Participation Reports help Crossref members drive research further

This article aims to explain the key metadata elements listed in Participation Reports, why it’s important to check them regularly, and how Crossref members can improve their scores. Crossref members register a lot of metadata in Crossref. That metadata is machine-readable, standardized, and then shared across discovery services and author tools. This is important because richer metadata makes content more discoverable and useful to the scholarly community. It’s not always easy to know what metadata Crossref members register in Crossref. This is why Crossref created an easy-to-use tool called Participation Reports to show editors, and researchers the key metadata elements Crossref members register to make their content more useful. The key metadata elements include references and whether they are set to open, ORCID iDs, funding information, Crossmark metadata, licenses, full-text URLs for text-mining, and Similarity Check indexing, as well as abstracts. ROR IDs (Research Organization Registry Identifiers), that identify institutions will be added in the future. This data was always available through the Crossref ’s REST API (Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface) but is now visualized in Participation Reports. To improve scores, editors should encourage authors to submit ORCIDs in their manuscripts and publishers should register as much metadata as possible to help drive research further.

PubMed Central as a platform for the survival of open-access biomedical society journals published in Korea

Twenty-one years have passed since PubMed Central (PMC) launched. The present case study describes Korean editors’ history of participation in PMC and their contributions to PMC. The three main turning points in the history of Korean editors’ involvement with PMC were as follows: first, the production of PMC XML files and deposition starting in 2008; second, thorough evaluations of applying journals since 2014; and third, the feasibility of non-English journals being indexed in PMC starting in 2019. The importance of PMC is further shown by the fact that KoreaMed Synapse, a full-text XML database of biomedical journals in Korea that was launched in 2007, was created by benchmarking PMC. Scholarly societies or institutes publish 724 (34.2%) of the 2,119 PMC journals without embargo in June 2021. Out of those 724 journals, 127 (17.5%) are published in Korea. PMC has helped local journals receive more citations from researchers worldwide, increasing their likelihood of being indexed in international databases. The number of submissions from international researchers has increased, thereby making it possible for journals to achieve international diversity. As the best full-text platform of biomedical journals, PMC has provided an excellent opportunity for biomedical journal editors in Korea to change their journals’ language to English and produce full-text JATS (Journal Article Tag Suite) XML files. These factors have made Korea the second-ranked country in terms of no-embargo PMC journals published by academic societies or institutes.

Writing letters and emails in English: correspondence for the editorial office

One of the main responsibilities of the editorial office is to communicate effectively with authors through emails, formal letters, and most importantly through decision letters. Even when the content is informative and constructive and the editor has only good intentions, if the tone and level of formality are not managed properly, the image of the journal may be negatively affected, which may deter authors from submitting papers to the journal again. Despite their best efforts to treat authors respectfully, some editors may unintentionally cause offense if they lack the appropriate sociolinguistic knowledge required for effective English correspondence. In order to ease the burden of the editorial office, this tutorial aims to assist non-native English speaking editors by demonstrating the basic format and principles of writing formal letters and email, providing tips on how to select an acceptable level of formality, and offering strategies to avoid unintentional rudeness. Specific tips include framing issues positively, using indirect language, and using hedging. Through this tutorial, non-native English speaking editors are expected to develop sociolinguistic competence to write professionally and improve their efficiency in corresponding with authors.

Scientific journals should be transformed into science storytellers to improve their visibility

What is the objective for science journals to publish research papers? Would it be enough to collect research manuscripts and simply publish them in print or on the web? Science journal publishers have always strived to find ways of disseminating journal content to as many readers as possible. It is now time for science journal publishers to think about why a journal should be published; whether it is acceptable for valuable scientific findings to lie dormant in a journal’s archive; and whether traditional science communication is still effective. The present article suggests that science journals should transform themselves into science storytellers to improve the visibility and discoverability of their research findings. First, a new communication network between journals, authors, peers, the public, and policymakers is required. Second, conversion of media from academic language to plain language is critical to broadening the audience. Third, audio-visual content should be introduced into journal publishing to facilitate easy comprehension of the content. Fourth, research-focused channels, including EurekAlert, Medium, and social networking service channels are recommended as new media to propagate journals’ content to researchers. Improving visibility and discoverability is an urgent mission, especially for small society journals. To achieve this mission, science journals should be adapted to become storytellers and science communicators, as suggested above. A small society journal’s editor is not merely an editor, but an editor-publisher; therefore, editors should understand and take on this role.

Korean researchers’ motivations for publishing in data journals and the usefulness of their data: a qualitative study

Purpose: This study investigated the usefulness and limitations of data journals by analyzing motivations for submission, review and publication processes according to researchers with experience publishing in data journals.Methods: Among 79 data journals indexed in Web of Science, we selected four data journals where data papers accounted for more than 20% of the publication volume and whose corresponding authors belonged to South Korean research institutes. A qualitative analysis was conducted of the subjective experiences of seven corresponding authors who agreed to participate in interviews. To analyze interview transcriptions, clusters were created by restructuring the theme nodes using Nvivo 12.Results: The most important element of data journals to researchers was their usefulness for obtaining credit for research performance. Since the data in repositories linked to data papers are screened using journals’ review processes, the validity, accuracy, reusability, and reliability of data are ensured. In addition, data journals provide a basis for data sharing using repositories and data-centered follow-up research using citations and offer detailed descriptions of data.Conclusion: Data journals play a leading role in data-centered research. Data papers are recognized as research achievements through citations in the same way as research papers published in conventional journals, but there was also a perception that it is difficult to attain a similar level of academic recognition with data papers as with research papers. However, researchers highly valued the usefulness of data journals, and data journals should thus be developed into new academic communication channels that enhance data sharing and reuse.