https://osf.io/ platform to deposit preregistration of studies (protocols)
- in some cases (medicine) is required to have your protocol approved before publishing the research
- make it possible to receive feedback sooner
Harking: the bad practice of making hypothesis after results are known. This is scientific misconducts. The preregistration is supposed to prevent harking
Nepotistic or predatory journals: your friend or family are part of the journal’s board, so the peer-review of the research is biased
Where to register a study
- Prospero for biology and health sciences
- Zenodo for every discipline. You can put here publication, dataset, and receive feedback from the community
- OSF for psychology, medicine and hard sciences
- PCR RR (peer-community review) can review the preprint deposited in the previous platforms. A positive feedback from PCR RR makes you more likely to be published in a high-ranked journal
Journal finders How to find a relevant journal
- bison, built upon DOAJ and OpenCites. DOAJ is a white-list of relevant journals in the wild
- web of science journal finder
- open journal matcher
- perplexity.ai
IF (impact factor): are widely know to be biased and non-transparent
- it just considers the number of citations per year
- does not actually assess the quality of a work
OpenAlex database: https://openalex.org/
- a transparent tool to assess the number of citations of a paper
Should you deposit a preprint of your paper? (=prepublication, the last stage of the manuscript before the review)
- in some disciplines a paper is rejected if a prepublication is found, because it means that you bypassed the peer-review project
- in other disciplines might be a good idea to fasten the visibility of your work if it is a breakthrough discovery that could be helpful to other. But since your paper will be published immediately without review, if the discovery turns out to be wrong this may impact also the work of other people that have used your preprint has a reference
- sometimes you have to do it because your founder requires you to do it
Embargo In academia, an “embargo” is a restriction placed on a thesis or dissertation that allows only the title, abstract and citation information to be available to the public, while the full text of the work is kept hidden for a limited period of time.
Green open access Once you have published something, you should be able to put an open-access copy of your work in a open-database (e.g., HAL, https://hal.science/?lang=en)
- you need the AAM (author accepted manuscript) from your journal before uploading your paper here
- you need to change the graphic layout of the paper not to make it related to the journal you have published in
- sometimes your journal proposed you an embargo, a time you have to wait before publishing
- the law guarantees you a shorter embargo than the one often proposed by journal. Journals do their interests and try to make the embargo longer
- often you can negotiate the embargo with the journal
- often you have to wait 3, 6 or 12 months depending on your discipline
Gold open access
- aims at an immediate open access without waiting for the embargo
- you might be requested to pay some charges (article publishing charges - APC)
- sometimes your university pays this APCs for you, sometimes is too expensive
Making money on science
Elsevier has 37.8% of profit margin, does not have to pay researchers, it just exploits its reputation and the hard work of a number of researchers. It is more than Apple profit margin!
Diamond Open Access
- private initiatives to make papers accessible (e.g., vulcanica)
- no APCs
- researches have rights on their publications
Predatory Open Access Publishers
- they don’t charge you that much and they promise you that the review will be fast
- often there is no peer-review at all
- they aim at publishing as much as they can, regardless of the quality
- they make intensive spamming
- they use false or dubious metrics
- they copy reliable journal in design and layout
- lack of details about APC, peer-review process, publication licence
- sometimes they even impersonate other people, stealing important people’s name and using their celebrity in their field to attract victims
There are black lists of predatory journals but:
- they are not 100% reliable
- maintaining the black list is costly
- white lists combined with criteria could be more useful
There is a large spectrum between the most fraudulent predatory open access publishers and the most reliable and virtuous journal. Most of the journals are placed in the middle of the spectrum
MDPI: include both serious and scamming journals (https://www.mdpi.com/)
You can use https://services.lib.uliege.be/compass-to-publish/ to evaluate the quality of a journal:
- helps you determine the degree of authenticity of open access journals requiring or hiding article processing charges (APCs) using a criteria-based evaluation
- aims to help the scholarly community to better understand predatory journals and publishers
- offers a transparent methodology and weighing method
- a project to help researcher share their data
- it helps in reproducing studies
- helps you to get a DOI even for your dataset
- SWHID (software heritage ID). The SH (Software Heritage) ID is a permanent link to a codebase (the GitHub link may change)
In HAL you can have links to all the important resources that you have used in your research (code, dataset, etc)
There is a plugin to keep the sync between the GitHub repo and the software heritage repo (UpdateSWH plugin)
re3data.org https://www.re3data.org/
- registry of research data
Making your codebase or dataset completely accessible could be required by your founder
Be F.A.I.R.
- findable
- accessible
- interoperable
- reusable