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The post Protected: Podcast: Preprints, Peer Review and Publishing appeared first on Digital Science.

ChemRxiv Beta open for submissions and powered by Figshare

ChemRxiv, a new chemistry preprint server for the global chemistry community, is now available in a fully functioning Beta version for use and feedback by researchers.

The Beta launch has been undertaken with initial strategic input from the American Chemical Society (ACS), Royal Society of Chemistry, German Chemical Society and other not-for profit organizations, as well as other scientific publishers and preprint services.

The free-of-charge service, originally announced late last year, is managed on behalf of the chemical science community by ACS and is powered by our portfolio company Figshare. By harnessing Figshare’s new preprint capabilities, ChemRxiv will facilitate the rapid and open dissemination of important scientific findings.

Following in the footsteps of arXiv and bioRxiv, preprint servers focused on physics and life sciences, respectively, ChemRxiv will enable researchers working across a broad range of chemistry fields to share early results with their colleagues ahead of formal peer review and publication.

James Milne, Ph.D., senior vice president, Journals Publishing Group, ACS Publications Division says:

“We have seen the value that preprints can make in accelerating the pace of discovery. With their commitment to open data, Figshare shares our goal of supporting the sharing and dissemination of research findings in a wide variety of file formats, allowing us to meet the Society’s key mission, as well as that of ChemRxiv.”

The preprint server includes a one-page streamlined submission portal with drag-and-drop file functionality through which authors can quickly, easily and directly submit preprints in a wide variety of file formats. ChemRxiv does not have submission or access fees. All content is accessible to interested users and also for harvesting through an open API or via OAI-PMH. ChemRxiv is developing a triage process that includes plagiarism and other checks with the goal of posting preprints within one to two business days. To better enable rapid handling, the preprint server features a “next-generation curation module” that allows multiple curators to work together on large volumes of submissions.

ChemRxiv will help to accurately attribute preprints through automatic assignments of digital object identifiers (DOI) and citation tracking, and will leverage CrossRef processes to establish links between the final published version of articles and preprints. Altmetric will track online mentions with each page displaying the associated Altmetric badge and attention score.

Milne adds,

“We are currently finalizing the community-wide governance supporting ChemRxiv and look forward to announcing more developments shortly. We encourage feedback from users during the weeks ahead. Direct feedback should be sent to Darla Henderson, Ph.D., assistant director, Open Access Programs, at d_henderson@acs.org.”

Emma Wilson, Ph.D., director of Publishing for the Royal Society of Chemistry, says,

“Serving the chemical science community by enabling them to effectively share scientific knowledge has been central to our learned society purpose throughout our 176-year history. Our shared priority is to provide the global chemistry community with the 21^st century tools they need to share and discover research.”

Mark Hahnel, CEO of Figshare adds:

“Scientific publishing is changing; transparency and completion of the communication cycle are important to scientists, publishers and funders. In fast-paced fields like chemistry, moving to facilitate broad dissemination of ideas earlier in the process will speed up science. The intent behind ChemRxiv is to give the global chemistry community a central place to share and build recognition for their research discoveries — positively shaping routes of future work. Working with the ChemRxiv community-driven team to make this a reality is a distinct honor.”

ChemRxiv is set to continue to release updates to functionality and features throughout 2017 and 2018. To learn more about ChemRxiv, visit www.chemrxiv.org.

The post ChemRxiv Beta Open For Submissions: New Chemistry Preprint Server For The Global Chemistry Community Powered by Figshare appeared first on Digital Science.

Last week, an article by Ewen Callaway and Kendall Powell in Nature News discussed the ASAPBio conference, which is dedicated to finding a way to make preprints do for biology, what they’ve done for other disciplines. The article talks about bioRxiv, the life science preprint server which was founded at Cold Spring Harbour in 2013 and modelled after arXiv.

While bioRxiv has been growing steadily since its foundation, with around 200 submissions per month, it has a long way to go to catch up with arXiv, which boasts almost 9,000 per month, with a total of over a million articles so far. What accounts for this difference? Is it just the fact that bioRxiv is the new kid on the block or is there something more at work?

One key difference between the two projects is the communities that they serve. As this article by Jocelyn Kaiser in Science Magazine pointed out, critics claim that there are cultural differences between biology, for example and physics. I’d actually go a little further and say that arXiv was designed to automate a process that was already going on in fields like high energy physics (HEP). It therefore owes its inception to a community that it didn’t have to be sold to in the way that bioRxiv needs to be. This article by Dawn Levy, Stanford University’s news service science writer outlines the way in which HEP physicists in particular have been distributing articles among themselves prior to publication since the 1960s, in order to get feedback and to communicate more rapidly. As Heath O’Connell, HEP database manager forThe Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) said at the time:

“The physics community had a really rapid adoption of this because in a sense it was just an evolutionary process rather than a revolutionary one,”

So the arXiv wasn’t initially an open access effort; it was about dissemination but also partly about quality control. This culture is in stark contrast with modern biology where in many cases, the results of work are kept secret for fear that somebody will steal the idea, rush out an article and get that high impact prize.

