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The second NISO Plus Conference was held virtually on February 22-25. This year’s theme was “Global conversations – global connections” with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), accessibility, and the changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic being transversal topics throughout the conference. This post recaps (mainly) the discussions around these topics and how they relate to our community’s current challenges. …

Covid-19 had devastating effects that go beyond economics and also affected the periodicals published in Brazil. An editorial of the Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências has called attention that no journal published in the country will receive any support from the funding agencies in 2021 and calls for relevant stakeholders to discuss solutions to avoid the collapse of the publication system that is approaching if no measures are taken. …

Peer review varies widely between journals and disciplines. A study recently published in eLife aimed to assess the posture of journal editors from five disciplines on their way of conducting peer review. The results suggest that peer review remains largely a closed practice, with some challenges from an ethical point of view. …

The need for a comprehensive infrastructure for scholarly publications has been on the European Union's agenda for a long time. In particular, the European Commission's open science policy highlights the need for a good database for monitoring Open Access publications in Europe. However, many publications are still missing to rely on a comprehensive information infrastructure on open research. Over the past 10 years, European countries have invested significantly in national infrastructures, and now, at least 20 European countries have a national database for open publication research metadata. However, they are not yet integrated or widely used for cross-country comparisons. …

The literature demonstrates growing criticism of the reliability of qualitative research, including claims that it lacks rigor and methodological clarity. In the publication system, several actions reflect this increased attention to rigor. Initiatives by major research funding agencies also emphasize rigor. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), for example, has fostered efforts to promote strategies to increase rigor and transparency in the reporting of results of qualitative research. Here, we offer a brief panorama, permeated by transformations that include increasing initiatives to promote open science. We explore some questions about the current discussion of scientific rigor, not only in publications, but also in proposing qualitative research projects. …

In this post a proposal is introduced for academic publishing outfits to encourage and enable authors to make their articles — and where possible the underlying datasets — semantically unambiguous so that they can be communicated as FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). The proposal is described in-depth in a published open access article, to which a link is provided in the post. …

Most of the data resulting from research conducted in Brazil is not yet available in open access repositories. Here, we urge soil scientists to adopt a more open stance towards research data in the area, aiming to increase science sustainability and foster scientific collaboration. …

In the UK, the government has presented itself as guided by scientific evidence in its policy responses to COVID-19. This has led to science, in particular epidemiology, itself becoming politicised and contested. However, neither the politicisation of science nor questions surrounding the status of evidence are new. In this post, Luis Pérez-González, outlines how a similar politics of expertise has played out in environmental policy-making. The author argues that for scientific evidence to be successfully communicated in policy, it needs to be informed by bipartisan values. …

DOAJ, CLOCKSS Archive, Internet Archive, Keepers Registry/ISSN International Centre and Public Knowledge Project (PKP) have agreed to partner to provide an alternative pathway for the preservation of small-scale, APC-free, Open Access journals. …

Stage one of the Open Access (OA) movement promoted the democratization of scholarly knowledge, making work available so that anybody could read it. However, publication in highly ranked journals is becoming very costly, feeding the same vendor capitalists that OA was designed to sidestep. In this Q&A, Simon Batterbury argues that when prestige is valued over publication ethics, a paradoxical situation emerges where conversations about social justice take place in unjust journals. Academic freedom and integrity are at risk unless Open Access becomes not simply about the democratization of knowledge, but the ethics of its publication too. …