Tracking down citations to retracted publications has gotten easier.

Projects like the Open Journal System, Manifold or Scalar are based on a distributed model that allow anyone to download and deploy the software (Maxwell et al., 2019), offering an alternative to the commercial entities that dominate the scholarly communication ecosystem.

Having been printed on paper since the very first scientific journal was inaugurated in 1665

trust that research processes generate valid, useful knowledge and evidence that caninform practice and decision-making both within the HE context and in society morebroadly.

On scientific networks

So this is where some older paths-not-taken, such as Ted Nelson’s original many-to-many, multidirectional model for hypertext, and some more recent potential paths, such as Herbert van de Sompel’s decentralized, distributed vision for scholarly communication, might come in.

Most progress will instead occur as annotations on the article text. Articles already contain live links to referenced articles, and future annotations could, for example, indicate the level of support for a particular point, or flag citations to retracted articles.

the actual problem to be addressed is not the website itself. It is instead the structure of the current academic publishing and knowledge dissemination system that led to the creation, popularisation, and widespread use of Sci-Hub.

The venerableLISTSERV email lists such as mediev-l (founded in 1992) and other medieval-focusedlistservs are early instances of the digital democratization of scholarship, conducted as anasynchronous and geographically dispersed conversation.

firstwant to consider the ways in which our increased online presence has exposed manyof the existing networks that ground the sources of academic and intellectual authority(reputation, credibility, reliability).

Together, these twin pressures—the need to enhance the ties between scholars and their organizations while simultaneously doing more with less —begin to suggest that the traditional value proposition of the scholarly society, in which one becomes a member in order to receive the various communications of the society, is no longer as viable as it once was. But there isn’t a clear sense, as yet, of where the society’s value for its members today, not to mention its sources of revenue that allow it to fulfill its mission, might lie. In order to find a way forward, today’s scholarly societies must begin to think differently about their functions, their structures, and their overall goals.

The letters that were exchanged among the membership of the Royal Society in the mid-17th century, and that were later gathered into journals, gradually accrued formalized processes of review, editing, production, and distribution. In creating this new product —the scholarly journal—learned societies found one part of the financial model that would allow them to serve their larger goals. Scholars were encouraged to join and maintain their memberships in order to receive the journal. In addition to memberships made available to individuals, journal subscriptions were created for libraries, allowing academic institutions to help support the organizations that facilitated, validated, and circulated the work of their faculty members.

he web was, like scholarly societies, invented for the express purpose of supporting communication amongst researchers by allowing them to create pages on which they could share their work with one another and with the world. The difference, of course, is that the web permits any individual scholar with server access and a little bit of technical knowledge to share their work directly and immediately further diminishing their apparent need for those collectives that scholarly societies have historically provided.

Since the Royal Society of London, learned and professional societies have been created precisely in order to help facilitate communication amongst members, scholars, and between those members and the broader intellectual world. Now, early on that communication took place via meetings and letters that were sent among the membership between meetings. Over time, the meetings developed into regularly scheduled conferences, and the letters were gathered into systematically produced and distributed journals. Those journals accrued a series of formal publishing processes including, of course, editing and peer review that came to mark them as authoritative resources for developing knowledge in their fields, and those resources came not only to be valued by their original audience, the members of the society, but also by a broader range of scholars, researchers, and students. As a result, research libraries collected those journals and made them available to their patrons

It could if we had more gold, but I am here to tell you that we do not. The boom Brandon just mentioned in the sciences has passed us by. ACLS funds a lot of scholarship, and we award $15 million in fellowship and grants, but if recipients of our fellowships use stipends to pay author fees that would be trading publication costs for research time. The National Endowment for Humanities, its funding is now 29% of its peak appropriation, and an additional 49% cut has been proposed, and the House Budget Committee is considering complete elimination of all funding. If the author pays model were widely adopted in the humanities, it would increase the already problematical level of inequality in academia. Wealthy universities could pay for their faculty but scholars at public universities and smaller colleges could not expect such largesse.

They were created to name and claim an area of knowledge and to establish and monitor standards for cultivating that area. Establishing a peer-review journal was the most obvious way of doing that but there are many other ways. Prizes for books and articles, even the elections of officers themselves. Most humanities journals have two types of peer review: prepublication review of research articles and postpublication review of books and other published materials.

William Rainey Harper, the first president of the nascent University of Chicago, was aggressive in recruiting star faculty to his new campus. He would offer blandishments including one relevant to our topic this morning. If Harper really wanted someone, the president would promise the wavering scholar that he, and it was almost always a “he” in those days, would be the editor of not one but two new journals that the university press would publish: one, a journal for academic specialists, and the second, for the general public.

