96 things publishers do...

Guest post on the The Scholarly Kitchen blog from Ken Anderson.

Top 5:

1. Audience/field detection and cultivation.
2. Journal launch and registration 
3. Create and establish a viable brand
4. Make money and remain a constant in the system of scholarly output.
5. Plan and create strategies for the future
   
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The Reproducibility Project finds a minority of studies can be replicated

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An attempt to estimate the reproducibility of psychological research has found that only 39% of results from three leading psychology journals could be reproduced.


Read the article from the Atlantic Monthly How Reliable Are Psychology Studies?
Visit the site for the Reproducibility Project and the Summary Report from Science.

2015 Academic Reputation Survey

Thomson Reuters released its 6th annual Academic Reputation Survey:
“Exploring Scholarly Trends and Shifts Impacting the Academic Reputation of the World’s Leading Universities”. 

The report analyzes the key trends and shifts in global research influencing institutions’ academic standings. It covers 65,000 academics from 6,500 universities in 105 areas of study.

AAUP Faculty Salary Survey 2014-2015

Busting the Myths, the annual update to the Staff and Faculty survey from the AAUP has been released. You can search the results from 4700 colleges and universities from the Chronicle of Higher Education page, sort by types of schools (very high research, business and management schools, men vs women salary etc.)

2015 List of Predatory Publishers

As of January 2017, J. Beall has shut down his blog.

5th update to the annual list of predatory publishers by J. Beall, librarian from the University of Colorado Denver. In addition the usual lists, there are now a list for Misleading Metrics and one for Hijacked Journals

The peer-review scam

Last month Nature posted an article: Publishing: The peer-review scam, it lists the existing weaknesses in modern publishing systems and details how editors are trying to plug the holes.

2014 Nobel prizes predictions from Thomson Reuters

The first 2014 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medecine will be announced shortly.

Like every year Thomson Reuters uses its citation analysis tools to predict the winners. Click for the press release and full list.

Click here for the methodology.

The state of Learning Management Systems in Higher Education

Educause has released a report this month: 'The Current Ecosystem of Learning Management Systems in Higher Education: Student, Faculty, and IT Perspectives" 

"On average, LMSs have been in place for eight years, and 15% of U.S. higher education institutions are currently planning to replace their LMS within the next three years."

Journal Subscription Costs

Cambridge mathematician Tim Gowers who had launched the 2012 Elsevier boycott movement digs deeper into the publishing giant business practices and the various ways it charges universities and schools . 

Read his entire blog entry: Elsevier journals — some facts

Source: http://neurodojo.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/cost-of-elsevier-journals-by-university.html 

2013-2014 AAUP Faculty Salary Survey

Another survey on faculty salary in the US.
The table is available on the Chronicle of Higher Education website:

Faculty in Higher Education Salary Survey 2014

CUPAHR, the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, has released its latest faculty salary survey: Salaries of Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty at 4-Year Colleges, 2013-14
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about it and the interactive table on their website.

"Research universities are doctorate-granting institutions that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has classified as having either high or very high research activity."

The top three disciplines with the highest salaries are respectively Legal Profession, Business and Engineering.

Read the Executive Summary for methodology and a list of participating institutions.

ISNI: International Standard Name Identifier

Author name disambiguation has become increasingly important with the rise of bibliometrics.


This article/interview from the Scholarly Kitchen by Todd Carpenter explains the goal of ISNI: the International Standard Name Identifier initiative and its relationship with the existing ORCID (see this post).

One year with MOOCs, research findings from the first 17 edX classes

Courtesy of: MOOCs.com

Professors from MIT and Harvard report on their first year in MOOCs and the edX project: 

MITx working papers
HarvardX Working Papers

• There were 841,687 registrations from 597,692 unique users
• Only 5 percent earned a certificate of completion.
• One-third of users never viewed any course materials.
• More than half of those who completed at least half of the course went on to earn a certificate of completion

See also:
Education Week article from one of the authors, 

The First Year of edX: Research Findings to Inform Online Learning

2014 Updated List of Predatory Publishers

As of January 2017, J. Beall has shut down his blog.

Jeffrey Beall, Scholarly Initiatives Librarian and Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Denver, has released the 2014 list of predatory publishers and questionable journals.

Reproduced with permission below, the table shows a significant growth in number:

Year	Number of predatory publishers
2011	18
2012	23
2013	225
2014	477

Google Scholar Library

A new initiative from Scholar:

"Google Scholar library is your personal collection of articles. You can save articles right off the search page, organize them by topic, and use the power of Scholar search to quickly find just the one you want "

Read this page detailed help to get started.
This could potentially become a threat to free citation management software such as Zotero and Mendeley as mentioned in a post from 'The Distant Librarian' .

Social Media for Teaching & Learning - Pearson report 2013

Pearson has released its 2013 Social Media in Higher Education survey [free registration required]

Infographic

Open Access Week - Oct 21- 27 2013.

Open Access Week "a global event now entering its sixth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they've learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research."

Publishers participation:

• Oxford 
• SAGE 
• Taylor & Francis 

HBR's fee policy questioned

Found on Flickr - CC

Joshua Gans, chaired professor at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto questions whether changes to Harvard Business Review article fee policy should impact their participation to the FT's business school rankings.

While this is a long shot - FT has already said that they would keep HBR on the list of publications used for their ranking - the article raises good questions about access to research content.

Links to his original post, his article in FT and HBR's answer are available from his Digitopoly blog.

Update: Librarians chime in via Chris Flegg's [Bodleian Business Librarian at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford] article in the Financial Times (Oct. 23, 2013):
Access to research comes at a price

Open Access and Peer Review issues

John Bohannon, journalist at Science, sent a fake research paper under a fake name to several open access peer review journals. He reports on the experiment in Science: Who's Afraid of Peer Review  (INSEAD community only)

CREDIT: C. SMITH/SCIENCE

Unfortunately "Acceptance was the norm, not the exception. The paper was accepted by journals hosted by industry titans Sage and Elsevier. The paper was accepted by journals published by prestigious academic institutions such as Kobe University in Japan. It was accepted by scholarly society journals. It was even accepted by journals for which the paper's topic was utterly inappropriate, such as the Journal of Experimental & Clinical Assisted Reproduction."

Some critique the paper for lack if its own academic rigor in not using a control group of subscription based journals to compare the acceptance/rejection rate, read: 

Open Access “Sting” Reveals Deception, Missed Opportunities .

Update Oct. 8, 2013: Read more reactions here or here

edX+Google = mooc.org

A new alliance in the ever growing field of MOOCs was announced on the Google Research blog:
The platform mooc.org is set to go live in the first half of 2014.

Today, Google will begin working with edX as a contributor to the open source platform, Open edX. We are taking our learnings from Course Builder and applying them to Open edX to further innovate on an open source MOOC platform. We look forward to contributing to edX’s new site, MOOC.org, a new service for online learning which will allow any academic institution, business and individual to create and host online courses.

edX press release.