Featuring the whodunit on the demise of Beall’s list, The Royal Society’s ORCID mandate and how authors and reviewers have responded to PeerJ’s optional open peer review.
Who killed Beall’s list? via The Chronicle of Higher Education
A review of the prime suspects in the demise of Beall’s list, and a discussion on where open access stands without its most notable defender against predatory publishing.
Cultivating ORCID at the Royal Society via OpenPharma
A guest blog from Stuart Taylor that reflects on the Royal Society’s mandate that authors submitting research include their ORCID identifier, and also outlines the results of this mandate.
Collaboration between bioRxiv and Hypothesis to enable preprint annotations via hypothesis.is
A look at the benefits of robust annotation capabilities following the selection of the Hypothesis open source annotation framework for the bioRxiv preprint service.
The absurdity of Impact Factor via Flockademic
An article detailing the flaws of this accidental pillar of the academic world, with suggestions on how to break its stranglehold on the academic community.
How are reviewers influenced by their peers’ decisions? via F1000 blog
The possibility that reviewers’ opinions could be influenced by the conclusions of their peers has been highlighted as a potential shortcoming of F1000’s open peer review model. This blog tackles the issue head-on and reports on a study investigating whether the behaviour of reviewers has changed in an open publishing model.
Who’s afraid of open peer review? via PeerJ.com
PeerJ uses a system of optional open peer review, allowing both authors and reviewers to choose whether or not they would like reviews, and the reviewer identities respectively to be publicly accessible. This piece looks at responses to open peer review: its popularity among authors, the concerns of reviewers and how it benefits the peer review process.
Researchers need a practical alternative to SciHub via Forbes
Sci-Hub has met a growing demand for free access to research from those who have grown impatient with paywalls or simply cannot afford to pay, but it cannot sustain quality if traditional journals begin to become obsolete. This article argues that publishers must find a sustainable publishing mechanism as SciHub cannot provide all that is needed in the dissemination of academic research.
Is ego getting in the way of reproducibility in scientific research? via Nature
This piece suggests that faculty positions need to be awarded to researchers who produce robust and reproducible research and who are also able to critique their own work.
