DATA SHARING
Clinical trial data sharing — not just for “research parasites” anymore
“Using the NHLBI data repository, 370 investigators requested data from at least one clinical trial — 51% of them trials on cardiovascular prevention and treatment. Requests were largely for post hoc secondary analysis (72%); a minority of requests were initiated for analytic or statistical approaches to clinical trials (9%) and meta-analyses (7%). More than half of investigators (53%) made their requests in the last 4.4 years of the study period (January 2000 to May 2016), ‘indicating an increasing demand for trial data that has outpaced acquisition,’ wrote Sean A. Coady, MS, MA, of the NHLBI in Bethesda, Md., and colleagues. ‘In contrast, demand for observational data has increased in a pattern more directly proportional to time.’ ”
NHLBI Data Sharing: Fears of ‘Research Parasites’ Melt Away Experience of NIH institute bolsters value of open trial data (MedPage Today)
OPEN ACCESS
- Unpaywall
Trying to find free articles online? Use http://unpaywall.org, a new widget to identify free copies of research articles. Unlike the open access button available for libraries and interlibrary loan, this is available to anyone (requires Firefox or Chrome browsers). Putting the OA Into Interlibrary Loan
Covered in:
- Unpaywall Finds Free Versions of Paywalled Papers (Nature)
- How a Browser Extension Could Shake Up Academic Publishing (Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Initiative for Open Citations
“The Initiative for Open Citations I4OC is a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of scholarly citation data…The aim of this initiative is to promote the availability of data on citations that are structured, separable, and open. Structured means the data representing each publication and each citation instance are expressed in common, machine-readable formats, and that these data can be accessed programmatically. Separable means the citation instances can be accessed and analyzed without the need to access the source bibliographic products (such as journal articles and books) in which the citations are created. Open means the data are freely accessible and reusable.”
RESEARCH INTEGRITY
- Fast corrections: Authors use PubMed’s commenting feature PubMed Commons to post corrections before a formal correction is published
Authors alerting readers via PubMed Commons
- Ghosts who don’t know they’re ghosts: Researcher provides fake contact information for coauthors, who aren’t aware they’re authors
Busted: Researcher used fake contact info for co-authors
GENDER GAP
Study of economics papers shows that while women authors take longer to revise, the readability of the revised manuscript is more improved than men’s. “Research papers with female authors spend six months longer in peer review at the top economics journals…In what appears to be a consequence, papers by women are easier to read and improve more as they are being revised than papers written by men.”
Gender Differences in Peer Review: Economics papers by women are stalled longer at journals – but they end up more readable and more improved (Royal Economic Society)
JOURNAL STANDARDS
Succession planning: How to prepare for when you’re no longer around — written more for publishers than editors but maybe useful for some. “With a mature workforce, you need to watch that knowledge and skills do not reside in one person. When that person leaves, for whatever reason, it is entirely possible that you will be stuck and with their departure goes an essential resource that you will be scrambling to replace.”
Succession Planning (Scholarly Kitchen))
GLOBAL HEALTH
Talk with Google: Using Technology to Tackle Global Health’s Biggest Challenges
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Newsletter #6, circulated April 11, 2017. Sources include Retraction Watch and Open Science Initiative listserve. Providing the links does not imply WAME’s endorsement.
News and Views 