COPE Council. COPE Retraction guidelines. Version 2. November 2019

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The role and significance of peer-review in Russian and foreign library and information science journals: a comparative analysis

The paper summarizes experience of the authors as peer-reviewers of more than 100 manuscripts in twelve Russian and foreign academic journals on Library and Information Science in the last seven years. Prepared peer-reviews were used for making a list of the most usual critical and special comments for each manuscript that were subsequently structured for the conducted analyzes. Typical issues accompanying the peer-review process are shown. Significant differences between the results of peer-review in Russian and foreign journals are detected: although the initial quality of newly submitted manuscripts is approximately equal, the final published versions in foreign journals addressed all critical and the majority of minor reviewers’ comments, while in Russian journals more than one third of final versions were published with critical gaps. We conclude about low interest in high quality peer reviews among both authors and editors-in-chief in Russian journals. Despite the limitations of the samples, the obtained findings can be useful when evaluating the current peer-review system in Russian academic journals on Library and Information Science.

The challenges of machine translation of academic publications

Clear translation remains a major challenge to better communication and understanding of the international academic literature, despite advances in Machine Translation (MT). Automatic translation systems which captured the detail and the sense of any manuscript in any language for a reader from any other linguistic background would find global applications.In this article, we discuss the current opportunities and constraints to the wider use of machine translation and computer-assisted human translation (CAT). At the present stage of technology development, these instruments offer a number of advantages to specialists working with scientific texts. These include the facility to skim and scan large amounts of information in foreign languages, and to act as digital dictionaries, thesauri and encyclopedias. Word-to-word and phrase-to-phrase translation between many languages and scripts is now well advanced.The availability of modern machine translation has therefore changed the work of specialist scientific translators, placing greater emphasis on more advanced text and sense editing skills. However, machine translation is still challenged by the nuances of language and culture from one society to another, particularly in the freestyle literature of the arts and humanities. Scientific papers are generally much more structured, but the quality of machine translation still largely depends on the quality of the source text. This varies considerably between different scientific disciplines and from one author to another.The most advanced translation systems are making steady progress. It is timely to revisit traditional training programmes in the field of written translation to focus on the development of higher-level research competencies, such as terminology search, and so to make best use of evolving machine translation technologies.More widely, we consider that there is a challenge across the higher education systems in all countries to develop a simple, clear and consistent “international” writing style to assist fast, reliable and low-cost machine translation and hence to advance mutual understanding across the global scientific literature.

Scientists, publishers debate paychecks for peer reviewers

While some academics have called for compensation for assessing other scientists’ work, publishers haven’t warmed to the idea

How to build the foundation for a successful research journal: Training, Language and Culture best practices

The success of a research journal rides on many factors and can be achieved only with a thorough analysis of the tasks and obstacles that arise at different work stages. The initial design stage is of particular importance, since the well-laid “foundation” of the journal is what emerges as its ticket to a bright future. The article discusses a number of key issues that require an exhaustive analysis at the stage of developing the journal’s conceptual framework. These issues include, in primis, determining the narrowly focused scientific focus of the publication, clarifying the type of published content, choosing the language (or languages) of publication, organizing the editorial board, developing the journal’s website and building a strategy for its active promotion. The experience of analysing and addressing these issues in developing the Training, Language and Culture journal is reported in the article through the prism of relevant statistical data, as well as international academic and publishing practices and trends, which acknowledgement turned out essential for the subsequent efficient performance, as well as for the title’s inclusion in Scopus.

Scientific publications – the bad, the good, for a fistful of dollars

The article is devoted to the problem of assessing the quality of scientific publications. It is emphasized that the formal ranking of an article is currently determined, as a rule, not so much by the data obtained or formulated concepts, as by the scientometric indicators of the corresponding journals. Approaches to determining the ranking of an article based on the analysis of its citation (impact factor and its analogues) and the number of mentions in social networks (so called altmetrics), as well as the number of downloads of the paper from the publisher’s website are considered. The authors emphasize the significant role of the appearance of author-paid articles in the current change in the situation with scientific publications. It is assumed that the thorough commercialization of the process of publishing their works by scientists has led to a serious deterioration in their scientific component due to the reducing requirements for the format and content of manuscripts sent to the editors of paid journals. The authors express the hope that the “informal” approach to the evaluation of scientific articles, which is based on their content, but not the ratings of the editions that published these works, has not lost its relevance even at the present stage.

Ensuring effective scholarly communication: traditions and innovations of peer review

The fundamental importance of the peer review in the context of scientific communication determines the unprecedented attention paid to it by researchers around the world. New trends in scientific communication are reflected in the transformation of the forms of peer review and the roles of its stakeholders. Within the framework of this article, the challenges faced by a modern reviewer are analyzed, the transforming models of peer review are presented, and the most significant issues generated by the logic of the development of the peer review process are outlined.