This begs the question as to why this difference exists? How can somebody working in big physics get away with showing their data to all their competitors a couple of years before it is recorded in the citable version of record, but biologists can’t. Is it partly because in fields like HEP, or plasma physics, the instruments (EG Joint European Torus, NIF or CERN) are unique, making it pretty obvious where the data came from? I don’t think that’s the answer because computer scientists and even economists make use of preprints. Is it because the communities are smaller? Perhaps, but I certainly know of people who have a reputation for sharp practice and scooping in the life sciences. It doesn’t seem to hurt their careers but their peers know who they are. Is excessive competition in the life sciences for money and position?

Maybe part of it is that the risk is overblown, or perhaps it’s more that when people build on work in the physical and computer sciences, it isn’t seen as a bad thing and it doesn’t harm the originator’s career. Whatever the reason, in order for preprints, or other forms of open-science to be truly successful in the life sciences, this is an issue that shouldn’t be ignored. The reasons why biologists are afraid of being scooped need to be identified and addressed either by convincing researchers that the rewards outweigh the risks, or changing the incentive structures so that they do.

The post Who’s Afraid of Preprints? Looking at the Origin and Motivation Behind arXiv for Clues as to Why It’s so Successful appeared first on Digital Science.

During its final few years, the ASA conference was a forum to discuss a broader range of topics than the business of subscription agents and it was good to see that trend continue. The program consisted of a series of talks, panels and workshops on a wide range of topics, including the economics of open access, the future of academic reputation, research management, and even practical discussions on how to build a culture of innovation. This last topic was the subject of a workshop that was expertly run by Martha Sedgwick (@coffeepot), Executive Director of Product Innovations at Sage. I attended that workshop and supplied a case study on how innovation is done at Digital Science.

It was good to see other ASA traditions continued. Particularly, the inclusion of a controversial opening keynote. Many of you will remember that Derk Haank, CEO of Springer Nature, famously accused subscription agents of being professional tea drinkers at last year’s ASA, while he appealed to them to find a way to stay in business. This year, it was Vitek Tracz’s turn to divide the audience. Tracz is Chairman of Science Navigation Group, which is responsible for F1000. During his talk, he predicted that academic journals are on the brink of demise because they serve no useful function as a container. This is a point of view that I have some sympathy for. When researchers search abstract databases like PubMed, there’s an increasing tendency to pay more attention to article title, author list, affiliation, and abstract, than the name of the journal.

Where I felt the argument fell down was that, by Tracz’ own admission, the role of journals as conferring prestige is as important, if not more important than ever. When the incentive structure in academia shifts so that research isn’t judged on the name of the journal in which it’s published, then the journal will become unnecessary.

Tracz talk raised an interesting question that was revisited several times during the conference, that of the potential to separate the two roles of scholarly publishing, those of dissemination and accreditation. With today’s Internet infrastructure, discrete journals aren’t needed in order to perform the former. The rise of the mega journal and particularly the success of PLOS ONE is proof that through search and appropriate meta-tagging it really is possible to create a big bucket of content and allow readers to explore and discover the content they need.

For historical reasons, accreditation and the quality control mechanisms that allow for it are tied to journals and this is where I think there is a risk. Danny Kingsley (@dannykay68), Head of Scholarly Communication at the University of Cambridge talked about some of the push-back that she gets from faculty when discussing subjects like research management and open access. She mentioned that many physicists are reluctant to pay for gold open access publication because they make their work available through arXiv. During questions, somebody raised the point that arXiv has resulted in a separation of dissemination and accreditation in physics, maths and related fields. While this is true, I think it’s important to note that as a pre-print server, arXiv offers the opportunity for researchers to get feedback on their work, often prior to submitting it to a journal. In fact, the development of arXiv was partly inspired by the way in which physicists in certain disciplines distribute their work amongst their peers prior to submitting it to a journal. So while arXiv is about dissemination, it’s also about quality control, or rather quality improvement.

People who are trying to improve the way that science is communicated often look to arXiv as an exemplar of how scientific information can be disseminated without all the tedious and time-consuming author burden that publishing involves. I agree, but it’s also important to look at the context in which it happens. If you were to ask a biologist, for example, if they’d be willing to distribute their work to competing labs to have it checked before submitting it to a journal, the answer would almost certainly be a resounding ‘no, that’s what peer review is for’. The reasons for differences in communication workflows are complex, they’re related to incentive structures, culture and history, and in some senses, the way that press offices and the media react to biology news.

Next week’s post will explore some of the differences between how biology and physics discussions play out in private vs in public, but in the meantime, I’ll leave you with the question of whether we should separate dissemination from accreditation and if we do, how do we ensure quality?

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