Month: October 2022

A guide to pre-print publication for early career researchers

Early career researchers (ECRs), including undergraduates and graduate students, postdocs, research associates and staff scientists, usually follow a lead author’s preference for publication channels. A pre-print is a final version of a research paper made publicly available prior to completion of a journal peer review process. A guide to pre-printing for early career researchers lays out why an ECR would want to submit research to a pre-print server and how to go about doing it. The authors note the increased submission rates to pre-print servers in the life sciences, such as bioRxiv and medRxiv, through the Covid-19 pandemic as a means to rapidly disseminate new research. Making timely research contributions to pressing issues is one of several advantages to publishing a pre-print:

  • the paper is assigned a digital object identifier (DOI), making it a permanent part of the scholarly record and recognizing the researchers for their work;
  • as a pre-print, the paper’s metadata is indexed by and discoverable through major search engines and scholarly databases;
  • a pre-print is free to read, review and cite; and
  • many funders allow and recognize pre-prints in grant applications and reports.

Publishing research on a pre-print server is an antidote to the work getting “scooped,” and broader exposure makes it subject to more timely examination and inclusion than it would get through a single journal peer review process. Still, lead authors and senior researchers may be resistant or afraid of sharing their work outside the journal review process. The guide advises ECRs about how to approach colleagues about pre-print publication, addressing potential points of concern and counterpoints. If all co-authors are in agreement with pre-printing, next steps include determining the server, choosing the license, preparing and submitting the work, and sharing its availability to your networks. This is a practical guide to why and how to share research on pre-print servers.

Cassandra L. Ettinger, Madhumala K. Sadanandappa, Kıvanç Görgülü, Karen L. Coghlan, Kenneth K. Hallenbeck, Iratxe Puebla; A guide to preprinting for early-career researchers. Biol Open 15 July 2022; 11 (7): bio059310. doi: https://doi.org/10.1242/bio.059310

MIT Press funds works from authors underrepresented in their fields

MIT Press announced that it received significant donations from the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to The Fund for Diverse Voices. With this funding, MIT Press is committed to publishing at least 10 new books annually for the next three years by authors who have been excluded or underrepresented in their fields. Through the MIT Grant Program for Underrepresented Voices “current and prospective authors with strong proposals for a book-length work who have significant personal experience or engagement with communities that are underrepresented in scholarly publishing” may apply through acquisitions editors in the sciences, arts and humanities. Grants of $15,000 can cover costs to support research, writing and publishing with MIT Press.

Recent books published with support of The Fund for Diverse Voices” include:

  • Power On! by Jean J. Ryoo and Jane Margolis, illustrated by Charis JB – “a lively graphic novel follows a diverse group of teenage friends as they discover that computing can be fun, creative, and empowering.”
  • Reimagining Design: Unlocking Strategic Innovation by Kevin G. Bethune – “Kevin Bethune shows how design provides a unique angle on problem-solving—how it can be leveraged strategically to cultivate innovation and anchor multidisciplinary teamwork. As he does so, he describes his journey as a Black professional through corporate America, revealing the power of transformative design, multidisciplinary leaps, and diversity.”
  • Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond: The Life of Astronomer Vera Rubin by Ashley Jean Yeager – “How Vera Rubin convinced the scientific community that dark matter might exist, persevering despite early dismissals of her work.”

Open access books on colonialism and imperialism

Oh! The Humanities has curated a collection of 100 academic open access book titles from 30 publishers on colonialism and imperialism topics. The books cover geographic areas around the world, including Ghana, Mozambique, Puerto Rico, Japan, Palestine, Australia, Canada and more from the Ottoman and Roman Empires to present times. The OTH list includes the book’s author or editor names, title and title remainder, year of publication, publisher, and open access format (PDF, EPUB, MOBI, etc.), as well as Library of Congress subject headings, digital object identifier or URL, and type of license. You can download this OTH Bookshelf list in Excel format.

