We analyse focus group discussions and free-text survey responses from a multi-stakeholder consultation conducted after the October 2023 publication of the proposal Towards Responsible Publishing by cOAlition S. The proposal calls for a systemic reform of scholarly communication by reducing barriers to knowledge dissemination, promoting early sharing of outputs through preprints, and shifting peer review to an open, post-publication model. We focus on how different stakeholder groups –such as researchers, infrastructure providers, academic institutions, and publishers –perceive obstacles to the large-scale, coordinated reform envisioned in the proposal. We interpret these accounts as articulations of collective action problems, shaped by entrenchment of many actors in existing academic reward systems and established commercial revenue models that make transitions toward a more economically sustainable scholarly communication system difficult, even where many actors see the principal need for change. This approach highlights the extent to which stakeholder perspectives align or conflict. It also underscores the performative nature of discourse about collective action problems in scholarly communication: by articulating challenges to reform, participants simultaneously construct, reinforce, or contest their own roles within the system, which directly influences their collective capacity to act.

Two of the main frameworks that shape the assessment of research units and individual researchers in the Netherlands are undergoing a quiet but meaningful shift. Both the new Strategy Evaluation Protocol (SEP) and the Dutch Research Council's (NWO) evidence-based CV are moving towards indicators based on open research information.

Preprinting has become an increasingly important component of the scholarly communication system, facilitating rapid open dissemination of scientific knowledge. This study investigates the adoption of preprinting over time, focusing on how it varies across scientific disciplines and geographical regions. We analyzed bibliometric data on 4M preprints and 105M peer-reviewed outputs in the period 1991-2023. Peer-reviewed outputs were linked to preprints using data from Dimensions, OpenAlex, and Crossref, resulting in 2.2M peer-reviewed outputs linked to a preprint. Our findings indicate a strong growth in preprinting, with a nearly threefold increase in the number of preprints published between 2017 and 2022. The adoption of preprinting is highest in the physical and mathematical sciences, particularly among researchers in the Americas and Europe. In recent years, preprinting has also increased notably in the information and computing sciences and the life and medical sciences, driven primarily by researchers in North America and Western and Northern Europe. Preprinting remains relatively uncommon in the humanities and the social and behavioral sciences. Asia demonstrates low preprint adoption, with Eastern Asia showing a modest increase in recent years. Preprint adoption in specific disciplines varies significantly across regions, showing that preprint adoption is shaped by the interplay between disciplines and regions.

Introduction: Traditional, complementary, and integrative medicine (TCIM) encompasses a wide range of healthcare practices and holds substantial research potential. However, the field faces persistent challenges, including variability in research methodology and limited engagement from the broader scientific community. One approach that may help address these issues is the use of preprints, openly accessible manuscripts posted prior to formal peer review. Preprinting can accelerate dissemination, increase accessibility, and offer opportunities for early feedback that may improve reporting quality prior to the publication of the journal article. Responsible use of preprints, paired with transparent reporting and critical appraisal, is therefore essential to maximize benefits while minimizing risks. Our protocol outlines a historical cohort study which compares abstracts of TCIM-related preprints with their corresponding journal articles, to characterize the nature and frequency of differences observed between both versions. Methods: Using a historical cohort design, we will analyse 611 TCIM preprint-journal article pairs identified through a prior bibliometric analysis of 11 preprint servers listed in the ASAPbio directory with TCIM-related subject areas. For each pair, abstracts from both the preprint and the journal article will be compared using Microsoft Word's "Compare Documents" function. Differences in how the background, methods, results, and conclusions are reported will be annotated and categorized (e.g., design alterations, numerical modifications, interpretation changes). Descriptive statistics will summarize the frequency and nature of changes. Conclusion: Our study will be the first to systematically investigate how the abstracts of TCIM preprints and the corresponding journal articles differ, offering insight into the reporting changes observed during the peer review process and contributing to discussions on transparency in scientific communication and reporting practices between preprints and their subsequent journal article within this field.

