Multiple authorship is the universal solution to multi-tasking in the sciences. Without a team, each with their own set of expertise, and each involved mostly in complementary ways, a research project will likely not advance quickly, or effectively. Consequently, there is a risk that research goals will not be met within a desired timeframe. Research teams that strictly scrutinize their modus operandi select and include a set of authors that have participated substantially in the physical undertaking of the research, in (...) its planning, or who have contributed intellectually to the ideas or the development of the manuscript. Authorship is not an issue that is taken lightly, and save for dishonest authors, it is an issue that is decided collectively by the authors, usually in sync with codes of conduct established by their research institutes or national ministries of education. Science, technology and medicine publishers have, through independent, or sometimes coordinated efforts, also established their own sets of guidelines regarding what constitutes valid authorship. However, these are, for the greater part, merely guidelines. A previous and recent analysis of authorship definitions indicates that the definitions in place regarding authorship and its validity by many leading STM publishers is neither uniform, nor standard, despite several of them claiming to follow the guidelines as set forward by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors or ICMJE. This disparity extends itself to ghost and guest authorship, two key authorship-related issues that are examined in this paper to assess the extent of discrepancies among the same set of STM publishers and what possible influence they might have on publishing ethics. (shrink)

Many journals and publishers employ online submission systems to process manuscripts. In some cases, one “template” format exists, but it is then molded slightly to suit the specific needs of each journal, a decision made by the editor-in-chief or editors. In the past few years, there has been an increase in the number of cases in which OSSs have been abused, mostly by the authorship, either through the creation of fake identities or the use of false e-mail accounts. Although the (...) abusive or fraudulent authors are at fault in such cases, the fact that such cases remained undetected for so long is of concern. Moreover, the current OSSs are imperfect, have security issues and may not be able to detect false information, except through post-submission verification. Sting operations, which involve the submission of false manuscripts with false identities and false affiliations, are no less unethical, and those who abuse the publishing protocol deserve to be as reprimanded as those who abuse OSSs. Finally, I question the ethics of editors or publishers creating OSS accounts on behalf of reviewers prior to obtaining their explicit permission. doi: 10.5294/pebi.2016.20.2.3. (shrink)

Leibniz’s role en current political and social thought is complex. On the one hand, he represents the last great synthesis built on the idea of the World as a creation of God and man as his cooperator in history. However his notion of contingency can help to explain some of the problems facing social sciences today in so far as he understandsthis concept not only from an ontological but also from an epistemological point of view. To this one should add (...) that criticisms of classical and modern philosophy such as those of Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt leave intact the need of reason to organise society and we can see in Leibniz use of reason a forerunner of public choice postions. In sum, his vision of reason is very much alive though in new contexts. (shrink)

. The semantic collapse problem is perhaps the main difficulty associated to the very powerful mechanism for combining logics known as fibring. In this paper we propose cryptofibred semantics as a generalization of fibred semantics, and show that it provides a solution to the collapsing problem. In particular, given that the collapsing problem is a special case of failure of conservativeness, we formulate and prove a sufficient condition for cryptofibring to yield a conservative extension of the logics being combined. For (...) illustration, we revisit the example of combining intuitionistic and classical propositional logics. (shrink)

Most departments in any field of science that have a sound academic basis have discussion groups or journal clubs in which pertinent and relevant literature is frequently discussed, as a group. This paper shows how such discussions could help to fortify the post-publication peer review movement, and could thus fortify the value of traditional peer review, if their content and conclusions were made known to the wider academic community. Recently, there are some tools available for making PPPR viable, either as (...) signed or anonymous comments, or in a hybrid format. Thus, limited platforms are currently in place to accommodate and integrate PPPR as a supplement to traditional peer review, allowing for the open and public discussion of what is often publicly-funded science. This paper examines ways in which the opinions that emerge from journal clubs or discussion groups could help to fortify the integrity and reliability of science while increasing its accountability. A culture of reward for good and corrective behavior, rather than a culture that protects silence, would benefit science most. (shrink)

