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Short abstract:

I explored how a mega-journal defines and implements geographic diversity in the composition of its editorial board, which comprises over 9,000 scholars from worldwide. I will share some findings on the biases that might be reproduced in journals linked to language and technologies for peer review.

Long abstract:

Ongoing debates on the disparities in journal editorial boards (EBs) have highlighted the dominance of editors largely based in high-income countries. To address that issue, some publishers have implemented geographic diversity strategies such as inviting scholars from the so-called Global South to join their editorial boards (EBs). As a result, some journals nowadays report EBs made up of scholars based in several countries across the world and publicize those numbers as compliance with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements. However, managing editorial boards that are diverse in their composition poses certain challenges that are less apparent. For example, the difficulties of running the technological infrastructure needed to manage the publication workflow of submissions from worldwide remain unknown. To investigate this further, I studied the case of a mega-journal run by a nonprofit based in the U.S. I explored how the mega-journal defines and implements diversity in the composition of its editorial board, which comprises over 9,000 scholars from around the world. In this presentation, I will share some of the findings of my study regarding the biases that might be reproduced in international EBs linked to language and the use of technologies for peer review.

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Short abstract:

I analyze peer review practices in psychology, a field said to be in the midst of a replication crisis. I focus on how experimentation with publishing workflows, review formats, and business models reconfigure the mutual obligation dynamics between researchers that underpin the peer review economy.

Long abstract:

Peer review is currently said to be in crisis, in the sense that many journals – even very reputed ones – find it difficult to recruit sufficient numbers of reviewers in a timely fashion. A common response by analysts and academic practitioners is to call for more incentives to take on peer review work, which is typically not formally acknowledged and rewarded by institutions. In this presentation, I challenge the behaviorist notion that there are simply insufficient incentives for peer review. While there is undoubtedly a mismatch between rewards for publishing and rewards for peer review, I argue that peer review is carried out in the context of a surplus of already existing but often invisible and undertheorized incentives on the level of academic communities and the political economy of publishing. Understanding their interaction is crucial to developing a better understanding of peer review systems. The empirical basis for my research is a set of 40 interviews with researchers in the field of psychology. Some ten years ago, many observers began to state that the field is in the midst of a so-called reproducibility crisis, which has in turn fueled significant experimentation with publishing workflows, review formats, and novel publishing business models. Concrete innovations include preprint review, registered reports, soundness-only review, various types of open peer review, and new APC models. I will show how such innovations configure experiences of mutual obligation between authors, reviewers and publishing venues, which I argue are central to the workings of peer review systems.

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Short abstract:

This study examines researchers' use of public communication in scholarly publishing, exploring its role in the accumulation of symbolic capital in the academic field. It uses problem-centred interviews and qualitative media analysis in sociology to explore sociologists' perceptions and practices.

Long abstract:

This paper examines the role of individual researchers’ public communication practices regarding a transformation of scholarly publishing. I argue that researchers direct their public communication not only to external audiences, but also to different actors within the academic field. On the one hand, individual researchers may use public communication to meet the visibility expectations of different (organizational) stakeholders. On the other hand, preliminary data suggest that it is also used to increase researchers’ own visibility among their peers.

Examining public communication as scholarly publishing draws on Bourdieu's concept of two forms of symbolic capital within the academic field. This notion of the academic field also opens up a perspective on public communication for negotiating the competitive structures of the field. In this respect, the study addresses the transformation of scholarly publishing towards public communication both at the individual level and also in terms of the concurrence of academic and media rationalities in the field. The latter refers to Weingart's concept of the medialization of science.

The guiding research question is "To what extent do individual researchers use and consider public communication as a form of scholarly communication?". I explore this through a combination of problem-centred interviews and qualitative media analysis in the field of sociology. This reflects sociologists' views on their communication activities and their perceptions of publicly visible peers. As this is work in progress, I will conceptualise the role of public visibility in relation to pure scientific capital accumulated through peer-reviewed academic publications, also drawing on preliminary findings.

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Short abstract:

The communication will begin by describing the reasons why these editorial boards have decided to stop collaborating with their publisher.It will then detail the fate of 'abandoned' journals and new journals. Finally, it will examine at how this 'liberation' fits into wider strategies.

Long abstract:

In 2001, SPARC produced a document entitled “Declaring Independence. A Guide to Creating Community-Controlled Science Journals ». This document was a toolkit to help editorial teams to move away from commercial publishers, in line with the Budapest Open Access Initiative call for “alternative journals”. More than two decades later, while thousands of new open access journals (commercial or community-owned) have been created, only a few dozens editorial boards have followed this independence path .However, they illustrate a contemporary transformation in scientific publication: the attempts by scientific communities to reappropriate distribution media.

The communication will begin by describing the reasons why these editorial boards have decided to stop collaborating with their publisher, which range from a demand for autonomy in the face of decisions deemed arbitrary to a rejection of licensing agreements and a disapproval of the publisher's general policies. It will then detail the fate of 'abandoned' journals (when relevant) and new journals in terms of survival, publication volume, disciplinary orientation and economic model (Gold APC, Diamond, Hybrid, Subscription). Finally, it will examine at how this 'liberation' fits into wider strategies, ranging from creating new journals from scratch to switch from publisher to publisher or to reincorporate disseminatoin for learned society journals.

