FAST principles for preprint feedback

There has been strong interest in preprint commenting and review activities in recent years. Public preprint feedback can bring benefits to authors, readers and others in scholarly communication, however, the level of public commenting on preprints is still low. This is likely due to cultural barriers, such as fear by authors that criticisms on their paper will bias readers, editors and evaluators, and concerns by commenters that posting a public critique on a preprint by a more senior colleague may lead to retribution. In order to help address these cultural barriers and foster positive and constructive participation in public preprint feedback, we have developed a set of 14 principles for creating, responding to, and interpreting preprint feedback. The principles are clustered around four broad themes: Focused, Appropriate, Specific, Transparent (FAST). We describe each of the FAST principles and designate which actors (authors, reviewers and the community) each of the principles applies to. We discuss the possible implementation of the FAST principles by different stakeholders in science communication, and explore what opportunities and challenges lie ahead in the path towards a thriving preprint feedback ecosystem.

Preprints & Pandemics: Interventions into the Dynamic Scholarly System of Scholarly Communication

The COVID-19 pandemic is an exemplar of how scholarly communication can change in response to external shocks, even as the scholarly knowledge ecosystem is evolving rapidly, and many argue that swift and fundamental interventions are needed. However, it is much easier to identify ongoing changes and emerging interventions than to understand their immediate and long term impacts. This is illustrated by comparing the approaches applied by the scientific community to understand public health risks and interventions with those applied by the scholarly communications community to the science of COVID-19. There are substantial disagreements over the short- and long- term benefits of most proposed approaches to changing the practice of science communication, and the lack of systematic, empirically-based research in this area makes these controversies difficult to resolve. We argue that the methodology of analysis and intervention developed within public health can be usefully applied to the science-of-science. Starting with the history of DDT application, we illustrate four ways complex human systems threaten reliable predictions and blunt ad-hoc interventions. We then show how these four threats apply lead to the last major intervention in scholarly publication -- the article publishing charge based open access model -- to yield surprising results. Finally, we outline how these four threats may affect the impact of preprint initiatives, and we identify approaches drawn from public health to mitigate these threats.

Ending Enclosure by Copying the Commons

In the beginning (of bibliometrics), citation counts of academic research were generated to be used in annual calculations to express a research journal’s impact. Now those same citation counts make up a social graph of scholarly communication that is used to measure the research strengths of authors, the hotness of their papers, the topic prominence of their disciplines, and assess the strength of the institutions where they are employed. More troubling, the publishers of this emerging social graph are in the process of enclosing scholarship by trying to exclude the infrastructure of libraries and other independent, non-profit organizations invested in research. This paper will outline efforts currently being employed by scholarly communication librarians using platforms built by organizations such as Our Research’s UnPaywall and Wikimedia’s Wikidata Project so that the commons of scholarship can remain open. Strategies will be shared so that researchers can adapt their workflows so that they might allow their work to be copied, shared, and be found by readers widely across the commons. Scholars will be asked to make good choices.

Perspectives on Open Science and The Future of Scholarly Communication: Internet Trackers and Algorithmic Persuasion

The current digital content industry is heavily oriented towards building platforms that track users’ behaviour and seek to convince them to stay longer and come back sooner onto the platform. Similarly, authors are incentivised to publish more and to become champions of dissemination. Arguably, these incentive systems are built around public reputation supported by a system of metrics, hard to be assessed. Generally, the digital content industry is permeable to non-human contributors (algorithms that are able to generate content and reactions), anonymity and identity fraud. It is pertinent to present a perspective paper about early signs of track and persuasion in scholarly communication. Building our views, we have run a pilot study to determine the opportunity for conducting research about the use of “track and persuade” technologies in scholarly communication. We collected observations on a sample of 148 relevant websites and we interviewed 15 that are experts related to the field. Through this work, we tried to identify 1) the essential questions that could inspire proper research, 2) good practices to be recommended for future research, and 3) whether citizen science is a suitable approach to further research in this field. The findings could contribute to determining a broader solution for building trust and infrastructure in scholarly communication. The principles of Open Science will be used as a framework to see if they offer insights into this work going forward.

Of Time, Renewal, and Scholarship: Volume 11 (2021) Wrapped

This editorial discusses the articles published and the activities undertaken by The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship during 2021, and calls for research system-wide cultural changes and wider contextual awareness in order to make scholarly communication fairer and up to the challenges of our time.

Trespassing the gates of research: identifying algorithmic mechanisms that can cause distortions and biases in academic social media

PurposeThe use of recommender systems is increasing on academic social media (ASM). However, distinguishing the elements that may be influenced and/or exert influence over content that is read and disseminated by researchers is difficult due to the opacity of the algorithms that filter information on ASM. In this article, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how algorithmic mediation through recommender systems in ResearchGate may uphold biases in scholarly communication.Design/methodology/approachThe authors used a multi-method walkthrough approach including a patent analysis, an interface analysis and an inspection of the web page code.FindingsThe findings reveal how audience influences on the recommendations and demonstrate in practice the mutual shaping of the different elements interplaying within the platform (artefact, practices and arrangements). The authors show evidence of the mechanisms of selection, prioritization, datafication and profiling. The authors also substantiate how the algorithm reinforces the reputation of eminent researchers (a phenomenon called the Matthew effect). As part of defining a future agenda, we discuss the need for serendipity and algorithmic transparency.Research limitations/implicationsAlgorithms change constantly and are protected by commercial secrecy. Hence, this study was limited to the information that was accessible within a particular period. At the time of publication, the platform, its logic and its effects on the interface may have changed. Future studies might investigate other ASM using the same approach to distinguish potential patterns among platforms.Originality/valueContributes to reflect on algorithmic mediation and biases in scholarly communication potentially afforded by recommender algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study on automated mediation and biases in ASM.

Article promotion on Twitter and Facebook: A case study of Cell journal

Social media has become an increasingly important channel of scholarly communication, especially for promoting the latest research outputs, so its role in facilitating access to academic texts is worth exploring. Based on 324 posts containing scholarly articles shared by journal Cell on Twitter and Facebook, this study compared the user engagement performance of articles posted on both platforms and examined the effect of such social media promotion and user engagement on article visiting. The user engagement performance of the articles was measured by retweets, shares, reactions, and likes, while click data tracked through bitly.com were used to indicate article visits. Statistical analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis were applied to explore and understand these data. For Cell, Facebook posts have a more significant influence than similar tweets in terms of volume. The user engagement on Facebook is 2.5~4 times as much as on Twitter. Moreover, the click metric of short links shows that Cell’s posts on Facebook directed twice as many visitors to the papers as posts on Twitter. However, the efficiency of the two platforms is approximate when the difference in the volume of followers is eliminated. The correlation and regression analysis suggested that user engagement positively affects the visiting of Cell’s papers. Both reactions and shares would affect the clicks of the short links to paper text. The results shed light on the implications of sharing scholarly articles on social media platforms for the promotion of article visits.

Participation, academic influences and interactions: A comparison of Chinese and U.S. research universities on ResearchGate

ResearchGate (RG) is an academic social networking (ASN) site that is used worldwide for scholarly communication. This study examines RG users from 21 top Chinese research universities and 61 U.S. research universities from three research activity levels to identify the differences in participation, interactions, and academic influences between their affiliated institutions on this ASN platform. The implications on scholarly communication and evaluation using altmetrics across nations are discussed.