The UGC-CARE initiative: Indian academia's quest for research and publishing integrity

First Monday ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhushan Patwardhan ◽  
Shubhada Nagarkar
Keyword(s):  
Academic Research ◽  
Research Integrity ◽  
Research Community ◽  
Open Access Publishing ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Publication Ethics ◽  
Reference List ◽  
Ethical Practices ◽  
Predatory Journals ◽  
Indian Academia

This paper discusses the reasons for emergence of predatory publications in India, engendered by mandates of higher educational institutions: that require stipulated number of research publications for employment and promotions. Predatory journals have eclipsed the merits of open access publishing, compromised ethical practices, and left the research community groping for benchmarks of research integrity and publication ethics. To fight back the menace of predatory publications, University Grants Commission, India has established “Consortium for Academic Research and Ethics” (UGC-CARE) in 2018 to promote and benchmark research integrity and publication ethics among the Indian academia. The present paper discusses the UGC-CARE initiative, its structure, objectives and specifically, “UGC-CARE Reference List of Quality Journals” (UGC-CARE list) and finally, the challenges it faces.

Scientific Writing and Publishing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denys Wheatley
Keyword(s):  
Academic Research ◽  
Journal Editor ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Scientific Writing ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Open Access Publishing ◽  
Publication Ethics ◽  
High Quality Research ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
User Friendly

Knowing how to prepare, write and publish high-quality research papers can be challenging for scientists at all stages of their career. This manual guides readers through successfully framing and presenting research findings, as well as the processes involved in publishing in learned journals. It draws on the author's wealth of practical experience, from working in academic research for over 40 years and teaching scientific writing in over 20 countries, to gaining insights as a journal editor. Well-written and logical, it provides clear step-by-step instructions to enable readers to become more effective at writing articles, and navigating difficulties related to journal submission, the review process, editing and publication. It comprehensively covers themes such as publication ethics, along with current topics including Open Access publishing and pre-print servers. This is a useful, user-friendly guide for graduate students, early career scientists, and more experienced researchers, particularly in the life and medical sciences.

scholarly journals Responsible Practice of Research: Safeguarding Research Integrity and Publication Ethics

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Rebat Kumar Dhakal
Keyword(s):  
Research Integrity ◽  
Research Community ◽  
Publication Ethics ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Research Practices ◽  
Academic Debate

In recent years, there has been an outburst of general interest on how we do ‘research’ (Bossi 2010; Lins & Carvalho, 2014) – right from planning to reporting results – and how we disseminate ‘knowledge’. This rise of interest has particularly resulted from the surfeit of news on dishonest practices of research community. Some of the ‘acts of wrongdoing’ or fraudulent research practices that arise in our academic debate comprise the cases such as creation of false data or manipulating data to generate preferred results, cheating or using other’s ideas as own, disclosing improperly the identity of participants, underserved authorship claims, submission to multiple journals, duplicate publications, salami slicing, and predatory publications. In fact, these practices pose a serious question on research integrity. But what actually is ‘integrity’ in research?

scholarly journals Guidance Document on Good Academic Research Practices (UGC GARP 2020)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
AISDL
Keyword(s):  
Research Performance ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Research Integrity ◽  
Research Community ◽  
Research Quality ◽  
Guidance Document ◽  
Research Practices ◽  
Quality Research ◽  
Education In India ◽  
The University

Message from the Chairman I am delighted to present the Guidance Document on Good Academic Research Practices (GARP). This document gives information on good practices across the research lifecycle for quality, impactful, and ethical research.It is important to conduct quality research with integrity and focus on publishing the outcomes in high-quality journals. This will help in raising the benchmarks of research performance and enhancing the reputation of individuals, institutions, and the country. The University Grants Commission (UGC) is committed to raising the standards of research at institutions of higher education in India. This document reiterates the values underlying research integrity to help create a culture of responsible and quality research in the academic and research community. It offers practical checklists at each step of the research, which will act as good ready references for the audience. This compilation also covers guidance from several internationally and nationally recognized model documents on best practices and frameworks of research. The guidance will help prepare the Indian academic research community to be at par with international benchmarks for research quality, integrity, and excellence.I congratulate the Vice Chairman, UGC, the knowledge partner Clarivate, and the expert group committee members who have worked tirelessly to conceptualize and compile this document.I hope the academic and research community will find the GARP document helpful to guide them towards quality and ethical research.Prof. D. P. Singh - Chairman, UGC

