Publications, Volume 10, Issue 1 (March 2022) – 13 articles

We see from information published elsewhere that Gold OA is on the increase globally. The OA Diamond study indicates that Diamond OA is an important component of scholarly communications, with an estimated 8–9% of the total global scholarly output. These numbers, however, are on a global scale and are not necessarily representative of any given country; country case studies are needed to find this information. Norway is a country where the government has declared a 100% OA goal and most research has public funding. Norway has good financing structures for various models of OA, and it has a national CRIS system. This study tries to find and present numbers for articles in scholarly journals to describe both recent developments and relative numbers for Norway as a whole, and for scholarly fields in Norway, with regards to Diamond OA. Numbers for and development of Gold OA will also be given and commented upon to some extent. Full article

Meticulous self-evaluative practices in the offices of academic periodicals can be helpful in reducing widespread uncertainty about the quality of scholarly journals. This paper summarizes the results of the second part of a qualitative worldwide study among 258 senior editors of scholarly journals across disciplines. By means of a qualitative questionnaire, the survey investigated respondents’ perceptions of needed changes in their own editorial workflow that could, according to their beliefs, positively affect the quality of their journals. The results show that the most relevant past improvements indicated by respondents were achieved by: (a) raising the required quality criteria for manuscripts, by defining standards for desk rejection and/or shaping the desired qualities of the published material, and (b) guaranteeing a rigorous peer review process. Respondents believed that, currently, three areas have the most pressing need for amendment: ensuring higher overall quality of published articles (26% of respondents qualified this need as very high or high), increasing the overall quality of peer-review reports (23%), and raising reviewers’ awareness of the required quality standards (20%). Bivariate analysis shows that respondents who work with non-commercial publishers reported an overall greater need to improve implemented quality assessment processes. Work overload, inadequate reward systems, and a lack of time for development activities were cited by respondents as the greatest obstacles to implementing necessary amendments. Full article

The need for more democratic models of interaction between scientists and non-expert audiences, the current commodification of research and the advancements of digital affordances have recently given rise to new online genres for science dissemination, such as the graphical abstract, increasingly demanded by high-impact journals despite its uncertain function. In this paper, I examine the problems posed by this hybrid genre as to the implementation of dialogical and more democratic models of science dissemination; namely, inferential confusion of concepts and narrative sequences, trivialisation and overall interpretive complexity, all of them caused or affected by visual stylisation. After scrutinising over 1000 graphical abstract samples from science blogs, research networks and random finds published in specialised high-rank international journals, I provide a taxonomy of stylisation and make the case for the explicit visual literacy training of students and scholars, as well as for a higher level of specification in the guidelines for potential authors of scientific journals. Full article

The research discipline of computer science (CS) has a well-publicized gender disparity. Multiple studies estimate the ratio of women among publishing researchers to be around 15–30%. Many explanatory factors have been studied in association with this gender gap, including differences in collaboration patterns. Here, we extend this body of knowledge by looking at differences in collaboration patterns specific to various fields and subfields of CS. We curated a dataset of nearly 20,000 unique authors of some 7000 top conference papers from a single year. We manually assigned a field and subfield to each conference and a gender to most researchers. We then measured the gender gap in each subfield as well as five other collaboration metrics, which we compared to the gender gap. Our main findings are that the gender gap varies greatly by field, ranging from 6% female authors in theoretical CS to 42% in CS education; subfields with a higher gender gap also tend to exhibit lower female productivity, larger coauthor groups, and higher gender homophily. Although women published fewer single-author papers, we did not find an association between single-author papers and the ratio of female researchers in a subfield. Full article

The paper focuses on variation across institutional and individual scientific blogs, i.e., blogs that are managed by journals, magazines or associations involved in the dissemination of scientific information and blogs that are managed by individual researchers. Using comparable corpora of posts from different scientific disciplines, look in particular at markers of dialogicity, i.e., the representation of participants (markers of self-reference, reader-reference, as well as representation of the scientific community and markers of attribution), markers of communicative action (organizational units and metastatements), and evaluative dialogue (evaluative lexis and dialogic contraction or expansion). Concordance analysis of keywords and key-phrases (as calculated by Wordsmith Tools 8.0) shows that blogs managed by individual scientists emphasize personal voice and interpersonal elements, while institutional blogs are comparatively more informational. Dialogicity markers are shown to contribute to defining how bloggers manage subjective and intersubjective positioning and construct their credibility, thus defining the nature of their relation to the audience and ultimately the functions of blogging. Full article

International business scholars have recognized the importance of the contextual embeddedness of firms. However, how they matter remains a contested question. Although recent efforts have been made to review the field, it remains unclear how institutions affect firms’ performance. We aim at answering the following research question: How is the intellectual and the conceptual structure of the institutions and firms’ performance field defined? We searched in the WoS and Scopus databases with pre-determined keywords, and we obtained a sample of 1063 articles that we analyzed by conducting the citation and co-citation analyses, keyword co-occurrence analysis, and thematic map analysis. Our bibliometric results portrayed how the intellectual and conceptual structure of the field has evolved. We contribute to the international business literature by providing a one-stop overview of the field, thus identifying current accomplishments and future research avenues on the relationship between institutions and firms’ performance. By analyzing the articles included on the Emerging and Niche clusters, we discuss future research avenues on the topics of sustainability, entrepreneurship, political ties, and institutional quality. Full article

