This study empirically examined the promotion and implementation of open science measures among high-performing journals of Brazil, Mexico, Portugal, and Spain. Journal policy related to data sharing, materials sharing, preregistration, open peer review, and consideration of preprints and replication studies was gathered from the websites of the journals. Four hundred articles were coded for the inclusion of data availability statements, conflict of interest disclosures, funding disclosures, DOI, ORCID, and continuous publishing. Analyses found a higher promotion of open science measures among Brazilian journals than their Portuguese counterparts, and higher promotion of open science measures among international journals than their domestic counterparts. Analyses found higher implementation of open science measures among Brazilian journals than their Portuguese and Mexican counterparts. One journal out of 40 encouraged preregistration of studies; none encouraged replication studies and none had implemented open peer review. These findings reveal reasonably strong implementation of secondary open science measures (e.g., DOI, ORCID, conflict of interest and funding source disclosure) among the sample, but weaker implementation of primary measures (e.g., open data, open materials, replication studies and open peer review). The implications of these findings are considered and suggestions are made to bolster the adoption of open science measures among Ibero-American scientific journals.
This study sets out to detail the deceptive practice of including stock characters in the editorial boards of journals run by predatory publishers. Stock characters are defined by the author as those that currently (2023) appear 20 or more times on these editorial boards. Predatory publishers are in turn defined by the author as open access publishers in violation of three or more out of eight egregiously ‘fatal’ criteria such as identity theft and token (or no) peer review. Stock characters (and stolen academic names and affiliations in general) are included in editorial boards to give them an unwarranted appearance of quality and excellence. Ninety-six of these stock characters were identified, with their numbers of board memberships ranging from 20 to 503 in the current year (2023). Some were cases of total identity theft, some partial identity theft, and some willing compliance. Academics in the latter category could also have records of publications with the predatory publishers in question. Universities typically warn staff and postgraduate students about the dangers of engaging with predatory publishers, but they can be unresponsive or otherwise negative when alerted to instances of such engagements involving their staff.
Despite the rising interest in open access (OA) diamond journals as a scholarly journal publishing model, their sustainability remains a pressing concern. Using the Open Access Diamond Journals Study (OADJS) Dataset, we examined the characteristics and factors of OA diamond journal publishing that are associated with high sustainability. From 1335 journals, 476 journals with low sustainability and 438 journals with high sustainability were selected and compared. Our analysis revealed that factors such as the region and official language of the publishing country and the discipline, ownership, and financial status of the journal were significantly associated with sustainability. Journals owned by government or national agencies, those with financial stability, and those promoting open practices like unrestricted text and data mining are more likely to be sustainable. This study also discusses the implications of these findings for the future of scholarly publishing and the open science movement. Ultimately, we emphasize the need for national and international support to enhance the sustainability of OA diamond journals and propose that a collective approach involving policymakers, funding agencies, and journal administrators is crucial for fostering a sustainable open access ecosystem.
Recent advances in the natural language processing (NLP) field have achieved impressive results in various tasks. However, NLP techniques are underrepresented in the analysis of Humanities and Social Science texts and in languages other than English. In particular, academic books are a highly valuable source of information that has not been exploited by these techniques at all. The recognition of named entities (person names, organizations or locations) and their semantic annotation over books could enrich the visibility and discoverability of the information by users. This is an opportunity for academia and the academic publishing industry in which semantic search is a central task and now books can be queried by named entities of interest that are in their content. This work proposes a methodology to apply named-entity recognition to publish the results into an ontological semantic-web format. The work has been performed over a corpus of academic books provided by UNE (Unión de Editoriales Universitarias Españolas, Union of Spanish University Presses). Results show an enrichment of the information extracted over the books and of the possibilities of querying them at the individual level but also within the whole set of books, increasing the possibilities for books to be discovered or retrieved beyond metadata.
The aim of this paper is to examine the status of national learned societies in social sciences and humanities (SSH) in Europe. Previous research shows that learned societies serve diverse roles in higher education and suggests that national societies come under pressure given different developments, such as internationalization or open science adoption. We investigate a comprehensive range of aspects within national learned societies: primary goals, activities, internationalization, organization, funding, membership, and recent changes, addressing potential pressures arising from them. Using a cross-national survey involving 194 learned societies across eight European countries, we study: (a) do the previous findings from individual countries or small selections of national societies hold for a broad range of learned societies in SSH across Europe, and (b) are national learned societies coming under pressure due to internationalization and commercialization processes? Our findings confirm previous results from single countries and single disciplines and expand them as our results show that national learned societies in SSH play an important role in Europe in promoting multilingualism in science, collaborating with many stakeholders, and fostering interdisciplinarity. Contrary to previous research, most SSH societies in our study have not undergone significant changes in the past 5 years, challenging expectations of their declining role.