Commentator Kat Nagel outlined a life cycle that every list seems to go through. First thereis initial enthusiasm and evangelism (where people complain about the infrequency ofpostings). This is followed by a period of growth and then community (with lots of threadsand information and willingness to help). When the number of messages increases both involume and in diversity, a certain discomfort arises (often marked by complaints that the listhas lost its central purpose). Finally, if a group of purists emerges and is allowed to ‘‘flame’’(attack ad hominem) and act self-righteously, while others leave to form groups of their own,then a complacency develops, or worse stagnation and death. If, however, the self-righteousare minimized and a balance develops between community and diversity, then a list will reachmaturity

The depth of interactivity varies widely among discussion groups. Some groups are likecocktail parties with many conversations (threads) competing. Some, like formal seminars,focus around specific topics. Some are like notice boards in the local grocery store wheremessages are pinned and left for others to read and comment on. And some groups merelyfunction as newspapers, disseminating electronic journals or computer programs, advertisingconferences or job vacancies. Many people are content to just read and listen, even in themost interactive groups, while a relatively few dominate conversations

In some ways, the exchange of correspondence publicly over these networksconstitutes a new form of publication. The posting on a list frequently resembles a letter to theeditor where someone conveys their opinions on a subjec

Figure 3 illustrates at what age ceased ‘indie’ journals stopped publishing. Most journals survived the first 2–5 years period, whereas the mortality rate rose in the critical 6–9 years period. After that, the number of journals ceasing dropped sharply, indicating that the surviving journals had found stability.

The development over time of active ‘indie’ OA journals before and after 2002 is shown in Figs. 1A and 1B. A journal was counted as ‘active’ in a particular year if it was still publishing articles in that year. Before 2002 the number of active journals grew very rapidly from a total of 76 journals in 1995 to 207 journals in 2002. The year 2002 was the cut-off year to be included in the studied cohort, meaning that no new journals were added to the data set after this point in time. After 2002, the number of journals in the cohort decreased steadily to the 127 that stayed active in 2014.

The average number of articles published was 31 per year with 74% publishing 0–30 articles, and 9% 60 or more. The study also contains interesting data about the workload done, revenues etc.

“The key question for OA publishing is whether it can be scaled up from a single journal publishing model with relatively few articles published per year to a comprehensive major journal with of the order of 50–100 articles annually.” They further note: “The continuation of the journal relies very heavily on the personal involvement of the editor and is as such a risk to the model. Employing staff to handle, for example, management, layout and copyediting tasks, is a cost-increasing factor that also is a threat to the model.” Both questions are still highly relevant today.

Earlier studies A number of previous studies, both snapshots and some with longitudinal elements, have shed light on different aspects of such type of journals, which for short we will call “indie” journals.

Often the enthusiasm of the founders and their personal network can carry a volunteer-based journal for a few years. But at that same time this type of journal, which lack the support of employed staff and a professional publishing organization, are threatened by many dangers. The editor may change affiliation or retire, or the support of the university hosting the journal might be withdrawn. Authors may stop sending in good manuscripts and it may become more and more difficult to find motivated reviewers. Not being included in the Web of Science, and the impact factor that follows, may in the long run limit the number of submissions severely. On the positive side of the balance the emergence of open source software for publishing (i.e., Open Journals System) and cheap or free hosting services like Latin American Scielo have facilitated the technical parts of publishing.

Most of the OA journals founded in the 1990s were of this variety, later many established subscription journals (particularly society ones) have made their digital versions freely available immediately or with a delay. This has been particularly noticeable in countries where cheap or free national or regional electronic portals have become available, like Scielo, Redalyc, and J-stage. Since around 2003 the OA market has become increasingly dominated by professionally published journals, which finance themselves by charging authors so-called article processing charges, APCs. At first such journals were being launched by open access publishers like BioMedCentral and PLOS, but in the last couple of years the major commercial and society publishers have increasingly started new OA journals and have also converted some subscription journals to APC-financed models.

Open Access (OA) is nowadays increasingly being used as a business model for the publishing of scholarly peer reviewed journals, both by specialized OA publishing companies and major, predominantly subscription-based publishers. However, in the early days of the web OA journals were mainly founded by independent academics, who were dissatisfied with the predominant print and subscription paradigm and wanted to test the opportunities offered by the new medium. There is still an on-going debate about how OA journals should be operated, and the volunteer model used by many such ‘indie’ journals has been proposed as a viable alternative to the model adopted by big professional publishers where publishing activities are funded by authors paying expensive article processing charges (APCs). Our longitudinal quantitative study of 250 ‘indie’ OA journals founded prior to 2002, showed that 51% of these journals were still in operation in 2014 and that the median number of articles published per year had risen from 11 to 18 among the survivors. Of these surviving journals, only 8% had started collecting APCs. A more detailed qualitative case study of five such journals provided insights into how such journals have tried to ensure the continuity and longevity of operations.

