Linking authorship and reviewing activity in science publishing

Everybody wants to publish, but peers for review are increasingly hard to find. Online systems that help journal editors handle submissions indicate how many invitations for review a person accepted or declined. Linking this information automatically to the names of the first and last author of any submission to a specific journal, and displaying it during the online submission process, would make submitters aware of their own reviewing history with this journal, and make them aware that the journal editor will also be automatically informed about this. Editors might justifiably be less inclined to allow a manuscript into review if the authors have a history of declining review invitations. Additionally, offering both authors and editors a ranking opportunity in the online system as commonplace with any online business ('how do you rate this review?' - corrected for the type of decision that is rated) would make submitters aware of their reviewing performance, as well as editors - at the time when submitters might want to make the best of impressions with editors, i.e. during submission of their own manuscript. Rather than rewarding reviewing activity by quantifying it in metrics, such practice might enhance effort put into peer review

The Library as Publishing House

The academic library has taken on the new role of institutional publishing house, using institutional repository (IR) services to enable journal publishing and manage conference planning. Librarians taking on this new role as publisher must know the journal publishing work flow, including online article submission, peer review, publishing, marketing, and assessment. They must understand international identifiers such as the electronic International Standard Serial Number (eISSN) and Digital Object Identifier (DOI). To manage conference planning functions, librarians need to understand event functions such as presentation submission, program scheduling, registration and third-party payment systems, proceedings publishing, and archiving. In general, they need to be technologically savvy enough to configure and manage a specialized content management system, the institutional repository

Non-conservation of dimension in divergence-free solutions of passive and active scalar systems

For any $h\in(1,2]$, we give an explicit construction of a compactly supported, uniformly continuous, and (weakly) divergence-free velocity field in $\mathbb{R}^2$ that weakly advects a measure whose support is initially the origin but for positive times has Hausdorff dimension $h$. These velocities are uniformly continuous in space-time and compactly supported, locally Lipschitz except at one point and satisfy the conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a Regular Lagrangian Flow in the sense of Di Perna and Lions theory. We then construct active scalar systems in $\mathbb{R}^2$ and $\mathbb{R}^3$ with measure-valued solutions whose initial support has co-dimension 2 but such that at positive times it only has co-dimension 1. The associated velocities are divergence free, compactly supported, continuous, and sufficiently regular to admit unique Regular Lagrangian Flows. This is in part motivated by the investigation of dimension conservation for the support of measure-valued solutions to active scalar systems. This question occurs in the study of vortex filaments in the three-dimensional Euler equations.Comment: 32 pages, 3 figures. This preprint has not undergone peer review (when applicable) or any post-submission improvements or corrections. The Version of Record of this article is published in Arch Rational Mech Anal, and is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00205-021-01708-

Electronic peer review: a large cohort teaching themselves?

[Abstract]: Electronic peer review can empower lecturers of large courses to produce rapid feedback, promote social interaction and encourage higher order learning for students. But what are the payoffs to educators? Do students recognise the benefits of such a system? Foundation Computing is one of the largest courses at the University of Southern Queensland. A system of electronic submission and peer reviewing with instructor moderation is now being used in this course. This system is innovative and unique and delivers benefits to students, lecturers and the University. This system has been evaluated, proven successful and is being considered for wider use

An evaluation of electronic individual peer assessment in an introductory programming course

[Abstract]: Peer learning is a powerful pedagogical practice delivering improved outcomes over conventional teacher-student interactions while offering marking relief to instructors. Peer review enables learning by requiring students to evaluate the work of others. PRAISE is an on-line peer-review system that facilitates anonymous review and delivers prompt feedback from multiple sources. This study is an evaluation of the use of PRAISE in an introductory programming course. Use of the system is examined and attitudes of novice programmers towards the use of peer review are compared to those of students from other disciplines, raising a number of interesting issues. Recommendations are made to introductory programming instructors who may be considering peer review in assignments

An Architecture for Deploying Reinforcement Learning in Industrial Environments

Industry 4.0 is driven by demands like shorter time-to-market, mass customization of products, and batch size one production. Reinforcement Learning (RL), a machine learning paradigm shown to possess a great potential in improving and surpassing human level performance in numerous complex tasks, allows coping with the mentioned demands. In this paper, we present an OPC UA based Operational Technology (OT)-aware RL architecture, which extends the standard RL setting, combining it with the setting of digital twins. Moreover, we define an OPC UA information model allowing for a generalized plug-and-play like approach for exchanging the RL agent used. In conclusion, we demonstrate and evaluate the architecture, by creating a proof of concept. By means of solving a toy example, we show that this architecture can be used to determine the optimal policy using a real control system.Comment: This preprint has not undergone peer review or any post-submission improvements or corrections. The Version of Record of this contribution is published in Computer Aided Systems Theory - EUROCAST 2022 and is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25312-6_6

Reframing e-assessment: building professional nursing and academic attributes in a first year nursing course

This paper documents the relationships between pedagogy and e-assessment in two nursing courses offered at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. The courses are designed to build the academic, numeracy and technological attributes student nurses need if they are to succeed at university and in the nursing profession. The paper first outlines the management systems supporting the two courses and how they intersect with the e-learning and e-assessment components of course design. These pedagogical choices are then reviewed. While there are lessons to be learnt and improvements to be made, preliminary results suggest students and staff are extremely supportive of the courses. The e-assessment is very positively received with students reporting increased confidence and competency in numeracy, as well as IT, academic, research and communication skills