Automatically detecting open academic review praise and criticism

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Emerald in Online Information Review on 15 June 2020. The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version, accessible at https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-11-2019-0347.Purpose: Peer reviewer evaluations of academic papers are known to be variable in content and overall judgements but are important academic publishing safeguards. This article introduces a sentiment analysis program, PeerJudge, to detect praise and criticism in peer evaluations. It is designed to support editorial management decisions and reviewers in the scholarly publishing process and for grant funding decision workflows. The initial version of PeerJudge is tailored for reviews from F1000Research’s open peer review publishing platform. Design/methodology/approach: PeerJudge uses a lexical sentiment analysis approach with a human-coded initial sentiment lexicon and machine learning adjustments and additions. It was built with an F1000Research development corpus and evaluated on a different F1000Research test corpus using reviewer ratings. Findings: PeerJudge can predict F1000Research judgements from negative evaluations in reviewers’ comments more accurately than baseline approaches, although not from positive reviewer comments, which seem to be largely unrelated to reviewer decisions. Within the F1000Research mode of post-publication peer review, the absence of any detected negative comments is a reliable indicator that an article will be ‘approved’, but the presence of moderately negative comments could lead to either an approved or approved with reservations decision. Originality/value: PeerJudge is the first transparent AI approach to peer review sentiment detection. It may be used to identify anomalous reviews with text potentially not matching judgements for individual checks or systematic bias assessments

Gold in Devono-Carboniferous red beds of northern Britain

We are grateful to D. Craw and an anonymous reviewer for comments that helped to clarify the paper. Research was funded by NERC grants NE/L001764/1 and NE/M010953/1.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Synthesis of hydrophobic MIL-53(Al) nanoparticles in low molecular weight alcohols: systematic investigation of solvent effects

The effects of using low-weight alcohols, methanol and ethanol, for the synthesis of MIL-53(Al) are investigated and the results directly compared with analogous synthesis in water and N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF). When methanol is employed in the synthesis of MIL-53(Al), termed MIL 53(MeOH), several unique properties are observed. The breathing phenomenon which is known for MIL-53(Al) derivatives, prepared using water or DMF as reaction solvent, is not observed for samples prepared from methanol and the framework adopts, and remains in, the large-pore form. Thus, measurement of N2-isotherms and calculation of internal surface areas have verified that the synthesis of MIL-53(MeOH) leads to a product which is highly porous without the requirement for an energy-consuming activation process. Furthermore, X-ray diffraction measurements and scanning electron microscopy at different humidity levels reveal a reversible loss of crystallinity at high humidity levels for MIL-53(MeOH) which was not observed previously for any other known MIL-53 derivative. In contrast the synthesis of MIL-53(Al) in ethanol leads of a product with low crystallinity

Measurement of inequality with a finite number of pay states : the majorization set and its applications

I am grateful to Vassily Gorbanov, Tarik Yalcin and Fabrizio Germano for extended discussions and suggestions, and to an associate editor and a reviewer for constructive comments. I also wish to thank Francesco Andreoli, Geoffrey Burton, Joe Swierzbinski, Alain Trannoy, Claudio Zoli and seminar participants at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics for discussions. I am responsible for any errors.Peer reviewedPostprin

History-Preserving Bisimilarity for Higher-Dimensional Automata via Open Maps

We show that history-preserving bisimilarity for higher-dimensional automata has a simple characterization directly in terms of higher-dimensional transitions. This implies that it is decidable for finite higher-dimensional automata. To arrive at our characterization, we apply the open-maps framework of Joyal, Nielsen and Winskel in the category of unfoldings of precubical sets.Comment: Minor updates in accordance with reviewer comments. Submitted to MFPS 201

The Concept of Equality in Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise

A version of this paper was first presented at the conference The Radical Enlightenment: the Big Picture and its Details in Brussels in May 2013. I would like to thank Steffen Ducheyne and the organizing team at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and to acknowledge the many helpful comments I received from listeners there and at subsequent events. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewer who suggested several helpful refinements.Peer reviewedPostprin