A longitudinal study of independent scholar-published open access journals

Here is the real message of the letter and the real rationale of the Spenser Society of America: to multiply the institutional contexts in which writing on Spenser will at once be demanded and published. It so happens that the letter was written before the society's first meeting, but as this sentence shows, the society need never have met at all, since its most impor- tant goal-the creation of a Spenser industry with all its attendant machinery-had already been achieved

Publish or perish? The rise of the fractional author…

Some researchers attribute the phrase to Kimball C. Atwood III, who is said to have coined the phrase in 1950 (

business

in the latter both the wide differential in manuscript rejection rates and the high correlation between refereerecommendations and editorial decisions suggests that reviewers and editors agree more on acceptance than on rejection.

In the former there is also much more agreement on rejectionthan acceptance

excellencetorecognizeexcellence

. I consider that my job, as a philosopher, is to activate the possible, and not to describe the probable, that is, to think situations with and through their unknowns when I can feel them

Levine, T., Asada, K. J., & Carpenter, C. (2009). Sample sizes and effect sizes are negatively correlated inmeta-analyses: Evidence and implications of a publication bias against non-significant findings.Communication Monographs, 76, 286–302

Paris, G., De Leo, G., Menozzi, P., & Gatto, M. (1998). Region-based citation bias in science.Nature, 396,6708

Rosenthal, R. (1979). The file drawer problem and tolerance for null results.Psychological Bulletin, 86,638–641

Song, F. J., Parekh-Bhurke, S., Hooper, L., Loke, Y. K., Ryder, J. J., Sutton, A. J., et al. (2009). Extent ofpublication bias in different categories of research cohorts: A meta-analysis of empirical studies.BMCMedical Research Methodology, 9, 79

Sterling, T. D. (1959). Publication decisions and their possible effects on inferences drawn from tests ofsignificance—Or vice versa.Journal of the American Statistical Association, 54, 30–34

Osuna, C., Crux-Castro, L., & Sanz-Menedez, L. (2011). Overturning some assumptions about the effects ofevaluation systems on publication performance.Scientometrics, 86, 575–592

Pautasso, M. (2010). Worsening file-drawer problem in the abstracts of natural, medical and social sciencedatabases.Scientometrics, 85(1), 193–202

Schmidt, S. (2009). Shall we really do it again? The powerful concept of replication is neglected in thesocial sciences.Review of General Psychology, 13(2), 90–100.

Shelton, R. D., Foland, P., & Gorelskyy, R. (2009). Do new SCI journals have a different national bias?Scientometrics, 79(2), 351–363. doi:

Silvertown, J., & McConway, K. J. (1997). Does ‘‘publication bias’’ lead to biased science?Oikos, 79(1),167–168.

Yousefi-Nooraie, R., Shakiba, B., & Mortaz-Hejri, S. (2006). Country development and manuscript selec-tion bias: A review of published studies.BMC Medical Research Methodology, 6, 37

Evanschitzky, H., Baumgarth, C., Hubbard, R., & Armstrong, J. S. (2007). Replication research’s disturbingtrend.Journal of Business Research, 60(4), 411–415. doi

Jeng, M. (2006). A selected history of expectation bias in physics.American Journal of Physics, 74(7),578–583

Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2008a). Perfect study, poor evidence: Interpretation of biases preceding study design.Seminars in Hematology, 45(3), 160–166

Feigenbaum, S., & Levy, D. M. (1996). Research bias: Some preliminary findings.Knowledge and Policy:The International Journal of Knowledge Transfer and Utilization, 9(2 & 3), 135–142.

Song, F., Parekh, S., Hooper, L., Loke, Y. K., Ryder, J., Sutton, A. J., et al. (2010). Dissemination andpublication of research findings: An updated review of related biases.Health Technology Assessment,14(8), 1–193. doi

De Rond, M., & Miller, A. N. (2005). Publish or perish—Bane or boon of academic life?Journal ofManagement Inquiry, 14(4), 321–329. doi:

Several possible problems have been hypothesised, including: undue proliferation ofpublications and atomization of results (Gad-el-Hak2004; Statzner and Resh2010);impoverishment of research creativity, favouring ‘‘normal’’ science and predictable out-comes at the expense of pioneering, high-risk studies (De Rond and Miller2005); growingjournal rejection rates and bias against negative and non-significant results (because theyattract fewer readers and citations) (Statzner and Resh2010; Lortie1999); sensationalism,inflation and over-interpretation of results (Lortie1999; Atkin2002; Ioannidis2008b);increased prevalence of research bias and misconduct (Qiu2010). Indirect empiricalevidence supports at least some of these concerns. The per-capita paper output of scientistshas increased, whilst their career duration has decreased over the last 35 years in thephysical sciences (Fronczak et al.2007). Rejection rates of papers have increased in thehigh-tier journals (Larsen and von Ins2010; Lawrence2003). Negative sentences such as‘‘non-significant difference’’ have decreased in frequency in papers’ abstracts, while catchyexpressions such as ‘‘paradigm shift’’ have increased in the titles (Pautasso2010; Atkin2002). No study, however, has yet verified directly whether the scientific literature isenduring actual changes in conten

