Fairness in scientific publishing

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Abstract

Major changes are afoot in the world of academic publishing, exemplified by innovations in publishing platforms, new approaches to metrics, improvements in our approach to peer review, and a focus on developing and encouraging open access to scientific literature and data.

The FAIR acronym recommends that authors and publishers should aim to make their output Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. In this opinion article, I explore the parallel view that we should take a collective stance on making the dissemination of scientific data fair in the conventional sense, by being mindful of equity and justice for patients, clinicians, academics, publishers, funders and academic institutions.

The views I represent are founded on oral and written dialogue with clinicians, academics and the publishing industry. Further progress is needed to improve collaboration and dialogue between these groups, to reduce misinterpretation of metrics, to minimise inequity that arises as a consequence of geographic setting, to improve economic sustainability, and to broaden the spectrum, scope, and diversity of scientific publication.

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Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals.

Richard Smith (2006)

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Data reuse and the open data citation advantage

Heather A. Piwowar, Todd J. Vision (2013)

Background. Attribution to the original contributor upon reuse of published data is important both as a reward for data creators and to document the provenance of research findings. Previous studies have found that papers with publicly available datasets receive a higher number of citations than similar studies without available data. However, few previous analyses have had the statistical power to control for the many variables known to predict citation rate, which has led to uncertain estimates of the “citation benefit”. Furthermore, little is known about patterns in data reuse over time and across datasets. Method and Results. Here, we look at citation rates while controlling for many known citation predictors and investigate the variability of data reuse. In a multivariate regression on 10,555 studies that created gene expression microarray data, we found that studies that made data available in a public repository received 9% (95% confidence interval: 5% to 13%) more citations than similar studies for which the data was not made available. Date of publication, journal impact factor, open access status, number of authors, first and last author publication history, corresponding author country, institution citation history, and study topic were included as covariates. The citation benefit varied with date of dataset deposition: a citation benefit was most clear for papers published in 2004 and 2005, at about 30%. Authors published most papers using their own datasets within two years of their first publication on the dataset, whereas data reuse papers published by third-party investigators continued to accumulate for at least six years. To study patterns of data reuse directly, we compiled 9,724 instances of third party data reuse via mention of GEO or ArrayExpress accession numbers in the full text of papers. The level of third-party data use was high: for 100 datasets deposited in year 0, we estimated that 40 papers in PubMed reused a dataset by year 2, 100 by year 4, and more than 150 data reuse papers had been published by year 5. Data reuse was distributed across a broad base of datasets: a very conservative estimate found that 20% of the datasets deposited between 2003 and 2007 had been reused at least once by third parties. Conclusion. After accounting for other factors affecting citation rate, we find a robust citation benefit from open data, although a smaller one than previously reported. We conclude there is a direct effect of third-party data reuse that persists for years beyond the time when researchers have published most of the papers reusing their own data. Other factors that may also contribute to the citation benefit are considered. We further conclude that, at least for gene expression microarray data, a substantial fraction of archived datasets are reused, and that the intensity of dataset reuse has been steadily increasing since 2003.

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Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial

Philip Davis, Bruce Lewenstein, Daniel H Simon … (2008)

Objective To measure the effect of free access to the scientific literature on article downloads and citations. Design Randomised controlled trial. Setting 11 journals published by the American Physiological Society. Participants 1619 research articles and reviews. Main outcome measures Article readership (measured as downloads of full text, PDFs, and abstracts) and number of unique visitors (internet protocol addresses). Citations to articles were gathered from the Institute for Scientific Information after one year. Interventions Random assignment on online publication of articles published in 11 scientific journals to open access (treatment) or subscription access (control). Results Articles assigned to open access were associated with 89% more full text downloads (95% confidence interval 76% to 103%), 42% more PDF downloads (32% to 52%), and 23% more unique visitors (16% to 30%), but 24% fewer abstract downloads (−29% to −19%) than subscription access articles in the first six months after publication. Open access articles were no more likely to be cited than subscription access articles in the first year after publication. Fifty nine per cent of open access articles (146 of 247) were cited nine to 12 months after publication compared with 63% (859 of 1372) of subscription access articles. Logistic and negative binomial regression analysis of article citation counts confirmed no citation advantage for open access articles. Conclusions Open access publishing may reach more readers than subscription access publishing. No evidence was found of a citation advantage for open access articles in the first year after publication. The citation advantage from open access reported widely in the literature may be an artefact of other causes.

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Author and article information

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): F1000Res

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): F1000Res

Journal ID (pmc): F1000Research

Title: F1000Research

Publisher: F1000Research (London, UK )

ISSN (Electronic): 2046-1402

Publication date (Electronic): 17 January 2017

Publication date Collection: 2016

Volume: 5

Electronic Location Identifier: 2816

Affiliations

[1 ]Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

[2 ]Harris Manchester College, Oxford, UK

[3 ]Department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, UK

[1 ]Department of Anesthesia, Pain Manahement & Perioperative Medicine, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

[1 ]Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

[1 ]Nigerian Academy of Science, Academy House 8A Ransome Kuti Road, University of Lagos, Akoka, Yaba Lagos, Nigeria

[1 ]Department of Anesthesia, Pain Manahement & Perioperative Medicine, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

[1 ]Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

Nuffield Department of Medicine, Peter Medawar Building for Pathogen Research, University of Oxford, UK

Author notes

[a ] philippa.matthews@ 123456ndm.ox.ac.uk

Competing interests: PCM was an invited speaker at the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) annual conference in September 2016.

Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed.

Article

DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.10318.2

PMC ID: 5247776

SO-VID: e997ab62-b2b0-4969-850d-8c5defd2dae4

License:

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The author(s) is/are employees of the US Government and therefore domestic copyright protection in USA does not apply to this work. The work may be protected under the copyright laws of other jurisdictions when used in those jurisdictions.

History

Date accepted : 11 January 2017

Funding

PCM is funded by a Wellcome Trust Intermediate Fellowship Grant, Ref. 110110/Z/15/Z.

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Fairness in scientific publishing

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Open Access Scholarship and its Impact on Scholarly Communication and Library Science

Most cited references 18

Peer review: a flawed process at the heart of science and journals.

Data reuse and the open data citation advantage

Open access publishing, article downloads, and citations: randomised controlled trial

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