Charting New Paths: The Promise of Alternative Publishing Practices

How does innovation arise in scientific publishing? Under what conditions can alternative publishing practices become established as the new standard? And what options for action are available to research institutions, funding organizations, or operators of publishing platforms? Answers to these and similar questions are provided in the final report of the Alternative Publishing Platforms project, Charting New Paths: The Promise of Alternative Publishing Practices. The study, commissioned by Knowledge Exchange and carried out by Research Consulting with the support of an international group of experts, identified six distinct alternative publishing practices: preprint posting, open peer review, preregistration, versioning, review and curation after publication, and modular publications, that address specific limitations in conventional publishing workflows, offer benefits around research integrity through transparency; increased speed and efficiency; and shifts power dynamics towards greater equity and access. The barriers to adoption of these alternative publishing practices are deeply embedded in how scholarly communication operates and researchers face hard choices between experimentation and career advancement. This work identifies the critical enablers for the successful adoption: critical collective action and coordination, reform of research assessment, investment in infrastructure and capacity and representation in digital infrastructure. It emphasizes opportunities for action across five key stakeholders: Research funders, Research institutions, Conventional publishing platforms, Alternative publishing platforms and Infrastructure providers.

Open Science taxonomy: revised and expanded

The figure presents a new version of the "Open Science Taxonomy", with 10 first-level facets, subdivided into 96 labels in all, 14 more than the version proposed by the Brazilians, Silveira et al. (2021), and 51 more than the initial version by Pontika et al. (2015). This study was developed through an exploratory research with a deductive approach. The first stage was composed of a review of the taxonomies, with 13 researchers who met weekly for conceptual and epistemological discussions related to Open Science, and methodological and procedural definitions for the study. As a result of the analyses, a taxonomy was developed to be evaluated by more specialists. For this, a questionnaire with open questions about each main axis of the taxonomy was sent to 68 experts. Twenty-one responses were obtained, which cooperated with the modeling and exposure of the terms for the new taxonomy.

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#scholarlycommunication #persistentidentifiers #pids | Katie Fraser

Great thought-provoking post https://lnkd.in/eb4aWWh6 from Ludo Waltman and André Brasil on the challenges of assigning DOIs, and metadata more generally, for innovative types of publishing. This really reflects my own challenges working with metadata of this type at Research Consulting Limited. In a previous role overseeing the DataCite account for an institution, I came across similar challenges in deciding when to assign DOIs. Institutional repositories regularly hold versions of content which have been assigned DOIs elsewhere. I ended up concluding we should become okay with giving multiple DOIs to different versions of content (even if different meant "hosted elsewhere"). In avoiding assigning a DOI because one already exists, we compromise the discoverability of valuable content and create a two-tier system of content. Plus there is already good metadata available within the DOI system to indicate where items are versions of each other. However, to capitalise on this data use of versioning metadata needs to be consistent and reliable. Bibliometric systems need to be able to automatically identify alternate versions and allow records to be collapsed together for analysis. I'm not certain whether the challenge in doing this lies more in the productionn of the original DOI metadata or how it is used in bibliometric systems, but I would be really interested to hear from those with insights. Final thought: I'm personally a fan of when one organisation mints DOIs for multiple versions (i.e. all records have the same DOI prefix) and indicates version information within the DOI itself. If it was possible to make the existence of an alternative version transparent in DOIs regardless of which organisation minted it, that would would be my dream! But infinitely easier said than done, I realise. #scholarlycommunication #persistentidentifiers #PIDs