Guiding the Next Step

This article examines the mentorship gap students face between the completion of a manuscript and its subsequent submission to a journal. Without continued faculty support, students often face unexpected hurdles as they enter the publication process. To alleviate these issues, the article discusses the value of extending undergraduate research mentorship.

Generation of Legal Norm Chains: Extracting the Most Relevant Norms from Court Rulings

Various online databases exist to make judgments accessible in the digital age. Before a legal practitioner can utilize state-of-the-art information retrieval features to retrieve relevant court rulings, the textual document must be processed. More importantly, many verdicts lack crucial semantic information which can be utilized within the search process. One piece of information that is frequently missed, as the judge is not adding it during the publication process within the court, is the so-called norm chain. This list contains the most relevant norms for the underlying decision. Therefore this paper investigates the feasibility of automatically extracting the most relevant norms of a court ruling. A dataset constituting over 42k labeled court rulings was used in order to train different classifiers. While our models provide F1 performances of up to 0.77, they can undoubtedly be utilized within the editorial publication process to provide helpful suggestions.

Transparency of peer review: a semi-structured interview study with chief editors from social sciences and humanities

Background Open peer review practices are increasing in medicine and life sciences, but in social sciences and humanities (SSH) they are still rare. We aimed to map out how editors of respected SSH journals perceive open peer review, how they balance policy, ethics, and pragmatism in the review processes they oversee, and how they view their own power in the process. Methods We conducted 12 pre-registered semi-structured interviews with editors of respected SSH journals. Interviews consisted of 21 questions and lasted an average of 67 min. Interviews were transcribed, descriptively coded, and organized into code families. Results SSH editors saw anonymized peer review benefits to outweigh those of open peer review. They considered anonymized peer review the “gold standard” that authors and editors are expected to follow to respect institutional policies; moreover, anonymized review was also perceived as ethically superior due to the protection it provides, and more pragmatic due to eased seeking of reviewers. Finally, editors acknowledged their power in the publication process and reported strategies for keeping their work as unbiased as possible. Conclusions Editors of SSH journals preferred the benefits of anonymized peer review over open peer and acknowledged the power they hold in the publication process during which authors are almost completely disclosed to editorial bodies. We recommend journals to communicate the transparency elements of their manuscript review processes by listing all bodies who contributed to the decision on every review stage.

APA Publishing's Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Toolkit for Journal Editors

As a mission-driven organization that applies the best available psychological science to benefit society and improve lives, APA is committed to infusing the principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) into all aspects of the work we do. As shepherds of psychology's science and practice, journal Editors are uniquely positioned to enable equitable and inclusive practices at every stage of the research and publication process. This toolkit offers more than 30 recommendations based on resources, standards, and initiatives available to Editors to support their efforts to encourage inclusive and equitable practices for their peer-reviewed journals.

Editorial: Education and the Quest for Educating in the Current and the Post-COVID-19 Era

This special issue contains quality, well-researched, and well-argued articles towards inter/multi-disciplinary understanding of the current and future state, manner, and disposition of social, educational, environmental, humanitarian, and technological perspectives of COVID-19 pandemic. Readers, academics, practitioners and students are provided with robust knowledge on the state and status of the COVID-19 pandemic in the world from its advent in 2020, its present state and future projections. We thank all colleagues involved in the editorial and publishing process for their supports, assistance and exceptional guidance. We are bold to say that the quality involved in the publication process of RESSAT Journal is second to none. To all our authors, your quality products remain part of the historical contribution to knowledge on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Characterizing the Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Dermatology Literature