International mobility grants are a prominent policy instrument for supporting early-career researcher development. However, empirical evidence on how mobility grant duration is associated with researchers’ long-term career outcomes remains limited. Drawing on a combination of publication records, ORCID profiles, LinkedIn data, and information from personal academic websites, this study investigates how the duration of China Scholarship Council (CSC) mobility grants (short-term vs. long-term) is associated with researchers’ subsequent career outcomes across four dimensions: geographic career mobility trajectories, promotion patterns, scholarly performance, and academic embeddedness. The results show that long-term international mobility grant recipients are more likely to start their early academic careers abroad and to return to their home countries at more advanced career stages. They also tend to progress more slowly through academic career stages than recipients of short-term mobility grants. The association between mobility duration and scholarly performance is temporally dynamic and field-dependent. Finally, long-term mobility is associated with more durable international collaboration, whereas short-term mobility is more compatible with embeddedness in domestic academic networks. These findings suggest that different international mobility grant designs are associated with heterogeneous long-term career outcomes, providing empirical evidence to inform the design of mobility funding policies.

Calls to reform research assessment are gaining momentum.

Given China’s rapid rise as a global science power and recent changes in the geopolitical landscape, exploring China’s international research collaborations is essential for a broader understanding of the global research system. This study examines the development of China’s international collaborations between 2014 and 2023 across six major disciplines. We analyze the level of international collaboration for China and other leading scientific countries, the global distribution of China’s bilateral collaborations with other countries, and developments in China’s bilateral collaborations with key partners, focusing on its top eight partner countries, the European Union (EU), and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries. Our results reveal notable shifts in China’s collaborative landscape over the last decade. China’s level of international collaboration has declined since 2019. This is particularly due to a major drop in China’s collaboration with the United States. China has diversified its partnerships by increasingly engaging with the BRI countries, the EU, and the United Kingdom. This study highlights the evolving nature of China’s scientific collaborations, shaped by political, social, and strategic factors, and underscores the growing importance of regional partnerships in China’s future research endeavors.

Background : Bibliometric analysis is a valuable approach for studying and evaluating scholarly communication, research output and impact, collaboration patterns, and knowledge flows by examining various aspects of scholarly works across different levels of actors and aggregations. Despite the strong growth in publications using bibliometrics, there is limited guidance on how to report bibliometric analyses. The lack of standardized reporting practices has led to the creation of the Guidance List for the repOrting of Bibliometric AnaLyses (GLOBAL) . This evidence-based guideline, developed via the EQUATOR Network’s framework, aims to provide a systematic approach to reporting bibliometric analyses in scholarly literature with the ultimate goal of improving reporting quality. This Explanation and Elaboration (E&E) document is a supplementary document intended to facilitate the use of the GLOBAL. Methods : This E&E document was modeled after similar documents prepared for other reporting guidelines, such as Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) and Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT). It includes feedback from Delphi participants and steering committee members, as well as references from peer-reviewed research papers. The GLOBAL steering committee, which supervised and provided input to the GLOBAL’s development, consisted of six international researchers, four with expertise in bibliometrics (LW, MSabé, MSolmi, and SH) and two with expertise in reporting guidelines (DM and JYN). This document underwent pilot-testing and iterative processes of editing to enhance its clarity and applicability. Results: This document includes detailed explanations and examples that satisfy the checklist items. Each item has an expanded explanation where the necessary components and rationale of the checklist items are presented, alongside practical examples. These examples are extracted from published bibliometric literature and provide authors with a framework on how to approach the reporting of their analyses when following the GLOBAL. Conclusion: The GLOBAL is designed to guide the reporting of bibliometric analyses with a particular focus on manuscript-style publications (including journal and conference papers), encouraging more transparent reporting of studies using bibliometric methods. The supplementary document aims to assist in the adoption of the GLOBAL by providing explanations and examples on its implementation.

Performance-based funding systems (PBFSs) are widely used to steer national research, but their effects vary significantly, particularly in countries with emerging research ecosystems. Relatively little attention has been paid to PBFSs and their concomitant policy dynamics in these countries, where the pressure to internationalise creates unique challenges. This paper presents a detailed study of the development of the Lithuanian PBFS from 2005 to 2022. Using a multi-level, multi-actor, and multi-issue framework, we combine policy analysis, semi-structured interviews, and bibliometric data to analyse the system's evolution. Our findings reveal a dynamic of 'insular policy feedback,' where a concentrated scientific elite, operating across all levels of governance, shapes policy to its advantage. This results in predictable cycles of strategic gaming, such as the proliferation of domestic journals, by reactive and often inconsistent state countermeasures. The Lithuanian case serves as a model for understanding how concentrated power structures can undermine reform, offering a crucial insight for policymakers: meaningful reform must address the governance structures that empower performance metrics, not just the metrics themselves.

