Suchergebnisse

Since 2013, the usage of preprints as a means of sharing research in biology has rapidly grown, in particular via the preprint server bioRxiv. Recent studies have found that journal articles that were previously posted to bioRxiv received a higher number of citations or mentions/shares on other online platforms compared to articles in the same journals that were not posted. However, the exact causal mechanism for this effect has not been established, and may in part be related to authors' biases in the selection of articles that are chosen to be posted as preprints. We aimed to investigate this mechanism by conducting a mixed-methods survey of 1,444 authors of bioRxiv preprints, to investigate the reasons that they post or do not post certain articles as preprints, and to make comparisons between articles they choose to post and not post as preprints. We find that authors are most strongly motivated to post preprints to increase awareness of their work and increase the speed of its dissemination; conversely, the strongest reasons for not posting preprints centre around a lack of awareness of preprints and reluctance to publicly post work that has not undergone a peer review process. We additionally find evidence that authors do not consider quality, novelty or significance when posting or not posting research as preprints, however, authors retain an expectation that articles they post as preprints will receive more citations or be shared more widely online than articles not posted.

Purpose: The recent proliferation of preprints could be a way for researchers worldwide to increase the availability and visibility of their research findings. Against the background of rising publication costs caused by the increasing prevalence of article processing fees, the search for other ways to publish research results besides traditional journal publication may increase. This could be especially true for lower-income countries. Design/methodology/approach: Therefore, the authors are interested in the experiences and attitudes towards posting and using preprints in the Global South as opposed to the Global North. To explore whether motivations and concerns about posting preprints differ, the authors adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining a quantitative survey of researchers with focus group interviews. Findings: The authors found that respondents from the Global South were more likely to agree to adhere to policies and to emphasise that mandates could change publishing behaviour towards open access. They were also more likely to agree posting preprints has a positive impact. Respondents from the Global South and the Global North emphasised the importance of peer-reviewed research for career advancement. Originality/value: The study has identified a wide range of experiences with and attitudes towards posting preprints among researchers in the Global South and the Global North. To the authors' knowledge, this has hardly been studied before, which is also because preprints only have emerged lately in many disciplines and countries.

Nach über 60 Jahren Nutzung ziviler Kernenergie in Deutschland und dem Atomausstieg bis 2022 stellt sich die Frage nach der Endlagerung (hoch-) radioaktiver Abfälle. Für die Endlagersuche in Deutschland trat 2017 das Standortauswahlgesetz (StandAG) in Kraft, das ein partizipatives, wissenschaftsbasiertes und transparentes Verfahren fordert (Deutscher Bundestag, 2020). Um die in diesem Verfahren auftretenden Fragen und Ergebnisse gesellschaftlich und wissenschaftlich fundiert diskutieren zu können, werden von den am Prozess beteiligten Stakeholdern in zunehmendem Maße auch digitale Informationsangebote bereitgestellt. Diese nutzen verschiedene Arten des Informationsdesigns (Umwandlung komplexer Daten in einfachere, nützliche und efektive Informationen, um Bedürfnisse und Ziele Nutzender kontextabhängig zu erfüllen (Herrera, 2013)), u.a. Kartendarstellungen, wie sie auch in anderen partizipativen Verfahren eingesetzt werden, um niederschwellig Information bereitzustellen (Moser et al., 2020). Vertrauen ist besonders wichtig, um den Betroffenen bei der Entscheidung zu helfen, ob sie an öffentlichen Beteiligungsprozessen teilnehmen (Santamaría-Philco & Wimmer, 2018). In früheren Umfragen wurde den verschiedenen Stakeholdern generell ein sehr unterschiedlicher Grad an Vertrauenswürdigkeit zugestanden (Drögemüller, 2017; Hocke, Stolle & Gloede, 2003; TNS Opinion & Social, 2008). Bei kritischer Würdigung der Fähigkeit dieser Stakeholder, die öffentliche Meinung zu beeinflussen, stellt sich die Frage, ob eine Beurteilung des Inhalts anhand des Informationsdesigns oder aufgrund des dem Stakeholder zugestandenen Vertrauens erfolgt. Wissenschaftlichkeit hingegen ist als Kriterium vor allem mit Blick auf das StandAG relevant, welches einen wissenschaftlich fundierten Prozess fordert. Um diese Aspekte zu untersuchen, wurde eine Umfrage durchgeführt. [Aus: Einleitung]

In recent years, increased stakeholder pressure to transition research to Open Access has led to many journals converting, or 'flipping', from a closed access (CA) to an open access (OA) publishing model. Changing the publishing model can influence the decision of authors to submit their papers to a journal, and increased article accessibility may influence citation behaviour. In this paper we aimed to understand how flipping a journal to an OA model influences the journal's future publication volumes and citation impact. We analysed two independent sets of journals that had flipped to an OA model, one from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and one from the Open Access Directory (OAD), and compared their development with two respective control groups of similar journals. For bibliometric analyses, journals were matched to the Scopus database. We assessed changes in the number of articles published over time, as well as two citation metrics at the journal and article level: the normalised impact factor (IF) and the average relative citations (ARC), respectively. Our results show that overall, journals that flipped to an OA model increased their publication output compared to journals that remained closed. Mean normalised IF and ARC also generally increased following the flip to an OA model, at a greater rate than was observed in the control groups. However, the changes appear to vary largely by scientific discipline. Overall, these results indicate that flipping to an OA publishing model can bring positive changes to a journal.