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted multiple aspects of medicine, including research focus and medical literature. Specifically, the dermatology literature has reflected the challenges faced by dermatologists throughout the pandemic.1 Given the widespread interest in understanding the pandemic and its effects on the field of dermatology, we conducted an analysis of the dermatology literature to characterize the literature’s impact, content, trends, and the publication process. We anticipated that there would be more interest in dermatology publications pertaining to COVID-19. Methods Journal Citation Reports was used to select the 15 dermatology journals with the highest impact factor in 2019, and all articles published in these journals in 2020 were evaluated.2 Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) was recorded for each article. For COVID-19 related articles, we also assessed whether AAS and citations varied by the type of article (editorial, original article, or guideline) and sub-specialty of dermatology to which the article pertained. Results Analysis revealed journals prioritized publishing articles related to COVID-19, as the mean time from submission to publication was shorter (43 days) than what has previously been observed. COVID-19 related articles in the dermatology literature received more widespread attention as measured by the average AAS (33 vs. 4 p<0.001) and were higher impact as measured by citation count (11 vs. 1, p<0.001) than non-COVID-19 articles. Conclusions These findings demonstrates that dermatology research published regarding the COVID-19 pandemic received broader attention and were higher impact, suggesting the importance and influence of the pandemic for dermatology.

A Nano(publication) Approach Towards Big Data in Biodiversity

One of the major challenges in biodiversity informatics is the generation of machine-readable data that is interoperable between different biodiversity-related data infrastructures. Producers of such data have to comply with existing standards and to be resourceful enough to enable efficient data generation, management and availability. Conversely, nanopublications offer a decentralised approach (Kuhn et al. 2016) towards achieving data interoperability in a robust and standarized way. A nanopublication is a named RDF graph, which serves to communicate a single fact and its original source (provenance) through the use of identifiers and linked data (Groth et al. 2010). It is composed of three constituent graphs (assertion, provenance, and publication info), which are linked to one another in the nanopublication header (Kuhn et al. 2016). For instance, a nanopublication has been published to assert a species interaction in which a hairy woodpecker (Picoides villosus) ate a beetle (genus Ips), along with the license and related bibliographic citation*1. In biodiversity, nanopublications can be used to exchange information between infrastructures in a standardised way (Fig. 1) and to enable curation and correction of knowledge. They can be implemented within different workflows to formalise biodiversity knowledge in self-enclosed graphs. We have developed several nanopublication models*2 for different biodiversity use cases: species occurrences, new species descriptions, biotic interactions, and links between taxonomy, sequences and institutions. Nanopublications can be generated by various means: semi-automatic extraction from the published literature with a consequent human curation and publication; generation during the publication process by the authors via dedicated formalisation tool and published together with the article; de novo generation of a nanopublication through decentralised networks such as Nanobench (Kuhn et al. 2021). semi-automatic extraction from the published literature with a consequent human curation and publication; generation during the publication process by the authors via dedicated formalisation tool and published together with the article; de novo generation of a nanopublication through decentralised networks such as Nanobench (Kuhn et al. 2021). One of the possible uses of nanopublications in biodiversity is communicating new information in a standardised way so that it can be accessed and interpreted by multiple infrastructures that have a common agreement on how information is expressed through the use of particular ontologies, vocabularies and sets of identifiers. In addition, we envision nanopublications to be useful for curation or peer-review of published knowledge by enabling any researcher to publish a nanopublication containing a comment of an assertion made in a previously published nanopublication. With this talk, we aim to showcase several nanopublication formats for biodiversity and to discuss the possible applications of nanopublications in the biodiversity domain.

Converting Dissertation to Journal Article: Why and How?

Research work embodied in a master's dissertation remains confined to a limited domain of the researcher, supervisor/co-supervisor and university library. It is desirable that the dissertation material be published in a reputed journal for various reasons including career growth of the researcher, recognition by the professional body, dissemination to a wider audience etc. Writing a research article from a dissertation does not mean just to shorten the latter mechanically or a cut-paste method. For the novice writer, it is a daunting task, but rewarding experience as well, to convert a dissertation to an article. Advice and support of the supervisor and senior colleagues having good experience in research as well as publication should be taken who can navigate the publication process, following the guidelines of the target journal. This article presents a synthesis of guidelines and practices to be followed by the researchers to see that the outcomes of their incessant and tireless efforts in preparing the dissertations be documented through publishable articles.