EORI keeps an eye on changes in the fields of Open Science, FAIR data principles, and others, and directs any interested parties to important updates:
- Worryingly, but somewhat predictably, nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones (here). Worse, the difference in citation rates do not change after the publication of the failure to replicate. If you’re using R, then thankfully there’s a tool/ package which has been recently developed, Easyreporting, to help reproducibility in code, but if you’re not then we need to find other ways. It’s worrying that this knowledge which is ontologically false continues to be cited and spread, like science’s equivalent of fake news. This comes as others have made a suggestion to the culture around citation: the right to refuse citations. It’s discussed as a potential reaction to being citied by predatory journals or by papers with questionable ethics/ methods etc., and they make some interesting points.
- Following the news, mentioned in the last update, that Clarative Analytics had bought Proquest, there’s pushback and concern from the community (here). The drive towards a monopolistic control of these systems and data is spurring calls for regulation and oversight. Considering Times higher Education’s recent call for academics to become involved in the Open Access struggle, this could be a good place to start. It also comes as SAGE journals have announced that its offering Open Peer Review using Clarative’s Web of Science portal (here), which is simultaneously a great initiative to be implemented (of which EORI thoroughly approves) and also a monopoly-building action. Hopefully this will
- Here’s a nice explainer behind preprints, and there’s an interesting new course dedicated to them (here). 2/3 of preprints go on to be published in journals (here), which could be suggestive of the amount of knowledge which never sees publication, or possibly of the issues which arise in 1/3 of work. Either way, accessing this data can be of great use.
Edinburgh Open Research Initiative 