David Lang makes the case that default open grant proposals benefit both individual scientists as well as the broader scientific community. Science is designed to move slowly. Debate, rigor, and peer review add layers of organized skepticism to new ide…
Category: peer review
Can Twitter data help in spotting problems early with publications? What retracted COVID-19 papers can teach us about science in the public sphere
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought science into mainstream public and political debates in novel ways, notably through the widespread use of social media to share and discuss new findings. In this post, Robin Haunschild and Lutz Bornmann discuss their r…
Can AI be used ethically to assist peer review?
As the rate and volume of academic publications has risen, so too has the pressure on journal editors to quickly find reviewers to assess the quality of academic work. In this context the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to boost productivity …
Side-stepping safeguards – Data journalists are doing science now
An aspect of the media landscape that has been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic has been the increasing role of media organisations in presenting and undertaking their own, often complex, data analyses. In this cross-post Irineo Cabreros, discusses…
Reading Peer Review – What a dataset of peer review reports can teach us about changing research culture
One of the first megajournals, PLOS ONE, has played a significant role in changing scholarly communication and in particular peer review, by placing an emphasis on soundness, as opposed to novelty, in published research. Drawing on a study of peer revi…
How the pandemic changed editorial peer review – and why we should wonder whether that’s desirable
Since its onset, COVID-19 has significantly accelerated and expanded scientific publishing. Drawing on research into open peer review in medical journals, Serge P.J.M. Horbach discusses what impact COVID-19 has had on the practice of peer review and what shifting assessment thresholds for academic research on COVID-19 might suggest about the future of peer review itself. … Continued
For China’s ambitious research reforms to be successful, they will need to be supported by new research assessment infrastructures
The Chinese government recently announced that research assessment in China should no longer be predominantly focused on metrics, Web of Science based indicators and what has become known as ‘SCI worship’. In this post Lin Zhang and Gunnar Sivertsen discuss how China’s new research policy might be implemented and the parallels it has to recent attempts to reform … Continued
To ensure the quality of peer reviewed research introduce randomness
Journals play an important role in signalling the quality of academic research. This quality is often linked to measures such as the journal impact factor. However, these measures often obscure the overall quality of research papers in a journal. In this post, Margit Osterloh and Bruno Frey argue that the overall quality and originality of … Continued
To address the rise of predatory publishing in the social sciences, journals need to experiment with open peer review.
Predatory journals are here, but our attention to them is unevenly distributed. Most studies on predatory publishing have looked at the phenomenon in the natural and life sciences. In this post, Maximilian Heimstädt and Leonhard Dobusch analyse the harmful potential of predatory journals for social science and specifically management research. Identifying key threats posed by predatory publishing, they argue that […]
2019 In Review: The culture of academic publishing
2019 has been a pivotal year for academic publishing and has seen many aspects of scholarly communication critically reassessed. This post brings together some of the top posts on the theme of the ‘culture’ of academic publishing that have featured on the LSE Impact Blog in 2019. Who are you writing for? The role of community membership on authors’ decisions […]