Frédérique Bordignon

ObjectiveWe study how researchers perceive comments pertaining to their papers on the debated post-publication peer review platform PubPeer.MethodsWe surveyed two groups: the commented group were researchers that received a critical comment on their article (10,603 sent, 80 respondents); and the citing group were researchers citing these articles, as a proxy for the wider community (84,325 sent, 720 respondents).ResultsAmong our respondents, the majority of commented authors knew of the PubPeer comment prior to the survey, compared to only a minority of citing authors. In both groups, the majority indicated that the issue raised on PubPeer did not affect the conclusions of their paper. Commented authors most frequently replied on PubPeer and/or contacted journal editors; citing authors largely did not act. Qualitative analysis revealed four types of defences used to minimise consequences: epistemic defence, honest error, contextual defence, and shifting responsibility. Respondents’ opinions about PubPeer varied between positive, negative and ambivalent, and anonymity was the main concern.ConclusionPubPeer's contribution to correcting the scientific record remains indirect, operating through retractions rather than through behavioural change in researchers. A diffusion of responsibility limits its correcting ambition, highlighting the need for complementary post-publication debate venues.

Online Scholarly Communication (SC) is a vast and fragmented landscape difficult to navigate. Traditional core activities of SC, such as registration, certification, archiving, and awareness, have not lost their importance but have changed and been distributed across actors and venues. To bring clarity, we have developed a taxonomy of communication patterns of online venues for SC, i.e. the different ways in which online venues contribute to the core activities of SC for the units of SC they deal with. In this article, we present the taxonomy built on a corpus of 465 venues, and offer examples to illustrate its intended uses and analytical potential. Our taxonomy is a research tool to map the complex reality of SC. When combined with other methods such as analysis of discourse and economic models, it can produce sophisticated analysis of online SC.

A defining feature of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on scholarly communication has been the brief and intense surge in the production of preprints. This has had significant impacts on the ways in which new research findings have been reported and communicated more broadly and the role played by abstracts in highlighting the meaning and value of new research. Based on a study of the language deployed in the abstracts of recently published COVID-19 preprints, Frédérique Bordignon, Liana Ermakova and Marianne Noël, argue two defining features of these abstracts are over-promotion and hedging, a deliberate ambiguity that suggests authors should pay greater attention to what they seek to communicate in their abstracts.

Le véhicule autonome dans les discours médiatisés : présentation des méthodes d'analysed'articles de presse et de tweets