Scholarly Publishing Round-Up March 2018

By and — March 5, 2018

Sharing of clinical trial results, the ORBIT project and scientific review are the topics for the March 2018 Round-Up.

Who’s Not Sharing their Trial Results? Check out the new FDAAA TrailsTracker Tool. The tool was built by the Evidence-Based Medicine DataLab from the University of Oxford. The FDA Amendments Act 801  (FDAAA) is a law that requires certain clinical trials to submit clinical trial information to the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for inclusion in the registry and results database established via ClinicalTrials.gov. and takes effect as of February  2018.

Researchers Have Finally Created a Tool to Spot Duplicated Images Across Thousands of Papers. Nature. February 23, 2018. A group of scientists have developed software to detect duplicate images among hundreds and thousands of biomedical articles. See: New Tool Looks for Signs of Image Doctoring. Retraction Watch. March 1, 2018. for an interview with two of the developers: Mary Walsh and Daniel Wainstock.

PubMed Commons to be Discontinued. NCBI. February 1, 2018. NIH has decided that the low level of participation does not warrant continued investment in the PubMed Commons project. See: PubMed Commons Closes Its Doors to Comments. Nature. February 02, 2018.

Looking for Articles? Try installing the widget Unpaywall for Chrome or Firefox browsers. Unpaywall, provided by Impactstory, automatically harvests freely shared papers from thousands of legal institutional repositories, preprint servers, and publishers, making them all available to you as you read. See: Unpaywall Finds Free Versions of Paywalled Papers. Nature. April 4, 2017. Unpaywall is also featured as Mozilla’s featured extensions for March 2018.

Open Mike: Teaming with ORCID to Reduce Burden and Improve Transparency. NIH. November 15, 2017.  Michael Lauer. We are excited to announce an expanded integration with ORCID. eRA Commons is establishing a real-time link with ORCID, which allows users to associate ORCID with their eRA account. We encourage investigators who have not done so already to go ahead and create an ORCID profile, which takes about 30 seconds (creating a fully-fleshed out profile will take some more time). Next, link your ORCID profile to your eRA Commons account for continued success of this activity. Those who participate should expect to see additional functionality over time, such as assistance completing NIH applications and reporting requirements as well as allowing public data on NIH grant awards to populate ORCID.

A related project is the ORCID Reducing Burden and Improving Transparency (ORBIT) project. NIH and ORCID are working together to broaden connections to the array of research and career data typically reported on CVs, and to enhance integrations with other systems using these data. This includes collaborating with other funders in the US and around the world to link researchers to their funding and other research and career activities using verified and structured data. For more information, download the presentation: Research Impact Infrastructure, NIH. November 17, 2017, Neil Thakur and Richard Ikeda.

The Genetics Society of America (GSA) Publications Committee and the Genetics Editorial Board are offering a pilot training program in scientific reviewing.  Participants will receive training in manuscript reviewing from members of the Genetics Editorial Board. Participants will also prepare reviews of manuscripts submit to the journal and receive one-on-one mentoring and feedback from journal editors. GSA members within seven years of receiving their Ph.D. degree, including senior graduate students, are invited to apply. Applicants should have published at least one peer-reviewed manuscript, preferably as the first author. The application deadline is April 14, 2018.  For more information, see: Genetics Peer Review Training Program application.

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