The editors of scholarly journals have a duty to uphold and promote the highest standards of ethical conduct of research. They also have a responsibility to maintain the integrity of the literature, and to promote transparency and honesty in reporting research findings. In the process of screening manuscripts they receive for possible publication, editors have the obligation to report infractions to the institutions of offending authors, and request an investigation. Since editors can reject a paper on ethical grounds, they can (...) be considered to be the guardians of ethics who should express high ethical standards in conducting and publishing their own research. An examination of several publishers’ websites reveals no such requirement or clear selection criteria for journal editors. Therefore, we aim to discuss the factors that publishers, in a broad sense, should consider when selecting editors for scholarly journals and believe that such criteria should be made public to ensure accountability. This would restore some of the eroding public trust in disseminated research, fortify confidence in the composition and qualification of members of an editorial board, and help to protect the reputations of publishers and editors. (shrink)

Publishing has become, in several respects, more challenging in recent years. Academics are faced with evolving ethics that appear to be more stringent in a bid to reduce scientific fraud, the emergence of science watchdogs that are now scrutinizing the published literature with critical eyes to hold academics, editors and publishers more accountable, and a barrage of checks and balances that are required between when a paper is submitted and eventually accepted, to ensure quality control. Scientists are often under increasing (...) pressure to produce papers in an increasingly stringent publishing environment. In such a climate, timing is everything, as is the efficiency of the process. Academics appreciate that rejections are part of the fabric of attempting to get a paper published, but they expect the reason to be clear, based on careful evaluation of their work, and not on superficial or unsubstantiated excuses. A desk rejection occurs when a paper gets rejected even before it has entered the peer review process. This paper examines the features of some desk rejections and offers some guidelines that would make desk rejections valid, fair and ethical. Academics who publish are under constant pressure to do so quickly, but effectively. They are dependent on the editors’ good judgment and the publisher’s procedures. Unfair, unsubstantiated, or tardy desk rejections disadvantage academics, and editors and publishers must be held accountable for wasting their time, resources, and patience. (shrink)

This opinion paper takes aim at an error made recently by Clarivate Analytics in which it sent out an email that congratulated academics for becoming exclusive members of academia’s most cited elite, the Highly Cited Researchers. However, that email was sent out to an undisclosed number of non-HCRs, who were offered an apology shortly after, through a bulk mail, which tried to down-play the importance of the error, all the while praising the true HCRs. When Clarivate Analytics senior management was (...) contacted, the company declined to offer an indication of the number of academics who had been contacted and erroneously awarded the HCR status. We believe that this regrettable blunder, together with the opacity offered by the company, fortify the corporate attitude about the value of the journal impact factor, and what it represents, namely a marketing tool that is falsely used to equate citations with quality, worth, or influence. The continued commercialization of metrics such as the JIF is at the heart of their use to assess the “quality” of a researcher, their work, or a journal, and contributes to a great extent to driving scientific activities towards a futile endeavor. (shrink)

Retractions are on the rise as a result of a surge in post-publication peer review and an emboldened anonymous whistle-blowing movement. Cognizant that their brand may be damaged as a result of not...

The distributed temporal logic (DTL) is a logic for reasoning about temporal properties of distributed systems from the local point of view of the system’s agents, which are assumed to execute sequentially and to interact by means of synchronous event sharing. Different versions of DTL have been provided over the years for a number of different applications, reflecting different perspectives on how non-local information can be accessed by each agent. In this paper, we propose an automata-theoretic model checking algorithm for (...) DTL. To this end, we propose a notion of distributed transition system that will be used to specify the system to be verified. The properties that the system should meet are specified in DTL. In order to capture the models of these properties, we propose the notions of generalized distributed Büchi automaton and of distributed Büchi automaton. With these concepts, we are able to adapt results from automata-theoretic approaches to model checking in LTL to the distributed case. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo se analizan las tensiones surgidas a partir de la pregunta ¿América Latina desde Marx o Marx desde América Latina? Para hacerlo se utilizan los conceptos de escritura idealista y escritura materialista, que identifican dos de las opciones más importantes en la producción teórica marxista. La primera se asocia a la perspectiva que concibe una forma universal de la historia, ligada a ciertos textos de Karl Marx y Friedrich Engels, continuada por la socialdemocracia alemana y cuyo punto (...) máximo es la filosofía de Georg Lukács. Del otro lado están las perspectivas abiertas por el mismo Marx en ciertos segmentos de El capital y en sus cartas a Vera Zasúlich. Así mismo, se retoman algunas de las implicaciones de esta última opción en las tradiciones latinoamericanas. Particularmente se señala la importancia de la obra de Álvaro García Linera. (shrink)

