OASPA Call for Rapid Reviewers

Please review the message and Open Letter of Intent below, share this information widely amongst your scholarly communications networks, and, if appropriate, consider signing up as a rapid reviewer here.
– Bernie Folan, OASPA, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association

CC-BY 2.0 #WOCinTech Chat- 40 #flickr https://flic.kr/p/Fv3zVg

OASPA has today posted an announcement on our blog about the launch of a new initiative which sees scholarly publishers working together to maximize the efficiency of peer review, ensuring that key work related to COVID-19 is reviewed and published as quickly and openly as possible.
The group of publishers and scholarly communications organizations — initially comprising eLife, Hindawi, PeerJ, PLOS, Royal Society, F1000 Research, FAIRsharing, Outbreak Science, and PREreview — is taking a collaborative approach to speed up the review process while ensuring rigor and reproducibility remain paramount and has issued an Open Letter of Intent with calls to reviewers, editors, authors, and publishers in the research community. 

The initiative is asking for volunteer reviewers with suitable expertise relevant to COVID-19, from all career stages and disciplines, to add their names to a “rapid reviewer list“. By doing so, these reviewers will be committing to rapid reviewing times, and upfront agreement that their reviews and identity can be shared among participating publishers and journals if submissions get rerouted for any reason.

Additionally, the group is asking all potential reviewers, whether they sign up to the rapid reviewer list or not, to help identify and highlight important and crucial COVID-19 preprints as early as possible, to optimize the limited time of expert reviewers who are subsequently invited to review the most important and promising research by a journal/platform. 

CFP for O3S: Open Scholarship for the Social Sciences symposium

Consider submitting for the SocArXiv O3S Conference  Interesting topical topics and positively reviewed!

October 18-19, 2018 at University of Maryland, College Park. O3S (a) highlights research that uses the tools and methods of open scholarship; (b) brings together researchers who work on problems of open access, publishing, and open scholarship; and (c) facilitates exchange of ideas on the development of SocArXiv, the open access preprint repository for the social sciences.

Paper submissions are due June 30, 2018. submit here

The symposium will feature two keynote speakers: Elizabeth Popp Berman, associate professor of Sociology at University at Albany, SUNY; and April Hathcock, Scholarly Communications Librarian at New York University.

The O3S symposium will take place during Open Access Week, a global event raising awareness about the benefits of open access and inspiring wider participation in making open access a new norm in scholarship and research.

How do you feel about preprint servers?

A cancer researcher and blogger, Jacob Scott, tweeted about an informal sentiment survey on preprint server use and was kind enough to engage with our interest in his results. Take a look at Dr. Scott’s blog for a good example of science communication.

Please take the survey and if you are UC San Diego affiliated, let us know in the comments if you have questions or want support in this area. We’re thinking of doing a workshop and would love to know what your interests are.

Barriers to posting pre-prints Survey
“I’m curious what the effects of the bioRxiv have been, so here is a follow up survey – 5 years later! – to ascertain barriers to utilization of open access preprint servers. All data is anonymous, participation is totally voluntary. I’ll be sharing the results on my blog in a few weeks time. If you are curious, the results from 5 years ago can be found here