In this article we raise a problem, and we offer two practical contributions to its solution. The problem is that academic communities interested in digital publishing do not have adequate tools to help them in choosing a publishing model that suits their needs. We believe that excessive focus on Open Access (OA) has obscured some important issues; moreover exclusive emphasis on increasing openness has contributed to an agenda and to policies that show clear practical shortcomings. We believe (...) that academic communities have different needs and priorities; therefore there cannot be a ranking of publishing models that fits all and is based on only one criterion or value. We thus believe that two things are needed. First, communities need help in working out what they want from their digital publications. Their needs and desiderata should be made explicit and their relative importance estimated. This exercise leads to the formulation and ordering of their objectives. Second, available publishing models should be assessed on the basis of these objectives, so as to choose one that satisfies them well. Accordingly we have developed a framework that assists communities in going through these two steps. The framework can be used informally, as a guide to the collection and systematic organization of the information needed to make an informed choice of publishing model. In order to do so it maps the values that should be weighed and the technical features that embed them. Building on our framework, we also offer a method to produce ordinal and cardinal scores of publishing models. When these techniques are applied the framework becomes a formal decision–making tool. Finally, the framework stresses that, while the OA movement tackles important issues in digital publishing, it cannot incorporate the whole range of values and interests that are at the core of academic publishing. Therefore the framework suggests a broader agenda that is relevant in making better policy decisions around academic publishing and OA. (shrink)

The potential of using personalized Large Language Models (LLMs) or “generative AI” (GenAI) to enhance productivity in academic research, as highlighted by Porsdam Mann and colleagues (Porsdam Mann...

The productivity of researchers and the impact of the work they do are a preoccupation of universities, research funding agencies, and sometimes even researchers themselves. The h-index is the most popular of different metrics to measure these activities. This research deals with presenting a practical approach to model the h-index based on the total number of citations and the duration from the publishing of the first article. To determine the effect of every factor on h, we applied a (...) set of simple nonlinear regression. The results indicated that both NC and D1 had a significant effect on h. The determination of coefficient for these equations to estimate the h-index was 93.4% and 39.8%, respectively, which verified that the model based on NC had a better fit. Then, to record the simultaneous effects of NC and D1 on h, multiple nonlinear regression was applied. The results indicated that NC and D1 had a significant effect on h. Also, the determination of coefficient for this equation to estimate h was 93.6%. Finally, to model and estimate the h-index, as a function of NC and D1, multiple nonlinear quartile regression was used. The goodness of the fitted model was also assessed. (shrink)

The academic journal publishing model is deeply unethical: today, a few major, for-profit conglomerates control more than 50 of all articles in the natural sciences and social sciences, driving subscription and open-access publishing fees above levels that can be sustainably maintained by publicly funded universities, libraries, and research institutions worldwide. About a third of the costs paid for publishing papers is profit for these dominant publishers' shareholders, and about half of them covers costs to keep the (...) system running, including lobbying, marketing fees, and paywalls. The paywalls in turn restrict access of scientific outputs, preventing them from being freely shared with the public and other researchers. Thus, money that the public is told goes into science is actually being funneled away from it, or used to limit access to it. Alternatives to this model exist and have increased in popularity in recent years, including diamond open-access journals and community-driven recommendation models. These are free of charge for authors and minimize costs for institutions and agencies, while making peer-reviewed scientific results publicly accessible. However, for-profit publishing agents have made change difficult, by co-opting open-access schemes and creating journal-driven incentives that prevent an effective collective transition away from profiteering. Here, we give a brief overview of the current state of the academic publishing system, including its most important systemic problems. We then describe alternative systems. We explain the reasons why the move toward them can be perceived as costly to individual researchers, and we demystify common roadblocks to change. Finally, in view of the above, we provide a set of guidelines and recommendations that academics at all levels can implement, in order to enable a more rapid and effective transition toward ethical publishing. (shrink)

PAMVEC is a novel vehicle modeling tool designed to complement the capabilities of dynamic vehicle simulators and be better-suited to the purposes of vehicle technology assessment. This paper presents a validation of PAMVEC against published data for a range of production and pre-production prototype vehicles whose powertrain technologies span the range currently being exhibited by automotive manufacturers. For each vehicle, the PAMVEC model was used to predict the fuel/energy consumption and required peak powertrain output due to acceleration performance. Errors (...) typically. (shrink)

Journals regulate a significant portion of the communication between scientists. This paper devises an agent-based model of scientific practice and uses it to compare various strategies for selecting publications by journals. Surprisingly, it appears that the best selection method for journals is to publish relatively few papers and to select those papers it publishes at random from the available “above threshold” papers it receives. This strategy is most effective at maintaining an appropriate type of diversity that is needed to (...) solve a particular type of scientific problem. This problem and the limitation of the model is discussed in detail. (shrink)

