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In the news: May Digest

Intellectual property

In a discussion paper posted on SSRN, Diana Simon, a Professor of Law at the University of Arizona, explores whether it is fair or helpful to try to generalise attitudes toward plagiarism across cultures?

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3377725

Data and reproducibility

Publications in the journal Scientific Data now include data citations in the main reference list, which will  promote credit for data sharing, and will make citation referencing easier, as citations to both data literature can be handled by the same reference management software.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-019-0026-5

Conflicts of Interest/Competing interests

Gastroenterology & Endoscopy News reports on three studies which have found considerable undeclared conflicts of interest in authors of endoscopy guidelines and of evidence-based resources that help guide the decisions of gastroenterologists at the point of care.

https://www.gastroendonews.com/In-the-News/Article/04-19/GI-Guidelines-Often-Fail-to-Disclose-Financial-Conflicts-of-Interest/54540

The BMJ is launching a stream of content to identify and respond to commercial influences on health and healthcare. They are calling for submissions across all article formats, including original data, qualitative and quantitative analysis, as well as evaluated examples of groups or organisations forging genuine independence from industry. The aim is to better understand the nature of commercial conflicts of interest, to examine how commercial interests effect health and healthcare, to explore when commercial ties are truly necessary and to share examples of progress from transparency to independence.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1706   

Journal management

How does journal editing differ between two very different disciplines,  History and Civil Engineering? This Scholarly Kitchen post investigates.

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/04/24/editing-is-at-the-heart-of-scholarly-publishing/

At the Scholarly Kitchen, Lisa Hinchcliffe interviews Stephen Inchcoombe, Chief Publishing Officer at Springer Nature about their recent release of A Faster Path to an Open Future, in response to Plan S.

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/05/08/another-response-to-coalition-s/

Peer review

A recent preprint on BioArxiv looking at the practice of ECRs ghostwriting peer reviews has been commented on in a number of places including Physics Today and Science. A survey showed that nearly half of respondents had ghostwritten a peer review report, despite the 80% of them having the opinion that ghostwriting is unethical.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/617373v1

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.20190429a/full/

https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2019/05/early-career-researchers-commonly-ghostwrite-peer-reviews-s-problem

Hilda Bastian, at PLOS Blogs, details the research that has been carried out into peer review over the last  30 years.

https://blogs.plos.org/absolutely-maybe/2019/04/30/trials-at-last-even-more-questions-milestones-in-journal-peer-review-research-part-2-1990-2018/

Ethical oversight

Presented at the COPE North American Seminar by Rebecca Kennison, the white paper on research into Publication Ethics in Philosophy is available for comment and community discussion: Just Ideas? The Status and Future of Publication Ethics in Philosophy.

 http://publication-ethics.org/white-paper/

Council member Tracey Bretag  is leading a new course on Academic Integrity from Epigeum which will help institutions find new ways to implement a consistent and unified approach to academic integrity throughout their whole university community.

www.epigeum.com/courses/studying/academic-integrity

In other news

In this post, Rob Warren lays out empirical evidence from the field of Sociology showing that early career and PhD researchers are expected to publish more research and earlier in their careers than previous generations, if they are to secure a permanent job, and highlights two market trends driving this.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/04/02/publishing-and-perishing-does-a-new-generation-of-social-scientists-have-to-publish-more-to-achieve-less/

A recent study of review, promotion and tenure documents, shows the extent to which the Impact Factor remains embedded as a measure of success in the academic job market.

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/04/26/the-impact-of-the-journal-impact-factor-in-the-review-tenure-and-promotion-process/

COPE Council member Deborah Kahn