over 70 years later, his writings enter the public domain in many countries … Continue reading →