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Long abstract:

Scholarly publishing and science communication today primarily rely on digital formats. Databases and digital repositories are increasingly being used to store and publish research data. Open access (OA) publishing, endorsed by researchers and funders, is regarded as a desirable and contemporary publication strategy allowing for free access to scientific knowledge, with non-commercial OA models contrasting commercialized ones.

While OA enhances the visibility and representation of research and may give a voice to marginalized groups, it also introduces new vulnerabilities. Challenges include the increasing difficulty of anonymizing informants, the potential for decontextualization and appropriation of sensitive content, and the risks researchers face, exemplified by cases like Ahmed Samir Santawy's imprisonment in Egypt.

Furthermore, OA infrastructures and the transition from printed journals to PDF documents raise questions about how digital-material practices intertwined with OA shape modes of academic knowledge production in the digital era, e.g. in regard to screen-based reading habits, the roles of algorithmic actors, or the growing importance of metrics like clicks and download counts.

The EthnOA project, funded by the German Research Foundation, seeks to accompany the ongoing transformation within German Social and Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology. Over three years, it aims to foster critical debates on OA, support journal editors and researchers, contribute to sustainable OA infrastructures, and ethnographically investigate ethical issues associated with OA.

In our contribution, we aim to explore the complex ethical issues surrounding OA and the transformation of scholarly publishing through the lens of phenomenal anthropologies and co-creative choreographies of diverse actors.

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Long abstract:

In chemistry, injunctions to open up publication (or perceived as such) have met with "resistance" for decades, and chemists have often mobilized to denounce this move towards openness in their discipline. The proposed communication focuses on disciplinary communities that may have appeared conservative in their choices for (or against) open science, and looks back at two key moments in the controversies around Open Access policies: firstly, in 2010, when the first OA mandates were adopted in Europe (with an “anti-OA” petition signed by 80 chemists addressed to the Swedish national funding agency, relatively confined to Sweden) and in 2018 with the announcement of Plan S, when collectives of scientists mobilized following the framing by a COAlition S (a group of European funders) of a 10-principle plan imposing, from 2020, OA on articles resulting from research funded by these stakeholders. Initiated by a chemist at Uppsala University, the 2018 mobilization took the form of a petition that spread internationally and gathered over 1,700 signatories in 50 countries. More than a mobilization of keyboards (Badouard), the petition is seen here as a relevant analyzer of complex dynamics, reflecting a social game but also a place of affirmation. It questions what it means to be "for" or "against" OA, and the scope of OA policies in "intermediate" countries where OA infrastructures and performance-based allocation systems have existed for years, and conceived as a programmatic framework for imagining and mobilizing support for change towards new practices rather than for describing and explaining existing ones.

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Long abstract:

The open access (OA) movement is one of the great transformations of contemporary science, offering both unmatched challenges and opportunities for developing regions of the world (Frank et al, 2023). In Latin America, some of the changes include the reform of national and institutional policies, and, more ubiquitously and despite the high costs associated with Article Processing Charges (APCs), the growth of OA publications. Minniti et al (2018) found that between 2005 and 2017, 1 in 5 Latin American and the Caribbean publications were published in OA, and there is an upward trend. However, as is the case with other regions of the Global South, the implications of this transition on scientific collaboration and interdisciplinarity have not been thoroughly explored, especially after the Covid 19 pandemic.

Using data from Scopus, this bibliometric analysis identifies patterns of collaboration and interdisciplinary research within Latin American OA research during the years 2017-2022. By examining publication, citation and co-authorship trends, we aim to answer: What are the collaboration patterns within Latin American OA research? What are the most studied research areas? And what role do stakeholders, such as universities, journals, research institutions, and funding agencies, play in the rise of OA publications in the continent? As such, this article provides insights into how OA practices reflect significant changes in Latin American and global scientific collaboration patterns. Additionally, by identifying the roles of various stakeholders, it may inform future policies aimed at fostering OA and promoting interdisciplinary collaboration in Latin America and beyond.

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Long abstract:

Publication in so-called questionable (‘grey’) journals has exponentially increased in the last few years. Big publishers like MPDI or Frontiers, which are often considered paradigmatic examples in this category, are already third and seventh in the ranking of most prolific academic publishers. Various criticisms have been levelled at some of these journals and, especially, at their quality standards: their peer review system, the unbridled use of special issues, their very broad or ambiguous thematic coverage or the percentage of self-citations, etc. Some academic institutions and governments have already minimised the impact of these publications on research evaluation. Spain is the third country in number of publications in these journals - while it is 12th in scientific output. One of these journals, recently removed from Web of Science, has been the preferred journal for Spanish scientists in 2021 and 2022. This paper aims to explore the opinions and assessments of researchers who have published repeatedly in this type of journals in the last 5 years. The study is based on 15 interviews with researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, from different fields and at different stages of their academic career, and analyses, firstly, their motivation to publish in these journals, their perception of the editorial process, to what extent they are aware of their controversial status and what is their opinion about it, and, secondly, what kind of imaginaries and norms they associate, in general, with scientific publication and peer review.

