FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence: Postponed, non-competitive peer review for research funding

Receiving research grants is among the highlights of an academic career, affirming previous accomplishments and enabling new research endeavours. Much of the process of acquiring research funding, however, belongs to the less favourite duties of many researchers: It is time consuming, often stressful and, in the majority of cases, unsuccessful. This resentment towards funding acquisition is backed up by empirical research: The current system to distribute research funding, via competitive calls for extensive research applications that undergo peer review, has repeatedly been shown to fail in its task to reliably rank proposals according to their merit, while at the same time being highly inefficient. The simplest, fairest and broadly supported alternative would be to distribute funding more equally across researchers, for example, by an increase of universities' base funding, thereby saving considerable time that can be spent on research instead. Here, I propose how to combine such a 'funding flat rate' model-or other efficient distribution strategies-with quality control through postponed, non-competitive peer review using open science practices.

Contribution of the Open Access Modality to the Impact of Hybrid Journals Controlling by Field and Time Effects

Purpose

Researchers are more likely to read and cite papers to which they have access than those that they cannot obtain. Thus, the objective of this work is to analyze the contribution of the Open Access (OA) modality to the impact of hybrid journals.

Design/methodology/approach

The “research articles” in the year 2017 from 200 hybrid journals in four subject areas, and the citations received by such articles in the period 2017–2020 in the Scopus database, were analyzed. The hybrid OA papers were compared with the paywalled ones. The journals were randomly selected from those with share of OA papers higher than some minimal value. More than 60 thousand research articles were analyzed in the sample, of which 24% under the OA modality.

Findings

We obtain at journal level that cites per article in both hybrid modalities (OA and paywalled) strongly correlate. However, there is no correlation between the OA prevalence and cites per article. There is OA citation advantage in 80% of hybrid journals. Moreover, the OA citation advantage is consistent across fields and held in time. We obtain an OA citation advantage of 50% in average, and higher than 37% in half of the hybrid journals. Finally, the OA citation advantage is higher in Humanities than in Science and Social Science.

Research limitations

Some of the citation advantage is likely due to more access allows more people to read and hence cite articles they otherwise would not. However, causation is difficult to establish and there are many possible bias. Several factors can affect the observed differences in citation rates. Funder mandates can be one of them. Funders are likely to have OA requirement, and well-funded studies are more likely to receive more citations than poorly funded studies. Another discussed factor is the selection bias postulate, which suggests that authors choose only their most impactful studies to be open access.

Practical implications

For hybrid journals, the open access modality is positive, in the sense that it provides a greater number of potential readers. This in turn translates into a greater number of citations and an improvement in the position of the journal in the rankings by impact factor. For researchers it is also positive because it increases the potential number of readers and citations received.

Originality/value

Our study refines previous results by comparing documents more similar to each other. Although it does not examine the cause of the observed citation advantage, we find that it exists in a very large sample.

C. S. Peirce’s Forgotten but Enduring Relevance to Psychological Science

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was one of the most polymathically brilliant scientific thinkers in American history. He was also arguably the first American experimental psychologist, strongly influencing some of the nation’s earliest modern psychology pioneers. Yet partly because of the lasting effects of personal scandals and powerful enemies, he has been almost entirely forgotten by the broader field of psychology. This article aims to briefly reintroduce Peirce as a historically important figure in psychology to a general audience and highlight a few ways in which his trailblazing perspectives point to pervasive deficiencies and opportunities in psychological science. First, his pioneering writings on the economy of research call on us to consider how diminishing returns may plague our research programs, potentially leading to waste of time, money, and intellectual labor in our communities of inquiry. Second, his pragmatic maxim of clarity for intellectual constructs provides a compelling framework in which to understand how jingle and jangle fallacies often undercut the cumulativeness of our field. We contend that Peirce’s work, much of it still unpublished, is a rich resource for psychological scientists across many domains.