Scholarly Communication in the News
A New Initiative to Help Speed the Peer Review of COVID-19 Articles
Announced on April 27, PeerJ and several other scholarly publishers have joined together in a new initiative to maximize the efficiency of peer review, as to help ensure that key work related to COVID-19 is reviewed and published as quickly and openly as possible. The group of publishers and scholarly communications organizations — initially comprising eLife, Hindawi, PeerJ, PLOS, Royal Society, F1000 Research, FAIRsharing, Outbreak Science, and PREreview — is working on initiatives and standards to speed up the review process while ensuring rigor and reproducibility remain paramount. With this announcement, PeerJ calls on any interested volunteers to read the Open Letter of Intent, and consider signing up as a rapid reviewer here. You can read the full press-release here.
May Issue of the Clarke & Esposito Brief Now Available
The May issues of the Clarke & Esposito Brief (#22: The Whirlwind) is now available. Topics covered in this month brief included: Modeling implications of the pandemic on subscription renewals, Developing institutional sales models for education products, Scenario planning for the future of scholarly publishing post-pandemic, and Developing strategies for increasing organizational agility. The full issue can be read here. Additionally, The Brief can now be found as a Twitter Feed, the Briefer Yet.
NIH Webinar Recording: Sharing, Discovering, and Citing COVID-19 Data and Code
On Friday, April 24 the NIH hosted a free webinar to researchers to learn how to share, discover, and cite COVID-19 data and code in generalist repositories. This webinar included speakers from a diversity of repository platforms, including Zenodo, GitHub, Figshare, and several others. The full list of speakers, slides, and full recording of the event can be found at the NIH's homepage for the event here.
Fostering Bibliodiversity in Scholarly Communications: A Call for Action
On April 15, representatives from the Confederation of Open Access Repositories,Centre for Critical Development at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Electronic Information for Libraries, and OPERAS released a paper, Fostering Bibliodiversity in Scholarly Communications: A Call for Action, which calls on on the community to make concerted efforts to develop strong, community-governed infrastructures that support diversity in scholarly communications (referred to as bibliodiversity). You can read the blog post here and full paper here.
Scholarly Communication at CMU
NISO Webinar Recording: NFAIS Forethought, Artificial Intelligence #1 – Planning for Implementation
On April 08, NISO hosted a NFAIS Forethought webinar, 'Artificial Intelligence #1 – Planning for Implementation.' Slides from the roundtable discussion have been uploaded to the NISO Web site.
Slides, Meeting Recording, Access Password: apr20Webins!
More information about this webinar can be found here.
Dimensions/Figshare Exportable Lists of Relevant Resources on COVID-19
Using Dimensions and Figshare, Digital Science has created a directory of publications, datasets, and clinical trials relevant to COVID-19. These openly available lists can be found as an exportable Google Sheet, and as a CSV file hosted on Figshare. Along with providing the Publisher's DOI, PMID, and PMCID, the Google Sheet also summarizes the open access status of the publications (All OA, Hybrid, Closed, etc.). To date, the lists contain 19,253 Publications, 1884 Clinical Trials, 252 Datasets, and 17 Grants.
Along with the Google Sheet and Figshare CSV File deposit, Dimensions has also created a dedicated link to the search query to follow as new items become available: https://covid-19.dimensions.ai/. Dimensions is updated once every 24 hours, so the latest research can be viewed alongside existing information using the provided link. I have also created a search string that looks for materials on COVID-19 from CMU authors, which can be viewed here.
Webinar Recording and Report: Dimensions and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
On Wednesday, May 6 from 10:00 - 11:00 AM EST, Dimensions hosted a free webinar on discovery and analysis of research in context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The webinar showed attendees how one could analyze their institution's SDG-related research and its authors, funders, publishers, collaborators and impact. The recording the webinar can be found here.
Additionally, Digital Science released a new report, which highlights the growth in research around the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. The forward to the report has been authored by Keith.
Open Access Updates
CMU APC Fund Discount Renewed: MDPI
CMU Authors publishing with MDPI will continue to receive a discounted APC rate for their articles after a successful renewal agreement with MDPI. Authors of MDPI publications will receive a 10% discount on their APCs from their affiliation listed with CMU. More information about MDPIs journals and their APCs can be found here. Additional information on all publishers CMU authors receive a discount on their APCs can be found on the APC Discount Tab of the CMU APC Fund page.
Elsevier Agreement PublicationsWith the new CMU-Elsevier Agreement now in effect, we will begin to see articles accepted for open access support under the terms of the agreement. Likewise, in an effort to support. Articles that have been accepted for Open Access status under the terms of the CMU-Elsevier Agreement will be listed in SCONE each month, and found in this new section of Open Access Updates.
April CMU APC Funded Articles
The following articles were approved for funding in April 2020:
- Carmel Majidi, Faculty, Civil and Environmental Engineering, 'Dynamic Simulation of Articulated Soft Robots,' Nature Communications
- Costa Samaras, Faculty, Civil and Environmental Engineering, 'Decarbonizing U.S. passenger vehicle transport under electrification and automation uncertainty has a travel budget,' Environmental Research Letters
- Lynn Walker, Faculty, Chemistry, 'Dynamic interfacial tension measurement under electric fields allows detection of charge carriers in nonpolar liquids,' Journal of Colloid and Interface Science (Pre Elsevier Agreement)
- Iain Cruickshank, Graduate Student, ISR, 'Analysis of Malware Communities Using Multi-Modal Features,' IEEE Access
Summary of FY '19-'20
A Summary of all articles funded in FY '19-'20 can be found here.
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