Opening up new channels for scholarly review, dissemination, and assessment

Abstract

The growing dissatisfaction with the traditional scholarly communication process and publishing practices as well as increasing usage and acceptance of ICT and Web 2.0 technologies in research have resulted in the proliferation of alternative review, publishing and bibliometric methods. The EU-funded project OpenUP addresses key aspects and challenges of the currently transforming science landscape and aspires to come up with a cohesive framework for the review-disseminate-assess phases of the research life cycle that is fit to support and promote open science. The objective of this paper is to present first results and conclusions of the landscape scan and analysis of alternative peer review, altmetrics and innovative dissemination methods done during the first project year.

The changed – and changing – landscape of serials publishing: Review of the literature on emerging models

“…Building on the concept of repositories as complementary to the publishing enterprise, rather than a possible alternative to it (see below), and taking advantage of the growing infrastructure around preprints, as well as their accelerating uptake by different research communities, overlay journals take upon themselves the certification function – the peer reviewing of articles, which is an important function of the scholarly journal that repositories do not perform (Priem & Hemminger, ; Tennant, Bauin, James, & Kant, ). Rounding out the role played by repositories, which typically do not go beyond a check by moderators if a paper fits thematically and is scientifically sound (Görögh et al ., ), the overlay journal is thus built as an additional peer reviewing layer on top of a publication repository, that is, it peer reviews the initial version of an article deposited, archived, registered, and made publicly available in a repository. If, following a conventional reviewing process, the article is accepted for formal publication in the overlay journal, its final version is reposted in the repository, assigned a DOI, and the journal publishes links to the paper from its own site (Pinfield, ).…”

Academic social networks metrics: an effective indicator for university performance?

“…Web 2.0 tools have become increasingly important in the research community (Ahmad, 2011;Grabner-Kräuter, 2009;He et al, 2014). Social networks based on Web 2.0 not only allow for the distribution of entertainment, they may also facilitate effective scholarly communication (Chugh & Ruhi, 2018;Görögh et al, 2017;Greifeneder et al, 2018;Harris & Rea, 2019;Hung & Yuen, 2010;Zaidieh, 2012). The current international academic environment is facilitated by many academic social networks (ASN) that are used by both early career and experienced researchers (Mason, 2020) and their usage has increased significantly over the past decade (Jordan, 2019).…”