Public Health Scientific Electronic Library Online

The need for a comprehensive infrastructure for scholarly publications has been on the European Union's agenda for a long time. In particular, the European Commission's open science policy highlights the need for a good database for monitoring Open Access publications in Europe. However, many publications are still missing to rely on a comprehensive information infrastructure on open research. Over the past 10 years, European countries have invested significantly in national infrastructures, and now, at least 20 European countries have a national database for open publication research metadata. However, they are not yet integrated or widely used for cross-country comparisons. …

The literature demonstrates growing criticism of the reliability of qualitative research, including claims that it lacks rigor and methodological clarity. In the publication system, several actions reflect this increased attention to rigor. Initiatives by major research funding agencies also emphasize rigor. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), for example, has fostered efforts to promote strategies to increase rigor and transparency in the reporting of results of qualitative research. Here, we offer a brief panorama, permeated by transformations that include increasing initiatives to promote open science. We explore some questions about the current discussion of scientific rigor, not only in publications, but also in proposing qualitative research projects. …

In this post a proposal is introduced for academic publishing outfits to encourage and enable authors to make their articles — and where possible the underlying datasets — semantically unambiguous so that they can be communicated as FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). The proposal is described in-depth in a published open access article, to which a link is provided in the post. …

Most of the data resulting from research conducted in Brazil is not yet available in open access repositories. Here, we urge soil scientists to adopt a more open stance towards research data in the area, aiming to increase science sustainability and foster scientific collaboration. …

In the UK, the government has presented itself as guided by scientific evidence in its policy responses to COVID-19. This has led to science, in particular epidemiology, itself becoming politicised and contested. However, neither the politicisation of science nor questions surrounding the status of evidence are new. In this post, Luis Pérez-González, outlines how a similar politics of expertise has played out in environmental policy-making. The author argues that for scientific evidence to be successfully communicated in policy, it needs to be informed by bipartisan values. …

DOAJ, CLOCKSS Archive, Internet Archive, Keepers Registry/ISSN International Centre and Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have agreed to partner to provide an alternative pathway for the preservation of small-scale, APC-free, Open Access journals. …

Stage one of the Open Access (OA) movement promoted the democratization of scholarly knowledge, making work available so that anybody could read it. However, publication in highly ranked journals is becoming very costly, feeding the same vendor capitalists that OA was designed to sidestep. In this Q&A, Simon Batterbury argues that when prestige is valued over publication ethics, a paradoxical situation emerges where conversations about social justice take place in unjust journals. Academic freedom and integrity are at risk unless Open Access becomes not simply about the democratization of knowledge, but the ethics of its publication too. …

Preprints are research reports have that have not yet been peer reviewed and accepted for publication. They have increased rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, high profile discredited studies have led to concerns that speed has been prioritized over the quality and credibility of evidence. Joeri Tijdink, Mario Malicki, Lex Bouter and Gowri Gopalakrishna argue that all stakeholders of the science system have a responsibility in improving the quality and credibility of pre-prints. They outline 5 steps by which this can be achieved. …

Plan S, launched in Europe late 2018 to accelerate the transition to open access starting in January 2020, imposes open access mandates to all publicly funded research. But would such mandates really be effective in promoting open access? A study showed that the results vary greatly among disciplines and funders. However, between the gold route and the green route, two-thirds of the articles are, in fact, available for reading. …

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has significant implications for academic researchers. The Royal Historical Society recently published a set of guidelines to help researchers navigate the legal requirements around data protection. Dr Katherine Foxhall, RHS Research and Communications Officer explains some of the key factors that researchers in SHAPE subjects should be aware of. …