Presenting evidence from the Harbingers Study, a three-year longitudinal study of Early Career Researchers (ECRs), David Nicholas assesses the extent to which the new wave of researchers are driving changes in scholarly practices. Finding that innovative practices are often constrained by institutional structures and precarious employment, he suggests that the pace of change in these areas is always going to […]
Category: scholarly communication
Building a globalised research system – the case of Bangladesh
The internet has had a double impact on scholarly communication in the global south, making it easier for these countries to access research and also making research published in these countries more accessible. In this post Dr Haseeb Irfanullah discusses how Bangladesh has adapted to this new scholarly communication system and highlights the need for strong research infrastructures and quality […]
Self-organising peer review for preprints – A future paradigm for scholarly publishing
Preprints – rapidly published non peer reviewed research articles – are becoming an increasingly common fixture in scholarly communication. However, without being peer reviewed they serve a limited function, as they are often not recognised as high quality research publications. In this post Wang LingFeng discusses how the development of preprint servers as self-organising peer review platforms could be the future of […]
Book Review: Scholarly Communication and Measuring Research – What Does Everyone Need to Know?
Academics are required to not only find effective ways to communicate their research, but also to increasingly measure and quantify its quality, impact and reach. In Scholarly Communication: What Everyone Needs to Know, Rick Anderson puts us in the picture. And in Measuring Research: What Everyone Needs to Know, Cassidy Sugimoto and Vincent Lariviere critically assess over 20 tools currently available for evaluating the quality […]
Say blockchain one more time! What is the real value of blockchain to higher education?
The revolutionary potential of blockchain has been much touted in many fields including research and higher education. In this post, Martin Hamilton discusses some of the potential applications of blockchain to academia and raises key questions about how these systems could be implemented and safeguarded from malicious exploitation. Blockchains are all the rage right now. They’ve joined cloud computing, […]
Wellcome Open Research, the future of scholarly communication?
In this blog, Robert Kiley and Michael Markie, discuss the ambition behind creating Wellcome Open Research, an innovative funder led publishing platform, and assess the success of the platform over its first two years. Going on to imagine a future, in which all research is published using the principles behind Wellcome Open Research, they suggest the potential benefits such a […]
Scholarly communications shouldn’t just be open, but non-profit too
Much of the rhetoric around the future of scholarly communication hinges on the “open” label. In light of Elsevier’s recent acquisition of bepress and the announcement that, owing to high fees, an established mathematics journal’s editorial team will split from its publisher to start an open access alternative, Jefferson Pooley argues that the scholarly communication ecosystem should aim not only […]
Microsoft Academic is on the verge of becoming a bibliometric superpower
Last year, the new Microsoft Academic service was launched. Sven E. Hug and Martin P. Brändle look at how it compares with more established competitors such as Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. While there are reservations about the availability of instructions for novice users, Microsoft Academic has impressive semantic search functionality, broad coverage, structured and rich metadata, and […]
Faculty Learning Communities are a positive way for libraries to engage academic staff in scholarly communication.
The stakes and politics of research and scholarship are different depending on discipline, department, and institution, and as such, increasing awareness of scholarly communication is fraught with difficulty. Librarians Jennifer Bazeley and Jen Waller share their experience developing a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) in order to address the issues. Cultivating awareness of the entire scholarly communication landscape created stronger faculty advocates for change, but […]