Scientometric engineering: Exploring citation dynamics via arXiv eprints

Scholarly communications have been rapidly integrated into digitised and networked open ecosystems, where preprint servers have played a pivotal role in accelerating the knowledge transfer processes. However, quantitative evidence is scarce regarding how this paradigm shift beyond the traditional journal publication system has affected the dynamics of collective attention on science. To address this issue, we investigate the citation data of more than 1.5 million eprints on arXiv (https://arxiv.org) and analyse the long-term citation trend for each discipline involved. We find that the typical growth and obsolescence patterns vary across disciplines, reflecting different publication and communication practices. The results provide unique evidence on the attention dynamics shaped by the research community today, including the dramatic growth and fast obsolescence of Computer Science eprints, which has not been captured in previous studies relying on the citation data of journal papers. Subsequently, we develop a quantitatively-and-temporally normalised citation index with an approximately normal distribution, which is useful for comparing citational attention across disciplines and time periods. Further, we derive a stochastic model consistent with the observed quantitative and temporal characteristics of citation growth and obsolescence. The findings and the developed framework open a new avenue for understanding the nature of citation dynamics. Peer Review https://publons.com/publon/10.1162/qss_a_00174

Preprints & Pandemics: Interventions into the Dynamic Scholarly System of Scholarly Communication

The COVID-19 pandemic is an exemplar of how scholarly communication can change in response to external shocks, even as the scholarly knowledge ecosystem is evolving rapidly, and many argue that swift and fundamental interventions are needed. However, it is much easier to identify ongoing changes and emerging interventions than to understand their immediate and long term impacts. This is illustrated by comparing the approaches applied by the scientific community to understand public health risks and interventions with those applied by the scholarly communications community to the science of COVID-19. There are substantial disagreements over the short- and long- term benefits of most proposed approaches to changing the practice of science communication, and the lack of systematic, empirically-based research in this area makes these controversies difficult to resolve. We argue that the methodology of analysis and intervention developed within public health can be usefully applied to the science-of-science. Starting with the history of DDT application, we illustrate four ways complex human systems threaten reliable predictions and blunt ad-hoc interventions. We then show how these four threats apply lead to the last major intervention in scholarly publication -- the article publishing charge based open access model -- to yield surprising results. Finally, we outline how these four threats may affect the impact of preprint initiatives, and we identify approaches drawn from public health to mitigate these threats.

Editorial

The first issue of volume 8 of the UDS International Journal of Development (UDSIJD) has been published. A total of eight papers are included in Volume 8, Issue 1 of the UDSIJD. Seven papers cover Humanities whilst one in the Agricultural Sciences. The UDSIJD has fully migrated its operations to an online journal management system and therefore, all authors, contributors, reviewers, and editors are to interact via the journal system. By this, it is imperative that one visits his/her dashboard regularly, to track updates to manuscripts and review. The UDSIJD urges all authors and contributors to pay particular attention to the journal’s guidelines and adhere strictly to them. Also, comments from peer review are meant to improve the quality of the manuscripts and hence should not be personalized. We encourage young academics, researchers, development practitioners, and entrepreneurs to submit original research across disciplines for consideration to be published in our journal. The UDSIJD strives to enhance scholarly communications with a development focus, on a regular and sustained basis. The Editorial Team wishes to sincerely thank the University Management, authors, reviewers, and staff of the Journal and all those who in diverse ways have supported in making this issue of the journal a reality. The Editor-in-Chief Prof. G. A. Teye

Bibliographic References to Publications from Online Resources. Normalization Requirements

The article discusses the rules for compiling bibliographic references to cited or mentioned electronic documents placed in information and telecommunications networks of the following categories: all types of electronic documents placed in information and telecommunications networks, regardless of the primary source of their publication (including republications, integrated and multimedia electronic documents, software and databases), groups of homogeneous and heterogeneous electronic documents, components of an electronic document (the fragment of a text, part of a work or a publication, a block of information in an integrated or multimedia document). The authors specify the bibliographic record for making a reference to electronic documents that have analogies in the system of traditional scholarly communications (books, articles, conference materials, etc.). Alternative requirements for making a bibliographic record when referring to documents that are not included in other bibliographic standards are proposed: research data; an integrated electronic document and its component part (messages and responses to them in social networks, chats and forums, on news feeds and on information resources; a fragment of a document, including a multimedia one; an information resource (website, portal); computer programs.

Innovations in Accessible Scholarly Communication

What does it mean to make scholarly communications accessible to people with disabilities and those who face other specific barriers to access? This talk gives an overview of recent work to support equitable access across the lifecycle of scholarly communication, offering useful updates and strategies for scholars, editors, publishers, librarians, and other professionals. Participants will understand what accessibility means today and how they can reduce barriers in their work by following accessibility standards and best practices, and learning from leading examples in the field.

Making Open Access Book Funding Work Fairly

In late 2020, COPIM, an Arcadia and Research England funded project, announced an innovative revenue model to sustainably fund open access (OA) monographs: Opening the Future. This initiative harnesses the power of collective library funding: increasing collections through special access to highly-regarded backlists, and expanding the global shared OA collection while providing a less risky path for smaller publishers to make frontlist monographs OA. We introduced this model at the 15th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing 2020 but this is no ‘story so far’ conference presentation proposal. Since Opening the Future launched, we’ve seen several other collective library funding models emerge in quick succession, including MIT’s Direct 2 Open, Michigan’s Fund to Mission, and Cambridge University Press’ Flip it Open. In the same year, the UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) new policy was announced, and it included OA requirements for monographs. The landscape is clearly changing rapidly - in this presentation we will appraise our model in the context of this changing environment. The programme has had success since its launch. Within a few months the first publisher to adopt the model, CEU Press, had accrued enough library support to fund their first three OA monographs. Soon thereafter the initiative was recognised by the publishing community and nominated for an ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. And the programme is growing; a second well-respected publisher, Liverpool University Press, launched with Opening the Future in June 2021. The COPIM project has now begun to turn its focus to the thorny problem of scaling up. But herein lies a tension. OA monograph publishing needs to be sustainable not just for publishers, but also for libraries. Opening the Future was designed to be low-cost and simple, slotting into acquisitions budgets and existing library purchasing workflows. However, as we bring the programme to more university presses and libraries, how do we ensure we are not just adding another circle to the OA labyrinth that libraries are attempting to navigate? How might Opening the Future scale without increasing the administrative and decision-making burden already on collections and scholarly communications teams, who are already picking through a tangle of transformative agreements, pay-to-publish deals, author affiliations, and legacy subscriptions? In this session, we will engage the audience through these questions, as well as discuss the role of the programme in the wider policy landscape and how it is positioned alongside other emerging OA collective funding initiatives.