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Long abstract:

This paper critically reflects on the work undertaken to establish the Open Book Collective (OBC), a digital platform and charity that, since its launch in 2022, has already reconfigured some key socio-economic relations surrounding the publishing and circulation of book length scholarship. It was established as part of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project and is at the heart of its successor project: Open Book Futures. Both aim to help deliver a fairer, more bibliodiverse future for open access book publishing. One unusual feature of the OBC is that from the start its design has been informed by key STS principles, including engaging directly with the politics of infrastructures and the politics of platforms. These principles have been brought to bear in an endeavour that involves new collaborations between scholars, librarians and open access publishers and infrastructure providers. As one of the co-creators of the OBC, I reflect on how engaging in this work of ‘infrastructuring’, while also bringing together these different components of the higher education ecosystem, sheds new light on how we might want to understand the political and practical challenges of building different futures for higher education, in the context of the rise of so-called ‘edutech’ and increasing logics of financialization and assetization. The paper argues that STS needs to grapple better with that small but increasingly active part of academic work itself directly involved in digital infrastructure building and efforts to engage with, and respond to, ongoing transformations in scholarly publishing.

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Long abstract:

In the midst of radical transformations in scholarly publishing driven by automated processes and AI tools, podcasting emerges as a counterforce with the potential to recentralize the practice of human dialogues in knowledge creation and dissemination. Particularly in podcast studies, researchers are experimenting not only with 'sonifying' their written works into spoken audio forms but also with voice-recorded peer reviews and conversation/interview-based co-authored articles. These endeavors aim to establish alternative publication channels, challenge existing power structures and norms within academic knowledge production, and reevaluate the primacy of writing in communicating research.

Accordingly, this proposal suggests positioning conversation as the focal point of publishable production, utilizing speech-to-text technology to draft an initial basis for academic articles. Drawing from my experience with cross-cultural conversational analysis of three distinct podcast productions centered on the same story, I present an auto-methodological perspective on how voice and conversation can prompt a reassessment of what qualifies as publishable scholarly work.

This method involves recording a semi-structured discussion, generating a written article draft with speech-to-text software, collaboratively revising the automated transcription, and subsequently reflecting on the roles of voice, language, and accent as mediators of the analysis. While initially designed to explore sound and voice-based cultural artifacts, this method prompts us to confront contemporary tensions in scholarly publication. These tensions include the dichotomies between written and spoken scholarly outlets, conventional and exploratory formats versus linear and standardized ones, and the balance between automated efficiency in academic writing and the intellectual depth and freedom fostered by ongoing dialogue.

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Long abstract:

Although they are gatekeepers in the credibility economy, scholarly book publishers have been largely overlooked by the social sciences, and by STS in particular. The last major study was conducted some twenty years ago, but economic challenges and digital technologies have subsequently transformed the industry’s norms and practices. Furthermore, the future of scholarly book publishing increasingly looks ‘open,’ with governments and funding agencies hastening progress towards a world in which everybody can access research at zero cost. Given these developments, it seems timely to re-examine these overlooked actors whose activities make a difference to disciplines and careers alike.

My suggestion is that whereas past generations of publishers were informed by editorial- or market-based logics, contemporary publishing is animated by a new logic of digitalization, where practices, organizational hierarchies and value orientations are shaped by (among other things) proprietary eBook and journal platforms, metadata flows, and the influence of ‘data-driven’ approaches to traditional editorial activities. Indeed, this tension between tradition and innovation is leading some organizations to reimagine what a publisher is for, positioning themselves less as gatekeepers than as disruptors, interested less in content than in infrastructural services through which new claims are made about the nature and the future of the academic book. Looking beyond the more visible processes of authorship and editorial decision-making, I attempt to show how books are now ‘made’ in this space between the old and the new, which carries implications for how we as academics might collectively imagine, produce and use texts.

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Long abstract:

Scholarly publications have been regarded as certified and trustworthy information. It is generally agreed that researchers abide by the Mertonian norms that prioritise public interests rather than self-interests. The calls for open access and open research adhere to the techno-utopian vision that scholarly information should be publicly accessible in a democratic society. In truth, scholarly publishing diverts from these norms and ideals for a multitude of reasons. The highly competitive academic environment, the stronghold of commercial publishers and data providers, the audit culture, and the influences commercial and political interests can tamper with scholarly pursuits and knowledge production. There exist hijacked and predatory journals, there are also increasing incidents of retraction and reports of fabricated and falsified data, stolen images, and paper mills. Generative AI, alongside the drive for open science, will accelerate and complicate scholarly publishing for there is no existing norms or regulations that forbid the uses of AI-generated contents including data, images, and texts, nor are there rules to prevent existing scholarly publications to be raw materials for large language models (LLMs). Scholarly publications are not immune from the contamination of misinformation and disinformation–and their status as certified and trustworthy information can be put into doubt with the consequence of losing credibility and public trust. In this presentation, I will address trust and trustworthiness of scholarly information in light of the proliferating uses of generative AI at every stage of knowledge production and the development of open science.