Research on illicit cultural artefacts

This paper examines whether we can have confidence in the scientific integrity of a research effort that could potentially be part of the illicit trade in cultural artefacts. As an example, I use the research on the ancient clay tablets from the Schøyen Collection. A closer study of the research product reveals questionable research practices, and the latter issue is then put into a wider context. After highlighting the importance of the research community as a social institution in shaping the norms and values of its members, and its influence on what is desirable research, I explore how these expectations and guidelines impact research conducted on illicit cultural artefacts.

The disinformation playbook: how industry manipulates the science-policy process—and how to restore scientific integrity

For decades, corporate undermining of scientific consensus has eroded the scientific process worldwide. Guardrails for protecting science-informed processes, from peer review to regulatory decision making, have suffered sustained attacks, damaging public trust in the scientific enterprise and its aim to serve the public good. Government efforts to address corporate attacks have been inadequate. Researchers have cataloged corporate malfeasance that harms people’s health across diverse industries. Well-known cases, like the tobacco industry’s efforts to downplay the dangers of smoking, are representative of transnational industries, rather than unique. This contribution schematizes industry tactics to distort, delay, or distract the public from instituting measures that improve health—tactics that comprise the “disinformation playbook.” Using a United States policy lens, we outline steps the scientific community should take to shield science from corporate interference, through individual actions (by scientists, peer reviewers, and editors) and collective initiatives (by research institutions, grant organizations, professional associations, and regulatory agencies).

Health sciences librarians’ engagement in open science: a scoping review

Objectives: To identify the engagement of health sciences librarians (HSLs) in open science (OS) through the delivery of library services, support, and programs for researchers.Methods: We performed a scoping review guided by Arksey and O’Malley’s framework and Joanna Briggs’ Manual for Scoping Reviews. Our search methods consisted of searching five bibliographic databases (MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, LISTA, and Web of Science Core Collection), reference harvesting, and targeted website and journal searching. To determine study eligibility, we applied predetermined inclusion and exclusion criteria and reached consensus when there was disagreement. We extracted data in duplicate and performed qualitative analysis to map key themes.Results: We included fifty-four studies. Research methods included descriptive or narrative approaches (76%); surveys, questionnaires, and interviews (15%); or mixed methods (9%). We labeled studies with one or more of FOSTER's six OS themes: open access (54%), open data (43%), open science (24%), open education (6%), open source (6%), and citizen science (6%). Key drivers in OS were scientific integrity and transparency, openness as a guiding principle in research, and funder mandates making research publicly accessible.Conclusions: HSLs play key roles in advancing OS worldwide. Formal studies are needed to assess the impact of HSLs’ engagement in OS. HSLs should promote adoption of OS within their research communities and develop strategic plans aligned with institutional partners. HSLs can promote OS by adopting more rigorous and transparent research practices of their own. Future research should examine HSLs’ engagement in OS through social justice and equity perspectives.

Preprint paper platforms in the academic scholarly communication environment

Academic scholarly communication is the predominant business of researchers, scientists, and scholars. It is the core element of promoting scientific thought, investigation, and building up solid knowledge. The development of preprint platform web interfaces, server repositories of electronic scholarly papers submitted by their authors and openly available to the scientific community proposed a new form of academic communication. The distribution of a preprint of a scientific manuscript allows the authors to claim the priority of discovery, in a manner similar to the conference proceedings output, but also creates an anteriority that prevents protection by a patent application. Herein, we review the scope and the role of preprint papers platforms in academia, we explore individual cases, arXiv, SSRN, OSF Preprints, HAL, bioRxiv, EconStor, RePEc, PhilArchive, Research Square, viXra, Cryptology ePrint Archive, Preprints.org, ChinaXiv, medRxiv, JMIR Preprints, Authorea, ChemRxiv, engrXiv, e-LiS, SciELO, PsyArXiv, F1000 Research, and Zenodo, and discuss their significance in promoting scientific discovery, the potential risks of scientific integrity, as well as the policies of data distribution and intellectual property rights, the plus and minus, for the stakeholders, authors, institutions, states, scientific journals, scientific community, and the public. In this review we explore the scope and policies of the existing preprint papers platforms in different academic research fields.