One of Ortega y Gasset's more important contributions was his theory and methodological use of the concept of perspective. Clearly he´s indebeted to Nietzsche on this issue, but it can also be surmised that Renan was also important in this issue at the time that Ortega was preparing Meditaciones del Quijote. The article compares Renan's criticism of Lamennais with Ortega's interpretation of Pío Baroja focusing not only on the paralelism of their criticisms of established and prominent personalities of their intelectual (...) community, but also on the underlying understanding of cultural practice. (shrink)

A surge in post-publication activity related to editing, including by technical editors and copyeditors, is worthy of some discussion. One of these issues involves the issue of 'tortured phrases', which are bizarre terms and phrases in academic papers that replace standard English expressions or jargon. This phenomenon may reveal an attempt to avoid the detection of textual similarity or to masquerade plagiarism, and yet remain undetected by editors, peer reviewers and text editors. Potentially thousands of cases have already been discovered (...) and reported publicly on the post-publication platform PubPeer. In this opinion paper, 35 cases from ranked scholarly journals are presented, mainly the fields of materials, computer and engineering sciences. This collation serves to expand discussion about this integrity-related phenomenon and to increase educational awareness of the topic. (shrink)

Editors have increasing pressure as scholarly publishing tries to shore up trust and reassure academics and the public that traditional peer review is robust, fail-safe, and corrective. Hidden conflicts of interest may skew the fairness of the publishing process because they could allow the status of personal or professional relationships to positively influence the outcome of peer review or reduce the processing period of this process. Not all authors have such privileged relationships. In academic journals, editors usually have very specialized (...) skills and are selected as agents of trust, entrusted with the responsibility of serving as quality control gate-keepers during peer review. In many cases, editors form extensive networks, either with other professionals, industry, academic bodies, journals, or publishers. Such networks and relationships may influence their decisions or even their subjectivity towards a set of submitting authors, paper, or institute, ultimately influencing the peer review process. These positions and relationships are not simply aspects of a curriculum, they are potential COIs. Thus, on the editorial board of all academic journals, editors should carry a COI statement that reflects their past history, as well as actual relationships and positions that they have, as these may influence their editorial functions. (shrink)

In the academic world, despite their corrective nature, there is still a negative stigma attached to retractions, even more so if they are based on ethical infractions. Editors-in-chief and editors are role models in academic and scholarly communities. Thus, if they have multiple retractions or a record of academic misconduct, this viewpoint argues that they should not serve on journals’ editorial boards. The exception is where such individuals have displayed a clear path of scholarly reform. Policy and guidance is needed (...) by organizations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics. (shrink)

Within any organization (e.g. a hospital or clinic) the perception of the way things operate may vary dramatically as a function of one’s location in the organizational hierarchy as well as one’s professional discipline. Interorganizational variability depends on organizational coherence, safety, and stability. In this four-nation (Canada, Ireland, Australia, and Korea) qualitative study of 42 nurses, we explored their perception of how ethical decisions are made, the nurses’ hospital role, and the extent to which their voices were heard. These nurses (...) suggested that their voices were silenced (often voluntarily) or were not expressed in terms of ethical decision making. Finally, they perceived that their approach to ethical decision making differed from physicians. (shrink)

RESUMENMoviéndose por caminos siempre complejos, la obra de Georges Bataille perdura como una de las más originales del pensamiento francés del siglo XX, donde su influencia ha sido inmensa. El presente artículo quiere mostrar el importante rol que jugarán en su obra las nociones de lo sagrado y de experiencia interior. Dicha experiencia, elemento central para entender su concepción de la religión, representará para Bataille la puesta en tela de juicio de todo lo conocido, pero también la íntima comunicación, ajena (...) al discurso racional, que se establece entre el mundo profano y el mundo sagrado.PALABRAS CLAVESAGRADO, EXPERIENCIA INTERIOR, COMUNICACIÓN, SACRIFICIO, MUERTE.ABSTRACTThe work of Georges Bataille, moving through complex paths, remains as one of the most original works of the twentieth-century French thought, where his influence has been immense. This article aims to show the important role that the notions of sacred and inner experience will play in his work. This experience, the central element for understanding his conception of religion, will represent to Bataille the putting into question all the known, but also the intimate communication, foreign to rational discourse, which is set between the profane and the sacred world. KEYWORDSSACRED, INNER EXPERIENCE, COMMUNICATION, SACRIFICE, DEATH. (shrink)

