Featuring new endorsements to the Open Pharma position statement on open access, a Nature Careers podcast, a meta-review of data sharing, more on coronavirus research, data visualization techniques, the STM Association’s Research Data Year, transformative agreements and the impact of preprints.
Ipsen and PLOS endorse the Open Pharma position statement! via Open Pharma
Open Pharma is pleased to announce that Ipsen and the PLOS suite of journals have now endorsed our position statement on open access. Ipsen announced its endorsement earlier this week via Twitter as part of its commitment to open access publishing and improving medical science. PLOS, a fully open access publisher, hopes that its endorsement will help promote open access within the wider publishing industry. This now brings us to a total of 29 organizational endorsements, including seven publishers!
On the evolution of the academic paper via Nature Careers
This 19-minute podcast, hosted by Dr Adam Levy, features interviews with Dr Pippa Woodhouse, Dr Sarvenaz Sarabipour and Professor Dr Benjamin List. It explores the benefits of preprint servers in helping to define research landscapes and explores the possibility of crowdsourcing the peer review process, harnessing the power of internet connectivity and social media to provide feedback on research outputs.
Perrier et al. 2020: a meta-review on researchers’ perspectives of data sharing via PLOS One
After performing a literature search for studies on data sharing, Perrier et al. 2020, identified four major research themes: data integrity, responsible conduct of research, feasibility of sharing data and the value of sharing data. They conclude that many researchers lack the skill, know-how and/or incentive to share data efficiently, and that a better infrastructure is needed to support data dissemination.
Coronavirus: shining a light on communication barriers via London School of Economics
Closed science is ineffective. However, despite calls from the Wellcome Trust in January 2020 urging the scientific community to make all coronavirus research accessible in a timely manner, research from Web of Science indicates that more than half of the 13 818 coronavirus articles published since 1988 remain locked behind a paywall.
Effective visual communication and data visualization via The Publication Plan
Most people are familiar with the phrase ‘a picture paints a thousand words’. Despite this knowledge, not all graphics depicting data are well designed. As explained by Betsy Mason, variances in formatting, shapes, colour and shading can all influence an audience’s perception of data.
2020 is the year of research data via The Scholarly Kitchen
The Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) Publisher’s Association, in collaboration with 11 publishers, has announced 2020 as the ‘STM Research Data Year’. In a recent series of workshops, Joris van Rossum, Research Data Director at the STM Association, described the current state of open data and highlighted the importance of following the Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines.
Industry transformation is not happening fast enough via Frontiers
A joint position paper from open access publishers Copernicus, Frontiers, the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute and Ubiquity Press, and the Journal of Medical Internet Research says that transformative agreements are not transformative enough; publish-and-read deals are slowing the industry’s efforts to an open access model.
Carlson and Harris, 2020: quantifying the impact of preprints via bioRxiv
Could Twitter and other social media platforms help drive engagement between researchers and the public? After reviewing 331 696 tweets referencing bioRxiv preprints, Carlson and Harris concluded that while 96% of these tweets were primarily reaching an academic audience, some engagement was seen from a wider, non-specialized audience.
