If you are passionate about positively impacting scholarly communication in the life sciences, #Open Science, and #preprints, don't miss the opportunity: apply for the ASAPbio Executive Director position!
Wojick, M., Conner, H., Farley, A., Huaman, E., Luyo, M., Thomas-Pate, S., & LaGrone, L. (2024). Access to evidence-based care: A systematic review of trauma and surgical literature costs across resource settings. Trauma Surgery & Acute Care Open, 9(1), e001238. https://doi.org/10.1136/tsaco-2023-001238
With the increasing popularity of #preprints comes the growth of preprint review initiatives. In the latest blog from Europe PMC, find out how @sciety and EMBO Early Evidence Base are using the community-endorsed framework DocMaps to help readers navigate the preprint review landscape: https://blog.europepmc.org/2024/01/discovering-reviewed-preprints.html
I am not a fan of #OSF's decision to gatekeep #preprints at all. I understand that minting DOIs costs money, but moderating at the individual preprint level is just not the way to do that. I've been bounced from arXiv before for entirely arbitrary reasons, and the appeals process amounted to "show us when it's been accepted to a journal and we'll post it." All digital social spaces need some form of moderation, but closed pre-moderation of individual submissions is far from the only model, and is antithetical to "democratizing science" and the purpose of preprints: to share work without prior justification and validation of your work. The email here says preprints will be public at the time of submission, but the linked documents disagree, saying they will only be visible after moderation - not a promising start to a transparent moderation system.
The argument here is nonsense - who asked them to take on the mantle of protecting the scholarly impact metrics that keep us yoked to an extraordinarily exploitative publishing system? Was there rampant gaming of the system? Shouldn't that be a signal that the metrics are the problem, rather than signal a need for gatekeeping preprints? Presumably daddy Elsevier came knocking, but since there's no further explanation, we're left with nonsense - again not a promising start.
Many of us had hope that preprints would bring radical change to science, a transitional stage away from traditional journals, but since instead they increasingly want to act like traditional journals I suppose we'll need to keep moving. The only way through is to acknowledge half measures get us nowhere, and that the many-billion dollar for-profit publishing industry is not our friend.
Here's an academic publishing story where the publisher (Springer Nature) inserts a random and incorrect figure into your paper after the proof stage and then refuses to correct the record. As the author writes, it is another case for preprints
It's interesting how relevant it still reads. For example, the debate about the author-pays model: I dislike Gold OA, and practice Green: #preprints FTW! #OpenAccess
In addition to supporting #preprints, content #mining, and #DORA#assessment reforms, it applies #CCBY licenses to all research carried out at the institute.
Question: If a journal receives a submission within its scope, and has trouble finding referees, how long should it wait, or how long should it keep trying, before it notifies the authors and invites them to submit the manuscript elsewhere?
"Addiction to journal brand and Impact Factor has led us to conflate quality, impact, and trust in research. We now have the opportunity to adopt a new approach with better trust signals, in which judgments of an article’s merits are not made at a single point in time" #ScientificPublishing#SciComm#Preprints
Update. Here's a useful update on the state of #AI text summaries, their benefits, their continuing problems with accuracy, and their ability to hit different reading levels. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00865-4
The piece mentions a risk I hadn't noted. AI summaries of #preprints carry "the risk of making unreviewed and inaccurate research more accessible." I won't comment on that here except to say: Noted.