Scholarly Publishing Round-up February 2023

By , , and — February 10, 2023

Learn more about Artificial Intelligence and authorship, the USNWR medical school rankings, and text recycling.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools and Authorship

Text-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT are garnering attention in 2023. Several publishers including JAMA, Science, and SpringerNature, along with arXiv (a preprint repository), have announced policies that text, images and/or figures generated by these tools to do not satisfy authorship criteria. Some policies are explicit in that AI cannot be an author and a violation of these policies will constitute scientific misconduct no different from altered images or plagiarism of existing works.

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The U.S. News & World Report Rankings

The U.S. News & World Report Rankings (USNWR) for Medical Schools are also in the news for 2023. A number of medical schools including Washington University School of Medicine announced that they will no longer provide data to USNWR. Reasons for non-participation include concerns with the methodology, emphasis on MCAT test scores, lack of criteria related to mentorship, among others.

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Text Recycling

Do you reuse content for grant proposals, dissertations or your published articles? These are examples of text recycling. Text recycling is defined as “the reuse of textual material (prose, visuals, or equations) in a new document where (1) the material in the new document is identical to that of the source (or substantively equivalent in both form and content), (2) the material is not presented in the new document as a quotation (via quotation marks or block indentation), and (3) at least one author of the new document is also an author of the prior document.” To learn more about text recycling, check out the Text Recycling Research Project. The Text Recycling Research Project is the first large-scale investigation of researchers’ reuse of materials from their own prior work in new documents.

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Readings and Resources:

  • NCBI Insights. Next Phase of the NIH Preprint Pilot Launching Soon. January 9, 2023.
  • National Library of Medicine. NIH Preprint Pilot Expands to Include Preprints Across NIH-Funded Research. February 8, 2023.
  • Kaiser J. To reduce ‘reputational bias,’ NIH may revamp grant scoring. Science. 2023 Jan 20;379(6629):223. doi: 10.1126/science.adg7352. Epub 2023 Jan 19. PMID: 36656948.
  • Ingram JR. A watershed moment for the BJD: Authors retain their article copyright. Br J Dermatol. 2023 Jan 23;188(1):1-2. doi: 10.1093/bjd/ljac006. PMID: 36689517. “. . .under the terms of our new publishing agreement with OUP, authors of all BJD papers, whether published as open access or not, will retain copyright of their article. Rather than handing over copyright, authors are asked to provide to the BJD an ‘Exclusive licence to publish’ instead.”
  • SpringerNature. Nature announces support for authors from over 70 countries to publish open access. January 9, 2023. “Primary research from authors from over 70 countries classified by the World Bank as low-income (LIC) or lower-middle-income economies (LMICs) accepted for publication in either Nature or one of the Nature research journals (e.g. Nature Chemistry, Nature Sustainability) can now be published Gold open access at no cost.”
  • Directory of Open Access Books. DOAB is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available. As of January 2023, there are over 64,000 academic peer-reviewed books.
  • A-Z Database List from Becker Library. Becker Library provides access to 62 databases such as Scopus, EMBASE, PsycINFO, among others. One new database is the Health Poll Database. The Health Poll Database is an archive of exclusively health-oriented survey questions. It is designed to support research on topics like the social determinants of health, access to care, individual health status, health policy, and health politics.