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347 news posts in Open science

Open science and peer review

01 Sep 2015

Publishers stand together in the fight against fraudulent peer review

In recent months, several academic publishers have been forced to retract a combined total of over 250 published articles across a number of disciplines due to irregularities and outright fraudulence in the peer-review process. As a result of this, the stringency of checks carried out by publishers during the submission and review process of manuscripts has come under the spotlight. Here, we give  some background to this ongoing issue and discuss the various practices by which it can be contained. At the beginning of 2014, several journals under the aegis of a major publishing house were forced to retract 100+ papers when it was revealed that these papers had been “created” by SCIgen, a computer program that generates ‘random Computer Science research’ using context-free grammar. Later that year, a piece in Nature by retractionwatch.com activists Ivan Oransky, Cat Ferguson and Adam Marcus warned of the increasing danger of authors surreptitiously reviewing their own papers; an issue taken up by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) in a statement on 19 December 2014. Although ostensibly different issues, they both pointed towards problems residing at the core of academic publication – the soundness of peer-review. In March of this year, a Web of […]

Open science and peer review

14 Aug 2015

ILLUSTRATION: Beginner’s Guide to Peer Review

By Chloe Schmidt and Katherine Lawson Submitting your first manuscript can be daunting to those who are unfamiliar with the process.  To help clear up any uncertainty surrounding manuscript submission and peer review for first-timers, we’ve put together an illustrated guide of some of the basics. To see the Illustrated Beginner’s Guide to Peer Review in full size, either click on the image or download the PDF at this link:

Young Minds

10 Aug 2015

VIDEO: The motivation behind Frontiers for Young Minds

Frontiers for Young Minds from Frontiers on Vimeo. Frontiers for Young Minds is a non-profit scientific journal written by scientists for young people, but with an innovative twist: the kids themselves assume the role of “peer reviewer.” Distinguished scientists are invited to write about their cutting-edge discoveries in a language that is accessible for a young audience, and it is then up to the kids themselves – with the help of a science mentor – to critique the article and to explain to the authors how to improve the contribution before publication. As a result, Frontiers for Young Minds provides a collection of freely available scientific articles that are not only rigorous, but also shaped for younger audiences by the input of their own peers. Even before the publication of our first 50 articles, the quality of Frontiers for Young Minds was recognized as one of the American Library Association’s 2014 Great Websites for Kids. In this video, Project Manager Amanda Baker explains some of the motivation behind the project and what it hopes to accomplish going forward. The presentation was given in early 2015 as part of an internal seminar series at Frontiers, since which more articles have been […]

Young Minds

27 Jul 2015

Trying For Fun, And Ending Up With A Textbook Instead

Note: This blog post was originally published as a blog on Scientific American – http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/frontiers-for-young-minds/trying-for-fun-and-ending-up-with-a-textbook-instead/ Knowing your audience is a vital piece of science communication: what is important to them, what is exciting to them, and what will send the right message. But it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that knowing about your audience is the same as knowing what they actually like. I speak from personal experience and – as the manager of a journal founded on the idea of asking kids to review scientific articles for their own peers – the irony of my own surprise at kid feedback is not lost. We recently set about creating a new design for the PDF versions of our articles. The goal was to make them more accessible and more enticing to young readers. Our team came up with a series of proposals that were each designed with the following goals in mind: Make the articles easier to read Take better advantage of the figures Make the articles seem more fun Make the new vocabulary easier to understand Make the articles feel as little like school as possible Get young readers to want to read all the way to the end […]

Open science and peer review

20 Jul 2015

EC endorses Gold Open Access with new pilot project

The European Commission (EC) recently announced a new pilot project that supports publishing with Gold Open Access publishers like Frontiers.  The pilot, entitled OpenAIRE, will help fund Open Access publications for FP7 projects finished within the last two years which have been accepted and peer-reviewed. Only publications in recognized Open Access journals listed in the DOAJ, Scopus, Web of Science and PubMed  are eligible for post-publication funding with as much as €2,000 per article to help cover publishing costs for research and review article types and as much as €6,000 for monographs. “This announcement is very important to the industry as it not only shows that the EC recognizes Gold Open Access publishing as one of the key solutions to unlocking research knowledge, it is also important as they have expressed their appreciation for the costs involved in providing a high quality Open Access publishing service,” said Kamila Markram, CEO of Frontiers. Frontiers provides a premier Gold Open Access solution with a novel enhanced interactive peer-review process that helps authors and reviewers enhance the quality of published articles. In as little as 7 years, Frontiers has became one of the top 5 Gold Open Access publishers in the world with over 34,000 articles published in 54 journals covering 411 specialties across all academia.  Articles published with Frontiers qualify for funding through […]