Today we had a paper published in Publications, as part of a special issue on “New Frontiers for Openness in Scholarly Publishing”, to capture some of the hot topics and emergent issues surrounding modern scholarly publishing. This paper was developed and written online with 16 international collaborators from across a range of disciplines — the majority of whom I have never met in the real world. It was led by palaeontologist Jon Tennant, conceived and written in a similar open, online and collaborative way to our 2017 paper on innovations in peer review.
The abstract of the paper is below; you can access the full paper online, or via my institutional repository:
Ten Hot Topics around Scholarly Publishing
Jonathan P. Tennant, Harry Crane, Tom Crick, Jacinto Davila, Asura Enkhbayar, Johanna Havemann, Bianca Kramer, Ryan Martin, Paola Masuzzo, Andy Nobes, Curt Rice, Bárbara Rivera-López, Tony Ross-Hellauer, Susanne Sattler, Paul D. Thacker and Marc Vanholsbeeck
The changing world of scholarly communication and the emerging new wave of ‘Open Science’ or ‘Open Research’ has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly debated topics. Evidence-based rational debate is regularly drowned out by misinformed or exaggerated rhetoric, which does not benefit the evolving system of scholarly communication. This article aims to provide a baseline evidence framework for ten of the most contested topics, in order to help frame and move forward discussions, practices, and policies. We address issues around preprints and scooping, the practice of copyright transfer, the function of peer review, predatory publishers, and the legitimacy of ‘global’ databases. These arguments and data will be a powerful tool against misinformation across wider academic research, policy and practice, and will inform changes within the rapidly evolving scholarly publishing system.
Keywords: peer review; copyright; open access; open science; scholarly communication; web of science; Scopus; impact factor; research evaluation
Publications 2019, 7(2), 34;
DOI: 10.3390/publications7020034
(also see: Publications)
Digital, Data & Policy 
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