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 109 of Psychological Review. Due to circumstances that were beyond the control of the authors, the studies reported in "Models of Ecological Rationality: The Recognition Heuristic," by Daniel G. Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer overlap with studies reported in "The Recognition Heuristic: How Ignorance Makes Us Smart," by the same authors and with studies reported in "Inference From Ignorance: The Recognition Heuristic". In addition, Figure 3 in the Psychological Review article (...) was originally published in the book chapter and should have carried a note saying that it was used by permission of Oxford University Press.] One view of heuristics is that they are imperfect versions of optimal statistical procedures considered too complicated for ordinary minds to carry out. In contrast, the authors consider heuristics to be adaptive strategies that evolved in tandem with fundamental psychological mechanisms. The recognition heuristic, arguably the most frugal of all heuristics, makes inferences from patterns of missing knowledge. This heuristic exploits a fundamental adaptation of many organisms: the vast, sensitive, and reliable capacity for recognition. The authors specify the conditions under which the recognition heuristic is successful and when it leads to the counter-intuitive less-is-more effect in which less knowledge is better than more for making accurate inferences. (shrink)

The ‘model approach’ facilitates a quantitative-oriented study of conceptual changes in large corpora. This paper implements the ‘model approach’ to investigate the erosion of the traditional art-nature distinction in early modern natural philosophy. I argue that a condition for this transformation has to be located in the late scholastic conception of final causation. I design a conceptual model to capture the art-nature distinction and formulate a working hypothesis about its early modern fate. I test my hypothesis on (...) a selected corpus of 25 works published in the Dutch academic milieu between 1607 and 1748. I analyse the corpus through a procedure based on concordancing of keywords associated with the model. I argue that the results obtained constitute a successful pilot study for the implementation of the model approach on larger scale research. (shrink)

Research programs regularly compete to achieve the same goal, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA or the construction of a TEA laser. The more the competing programs share information, the faster the goal is likely to be reached, to society’s benefit. But the “priority rule”-the scientific norm according to which the first program to reach the goal in question must receive all the credit for the achievement-provides a powerful disincentive for programs to share information. How, then, is (...) the clash between social and individual interest resolved in scientific practice? This chapter investigates what Robert Merton called science’s “communist” norm, which mandates universal sharing of knowledge, and uses mathematical models of discovery to argue that a communist regime may be on the whole advantageous and fair to all parties, and so might be implemented by a social contract that all scientists would be willing to sign. (shrink)

The papers collected in this volume were written over a period of some eight or nine years, with some still earlier material incorporated in one of them. Publishing them under the same cover does not make a con tinuous book of them. The papers are thematically connected with each other, however, in a way which has led me to think that they can naturally be grouped together. In any list of philosophically important concepts, those falling within the range of (...) application of modal logic will rank high in interest. They include necessity, possibility, obligation, permission, knowledge, belief, perception, memory, hoping, and striving, to mention just a few of the more obvious ones. When a satisfactory semantics (in the sense of Tarski and Carnap) was first developed for modal logic, a fascinating new set of methods and ideas was thus made available for philosophical studies. The pioneers of this model theory of modality include prominently Stig Kanger and Saul Kripke. Several others were working in the same area independently and more or less concurrently. Some of the older papers in this collection, especially 'Quantification and Modality' and 'Modes of Modality', serve to clarify some of the main possibilities in the semantics of modal logics in general. (shrink)

This book explores a new approach to understanding the human mind - rational analysis - that regards thinking as a facility adapted to the structure of the world. This approach is most closely associated with the work of John R Anderson, who published the original book on rational analysis in 1990. Since then, a great deal of work has been carried out in a number of laboratories around the world, and the aim of this book is to bring this work (...) together for the benefit of the general psychological audience. The book contains chapters by some of the world's leading researchers in memory, categorisation, reasoning, and search, who show how the power of rational analysis can be applied to the central question of how humans think. It will be of interest to students and researchers in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and animal behaviour. (shrink)

This research was conducted to examine the psychological profiles of people who publish their weblogs on the Internet and the characteristics of their community. Weblogs can be defined as online sites, not owned by major corporations, which are frequently updated by one or more people. Weblogs provide an opportunity to develop communication through information sharing with other Internet users. Our particular focus is on authors of “informative” weblogs, who have a powerful desire to provide information and share their knowledge, rather (...) than other weblog forms, such as “diary-like” weblogs, in which the authors have a more powerful need for self-disclosure and the resulting interactions. The results of online author surveys suggested that the system of weblog have many benefits for supporting knowledge community and the weblog authors were oriented to reciprocal information interchange and perceive much psychological benefits from it. (shrink)