C.S. Peirce defended a pragmatist view of assertion in terms of its normative effect. This paper has two goals. First, to reconstruct and assess Peirce’s argument for the thesis that to assert a proposition is to make oneself responsible for its truth. Second, to argue that Peirce interpreted “responsibility for truth” as the acquisition of a dialogical commitment, namely, the duty to defend the proposition asserted by giving reasons upon challenge.

Without peer reviewers, the entire scholarly publishing system as we currently know it would collapse. However, as it currently stands, publishing is an extremely exploitative system, relative to o...

A very important event took place on January 15, 2017. On that day, the Jeffrey Beall blog was silently, and suddenly, shut down by Beall himself. A profoundly divisive and controversial site, the Beall blog represented an existential threat to those journals and publishers that were listed there. On the other hand, the Beall blog was a ray of hope to critics of bad publishing practices that a culture of public shaming was perhaps the only way to rout out those (...) journals—and their editors—and publishers who did not respect basic publishing ethical principles and intrinsic academic values. While members of the former group vilified Beall and his blog, members of the latter camp tried to elevate it to the level of policy. Split by extreme polar forces, for reasons still unknown to the public, Beall deliberately shut down his blog, causing some academic chaos among global scholars, including to the open access movement. (shrink)

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 33, Issue 1, Page 38-62, Spring 2022.

El presente artículo trata de enmarcar la economía social y solidaria en el seno del actual debate producto de la crisis económica vigente, haciendo especial hincapié en las cuestiones relacionadas con los bienes comunes y la gestión democrática. La crisis presente ha puesto de manifiesto la necesidad de proponer modelos socio-económicos alternativos que aúnen democracia, compromiso social y sostenibilidad del medio ambiente. La economía social y solidaria, sin ser un programa homogéneo, está contribuyendo a proponer respuestas a algunos de los (...) problemas actuales en materia de desempleo e integración social, revalorizando en los procesos económicos, no sólo los intercambios mercantiles, sino también los intereses sociales y los recursos naturales.This article aims to enlighten the importance ofsolidary and social economy in the present discussion, whose importance has increased as a result of the current economic crisis, making a special emphasis on subjects such as commons goods and democratic management. The crisis has brought up the need for alternative socio-economical management models which must combine democracy, social commitment and environmental sustainability. Solidary and social economy, without being a homogeneous program, are proposing answers to some of the present problems related to unemployment and social integration, contributing to increase the value of economic processes, not only in commercial exchanges, but also the social interest and natural resources. (shrink)

Starting on Bourdieu’s approach to precariousness, this article analyzes this phenomenon as a new flexible norm that displaces the Fordist social norm. The authors argue, based on Gramsci’s study of Fordism, that precarization creates a mechanism of discipline for the legitimization of the loss of both labour and social rights, destroying the Keynesian social pact. Such disciplining happens coercively, both by the use of new technologies and by the generalization of the function of Marx’s industrial reserve army to all productive (...) strata; and also, by consensus, through a transformation in the work culture, leading to a “new flexible man” with a flagrant loss of its autonomy. (shrink)

The institutions we create shape many of the activities we engage insofar as they are pervasive entities in our society. In an era full of new technologies, including the semantic web, there is a movement toward sound conceptual modeling for socio-technical solutions applied to government institutions. To develop these complex solutions, one needs to deepen the ontological status of entities in the institutional domain, because literature is full of ambiguous and ad-hoc hypotheses about distinctions between public and private corporations. We (...) believe we can find better explanations for such distinctions in the interdisciplinary field of library a information science. Within an ongoing semantic web project, we focus on a study case of official documents. First, we analyze theories about public and private corporations, seeking a reliable on‘tological distinction between them; then, by focusing on documents produced by each type of corporation, we hope to provide a well-founded analysis. Second, we adopt the aforementioned theories and the new analysis as recommendations for the improvement for the access and understanding of public documents, through appropriate classification of them within government information systems. This project, ultimately, aims to maximize the transparency of public government documents by favoring retrieval and comprehension by a society with plenty of automated information systems. (shrink)