scholarly journals Predatory Journals: A Literature Review

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-51
Author(s):  
Zouina Sarfraz ◽  
Azza Sarfraz ◽  
Ammar Anwer ◽  
Zainab Nadeem ◽  
Shehar Bano ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Associate Professor ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Boolean Logic ◽  
Open Access Publishing ◽  
Publication Ethics ◽  
Predatory Journals ◽  
Predatory Publishing ◽  
The Impact

Background: Predatory publishing is an exploitative fraudulent open-access publishing model. Most predatory journals do not follow policies that are set forth by organizations including the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Council of Science Editors (CSE), and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Jeffrey Beall, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver and a librarian at Auraria Library, coined the term ‘predatory journals’ to describe pseudo-journals. Our literature review has highlighted that predatory journal authorship is not limited to early-career researchers only. Majority of authors are unfamiliar with practices in pseudo journals despite publishing manuscripts. Methodology: For the purpose of this review, a systematic literature search was carried in October 2019 of the following databases: (1) Web of Science (all databases), (2) ERIC, and (3) LISTA. All stages of the review process included access to the search results and full articles for review and consequent analysis. Articles were added after screening fulltext articles by meeting the inclusion criteria and meeting none of the exclusion criteria. As there were a high number of articles reporting findings on predatory journals, they were further screened re-evaluating them for any deviations from the theme of this study. Relevant material published within the last five years was used. Results: After a thorough review, 63,133 were located using the Boolean logic. After reviewing 63 abstracts and titles for relevance, 9 articles were included in the literature review. Four themes are concerned with the results of the synthesis that demarcate legitimate and predatory publications. They include factors: (1) Related to the journal, (2) Academic and professional, (3) Dissemination, and (4) Personal. Conclusion: Our literature review found that there is a lack of one single definition for predatory journals. We believe that it is essential for potential authors and young researchers to have clear guidelines and make demarcations of potential journals that seem dubious. Moreover, the authors’ selection of publishers should be modified to control the risks of tainting ‘open-access’ publishing with fraudulent journals. The academic and research community ought to revise their criteria and recognize high quality and author journals as opposed to ‘predatory’ journals. Research mentorship, realigning research incentives, and education is vital to decrease the impact of predatory publishing in the near future.

PEDAGOGY AND MODERN EDUCATION (ICPME) September 2019: сб.науч.тр./ RELF Group & OEAPS Inc.; редкол.: Каапо Кумпулайнен (отв.ред.) [и др.]. - Варшава, Польша : OEAPS Inc., 09. 2019. - 114 С. ISBN: 978-1697070392

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Гульдар Фанисовна Ибрагимова ◽  
Ольга Алексеевна Ковалевич ◽  
Раиса Николаевна Афонина ◽  
Елена Алексеевна Лесных ◽  
Яна Игоревна Ряполова ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Open Access Publishing ◽  
Impact Factors ◽  
Publication Ethics ◽  
European Academy ◽  
Creative Commons ◽  
Authorship Credit ◽  
Open Access Journals ◽  
Publishing Ethics ◽  
Article Processing Charges

