Opening the Black-Box of Peer Review: An Agent-Based Model of Scientist Behaviour
Peer review is a cornerstone of science. The process allows scientists to experimentally pursue new lines of research through a continuous, decentralised and socially shared process of trial and error and ensures the quality of knowledge produced. This paper investigates the impact of referee behaviour on the quality and efficiency of peer review. We focused on the importance of reciprocity motives in ensuring cooperation between all involved parties. We modelled peer review as a process based on knowledge asymmetries and subject to evaluation bias. We built various simulation scenarios in which we tested different interaction conditions and author and referee behaviour. We found that reciprocity cannot always have per se a positive effect on the quality of peer review, as it may tend to increase evaluation bias. It can have a positive effect only when reciprocity motives are inspired by disinterested standards of fairness.
Directory of Open Access Books
The primary aim of DOAB is to increase discoverability of Open Access books. Academic publishers are invited to provide metadata of their Open Access books to DOAB. Metadata will be harvestable in order to maximize dissemination, visibility and impact. Aggregators can integrate the records in their commercial services and libraries can integrate the directory into their online catalogues, helping scholars and students to discover the books. The directory will be open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided that these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards.
The Directory of Open Access Books is a service of OAPEN Foundation. The OAPEN Foundation is an international initiative dedicated to Open Access monograph publishing, based at the National Library in The Hague. DOAB is being developed in close cooperation with Lars Bjørnshauge and Salam Baker Shanawa (director of SemperTool), who were also responsible for the development of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). SemperTool develops and maintains DOAB system.
Policy Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Open Access
These Guidelines provide an account of the development of Open Access, why it is important and desirable, how to attain it, and the design and effectiveness of policies. The Policy Guidelines can be used by individuals as a basic text on Open Access and related policies. While we recommend that beginners to the world of Open Access should read it from cover to cover, people having some understanding of OA may like to start reading from any of the sections. Decision-makers, administrators and research managers should focus on Sections 8 and 9 that capture all relevant issues of OA policy development. At the end of this document, you will find examples of different types of OA policies, and three policy templates to choose and adopt. While every institution may have their unique process of policy adoption, we recommend a more democratic, consultative and open approach to adopt Open Access policy, as success of the policy implementation will depend on the ownership of the stakeholders to deposit their work and/or publish in OA journals.
Science Dissemination using Open Access
This book aims to guide the scientific community on the requirements of Open Access, and the plethora of low-cost solutions available. A compendium of selected literature on Open Access is presented to increase the awareness of the potential of open publishing in general. Discussions on open publishing via Academic Webcasting are also included. The book also aims to encourage decision makers in academia and research centers to adopt institutional and regional Open Access Journals and Archives to make their own scientific results public and fully searchable on the Internet.
Open Access – Scholarly Literature and Digital Library Initiatives – The South Asian Scenario
The South Asia sub-region is now in the forefront of the Open Access movement within developing countries in the world, with India being the most prominent partner in terms of its successful Open Access and Digital Library initiatives. Institutional and policy frameworks in India also facilitate innovative solutions for increasing international visibility and accessibility of scholarly literature and documentary heritage in this country. This publication discusses successful activities in the South Asia subregion bringing closer to the worldwide audience, the subject of access to scholarly literature and documentary heritage. This may thus be considered an authoritative source-book on Open Access Development in this sub-region.
Global Open Access Portal – UNESCO
The Global Open Access Portal is designed to provide the necessary information for policy-makers to learn about the global OA environment and to view their country’s status, and understand where and why Open Access has been most successful. At a glance, the portal provides an overview of the framework surrounding Open Access in UNESCO Member States by focusing on:
- the critical success factors for effectively implementing Open Access;
- each country’s strengths and opportunities for further developments;
- where mandates for institutional deposits and funding organization have been put into place;
- potential partners at the national and regional level; and
- funding, advocacy, and support organizations throughout the world.
Adaptable leaders may have best brains for the job
Effective leaders’ brains may be physically “wired” to lead, offering the promise of more precise identification and training. Researchers have linked adaptive leadership skills with brain functioning and psychological complexity measures among active leaders. Those leaders who were found to be more adaptable and complex in psychological studies appeared to have brains that function differently from those of less adaptable leaders, according to an article published online in the APA Journal of Applied Psychology. This fusion of neuroscience and leadership research could one day revolutionize how organizations assess and develop effective and adaptive leaders, according to the study’s authors.
Directory of Open Access Journals
The aim of the DOAJ is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals, thereby promoting their increased usage and impact. The DOAJ aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content. In short, the DOAJ aims to be THE one stop shop for users of open access journals. We define open access journals as journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. From the BOAI definition of “open access“, we support the rights of users to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles” as mandatory for a journal to be included in the directory.
Open Access – Episciences Project offers new publishing formula
If universities are so concerned about the subscription prices and article fees charged by publishers, why don’t they disseminate their research for free via their own repositories? One answer to this question is that researchers want to target their papers at others in their field, but some disciplines have their own subject-wide repositories. The most celebrated is arXiv.org, which covers an ever-expanding range of fields within physics and mathematics. But might it be possible at least to reduce the cost of journal publishing by taking it out of the hands of commercial publishers and using arXiv itself as the publishing platform? This is precisely what the Episciences Project aims to achieve by establishing a series of “epijournals” in maths.
Open access: The true cost of science publishing
Cheap open-access journals raise questions about the value publishers add for their money.
These charges and counter-charges have been volleyed back and forth since the open-access idea emerged in the 1990s, but because the industry’s finances are largely mysterious, evidence to back up either side has been lacking. Although journal list prices have been rising faster than inflation, the prices that campus libraries actually pay to buy journals are generally hidden by the non-disclosure agreements that they sign. And the true costs that publishers incur to produce their journals are not widely known.
The past few years have seen a change, however. The number of open-access journals has risen steadily, in part because of funders’ views that papers based on publicly funded research should be free for anyone to read.
