17 research outputs found

    Current market rates for scholarly publishing services

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    For decades, the supra-inflation increase of subscription prices for scholarly journals has concerned scholarly institutions. After years of fruitless efforts to solve this “serials crisis”, open access has been proposed as the latest potential solution. However, the prices for open access publishing are also high and are rising well beyond inflation. What has been missing from the public discussion so far is a quantitative approach to determine the actual costs of efficiently publishing a scholarly article using state-of-the-art technologies, such that informed decisions can be made as to appropriate price levels. Here we provide a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving. We find that these costs range from less than US200perarticleinmodern,large−scalepublishingplatformsusingpost−publicationpeer−review,toaboutUS200 per article in modern, large-scale publishing platforms using post-publication peer-review, to about US1,000 per article in prestigious journals with rejection rates exceeding 90%. The publication costs for a representative scholarly article today come to lie at around US$400. We discuss the additional non-publication items that make up the difference between publication costs and final price

    Current market rates for scholarly publishing services

    Get PDF
    For decades, the supra-inflation increase of subscription prices for scholarly journals has concerned scholarly institutions. After years of fruitless efforts to solve this “serials crisis”, open access has been proposed as the latest potential solution. However, the prices for open access publishing are also high and are rising well beyond inflation. What has been missing from the public discussion so far is a quantitative approach to determine the actual costs of efficiently publishing a scholarly article using state-of-the-art technologies, such that informed decisions can be made as to appropriate price levels. Here we provide a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving. We find that these costs range from less than US200perarticleinmodern,large−scalepublishingplatformsusingpost−publicationpeer−review,toaboutUS200 per article in modern, large-scale publishing platforms using post-publication peer-review, to about US1,000 per article in prestigious journals with rejection rates exceeding 90%. The publication costs for a representative scholarly article today come to lie at around US$400. We discuss the additional non-publication items that make up the difference between publication costs and final price

    Mapping the landscape: Peer review in computing education research

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    Peer review is a mainstay of academic publication – indeed, it is the peer-review process that provides much of the publications’ credibility. As the number of computing education conferences and the number of submissions increase, the need for reviewers grows. This report does not attempt to set standards for reviewing; rather, as a first step toward meeting the need for well qualified reviewers, it presents an overview of the ways peer review is used in various venues, both inside computing education and, for com- parison, in closely-related areas outside our field. It considers four key components of peer review in some depth: criteria, the review process, roles and responsibilities, and ethics and etiquette. To do so, it draws on relevant literature, guidance and forms associated with peer review, interviews with journal editors and conference chairs, and a limited survey of the computing education research community. In addition to providing an overview of practice, this report identifies a number of themes running through the discourse that have relevance for decision making about how best to conduct peer review for a given venue

    Pubfair: A Framework for Sustainable, Distributed, Open Science Publishing Services

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    Over the last thirty years, digitally-networked technologies have disrupted traditional media, turning business models on their head and changing the conditions for the creation, packaging and distribution of content. Yet, scholarly communication still looks remarkably as it did in the pre-digital age. The primary unit of dissemination remains the research article (or book in some disciplines), and today’s articles still bear a remarkable resemblance to those that populated the pages of Oldenburg’s Philosophical Transactions 350 years ago. In an age of such disruptive innovation, it is striking how little digital technologies have impacted scholarly publishing; and this is also somewhat ironic, since the Web was developed by scientists for research purposes. Pubfair is a conceptual model for a modular open source publishing framework which builds upon a distributed network of repositories to enable the dissemination and quality-control of a range of research outputs including publications, data, and more. Pubfair aims to introduce significant innovation into scholarly publishing. It enables different stakeholders (funders, institutions, scholarly societies, individuals scientists) to access a suite of functionalities to create their own dissemination channels, with built in open review and transparent processes. The model minimizes publishing costs while maintaining academic standards by connecting communities with iterative publishing services linked to their preferred repository. Such a publishing environment has the capacity to transform the scholarly communication system, making it more research-centric, dissemination-oriented and open to and supportive of innovation, while also collectively managed by the scholarly community

    Determining the factors which positively affect the intra-family chief executive officer succession of UK small and medium-sized companies

