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Cambridge Data Week 2020 day 5: How do we peer review data? New sustainable and effective models
Cambridge Data Week 2020 was an event run by the Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge University Libraries from 23–27 November 2020. In a series of talks, panel discussions and interactive Q&A sessions, researchers, funders, publishers and other stakeholders explored and debated different approaches to research data management. This blog is part of a series summarising each event: The rest of the blogs comprising this series are as follows:Cambridge Data Week day 1 blogCambridge Data Week day 2 blogCambridge Data Weekday 3 blogCambridge Data Week day 4 blog Introduction Cambridge Data Week 2020 concluded on 27 November with a discussion between Dr Lauren Cadwallader (PLOS), Professor Stephen Eglen (University of Cambridge) and Kiera McNeice (Cambridge University Press) on models of data peer…
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‘No free labor’ – we agree.
[NOTE: The introductory sentence to this blog was changed on 27 June to provide clarification] Last week members of the University of California* released a Call to Action to ‘Champion change in journal negotiations’ which references the April 2018 Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication. This states as one of the 18 principles: “No free labor. Publishers shall provide our Institution with data on peer review and editorial contributions by our authors in support of journals, and such contributions shall be taken into account when determining the cost of our subscriptions or OA fees for our authors.” Well, this is interesting. At Cambridge we have been trying to look…
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Reflections on Open Research – a PI’s perspective
As part of the Open Research Pilot Project, Marta Teperek met with Dr David Savage and asked him several questions about his own views and motivations for Open Research. This led to a very inspiring conversation and great reflections on Open Research from the Principal Investigator’s perspective. The main points that came out of the discussion were: Lack of reproducibility raises questions about scientific rigour, integrity and relevance of work in general Being open is to work in a team and be collaborative Open Research will benefit science as a whole, and not the careers of individuals Peer review remains a critical aspect of the scientific process Nowadays, global collaboration…
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How to get the most out of modern peer-review
On 30th March the Office of Scholarly Communication hosted an event How to get the most out of modern peer-review, bringing together researchers, publishers and library staff to discuss how peer review is changing. Dr Laurent Gatto was both a presenter and a participant, and with permission we have re-posted his blog about the event here. Publisher presentations There were presentations from eLife (Dr Wei Mun Chan) and F1000Research (Dr Sabina Alam, @Sab_Ra) in the Innovations in peer-review session. PeerJ was mentioned several times, for publishing their peer reviews, for example. I general, I think the presenters did a good job in demonstrating modern peer review on how it can benefit authors…
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The case for Open Research: solutions?
This series arguing the case for Open Research has to date looked at some of the issues in scholarly communication today. Hyperauthorship, HARKing, the reproducibility crisis, a surge in retractions all stem from the requirement that researchers publish in high impact journals. The series has also looked at the invalidity of the impact factor and issues with peer review. This series is one of an increasing cacophony of calls to move away from this method of rewarding researchers. Richard Smith noted in a recent BMJ blog criticising the current publication in journal system: “The whole outdated enterprise is kept alive for one main reason: the fact that employers and funders…
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The case for Open Research: does peer review work?
This is the fourth in a series of blog posts on the Case for Open Research, this time looking at issues with peer review. The previous three have looked at the mis-measurement problem, the authorship problem and the accuracy of the scientific record. This blog follows on from the last and asks – if peer review is working why are we facing issues like increased retractions and the inability to reproduce considerable proportion of the literature? (Spoiler alert – peer review only works sometimes.) Again, there is an entire corpus of research behind peer review, this blog post merely scrapes the surface. As a small indicator, there has been a Peer Review Congress…
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‘It is all a bit of a mess’ – observations from Researcher to Reader conference
“It is all a bit of a mess. It used to be simple. Now it is complicated.” This was the conclusion of Mark Carden, the coordinator of the Researcher to Reader conference after two days of discussion, debate and workshops about scholarly publication.. The conference bills itself as: ‘The premier forum for discussion of the international scholarly content supply chain – bringing knowledge from the Researcher to the Reader.’ It was unusual because it mixed ‘tribes’ who usually go to separate conferences. Publishers made up 47% of the group, Libraries were next with 17%, Technology 14%, Distributors were 9% and there were a small number of academics and others. In addition to talks and panel discussions…
