Tag: academic publishing

Would you like to become a certified peer reviewer?

Rachel Brennesholtz

 

The process of peer reviewing is associated with certain challenges. Editors often struggle with finding reviewers for their next articles. Reviewers want to demonstrate their expertise but have no way of getting noticed. It happens that reviewers decline requests due to lack of familiarity with the subject matter, or because they think they are not competent and experienced enough to review someone else’s work. In the mission of overcoming these challenges, potential reviewers can gain ground skills on peer reviewing by participating in The Certified Peer Review course developed by Elsevier Researcher Academy. Becoming a certified peer reviewer will allow potential reviewers to publicly demonstrate their expertise as referees and contribute to the integrity of academic.

What is happening?

For the past few months, the Elsevier Researcher Academy team was working on a new crash course. The course has been specifically designed to give those who have not yet reviewed – or who feel they would like additional training in this area – the skills and confidence to accept a request to review. The course content is delivered via directed self-learning in the form of webinars, podcasts and questionnaires and can be tackled at the desired pace of the participant. Completion is recognised by a certificate. We hope that the course will help to tackle the reviewer shortage issue that so many of you and your peers face.

Why is this important?

The integrity of scholarly communications depends heavily on the peer reviewing process. 82% academics agreed “without peer review there is no control in scientific communication” and 74% agreed that reviewing significantly raises the quality of published papers (full report here). Therefore, it is crucial for science to expand the reviewer pool and to ensure that proper training is received for producing trustworthy and high-quality peer reviews.

Researchers agree that there is a general ”lack of guidance about how to perform a good review, and reviewers are expected to ‘learn on the job’” (read more here).  Therefore, 77% of reviewers would be interested in receiving specific peer reviewing training. Those who are interested are early researchers (with experience of 5 years and less) but also established career researchers.

What to expect?

The course is divided into 4 major sections.  Each section features complex subthemes to assure that every aspect of the procedure is covered, establishing skills and confidence in the process.

When is it happening?

The course will launch during Peer Review Week on 17th September. Register for free via this link: https://researcheracademy.elsevier.com/navigating-peer-review/certified-peer-reviewer-course/introduction-certified-peer-reviewer-course

Peer review week is a global event, organized to emphasize the central role peer review plays in scholarly communication. On 16-20 September 2019, individuals, institutions and organizations devoted to the mission of maintaining a high quality of science participate in this event to share research, highlight the latest innovation and advance best practices.

The top 10 journal articles published in 2009 by readership on Mendeley

victorhenning6 Comments

Having seen a lot of ‘top 10 lists of 2009’ around, we thought we’d throw in our two cents and give you the top 10 most read articles on Mendeley, published in 2009!

The top paper for 2009 was written by Uri Alon, entitled: ‘How to choose a good scientific problem’, published in the journal “Molecular Cell.” Our stats tell us that there are currently 74 Mendeley users who have read this paper, even though it was only published in late 2009.

The full list of the top ten articles published in 2009 on Mendeley (as of 28th January 2010) is:

1. Uri Alon, ‘How to choose a good scientific problem’, Molecular Cell (2009), Volume: 35, Issue: 6

2. Castro Neto et al, ‘The electronic properties of graphene’, Reviews of Modern Physics (2009), Volume: 81, Issue: 1

3. Erez Lieberman-Aiden et al, ‘Comprehensive mapping of long-range interactions reveals folding principles of the human genome’, Science (2009), Volume: 326, Issue: 5950

4. Ed Bullmore & Olaf Sporns, ‘Complex brain networks: graph theoretical analysis of structural and functional systems’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2009), Volume: 10, Issue: 3

5. Zhong Wang, Mark Gerstein, Michael Snyder, ‘RNA-Seq: a revolutionary tool for transcriptomics’, Nature Reviews Genetics (2009), Volume: 10, Issue: 1

6. Development Core Team, ‘R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing’, R Foundation for Statistical Computing (2009) Volume: 2, Issue: 09/18/2009