For most literary sociologists serious modern work starts with Robert Escarpit’s Sociologie de la Littérature , a book which proposes that sociology can usefully explain how literature operates as a social institution. Subsequent Escarpit-inspired work on the literary enterprise covers topics such as the profession of authorship; the stratified “circuits” of production, distribution, and consumption; and the commodity aspect of literature. Critics have objected that Escarpit’s increasingly macroquantitative and statistics-bound procedures bleach out literary and ideological texture. And his model (...) of literature as discrete social system encourages the abstract model making which Raymond Williams despises.1 But, whatever its shortomcings, Escarpit’s definition of literary product and practice as social faits forms an essential starting point for the sociologist intending to investigate the apparatuses of literature.In what follows, I shall mainly fix on a problem currently disabling constructive research on the literary-sociological lines projected by Escarpit: namely, scholarly ignorance about book trade and publishing history technicalities. This sets up, I shall suggest, a large and troubling hole at the centre of the subject, and there is little indication, at this stage, how or when the hole is to be filled. 1. See Raymond Williams, “Literature and Sociology,” Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays , pp. 11-30. John Sutherland is professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology. His books include Fiction and the Fiction Industry , Bestsellers , and Offensive Literature . He is currently completing an encyclopedia of Victorian fiction. (shrink)

Through use of decision?making expertise already in place, newspaper publishers already possess elemental tools required for ethical decision?making relating to extent of participation in civic activities. By also considering added qualitative factors that embrace broad perspective, detachment, and declaration, decisions are more likely to be adequately informed. This article suggests that publishers become active in building business and community leadership models strong enough to allay critics who question ethical motives.

The author argues that the new digital possibilities in scientific communication do not imply, by any means, that many old requirements are becoming dispensable. The essential elements of the system, such as quality assurance, authenticity, orientation and navigation will still demand considerable expense. The overall system costs will rather be higher in a hybrid system. In the second part of his lecture, the author discusses the two fundamentally different open access models, the Golden Road, which is supposed to be able (...) to operate, eventually, without any publishers, and the Green Road, whose functioning is based on primary publication through publishing houses. Finally, the basic issue of the indispensable qualitative stratigraphy of scientific documents is addressed. For this, the published journals, which also provide topical focus and, thus, orientation as well as active marketing in terms of optimal diffusion, still are a very capable tool. It is questionable to what extent these tasks could be fulfilled by university-based repositories. The publishing houses, on the other hand, have a proven track record of providing a wide range of useful value-adding services in digital publishing. (shrink)

Business models for biomedical research prescribe decentralization due to market selection pressures. I argue that decentralized biomedical research does not match four normative philosophical models of the role of values in science. Non-epistemic values affect the internal stages of for-profit biomedical science. Publication planning, effected by Contract Research Organizations, inhibits mechanisms for transformative criticism. The structure of contracted research precludes attribution of responsibility for foreseeable harm resulting from methodological choices. The effectiveness of business strategies leads to overrepresentation of profit values (...) versus the values of the general public. These disconnects in respect to the proper role of values in science results from structural issues ultimately linked to the distinct goals of business versus applied science, and so it seems likely that disconnects will also be found in other dimensions of attempts to combine business and science. The volume and integration in the publishing community of decentralized biomedical research imply that the entire community of biomedical research science cannot match the normative criteria of community-focused models of values in science. Several proposals for changing research funding structure might successfully relieve market pressures that drive decentralization. (shrink)

Background: Health researchers must weigh the benefits and risks of publishing their findings.Objective: To explore differences in decision making between rural health researchers and managers on the publication of research from small identifiable populations.Method: A survey that investigated the attitudes of Australian rural general practitioners to nurse practitioners was explored. Decisions on the study’s publication were analysed with bioethical principles and health service management ethical decision-making models.Results: Response rate was 78.5% . 84–94% of GP responders considered it to be (...) undesirable for nurse practitioners to initiate referrals to medical specialists , to initiate diagnostic imaging and to prescribe medication .Bioethical analysis: It was concluded that the principle of beneficence outweighed the principle of non-maleficence and that a valid justification for the publication of these results existed.Decision-making models of health service managers: On the basis of models of ethical decision making in health service management, the decisions of the area’s health managers resulted in approval to publish this project’s results being denied. This was because the perceived risks to the health service outweighed benefits. Confidentiality could not be ensured by publication under a regional nom de plume.Conclusions: A conflict of interests between rural researchers and health managers on publication of results is shown by this case study. Researchers and managers at times owe competing duties to key stakeholders. Both weigh the estimated risks and benefits of the effect of research findings. This is particularly true in a rural area, where identification of the subjects becomes more likely. (shrink)