Search

PLOS Medicine editors and guest editors announce a call for papers for submissions for a special issue on diabetes prevention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the fiftieth volume of the periodical "Canadian Slavonic Papers". The author ackowledges all the editors and contributors of the issue referred to as a milestone, a testimonial piece that depicts the periodical's contribution in history, language, literature, and social sciences in Canada and across the globe.

The existence of a shared classification system is essential to knowledge production, transfer, and sharing. Studies of knowledge classification, however, rarely consider the fact that knowledge categories exist within hierarchical information systems designed to facilitate knowledge search and discovery. This neglect is problematic whenever information about categorical membership is itself used to evaluate the quality of the items that the category contains. The main objective of this paper is to show that the effects of category membership depend on the position that a category occupies in the hierarchical knowledge classification system of Wikipedia—an open knowledge production and sharing platform taking the form of a freely accessible on-line encyclopedia. Using data on all English-language Wikipedia articles, we examine how the position that a category occupies in the classification hierarchy affects the attention that articles in that category attract from Wikipedia editors, and their evaluation of quality of the Wikipedia articles. Specifically, we show that Wikipedia articles assigned to coarse-grained categories (i. e., categories that occupy higher positions in the hierarchical knowledge classification system) garner more attention from Wikipedia editors (i. e., attract a higher volume of text editing activity), but receive lower evaluations (i. e., they are considered to be of lower quality). The negative relation between attention and quality implied by this result is consistent with current theories of social categorization, but it also goes beyond available results by showing that the effects of categorization on evaluation depend on the position that a category occupies in a hierarchical knowledge classification system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open peer review (OPR) is a cornerstone of the emergent Open Science agenda. Yet to date no large-scale survey of attitudes towards OPR amongst academic editors, authors, reviewers and publishers has been undertaken. This paper presents the findings of an online survey, conducted for the OpenAIRE2020 project during September and October 2016, that sought to bridge this information gap in order to aid the development of appropriate OPR approaches by providing evidence about attitudes towards and levels of experience with OPR. The results of this cross-disciplinary survey, which received 3,062 full responses, show the majority (60.3%) of respondents to be believe that OPR as a general concept should be mainstream scholarly practice (although attitudes to individual traits varied, and open identities peer review was not generally favoured). Respondents were also in favour of other areas of Open Science, like Open Access (88.2%) and Open Data (80.3%). Among respondents we observed high levels of experience with OPR, with three out of four (76.2%) reporting having taken part in an OPR process as author, reviewer or editor. There were also high levels of support for most of the traits of OPR, particularly open interaction, open reports and final-version commenting. Respondents were against opening reviewer identities to authors, however, with more than half believing it would make peer review worse. Overall satisfaction with the peer review system used by scholarly journals seems to strongly vary across disciplines. Taken together, these findings are very encouraging for OPR’s prospects for moving mainstream but indicate that due care must be taken to avoid a “one-size fits all” solution and to tailor such systems to differing (especially disciplinary) contexts. OPR is an evolving phenomenon and hence future studies are to be encouraged, especially to further explore differences between disciplines and monitor the evolution of attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Introduction, we attempt to convey something of the angst we have experienced at various times during the long drawn out process of being commissioned as Editors of this Special Issue, of commissioning the authors and thereafter variously exhorting, encouraging and congratulating them (at a crucial stage, when the whole thing had got too big and the consulting referees had reported, being obliged to reject the efforts of some potential contributors); engaging the services of said referees, and later, with some difficulty, negotiating with them the continuation of the project; and finally, after an incredibly intense period of solid wall-to-wall subediting on the final drafts (Ashmore) and the writing of this Introduction (Richards), finding it all, almost, over: at last, at last, This is attempted through the deployment of an extended narrative metaphor which likens our field to a restaurant, and a lyrical coda celebrating anticlimax. We also manage to introduce the papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article narrates the author's comments on editing, reviewing and publishing articles in the American Sociological Review (ASR). Some people complained that the ASR had been unsympathetic to their kind of sociology and that a special issue was the only sure way to remedy the situation. So far, my own appraisal is that neither their diagnosis nor their proposed cure is appropriate. In both the previous and the current editorial regimes the Deputy Editors have been responsible for assigning all reviewers. The Deputy Editors have varied scholarly histories, preferences and prejudices. However, they generally make reviewer assignments and about which they are most familiar and about which they tend to be positive. In any case they are usually do desperate to find appropriate, skilled and conscientious reviewers that they do not have enough degrees of freedom to be able to choose individuals whose prejudices they know. Even if the review process were discriminatory I think that special issues would be a dangerous and costly remedy. The ASR should be a journal that publishes the best papers available regardless of topic or research style. It is important that readers know that when a paper is published in the ASR it is not because of politics or fashion but because a reasonable, fair and rigorous peer review process has selected it on the basis of quality.

The article focuses on the contributions made by Collaborating Editor Jim McCartney to the periodical "Social Studies of Science." Over the years, the sheer professionalism of Jim's editorial work has been one standard by which the academic excellence of this journal has been judged. His contribution to community has been beyond measure, and people are all grateful to him for what he has done. But when the chips are down, local commitments to students and faculty, and to research, must win out. Editors of the journal thank him, and are with him in his struggles. Meanwhile, the editors welcome scholar Malcolm Ashmore to Jim's vacated hot seat. Ashmore work will already be well known to many readers. It is not entirely irrelevant to note that a major paper of his discusses the activities of a prankster. Readers will appreciate author's wry amusement when, at the end of the week in which he returned home from Bielefeld, he saw an Editorial in Nature, commenting on an international meeting on assessing research performance, urging the serious application of work by science policy researchers to help avoid situations in which, as noted, scientists are often to be found engaged in heated discussions about assessment in which the wheel is repeatedly reinvented.