7. Fatih Ozsolak et al, ‘Direct RNA sequencing’, Nature, Volume: 461, Issue: 7265

8. Benjamin M Bolker et al, ‘Generalized linear mixed models: a practical guide for ecology and evolution’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution (2009), Volume: 24, Issue: 3

9. Michael Schmidt & Hod Lipson, ‘Distilling free-form natural laws from experimental data’, Science (2009), Volume: 324, Issue: 592

10. Stephen J Eglen, ‘A quick guide to teaching R programming to computational biology students’, PLoS Computational Biology (2009), Volume: 5, Issue: 8

We’d like to point out that this isn’t an authoritative list of all the ‘most read articles for 2009’. Instead, these are the ones that appear in Mendeley user libraries and show some early indications of the popularity of a journal article. We will also track the evolution of these stats over the course of 2010.

Readership complementing the impact factor

With Mendeley’s growing user base, the readership count can complement other measures, such as citation metrics, adding an extra dimension to assessing a journal article’s impact.

For example, the article “How to choose a good scientific problem” is a general interest article, rather than being specific to biology which suggests it is not likely to have a high citation count in future primary research literature.

Nonetheless, it is already the most read paper on Mendeley published in 2009, a factor that would otherwise be missed. This indicates that the readership count can allude to other ways in which articles are used within a community, and therefore increase awareness of what should be read. The next step will be to anonymously track reading time and quality rating metrics to gather the most accurate data possible for our upcoming personalized recommendation engine.

Predicting research trends?

Understanding and predicting research trends is an important part of research. The citation count, used for decades as the gold standard in article-level metrics, can verify broad trends occurring within academic disciplines such as biology. While quite accurate, official citation metrics take two years to calculate. In contrast, readership statistics may be able to predict similar trends in real-time.

For example, look at The Scientist’s list of the hottest biology papers in 2009 (all published in 2007). The readership count for these papers on Mendeley correlates with ISI’s citation count at r=.76 (two-tailed, p=.13 due to the low sample size) – a near perfect correlation, even if only based on five papers and our userbase of just over 100,000 users:

Comparison of Mendeley’s most read papers with the ISI Citations

Publication ISI Citations Readers on Mendeley
A M. Werning, et al., “In vitro reprogramming of fibroblasts into a pluripotent ES-cell-like state,” Nature 448: 318-24, 2007. 512 26
E. Birney, et al., “Identification and analysis of functional elements in 1% of the human genome by the ENCODE pilot project,” Nature 447: 799-816, 2007. 618 63
A. Barski, et al., “High-resolution profiling of histone methylations in the human genome,” Cell 129: 823-37, 2007. 560 33
K.A. Frazer, et al., “A second generation human haplotype map of over 3.1 million SNPs,” Nature 449: 854-61, 2007. 588 46
K. Takahashi, et al., “Induction of pluripotent stem cells from adult human fibroblasts by defined factors,” Cell 131: 861-72, 2007. 886 64
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Pearson Correlation r = .76

We look forward to comparing the top 10 list shown above to the official ISI citation metrics for 2009 publications when they are calculated and released later in 2010 or 2011.

In summary, using Mendeley’s readership figures alongside the citation metrics should make it possible in the future to evaluate the scope of a journal article within the community more effectively. Finally, further refinements and understanding of readership metrics might make it possible to identify the next big trend in the academic world.

Methodology

The top 10 list was made by noting how many times a paper appears in the libraries of individual Mendeley users (readership count) and how many distinct user tags were attributed to that paper (tag count), then we filtered the results to include only papers from 2009 – done!

Who is killing science on the Web? Publishers or Scientists?

Jason Hoyt14 Comments

Killing the advancement of science on the Web is killing the advancement of science as a whole.

A few weeks ago I attended a panel session at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco called, “Making the Web work for science.” (Video wrap-up here) Really, the focus was on how to get scientists to put their data up on the Web. Later that evening, I attended a post-reception gathering and briefly spoke with (name shall remain anonymous), the founder of a very popular social news media site; sites like Mixx, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Del.ic.ious, Stumbleupon, etc. I told him what I do and his enthusiastic response was, “Fuck the academic publishing industry!”