A potential motivation for scientists to deposit their scientific work as preprints is to enhance its citation or social impact. In this study we assessed the citation and altmetric advantage of bioRxiv, a preprint server for the biological sciences. We retrieved metadata of all bioRxiv preprints deposited between November 2013 and December 2017, and matched them to articles that were subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals. Citation data from Scopus and altmetric data from Altmetric.com were used to compare citation and online sharing behavior of bioRxiv preprints, their related journal articles, and nondeposited articles published in the same journals. We found that bioRxiv-deposited journal articles had sizably higher citation and altmetric counts compared to nondeposited articles. Regression analysis reveals that this advantage is not explained by multiple explanatory variables related to the articles' publication venues and authorship. Further research will be required to establish whether such an effect is causal in nature. bioRxiv preprints themselves are being directly cited in journal articles, regardless of whether the preprint has subsequently been published in a journal. bioRxiv preprints are also shared widely on Twitter and in blogs, but remain relatively scarce in mainstream media and Wikipedia articles, in comparison to peer-reviewed journal articles.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to identify governmental social media use in cities with enhanced information and communications technology infrastructures (i.e. Informational World Cities) and high Internet penetration rates. Social media platforms are increasingly being used by governments to foster user interaction and it was investigated if social media platforms are valuable tools for reaching high numbers of citizens.


Design/methodology/approach
– This paper is based on an iterative content and Web analysis from November 2012 till January 2013 and offers a comparison of different social media service types and the particular use.


Findings
– This empirical investigation of 31 Informational World Cities provides an overview of social media services used for governmental purposes, of their popularity among governments and of their usage intensity in broadcasting information online. Even as cities in a globalized world become more similar, a variety in the use of social media by governments was detected, which is due to regional and cultural characteristics.


Research limitations/implications
– The findings are limited to calculable data, e.g. number of used social media accounts, posts and followers which were available through a content and Web analysis at the time of investigation.


Practical implications
– A more detailed content analysis, as well as a more differentiated analysis of users, must be conducted in the future.


Originality/value
– This paper is one of the first that presents a global comparison of governmental social media use of cities of the knowledge society and compares different social media platforms.

Citations are a classic dimension of scientific communication. This paper looks at two different scenarios in which citation analysis can be applied to novel Web 2.0 environments: One case study deals with citations on Twitter and the other with analyzing blog posts and social bookmarking systems. (Autorenreferat)

In 2014, a union of German research organisations established Projekt DEAL, a national-level project to negotiate licensing agreements with large scientific publishers. Negotiations between DEAL and Elsevier began in 2016, and broke down without a successful agreement in 2018; in this time, around 200 German research institutions cancelled their license agreements with Elsevier, leading Elsevier to restrict journal access at those institutions. We investigated the effect on researchers' publishing and citing behaviours from a bibliometric perspective, using a dataset of ∼400,000 articles published by researchers at DEAL institutions between 2012-2020. We further investigated these effects with respect to the timing of contract cancellations, research disciplines, collaboration patterns, and article open-access status. We find evidence for a decrease in Elsevier's market share of articles from DEAL institutions, with the largest year-on-year market share decreases occuring from 2018 to 2020 following the implementation of access restrictions. We also observe year-on-year decreases in the proportion of citations, although the decrease is smaller. We conclude that negotiations with Elsevier and access restrictions have led to some reduced willingness to publish in Elsevier journals, but that researchers are not strongly affected in their ability to cite Elsevier articles, implying that researchers use other methods to access scientific literature.

Open Access (OA) facilitates access to research articles. However, authors or funders often must pay the publishing costs, preventing authors who do not receive financial support from participating in OA publishing and gaining citation advantage for OA articles. OA may exacerbate existing inequalities in the publication system rather than overcome them. To investigate this, we studied 522,411 articles published by Springer Nature. Employing correlation and regression analyses, we describe the relationship between authors affiliated with countries from different income levels, their choice of publishing model, and the citation impact of their papers. A machine learning classification method helped us to explore the importance of different features in predicting the publishing model. The results show that authors eligible for article processing charge (APC) waivers publish more in gold OA journals than others. In contrast, authors eligible for an APC discount have the lowest ratio of OA publications, leading to the assumption that this discount insufficiently motivates authors to publish in gold OA journals. We found a strong correlation between the journal rank and the publishing model in gold OA journals, whereas the OA option is mostly avoided in hybrid journals. Also, results show that the countries' income level, seniority, and experience with OA publications are the most predictive factors for OA publishing in hybrid journals.

The publication and distribution of scientific results is of major importance for the functioning of an information society and the tackling of the complex challenges the world faces today. It is not only scholars who rely on scientific publications to advance research but also the general public which demands scientific knowledge for its forthcoming. Major suppliers of scientific knowledge are the researchers themselves, science communicators and science journalists – each of which choose their very own approaches to selection, presentation and communication of science, often depending on the target group. Although different in their goals and approaches, digital media in particular has led to great overlaps which result in interwoven relationships equally affecting both external and internal forms of science communication. This edited book describes, quantifies and critically discusses the interplay between publisher- and journalism-driven science communication and its effect on the scholarly communication system, especially on the measures of impact evaluation. It is of major interest to researchers from science of science, bibliometrics, science communication, and journalism studies. ; The publication and distribution of scientific results is of major importance for the functioning of an information society and the tackling of the complex challenges the world faces today. It is not only scholars who rely on scientific publications to advance research but also the general public which demands scientific knowledge for its forthcoming. Major suppliers of scientific knowledge are the researchers themselves, science communicators and science journalists – each of which choose their very own approaches to selection, presentation and communication of science, often depending on the target group. Although different in their goals and approaches, digital media in particular has led to great overlaps which result in interwoven relationships equally affecting both external and internal forms of science communication. This edited book describes, quantifies and critically discusses the interplay between publisher- and journalism-driven science communication and its effect on the scholarly communication system, especially on the measures of impact evaluation. It is of major interest to researchers from science of science, bibliometrics, science communication, and journalism studies.