The changing world of scholarly communication and the emerging new wave of ‘Open Science’ or ‘Open Research’ has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly debated topics. Evidence-based rational debate is regularly drowned out by misinformed or exaggerated rhetoric, which does not benefit the evolving system of scholarly communication. This article aims to provide a baseline evidence framework for ten of the most contested topics, in order to help frame and move forward discussions, practices, and policies. We address issues around preprints and scooping, the practice of copyright transfer, the function of peer review, predatory publishers, and the legitimacy of ‘global’ databases. These arguments and data will be a powerful tool against misinformation across wider academic research, policy and practice, and will inform changes within the rapidly evolving scholarly publishing system.

More than 70% of the output of the highest impact international journals is produced by American and British scholars in the disciplines of Human Geography and Marketing (Gutierrez and Lopez-Nieva, 2001;Rosenstreich and Wooliscroft, 2006;Bański and Ferenc, 2013). Additionally, 85.3% of the editorial board members of international Marketing journals are based in the US (Rosenstreich and Wooliscroft, 2006). Furthermore, 95% of the journals in the Web of Science database use English as their language of publication (Paasi, 2015). These empirical data seem to indicate that international publication spaces are dominated by US and UK-based research (Paasi, 2015). In this context, this research seeks to deepen the debate by focusing on a new research unit: references. Through case studies on the referencing of the three higher impact journals in the disciplines of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (PLoS Biology, Cell, and Reviews of Biochemistry) it was possible to identify, describe and visually represent the spatial patterns of knowledge production. The main findings support previous literature; 74.9% of the references surveyed had at least one author from either the US or the UK. Moreover, there was a notable predominance of authors from the US (69.9%). Furthermore, there was a high preponderance of authors from Englishspeaking countries (88.32%). Finally, it was determined that there is an uneven writing space created by three factors: marginalization, governmental and institutional evaluation practices and the use of English. As a conclusion, a series of managerial and linguistic suggestions for academic publishers is provided in order to promote ethnic diversity and genuinely global journal publishing spaces.

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