Now, perhaps his bold statement was due, in part, to the flow of alcoholic beverages at the event. There is more to it than that, however. He is not a trained scientist, but as the founder of a popular social news site, is very well aware of the state of science on the Interwebs. Like many people (notice the avoidance of the worn phrase ‘members of the public’ as if they are unable to contribute to science), he has a personal interest in the domain, and is trying to figure out how his business can enable scientists.

We have to wonder though, why are things so bad with science on the Web, that even an Internet entrepreneur recognizes the problem? And who or what is responsible for this mess?

Two groups are responsible: Scientists and, as you can tell, Publishers. Let’s start with the bad guys first, and then talk about the even more guilty party of bad guys.

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Top 8 influential Science and Tech Stories of 2009, so far

Jason Hoyt1 Comment

The year 2009 is halfway through and already we’ve seen some great stuff being published, created, and predicted that could have a major impact in the future. Each of the eight items were chosen because they could influence how every one of us communicates, learns, and lives more so than any other discoveries so far in 2009. What’s that? You’re not a science or techie person? It doesn’t matter, you and everyone else are going to be affected because of the work and ideas brought forth below. So, pay attention. We start with some exclusive, never before public news from NASA, very fitting as today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch.

1. NASA starts project Nebula (new exclusive information) Nope, this isn’t another space probe. This is the government giving a head nod to cloud computing. They’ve wisely hired a few seasoned Internet entrepreneurs to command the mission at NASA Ames and take NASA data into the cloud. That much has been known since May. Last week I had dinner with Chris Kemp (CIO, NASA Ames) and some of the Nebula team. Here’s what Kemp agreed to reveal publicly for the first time:

”NASA collaborates with hundreds of universities, commercial partners, and other federal and international partners. The NASA Nebula cloud computing platform will dramatically increase the efficiency and productivity of these collaborations.”

How it affects you: If you’re a NASA collaborator or want to become one, then get ready. As for every day citizens, you too will reap the rewards of Nebula via the research performed. There’s also been a lot of speculation that Nebula will power data sets other than just NASA’s, such as data.gov. Is this true? Let’s put it this way. Their focus, for now, is on NASA’s data. The rest is my opinion only: imagine the possibilities if we had a national or even international cloud computing platform. Remember that it was originally a similar government project called ARPANET that gave rise to today’s Internet. This could be BIG for science, tech, and planet Earth.

Hurdles to jump: Kemp and team must first get this rolling with NASA before opening it up to outsiders. And it’s government, so there’s a lot of bureaucracy and red tape to cut through to get this done and costs down. President Obama and Vivek Kundra (Federal CIO), if you’re listening, then help this team out by cutting that tape and give them carte blanche funding to get it done.

More info: Official NASA Nebula website – Follow Nebula on Twitter

World avoided2. The ozone has been saved – sort of

Ever ask yourself what the ozone layer and our planet would look like today if we hadn’t passed some of those pesky environmental laws back in the 1980’s? Researchers, led by Paul Newman, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and elsewhere asked “What would have happened to the ozone layer if chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) had not been regulated in 1987?” This was an important and difficult to answer question, until this year. I reached Dr. Newman for a comment to let us know the most important message from this research:

“If chlorofluorocarbons had not been regulated by the Montreal Protocol, two-thirds of the ozone layer would have been destroyed by the year 2065 with a consequent increase of surface ultraviolet radiation to extreme levels.”

How it affects you: While the conclusions were based on computer models, the importance of environmental policy cannot be overstated, and now we have proof that policy does work. Oh, and your grandkids will get to play outside in 2065. Even by 2020 it would have been pretty nasty without SPF 3 billion lathered on. Check out these neat simulations, such as the image above.

Hurdles to jump: As you may know, we still have a slight problem with a thing called “Global warming.” Lots to do in order to reduce carbon emissions.

More info: Original study

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