Responding to the necessities of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accelerating application of the open paradigm to more and more aspects of research, academic publishing and the cultures that support it continue to be in flux in 2021. This review brings t…
Category: scholarly communication
Multilingualism is integral to accessibility and should be part of European research assessment reform
Developing research systems that promote diverse, multilingual and relevant research for different audiences is a key and often overlooked element in making research accessible. However, biases in traditional research assessment often place researchers…
‘It could be effective…’: Uncertainty and over-promotion in the abstracts of COVID-19 preprints
A defining feature of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on scholarly communication has been the brief and intense surge in the production of preprints. This has had significant impacts on the ways in which new research findings have been reported and…
Rethinking the research seminar for a post-COVID world with Cassyni
Research seminars are a foundational part of academia and an important medium for communicating new ideas and research. However, national lockdowns and social distancing regulations have required research seminars to be translated at speed into digital…
Joining the ‘great conversation’ – The fundamental role of annotation in academic society
Annotations can often be seen as an interruption, something to be expunged from carefully maintained library collections and the version of record. However, drawing on their research and writing practice, Remi Kalir and Antero Garcia present a differen…
Goodbye, Microsoft Academic – Hello, open research infrastructure?
The announcement of the closure of Microsoft Academic later this year, may have left the research community largely unmoved, although its demise has significant implications for those working with the service’s substantial database. Here, Aaron Tay, Al…
Book Review: The Technology Takers: Leading Change in the Digital Era by Jens P. Flanding, Genevieve M. Grabman and Sheila Q. Cox
In The Technology Takers: Leading Change in the Digital Era, Jens P. Flanding, Genevieve M. Grabman and Sheila Q. Cox explore how organisations and managers can lead change and pursue strategic opportunities at a time when contemporary digital technolo…
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 …
Power and publications in Chinese academia
The role of power is often neglected in accounts of scholarly communication and knowledge production, in favour of more idealised ‘scientific norms’. In this cross-post, Ruixue Jia, discusses how administrative power shapes academic research and publication in China and the wider implications an analysis of power might have for academic publishing practices. It has been well … Continued
What will the legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic be for Early Career Researchers?
David Nicholas discusses the challenges facing early career researchers as a result of the pandemic and outlines how a new longitudinal, qualitative study involving 160 Early Career Researchers (ECRs) from 8 countries will seek to understand how they fare over the next two years. In something of an oxymoron, we often look to new generations … Continued