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    A change in Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is a critical event in the life of any business. For family businesses the stakes can be higher, as failure may lead to the dual issues of business collapse and significant family harm. Intra-family business CEO succession is the transfer of leadership to a different member of the family and is a strategic direction family businesses take, even if sacrificing performance across generations to secure long-term control benefits. The research aims to determine the factors which positively affect the intra-family CEO succession of UK Small and Medium companies as gaps were identified in the research of businesses that had been through a succession across a range of areas. This research uses a deductive research design to test the existing theory and combines theoretical conceptualisations developed within the literature review with the aim of providing new theory and insight into the issues. Quantitative data was collected from primary and secondary sources from 230 UK Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) which identified as family businesses and had been through a succession. The questionnaires were completed by company directors and the questions consisted of measures relating to the succession event, processes and outcomes. The data collected was tested empirically using process tracing and regression analysis. Findings show that disagreements relating to the initial planning made an intra-family CEO more likely as did a discussion of passing control to a professional manager. It was found that a family business with higher proportions of senior management, higher levels of generational involvement and higher levels of experience led to an increasingly likely succession to an intra-family CEO. This finding took an additional step in the understanding of elements of the Family Influence on Power, Experience and Culture model. The thesis also found, empirically, that satisfaction with the succession process increased with the presence of advisors and that there was a positive relationship between director stability and profit and a negative relationship with management stability and profit. The findings indicated that a degree of externality in the succession contributes to a positive intra-family CEO succession outcome.N/

    Open Peer Review for Evaluating Academic Legal Publications: The “Antidote” to an “Ill” Blind Peer Review?

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    Numerous peer-reviewed law journals, in particular Latin-American ones, stand out for their general use of blind methods to assess the substantive quality of academic articles. Nevertheless, this traditional peer review model is considered 'ill' (i.e. poor-quality) across disciplines due to different 'technical' and 'social' issues. The cause seems to be the anonymity between the actors involved. Then, open peer review models have emerged as an 'antidote' to combat the main 'symptoms' that the blind model presents, namely, lack of transparency during the process and absence of reviewers’ accountability. However, thus far law journals have not adopted an open system yet. Moreover, neither theoretical nor empirical research has been conducted about its potential use. This article presents an in-depth analysis of the pros and cons of both the traditional and the open identities review models in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines – in which the latter has been broadly applied. This paper compares the experience of STEM disciplines in relation to both of the methods and use the insights from this comparison to examine the legal discipline. The author specifically argues that unmasking the identities of authors and evaluators may be a suitable way to counteract only some of the flaws that the blind model has entailed in the evaluation of academic legal publications, therefore a mixed method could be a fairer alternative for current blind-peer-reviewed law journals. The author concludes by providing recommendations for further research

    Open Science: A Review on Open Peer Review Literature

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    Peer review truly, is the king in scientific communication –however, traditional peer review has been accused of many irregularities such as inconsistency and unrealistic peer reviewing, methodology flaws, and the likes. Despite all these irregularities, scholars still believe in peer review but new ways of opening up peer reviews are encouraged. There were high levels of backing for most of the attributes of OPR, such as disclosing identities of reviewers, open reports, open interaction, open platform, commenting on the final-version of published articles or data. Furthermore, the idea of supplementing pre-publication peer review with some form of post-publication evaluation would improve scientific communication. Also, novel initiatives for OPR are reviewed and how they can speed up peer review in today scholarship. In conclusion, ways of making OPR not just a new science but a sound and reliable scientific exercise were elaborated. The purpose of this study is to review OPR literature and discuss the novel and sharp practices of OPR in today’s scholarshi

    A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

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    Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform and reduce the biases of existing models as much as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that could, at least partially, resolve many of the socio-technical issues associated with peer review, and potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments

    A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review [version 2; referees: 2 approved]

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    Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform and reduce the biases of existing models as much as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that could, at least partially, resolve many of the socio-technical issues associated with peer review, and potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments

    A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

    Get PDF
    Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform and reduce the biases of existing models as much as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that could, at least partially, resolve many of the socio-technical issues associated with peer review, and potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments
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