Scholarly Publishing Round-up October 2020

By , , and — October 12, 2020

Learn more about Open October 2020, peer review and research impact.

Open October 2020

Open October 2020 is underway at Washington University with speakers and a panel session to highlight trends in open science, open data and open access. Among the speakers is Dr. Joe Ross, MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine and Public Health at Yale School of Medicine, and one of the co-founders of MedRxiv. MedRxiv was developed to support the scientific community and foster collaboration and is a “trusted intermediary” to accelerate the sharing of clinical papers, results, and data to improve public health and healthcare. The title of Dr. Ross’ talk is Preprints in Medicine: More Promise or Pitfall for Research Transparency? To view other speakers and to register, see Open October 2020.

Peer Review Week

Peer Review Week was celebrated the week of September 21-25, 2020.  Peer Review Week is a global event celebrating the essential role that peer review plays in maintaining scientific quality. For videos about peer review, see The Peer Review Week YouTube Channel.

Rethinking Research Impact Assessment

The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), developed in 2012, is a worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines and all key stakeholders including funders, publishers, professional societies, institutions, and researchers. The DORA initiative recognizes the need to improve the ways in which the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. DORA recently released a new briefing document, “Rethinking Research Assessment: Ideas for Action,” which provides five design principles to help universities and research institutions improve their research assessment policies and practices. A related PDF is here.

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Editing Services on Campus 

Academic Publishing Services

The Office of Faculty Affairs offers Academic Publishing Services for faculty by providing education and training in scientific writing and editing, manuscript publishing, grant proposal development, and oral presentation skills. The Office of Faculty Affairs also manages a directory of writers and editors who can provide editorial services for a fee.

InPrint-A Scientific Editing Network

InPrint is a trainee-run scientific editing network and resource that provides free, confidential editing of scientific communications to the Washington University community. InPrint also provides a Sentence and Figure Doctor Submission Form that allows for fast feedback on short excerpts and figures.

Scientific Editing Service

The Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences (ICTS) offers a Scientific Editing Service (SES) for its members. The Scientific Editing Service (SES) works with ICTS members to strengthen and clarify their extramural grant applications and manuscripts. Experienced scientific editors customize their services to meet the specific needs of your documents. The service is jointly supported by the ICTS and the Washington University Department of Medicine. If you are not a current ICTS member, please complete the ICTS membership registration form to utilize the editing services.

The Writing Center and the Speaking Studio

The Writing Center and the Speaking Studio at Washington University in St. Louis provide free, one-on-one tutoring to all WUSTL undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff for any writing or public speaking project.

 

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Interested in software for illustration? In response to several researcher requests, Becker Library has been working with the WashU IT software licensing group to investigate university licensing of BioRender, a software tool for making professional science figures and graphics. The team is currently in the implementation phase and plans to finalize licensing in FY21. Please contact Maze Ndukum for more information.