Formann, A. K. (2008). Estimating the proportion of studies missing for meta-analysis due to publicationbias.Contemporary Clinical Trials, 29(5), 732–739. doi

Fronczak, P., Fronczak, A., & Holyst, J. A. (2007). Analysis of scientific productivity using maximumentropy principle and fluctuation-dissipation theorem.Physical Review E, 75(2), 026103. doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.75.026103.

Atkin, P. A. (2002). A paradigm shift in the medical literature.British Medical Journal, 325(7378),1450–1451

Bonitz, M., & Scharnhorst, A. (2001). Competition in science and the Matthew core journals.Sciento-metrics, 51(1), 37–54

To publish. And sometimes publish in the right journals.... In my discipline ...there’s just a few journals, and if you’re not in that journal, then yourpublication doesn’t really count

In addition to that, the other thing that they focus on is science as celebrity.... Sothe standards are, ‘‘How much did it cost, and is it in the news?’’ And if it didn’tcost much and if it is not in the news, but it got a lot of behind-the-scenes talkwithin your discipline, they don’t know that, nor do they care

You’ve got to have a billionpublications in my field. That is the bottom line. That’s the only thing that counts.You can fail to do everything else as long as you have lots and lots of papers

The winner-take-all aspect of the priority rule has its drawbacks, however. It can encourage secrecy, sloppy practices, dishonesty and an excessive emphasis on surrogate measures of scientific quality, such as publication in high-impact journals. The editors of the journal Nature have recently exhorted scientists to take greater care in their work, citing poor reproducibility of published findings, errors in figures, improper controls, incomplete descriptions of methods and unsuitable statistical analyses as evidence of increasing sloppiness. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)As competition over reduced funding has increased markedly, these disadvantages of the priority rule may have begun to outweigh its benefits. Success rates for scientists applying for National Institutes of Health funding have recently reached an all-time low. As a result, we have seen a steep rise in unhealthy competition among scientists, accompanied by a dramatic proliferation in the number of scientific publications retracted because of fraud or error. Recent scandals in science are reminiscent of the doping problems in sports, in which disproportionately rich rewards going to winners has fostered cheating.

The role of external influences on the scientific enterprise must not be ignored. With funding success rates at historically low levels, scientists are under enormous pressure to produce high-impact publications and obtain research grants. The importance of these influences is reflected in the burgeoning literature on research misconduct, including surveys that suggest that approximately 2% of scientists admit to having fabricated, falsified, or inappropriately modified results at least once (24). A substantial proportion of instances of faculty misconduct involve misrepresentation of data in publications (61%) and grant applications (72%); only 3% of faculty misconduct involved neither publications nor grant applications.

The predominant economic system in science is “winner-take-all” (17, 18). Such a reward system has the benefit of promoting competition and the open communication of new discoveries but has many perverse effects on the scientific enterprise (19). The scientific misconduct among both male and female scientists observed in this study may well reflect a darker side of competition in science. That said, the preponderance of males committing research misconduct raises a number of interesting questions. The overrepresentation of males among scientists committing misconduct is evident, even against the backdrop of male overrepresentation among scientists, a disparity more pronounced at the highest academic ranks, a parallel with the so-called “leaky pipeline.” There are multiple factors contributing to the latter, and considerable attention has been paid to factors such as the unique challenges facing young female scientists balancing personal and career interests (20), as well as bias in hiring decisions by senior scientists, who are mostly male (21). It is quite possible that, in at least some cases, misconduct at high levels may contribute to attrition of woman from the senior ranks of academic researchers.

Editors, Publishers, Impact Factors, and Reprint Income

National governments are also weighing in on the issue. The UK government aims this April to make text-mining for non-commercial purposes exempt from copyright, allowing academics to mine any content they have paid for.

“Our plan is just to wait for the copyright exemption to come into law in the United Kingdom so we can do our own content-mining our own way, on our own platform, with our own tools,” says Mounce. “Our project plans to mine Elsevier’s content, but we neither want nor need the restricted service they are announcing here.”

some researchers feel that a dangerous precedent is being set. They argue that publishers wrongly characterize text-mining as an activity that requires extra rights to be granted by licence from a copyright holder, and they feel that computational reading should require no more permission than human reading. “The right to read is the right to mine,” says Ross Mounce of the University of Bath, UK, who is using content-mining to construct maps of species’ evolutionary relationships.