Conference paper Covered by Leading Indexing DatabasesOpen European Academy of Public Sciences aims to have all of its journals covered by the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and Scopus and Web of Science indexing systems. Several journals have already been covered by SCIE for several years and have received official Impact Factors. Some life sciencerelated journals are also covered by PubMed/MEDLINE and archived through PubMed Central (PMC). All of our journals are archived with the Spanish and Germany National Library.All Content is Open Access and Free for Readers Journals published by Open European Academy of Public Sciences are fully open access: research articles, reviews or any other content on this platform is available to everyone free of charge. To be able to provide open access journals, we finance publication through article processing charges (APC); these are usually covered by the authors’ institutes or research funding bodies. We offer access to science and the latest research to readers for free. All of our content is published in open access and distributed under a Creative Commons License, which means published articles can be freely shared and the content reused, upon proper attribution.Open European Academy of Public Sciences Publication Ethics StatementOpen European Academy of Public Sciences is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Open European Academy of Public Sciences takes the responsibility to enforce a rigorous peerreview together with strict ethical policies and standards to ensure to add high quality scientific works to the field of scholarly publication. Unfortunately, cases of plagiarism, data falsification, inappropriate authorship credit, and the like, do arise. Open European Academy of Public Sciences takes such publishing ethics issues very seriously and our editors are trained to proceed in such cases with a zero tolerance policy. To verify the originality of content submitted to our journals, we use iThenticate to check submissions against previous publications.Mission and ValuesAs a pioneer of academic open access publishing, we serve the scientific community since 2009. Our aim is to foster scientific exchange in all forms, across all disciplines. In addition to being at the root of Open European Academy of Public Sciences and a key theme in our journals, we support sustainability by ensuring the longterm preservation of published papers, and the future of science through partnerships, sponsorships and awards.

Getting out of the Field

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeasik Cho
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Research Community

This chapter provides a review of the book, which explores how to conceptually understand and practically evaluate the quality of qualitative research. Despite the fact that there are few scholarly pieces regarding qualitative research, the depth and creativity that the pioneering researchers have demonstrated are profound, and the extent to which they cover not only the broad quality of qualitative research but also most of the specific qualities expected by many different kinds of qualitative research is incredible. This chapter summarizes the major topics of this book. Final remarks on this exciting, creative, but difficult topic are preceded by the following summary: Fortunately, There are commonly agreed, bold standards for evaluating the goodness of qualitative research in the academic research community. These standards are a part of what is generally called “scientific research.”

Evaluating Qualitative Research

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeasik Cho
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Research Community ◽  
Assessment Tools ◽  
Journal Articles ◽  
Journal Editors ◽  
The Past ◽  
Grant Proposals

This book provides the qualitative research community with some insight on how to evaluate the quality of qualitative research. This topic has gained little attention during the past few decades. We, qualitative researchers, read journal articles, serve on masters’ and doctoral committees, and also make decisions on whether conference proposals, manuscripts, or large-scale grant proposals should be accepted or rejected. It is assumed that various perspectives or criteria, depending on various paradigms, theories, or fields of discipline, have been used in assessing the quality of qualitative research. Nonetheless, until now, no textbook has been specifically devoted to exploring theories, practices, and reflections associated with the evaluation of qualitative research. This book constructs a typology of evaluating qualitative research, examines actual information from websites and qualitative journal editors, and reflects on some challenges that are currently encountered by the qualitative research community. Many different kinds of journals’ review guidelines and available assessment tools are collected and analyzed. Consequently, core criteria that stand out among these evaluation tools are presented. Readers are invited to join the author to confidently proclaim: “Fortunately, there are commonly agreed, bold standards for evaluating the goodness of qualitative research in the academic research community. These standards are a part of what is generally called ‘scientific research.’ ”

scholarly journals Awareness of predatory journals and open access publishing among orthopaedic and trauma surgeons – results from an online survey in Germany

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elke Maurer ◽  
Nike Walter ◽  
Tina Histing ◽  
Lydia Anastasopoulou ◽  
Thaqif El Khassawna ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Peer Review Process ◽  
Trauma Surgery ◽  
Open Access Publishing ◽  
Predatory Journals ◽  
Open Access Journals ◽  
Trauma Surgeons

