EASE

Tag: data sharing

  • PEERE Nature paper encourages systematic study of peer review

    Illustration by David Parkins, Nature

    A group of authors involved in the PEERE project, lead by Flaminio Squazzoni, including several members from EASE Council and our community, have published a paper in Nature, titled Unlock ways to share data on peer review which calls for “Journals, funders and scholars [to] work together to create an infrastructure to study peer review.”

    The article combines the output from a meeting between researchers, publishers and tech companies, held in October 2018, to discuss best practices, methods, and infrastructure required for peer review data sharing; and the results of a pilot project to enable the efficient systematic study of peer review.

    Despite the wide interest and value placed on peer review, current research on the process is very limited, fragmented, and generally restricted to a few journals, partly because acquiring the data to facilitate the research is difficult to acquire, and often only available from journals with processes that lend themselves to open practices, or from such a limited number of donated titles that generalizations are hard to make.

    This paper presents arguments for the benefits of creating a system of greater interoperability and transparency, that could help us determine which models and practices of peer review are most efficient, best promote research integrity and reliability, and a whole host of other insights.

    Squazzoni F. et al. Unlock ways to share data on peer review. Nature 578, 512-514 (2020)
    doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-00500-y

  • Open Access on the rise

    Digital Science, the company behind different research supporting technologies, such as the figure and data repository Figshare, published in January a report called “The Ascent of Open Access”. The report tracks the development in open access (OA) publications from 2000 to 2016. After stating that the number of OA publications is rising, but this could be due to the total research output rising, the authors dig deeper into trends in OA publishing, including its funding model and geographical distribution. Interestingly, the papers published in OA are more often the result of international collaboration. There can be a global citation advantage of open access, as OA papers form around 35% of all papers, and gathered a bit less than 48% of total citations. They also seem to gather more interest in social media and news outlets, as measured by their Altmetric score.

    Open access to publications usually precedes open access to the research data, and SPARC Europe set out to analyse the policies on sharing research output in all EU countries. Its report, published in December 2018 looks at recently added policies in five EU countries, and new plans for policies announced in a further five. The regulation landscape varies, from access to research output being guaranteed in national law, as in France and Lithuania, to different funder mandates, to universities’ policies. The authors summarise and discuss the policies, and note that few policies cover monitoring of their implementation, leaving open the question who will check the compliance of researchers to the rules.