The task of making Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning systems, fair, accountable and transparent is a necessarily interdisciplinary one, involving contributions from computer science, philosophy, sociology and law. But in this emerging field it is frequently acknowledged that key terms like ‘fairness’, ‘accountability’, ‘transparency’, ‘discrimination’ and ‘bias’ are used very differently by these different disciplines. This paper presents a workshop exercise intended to facilitate discussions about the divergent uses of key terms in AI Ethics, FairML and related interdisciplinary spaces. It uses a simple data visualization technique to highlight different uses of key terms in a given corpus of scientific papers and also provides a platform and protocol to guide the discussion. We argue that data visualizations can play an important role in this task, but they need to acknowledge the multivalence of key terms, rather than glossing over them, and they need to be deployed as part of a process of collective inquiry and managed dialogue (they do not speak for themselves). Our goal is to both promote awareness and understanding of different uses of words and, hopefully, generate new ideas and thinking through more productive dialogue between disciplines.

A couple of months ago, Ludo Waltman and André Brasil raised some questions about good practices for Crossref DOI registration, asking for input from the scholarly communication community.

Why a scholarly communication policy? Scholarly communication is often treated as a matter of individual choice. Researchers decide where to publish and how to communicate their work.

A preprint is a research article that is made openly available on a preprint server, typically before submission to a peer-reviewed journal. Preprinting enables new scientific knowledge to be shared in a timely and open way. It often takes many months or even years for an article to pass through the peer review process of a journal.

This mixed-methods study examines the complex interplay of actors and factors shaping research assessment policies in Lithuania in the years 1996–2008, a period of transition towards Western practices. Analysing policy documents, bibliometric data, interviews, and grey literature, we focus on the interactions among policymakers, international experts, providers of publication data, and researchers. Our findings reveal the significant influence of international networks on Lithuanian policymakers, leading to the adoption of quantitative assessment and reliance on Web of Science data. However, this narrow focus, coupled with existing power dynamics and top-down decision-making, led to gamesmanship in publishing practices and conflicts among disciplines, culminating in a Constitutional Court challenge. This research also highlights the substantial role of journal publishers and data providers in influencing policy shifts. We underscore the need for international organisations to adopt open data sources that encompass a wider array of scholarly outputs. Additionally, national policymakers must consider disciplinary differences and research capacity when designing assessment policies. The Lithuanian experience serves as a cautionary tale, emphasising the importance of context-specific, inclusive, and flexible research assessment systems, particularly in light of ongoing reforms such as the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA).

Preprinting has gained considerable momentum, and in some fields it has turned into a well-established way to share new scientific findings. The possibility to organise quality control and peer review for preprints is also increasingly highlighted, leading to the development of preprint review services. We report a descriptive study of preprint review services with the aim of developing a systematic understanding of the main characteristics of these services, evaluating how they manage preprint review, and positioning them in the broader scholarly communication landscape. Our study shows that preprint review services have the potential to turn peer review into a more transparent and rewarding experience and to improve publishing and peer review workflows. We are witnessing the growth of a mixed system in which preprint servers, preprint review services and journals operate mostly in complementary ways. In the longer term, however, preprint review services may disrupt the scholarly communication landscape in a more radical way.

Understanding the different ways in which different science mapping approaches capture the structure of scientific fields is critical. This paper presents a comparative analysis of two commonly used approaches, topic modeling (TM) and citation-based clustering (CC), to assess their respective strengths, weaknesses, and the characteristics of their results. We compare the two approaches using cluster-to-topic and topic-to-cluster mappings based on science maps of cardiovascular research generated by TM and CC. Our findings reveal that relations between topics and clusters are generally weak, with limited overlap between topics and clusters. Only in a few exceptional cases do more than one-third of the documents in a topic belong to the same cluster, or vice versa. For TM the presence of highly similar topics is a considerable challenge. A strength of TM is its ability to represent societal needs related to cardiovascular disease, potentially offering valuable insights for policymakers. In contrast, CC excels in depicting the intellectual structure of cardiovascular diseases, with a strong capability to reflect scientific micro-communities. This study deepens the understanding of the use of TM and CC for science mapping, providing insights for users on how to apply these approaches based on their needs.

Although fraud and misconduct have always existed in research and scholarly communication, the rise of paper mills over the past decade has led to an unprecedented volume of fake or manipulated research being published. A 2022 report jointly published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the STM Association suggests that between 2 and 46% of submissions to journals in the time between 2019 and 2021 were produced by paper mills.