The blogosphere is full of personalities with masks, or pseudonyms. Although not a desired state of public communication, one could excuse the use of pseudonyms in blogs and social media, which are generally unregulated or weakly regulated. However, in science publishing, there are increasingly strict rules regarding the use of false identities for authors, the lack of institutional or contact details, and the lack of conflicts of interest, and such instances are generally considered to be misconduct. This is because these (...) violations of publishing protocol decrease trust and confidence in science and bring disrepute to those scientists who conform to the rules set out by journals and publishers and abide by them. Thus, when cases are encountered where trust and protocol in publishing are breached, these deserve to be highlighted. In this letter, I focus on Neuroskeptic, a highly prominent science critic, primarily on the blogosphere and in social media, highlighting the dangers associated with the use of pseudonyms in academic publishing. (shrink)

Medical practitioners and healthcare workers rely on information accuracy in academic journals. Some Covid-19 papers contain “tortured phrases”, nonstandard English expressions, or imprecise or erroneous terms, that give the impression of jargon but are not. Most post-publication attention paid to Covid-19 literature has focused on the accuracy of biomedical aspects, the validity of claims, or the robustness of data, but little has been published on linguistic specificity. This paper highlights the existence of “tortured phrases” in select Covid-19 literature, arguing that (...) they could serve as a class of epistemic marker when evaluating the integrity of the scientific and biomedical literature. (shrink)

The formal and empirical-generative perspectives of computation are demonstrated to be inadequate to secure the goals of simulation in the social sciences. Simulation does not resemble formal demonstrations or generative mechanisms that deductively explain how certain models are sufficient to generate emergent macrostructures of interest. The description of scientific practice implies additional epistemic conceptions of scientific knowledge. Three kinds of knowledge that account for a comprehensive description of the discipline were identified: formal, empirical and intentional knowledge. The use of formal (...) conceptions of computation for describing simulation is refuted; the roles of programming languages according to intentional accounts of computation are identified; and the roles of iconographic programming languages and aesthetic machines in simulation are characterized. The roles that simulation and intentional decision making may be able to play in a participative information society are also discussed. (shrink)

A retraction of a scientific paper is made, most often due to errors or lack of publishing ethics on the part of authors, or, on occasion, duplicate publication by a publisher in error. The retraction notice that accompanies the retraction is an extremely important document, because it is the only information that provides a background to the public regarding the reason why the manuscript was retracted. In most cases, if the retraction notice is truly transparent, it will contain a few (...) sentences that indicate the reason, and possibly also the authors’ responsible, among other facts. According to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), retraction notices should be free to view, i.e. open access. This opinion piece exposes how several publishers are selling access to retraction notices, including COPE members, despite, in some cases, being paying COPE members. The business and academic ethics of such an action is thus called into question.Bangladesh Journal of Bioethics 2015 Vol.6 (1):27-39. (shrink)

A groundbreaking examination of Michel Foucault's history of truth. Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the philosopher’s project. Foucault did not question truth itself but what Lorenzini calls “the force of truth,” or how some truth claims are given the power to govern our conduct while others are not. This interest, Lorenzini shows, drove Foucault to articulate a new ethics and politics (...) of truth-telling precisely in order to evade the threat of relativism. The Force of Truth explores this neglected dimension of Foucault’s project by putting his writings on regimes of truth and parrhesia in conversation with early analytic philosophy and by drawing out the “possibilizing” elements of Foucault’s genealogies that remain vital for practicing critique today. (shrink)

En varios estudios ya se ha documentado la falta de transparencia en los avisos de retractación (AdR), que a menudo omiten infor-mación de vital importancia que permitiría a los lectores apreciar las complejidades de todo el proceso, incluidos los involucrados y las razones que llevaron a la retractación en sí. Un tema específico que rara vez se discute en la literatura académica es el desacuerdo de los autores con las retractaciones, la redacción de las AdR o las propias retractaciones. En (...) este artículo, mediante seis ejemplos de retractaciones y sus respectivos AdR en diferentes revistas y/o editoriales, todos miembros de la COPE, se ofrece una reflexión sobre por qué este tema necesita mayor debate y claridad de procedimiento por parte de editores, revistas y editoriales. (shrink)