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In the news: September 2018 Digest

Peer review processes

Is there a problem around diversity and inclusion in peer review?
#PeerReviewWeek18
https://twitter.com/PeerRevWeek/status/1031911897149394944

Gender and international diversity improves equity in peer review
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/08/29/400515

Uptake and outcome of manuscripts in Nature journals by review model and author characteristics. Study of double- versus single-blinded manuscript peer review: "The proportion of authors that choose double-blind review is higher when they submit to more prestigious journals, they are affiliated with less prestigious institutions, or they are from specific countries; the double-blind option is also linked to less successful editorial outcomes.
https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-018-0049-z

How do young career-scientists think peer review can be improved?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-018-0230-x

Creating a culture of diversity and inclusion in scholarly publishing
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/08/13/creating-culture-diversity-inclusion-interview-vicky-williams-ceo-emerald-publishing/

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports. Journals sign letter in support of publishing peer reviews
http://asapbio.org/letter

Nature editorial on the right of reviewers to request detail and data for review. Peer reviewers should not feel pressured to produce a report if key data are missing.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06006-y 

What is open annotation and why could it be important for scholarly communications?
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/08/28/all-about-open-annotation/ 

Publishing peer reviews – call for journals to sign a pledge to make reviewers’ anonymous comments part of the official s cientific record
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06032-w

Post-publication peer review in biomedical journals: overcoming obstacles and disincentives to knowledge sharing
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/roars/article/view/10125

The European Research Council (ERC), Europe’s most prestigious funding programme, is to start accepting publications that have not yet been peer reviewed as part of applicants’ track records
https://www.researchresearch.com/news/article/?articleId=1376714

Predatory publishing

The problem of predatory publishing
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/08/07/denialism-rocks-just-got-lot-harder-pretend-predatory-publishing-doesnt-matter/

Indian government ‘Will end menace of predatory journals’
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/govt-responds-to-express-series-will-end-menace-of-predatory-journals-5272455/

Revisiting some of the coverage of predatory publishing over the years
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/08/14/revisiting-six-years-predatory-publishing/

Open access/open science

Interactive report from the European Commission—'Trends for open access for publications': Covers gold and green publications by country and discipline, and also funder and journal policies on open access and open data
https://ec.europa.eu/info/open-science/open-science-monitor/trends-open-access-publications_en#open-access-to-publications

Measuring openness: is the best way of incentivising open scholarship to measure it?
https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/2018/08/21/measuring-openness-should-we-be-careful-what-we-wish-for/

How Unpaywall is transforming open science
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05968-3

Data and reproducibility

A toolkit for data transparency takes shape
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05990-5

How we judge research outputs when making funding decisions. Steps Wellcome is taking to fulfil the principles of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)
https://wellcome.ac.uk/news/how-we-judge-research-outputs-when-making-funding-decisions

The UK’s four higher education funding bodies have published the draft guidance and criteria on making submissions to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, for consultation
http://www.ref.ac.uk/news/2018/draftguidanceandcriteriasetoutdetai ledarrangementsforref2021.html

Are you liable for misconduct by scientific collaborators?
https://retractionwatch.com/2018/08/13/are-you-liable-for-misconduct-by-scientific-collaborators-what-a-recent-court-decision-means-for-scientists/

Authorship

In research domains where authors are listed alphabetically on papers (eg economics and physics), those closer to A none the less fare better in career terms https://academic.oup.com/rev/article/27/3/238/4959272

Intellectual Property

India cracks down on plagiarism at universities https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05924-1

Read September Digest: Peer Review for new and revised peer review resources, podcast on diversity in peer review, a member survey for your views on diversity and more.