Didier Raoult has acquired media authority in the debates on the treatment of COVID-19 in France thanks to his professional competence, raising issues of legitimacy and authority. He presents himself as a “star of infectious diseases”, belonging to the “elite”. In the press and online comments, the scientificity of the subject is mixed with considerations that may seem trivial. This paper will analyze the way in which scientificity is expressed in the media coverage of the scientist but also the way in which online communities discuss, argue, and become involved in polemics and controversies concerning him. It will analyze the links and shifts between scientific and parascientific communication. It will, therefore, deal with both the discourse and the staging around the scientist Didier Raoult and the circulation of his words and positions through online media and citizen communities. Full article

Social cohesion is recognised as the glue that holds societies together and is connected to numerous positive social outcomes. Many authors have defined the term and its dimensions, leading to a wide range of different perspectives. Indeed, an array of dimensions have emerged as researchers have conceptualized social cohesion based on the theoretical assumptions of their disciplines. This wide range of disciplinary contributions has created a rich but muddled research field. In line with the growing recognition of social cohesion, there is a need to better understand social cohesion’s evolution and status within broader academic research. Thus, this study has two main objectives: (i) to analyse the nature and evolution of literature related to social cohesion and (ii) to identify the thematic areas related to social cohesion research and their connections to specific disciplines. To achieve this, a bibliometric analysis of 5027 journal articles listed in the Web of Science (WoS) was conducted. Through this, a substantial increase in research activity was noted, and the broad, multidisciplinary nature of the research is also illustrated. However, there remains room for further collaboration across disciplines as well as research exploring how different social groups and institutions contribute to social cohesion. Full article

This article is part of an on-going research project dedicated to enhancing our understanding of domain-specific knowledge communication across various multiliterate communities, semiotic modes and media contexts. The focus of the present analytical endeavour is on the dissemination of knowledge of academics from the domain of business and management to professionals and other non-academic communicative partners in the context of the Harvard Business Review journal. The central empirical material is constituted by a cluster of videos selected from the Facebook context of the journal whose intention is to function as a bridge between academia and enterprises. For this bridging effort, a number of video genres which are not traditionally used for scientific knowledge communication in academic contexts (e.g., Quick Study, Explainers, Tips & Ideas, etc.) are employed. Furthermore, in accordance with the Facebook context, the videos are accompanied by users’ commentaries that evaluate the knowledge provided or/and contribute to communicating and co-constructing new knowledge. Finally, we include the articles, books and special issues to which the videos refer in the empirical study. This hybrid knowledge-communication setting is studied from a multimodal perspective in order to address the new ways in which semiotic modes and sub-modes enter into a meaning-making interplay at the level of each video and when users comment on the respective videos. The main analytical tools are the concepts of knowledge expansion and knowledge enhancement that characterize the interaction of modes in the knowledge-building process. Across the video genres that have been investigated, we see a tendency towards engaging users of the videos through diminishing the distance to the viewers. As a consequence, the videos have a high number of views, but at the same time there are few comments and hardly any comments engaging in mutual knowledge building. This paradox is discussed in more detail in the concluding section. Full article

In this short communication, we discuss the latest advances regarding Open Access in the earth sciences and geochemistry community from preprints to findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data following the 14f session held at Goldschmidt conference (4–9 July 2021) dedicated to “Open Access in Earth Sciences”. Full article

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an enormous stream of information. Parascientific digital communication has pursued different avenues, from mainstream media news to social networking, at times combined. Likewise, citizens have developed new discourse practices, with readers as active participants who claim authority. Based on a corpus of 500 reader comments from The Guardian, we analyse how readers build their authorial voice on COVID-19 news as well as their agentive power and its implications. Methodologically, we draw upon stance markers, depersonalisation strategies, and heteroglossic markers, from the perspective of discursive interpersonality. Our findings unearth that stance markers are central for readers to build authority and produce content. Depersonalised and heteroglossic markers are also resorted, reinforcing readers’ authority with external information that mirrors expert scientific communication. Conclusions suggest a strong citizen agentive power that can either support news articles, spreading parascientific information, or challenge them, therefore, contributing to produce pseudoscientific messages. Full article

‘Feminization’ is used either quantitatively to indicate an increased female labor market participation or qualitatively to refer to labor devaluation and to types of work that supposedly require “feminine” skillsets. This article cautiously hews to the qualitative interpretations but suggests an affirmative reconstruction of the concept in the context of collective action. It argues that contemporary grassroots academic labor movements rely more explicitly on collective emotions and aim at building long-term bases of solidarity, instead of performative activism and mass mobilizations. This ‘affective turn’ in academic labor activism is argued to signal a “feminization of resistance”, characterized by a pronounced propensity for affective and relational groundwork. This argument is substantiated in view of the Network for Decent Work in Academia (NGAWiss), a nation-wide precarious researchers’ network in Germany, and the New Faculty Majority (NFM), an adjunct advocacy group in the US. The aim is twofold: first, the article contributes to a better understanding of contemporary labor activism by elucidating the precarious collective’s incremental achievements, often ignored by the outcome-oriented labor movement literature. Second, by reframing it as a mode of affective resistance, the article extends the analytical scope of the term “feminization”. Full article