eLife ends accept/reject decisions, expands open peer review to Brazilian-Portuguese preprints

eLife publishing process

eLife announced that as of January 2023 it will publish public peer reviews with preprints, ceasing rejection of manuscripts on the basis of closed peer review. Papers included in the journal will be Reviewed Preprints. Authors will have the opportunity to revise their preprints on the basis of the reviews. This is a natural extension of eLife’s “publish, review, curate” model through which they remove themselves as gatekeeper and enable experts in the disciplines to publicly assess research. This improves transparency, inclusion and speed of access to research. Quality of research and integrity of researcher communities are other trademarks of the journal. In a parallel development, eLife is reducing its submission fee from $3,000 to $2,000, with fee waivers granted to authors unable to pay.

eLife has a stated commitment to a diverse, global community of researchers sharing results for the benefit of all, and it is advancing this through its partnership with ASAPbio-SciELO to conduct open reviews of infectious disease research posted on the SciELO Preprints server in Brazilian Portuguese. This is eLife’s first non-English review group.

eLife is a non-profit, open access journal publisher of medical and health sciences research that receives financial support and strategic guidance from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Max Planck Society and Wellcome.

Publishing Ethics for Research Data

In September 2021, Force11 Research Data Publishing Ethics Working Group, in collaboration with the Coalition on Publishing Ethics (COPE), issued recommendations for how publishers should handle data authorship and contribution conflicts. Research data is an output distinct from other elements (methodology, software, visualization, analysis, etc.) of a study. It may be published in repositories with no consistent standards of attribution and have authors different from those who produce or write about other elements. Data contributors should be cited separately from the authors of the study. The same data may be used as the basis for different studies. Disagreements may arise after data is published about author order or inclusion, or an original data author may become unavailable (death, incarceration) or change their name. Concerns may arise from authors, collaborators, readers or institutions.

Repositories could smooth or avoid issues if they were to take these steps at a system level:

  • include declarations of competing interests in submission forms;
  • offer authorship taxonomies;
  • capture changes to author metadata; and
  • employ features to easily add authors for dynamic datasets.

The recommendations for pre- and post publication issues are useful in outlining potential sources of conflict and ethical approaches to addressing them. Resolution of disputes should begin with direct and private engagement with the party raising the concern and the corresponding author(s). The data publisher would then consider who else should be notified or involved, e.g. journal publisher or author’s institution, about a concern if it cannot be directly resolved.

Puebla, Iratxe, Lowenberg, Daniella, & FORCE11 Research Data Publishing Ethics WG. (2021). Joint FORCE11 & COPE Research Data Publishing Ethics Working Group Recommendations. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5391293

“Open for Climate Justice” Open Access Week events at UMass Amherst – October 24th-27th, 2022

The UMass Amherst Libraries will celebrate International Open Access Week and the 2022 theme “Open for Climate Justice” with a series of events to highlight the benefits of open scholarship to advance common knowledge and shared well-being, particularly in the face of our current climate crisis.

Micah Vandegrift, Senior User Experience (UX) Strategist for the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, will lead off with a keynote address on Monday, October 24th at 4 p.m..  Vandegrift’s virtual talk, “Open to Change: Possibilities and Probabilities,” addresses current opportunities at the intersection of climate change, open science, and community engagement, in light of the updated policy to make the results of taxpayer-supported research immediately available to the American public at no cost. Vandegrift will outline a possible case study informed by his experience and recent research, provide a foundation and a forecast, and answer questions following his talk. Registration is required for the event.

Three UMass Amherst scholars will join a panel discussion, “Open for Climate Justice” on Thursday, October 27th from noon to 1:45 at the Science and Engineering Libraries’ Learning Studio. Kiran Asher, Professor and Chair of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Craig Nicolson, Lecturer in Environmental Conservation, and Justin Richardson, Assistant Professor in Geosciences each address how using and sharing open works (articles, books, data, software, etc.) in their research and teaching can benefit communities who have borne the worst effects of climate change. No registration is required but space is limited. Refreshments will be served.

The Libraries are co-sponsors of the Department of Sociology author talk on Janice Irvine’s book “Marginal People in Deviant Places: Ethnography, Difference and the Challenge to Scientific Racism” on Wednesday, October 26th from 11:15 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. at the Old Chapel. Christina Hanhardt, Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, will lead the discussion. Irvine’s book is published open access by the University of Michigan Press with partial funding provided by the Libraries’ SOAR Fund.

The following two workshops will be offered during Open Access Week: