Academic publishing and scholarly communications: Good reads, April 2016

What have the scholarly circles been discussing this month? If you feel you may have missed out on

some of the buzz, we have you covered. This post shares some of the most interesting trends in

academia this April. This month saw recurring deliberations on the evolution of peer review and its

current state, the Sci-Hub initiative, career development of researchers, retraction, and so forth. Read

on this curated list of articles that includes some of the top discussions.

1. The beginnings of the peer review system: Do you know how peer review evolved to its present

form? Alex Csiszar, associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University, explains in

a Nature article how peer review was troubled from the start and how referee systems transitioned

into the peer review system of today.

2. Correcting the literary record: Retraction Watch reported the curious case of a journal that forced a

researcher to retract her earlier publication because she wished to expand on some of the ideas in her

previous paper. Hanna Kokko of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, co-authored a paper in 2016 in

which she explained the errors she had spotted in the previous paper she had co-authored. This

eventually led the journal to retract the paper, bringing into question whether retraction is the only way

to correct the literary record.

3. Novelty underrated in research proposals: According to a recently published study, highly novel

research proposals are being rejected because the academics evaluating these proposals are unable to

fully comprehend or appreciate creative scientific ideas. Resultantly, researchers might prefer to focus

on ideas that are easier to get funded. Such bias against novel proposals could potentially hamper

breakthroughs and be damaging to the progress of science.

4. Scie ce co u ity’s reactio to the Sci-Hub initiative: In the article Who s dow loadi g pi ated papers? Everyone, John Bohannon discusses why publishers are feeling threatened by Sci-Hub, the

world's largest site that hosts pirated papers and gives researchers free access to over 50 million papers.

While initially intended to benefit researchers from developing countries by helping them bypass the

paywalls of for-profit journals, Sci-Hub is gaining popularity among researchers in the US and Europe as

well. Many scholars support the initiative as they feel that companies should not make huge profits from

research that scholars provide to them for free.

5. Imposter syndrome among academics: Beth M Milla i gs i to li elight the p o le of impostor

syndrome, o the pa a oia that a pe so is ot wo thy of his o he positio , whi h is uite o o among researchers. Many academics, even the successful ones, often feel that their success is a result of

sheer luck or external factors instead of their own merits or hard work. The author discusses whether

academic success would come easily to those who fight the syndrome or accept themselves as

imposters.

6. Problematic images in biomedical papers: A recent analysis of biomedical papers revealed that

around one in every twenty five papers, which is around 4% of all papers, includes problematic images.

A group of researchers analyzed 20,621 research articles in multiple journals and found that although

most image-related problems were not fraudulent, they misrepresented the experiments, suggesting

that journals need to be more vigilant when reviewing papers.

7. Creativity and innovation in biomedical papers: Often, researchers are afraid to get creative when it

comes to research, and this is exactly what Patrick Dunleavy, author of "Authoring a PhD Thesis: How to

Plan, Draft, Write and Finish a Doctoral Dissertation," talks about in his article. He discusses how

biomedical researchers can introduce creativity and innovation in their research by not being too

worried about success or failure. In his article, he provides tips for creative thinking in biomedical

research including taking the risk of trying to think innovatively, being alert for anomalies and

paradoxes, reading a variety of different types of literature in the field (journals, blogs, etc.), and so on.

He concludes saying that "Over time, the effort to think more creatively will hopefully pay dividends."

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Did you read something interesting about academic publishing this month? And would you like to share

it with our readers? Feel free to share your reading in the comments section below.