Abstract Background Along with emerging open access journals (OAJ) predatory journals increasingly appear. As they harm accurate and good scientific research, we aimed to examine the awareness of predatory journals and open access publishing among orthopaedic and trauma surgeons. Methods In an online survey between August and December 2019 the knowledge on predatory journals and OAJ was tested with a hyperlink made available to the participants via the German Society for Orthopaedics and Trauma Surgery (DGOU) email distributor. Results Three hundred fifty orthopaedic and trauma surgeons participated, of which 291 complete responses (231 males (79.4%), 54 females (18.6%) and 5 N/A (2.0%)) were obtained. 39.9% were aware of predatory journals. However, 21.0% knew about the “Directory of Open Access Journals” (DOAJ) as a register for non-predatory open access journals. The level of profession (e.g. clinic director, consultant) (p = 0.018) influenced the awareness of predatory journals. Interestingly, participants aware of predatory journals had more often been listed as corresponding authors (p < 0.001) and were well published as first or last author (p < 0.001). Awareness of OAJ was masked when journal selection options did not to provide any information on the editorial board, the peer review process or the publication costs. Conclusion The impending hazard of predatory journals is unknown to many orthopaedic and trauma surgeons. Early stage clinical researchers must be trained to differentiate between predatory and scientifically accurate journals.

scholarly journals Cooperation & Liaison between Universities & Editors (CLUE): recommendations on best practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Wager ◽  
◽  
Sabine Kleinert
Keyword(s):  
Peer Review ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Research Integrity ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Publication Ethics ◽  
List Type ◽  
Research Institutions ◽  
Academic Journals ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Published Research

Abstract Background Inaccurate, false or incomplete research publications may mislead readers including researchers and decision-makers. It is therefore important that such problems are identified and rectified promptly. This usually involves collaboration between the research institutions and academic journals involved, but these interactions can be problematic. Methods These recommendations were developed following discussions at World Conferences on Research Integrity in 2013 and 2017, and at a specially convened 3-day workshop in 2016 involving participants from 7 countries with expertise in publication ethics and research integrity. The recommendations aim to address issues surrounding cooperation and liaison between institutions (e.g. universities) and journals about possible and actual problems with the integrity of reported research arising before and after publication. Results The main recommendations are that research institutions should: develop mechanisms for assessing the integrity of reported research (if concerns are raised) that are distinct from processes to determine whether individual researchers have committed misconduct; release relevant sections of reports of research integrity or misconduct investigations to all journals that have published research that was investigated; take responsibility for research performed under their auspices regardless of whether the researcher still works at that institution or how long ago the work was done; work with funders to ensure essential research data is retained for at least 10 years. Journals should: respond to institutions about research integrity cases in a timely manner; have criteria for determining whether, and what type of, information and evidence relating to the integrity of research reports should be passed on to institutions; pass on research integrity concerns to institutions, regardless of whether they intend to accept the work for publication; retain peer review records for at least 10 years to enable the investigation of peer review manipulation or other inappropriate behaviour by authors or reviewers. Conclusions Various difficulties can prevent effective cooperation between academic journals and research institutions about research integrity concerns and hinder the correction of the research record if problems are discovered. While the issues and their solutions may vary across different settings, we encourage research institutions, journals and funders to consider how they might improve future collaboration and cooperation on research integrity cases.

Open Access Publishing, academic research and scholarly communication

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
pp. 637-648 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Osborne
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Open Access Publishing ◽  
Free Access ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Research Councils ◽  
Practical Implications ◽  
Wrong Place

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the difference between Open Access and accessibility, to argue that accessibility is the most crucial feature, and to suggest some ways in which Open Access militates against accessibility. Design/methodology/approach – Analysis of best practice by journals and monograph publishers is used to highlight the degree to which accessibility is enhanced by input from readers and editors. The expense of this, both real and hidden, is shown to be compatible only with difficulty with publishing methods where keeping costs low is essential, and Open Access alternatives that make available manuscripts “as submitted” are shown to make available less accessible scholarship. Findings – Scholarship is markedly improved by referees and editors; the emphasis needs to be put on making available the most accessible scholarship, not on making more scholarship available. Practical implications – Journals and publishers should concentrate on, and research councils and similar bodies insist upon, ensuring high quality critical review and editing, not cost-free access. Originality/value – The debate on Open Access has put its emphasis in the wrong place. Rather than easier access to more scholarship, increased resource devoted to pre-publication review, revision and editing is the most important development to ensure the greatest advances in research and scholarship.

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