Ten Hot Topics around Scholarly Publishing

Abstract

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.

The harsh world of publishing in emerging regions and implications for editors and publishers: The case of Vietnam

“…There is still room for these key players to increase the quality of research and ethics. For example, to make further improvements in transparency, the government and public institutions can demonstrate stronger willingness to embrace open science with gestures such as funding for open‐access journals, encouraging the use of open data depositories and open‐source systems, promoting pre‐registered studies, and the rest (Tennant et al ., ).…”

“…There is still room for these key players to increase the quality of research and ethics. For example, to make further improvements in trans- (Tennant et al, 2019).…”

Open Science in the Humanities, or: Open Humanities?

“…Some of these issues are equally applicable to all disciplines, but by means of their discourse on openness, these issues are regularly addressed for the sciences (but not so for the humanities). The latest example for this is the recently published Ten Hot Topics around Scholarly Publishing by Tennant et al [29].…”

Scientific impact and the quest for visibility

“…This is not a problem in itself since research should ideally benefit society by monitoring and addressing topical issues. The problem arises internally when academics start to rely on a flawed metricthe journal impact factor [2,3] to assess scientific quality and thus decide how to distribute research funding. This practice promotes research that produces 'sexy', high-impact 'stories'with impact no longer defining societal benefit, but the amount of attention received by a publication and its authors.…”

“…Although many scientists are obsessed with the number of citations a paper receives and a journal's impact factor, as scientists we ought to know that using the mean of data that conform to a skewed distribution is invalid. The impact factor is exactly that, therefore the citation performance of individual papers cannot be inferred from this metric [2,3,22,23]. Perhaps it would be better to promote a 'rigour factor' instead?…”