Re: [AUDITORY] preprints, community journals, and the carbon footprint of hearing healthcare

[Alejandro Osses <ale.a.osses@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hoi Jan-Willem,

These are very interesting questions. I just read Raúl's answers with his clarifications about these new ""publishing schemes", so my answer here is based on my own experience about some of the platforms you mentioned (this means that I am not answering directly to your questions).

You mentioned BioRxiv, ArXiv, OSF, and Zenodo. I happened to have used all these platforms and I actually use them for different purposes.

• BioRxiv and ArXiv I use them to host preprints. I use BioRxiv if my paper contains collected behavioural data (human data from perceptual studies in my case), whereas I use ArXiv when I only use computational simulations as main component of my study. For both cases, I use them as a quick way to generate the permanent identifier while I sumit the papers to a peer-reviewed journal. (Some of my examples: One of my papers from BioRxiv; one of my ArXiv papers that has many versions)
  
• OSF: I am using it now for my first pre-registered project. The idea is to pre design your study and clearly state your hypothesis before you run the actual study, in a way that if you get non-significant results or if you reject some of your hypotheses you still pulish your study. This is a way to avoid p-hacking. Of course OSF provides a permanent identifier for your project (I didn't realise it was a doi number), but my goal here is to cite the pre-registered document from OSF once my paper is finished and published (My current OSF project, I think is still embargoed: https://osf.io/4ju3f/)
  
• Zenodo: I use it to host all binary data, meaning WAV files or any other data that I cannot store using TXT files and codes from Python or MATLAB and that are related to my study. Complementary to that, I linked Zenodo to my Github, so that my "main codes" get tracked and obtain a doi number every time I make a  new release of my software codes. This way "Zenodo Git" and "Zenodo data" contain all the data I need to reproduce my paper data (Zenodo linked to one of my Github MATLAB toolboxes; Zenodo containing just binary data for one of my studies-the study where those data were used/cited is here)
  

I have used these platforms without peer review, but the idea is for me, to always publish in a peer review journal soon after. My own papers have suffered big transformations during a couple of reviews. Therefore, I found it somehow a "risk" that my first preprint versions are circulating. My workaround is that, once a paper is published, I make a new final version of the preprint, so that people who will download my preprint in the future will not only see the link to the published paper (an automatic option from BioRxiv and ArXiv), but if the press "download" they will get the most recent preprint version of the paper.

Of course not every person sticks to these rules very strictly, so it can well be that you run into papers that never got through a peer review (and are not planning to). To this extent BioRxiv and ArXiv may not be the best for relying 100% on what is hosted there. 

I hope the insights here are useful :)

Success...

Groetjes,

Alejandro

Op vr 4 nov. 2022 om 05:04 schreef Wasmann, Jan-Willem <Jan-Willem.Wasmann@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Dear list, 

Via this thread, I’d like to touch upon preprints, community journals, and the carbon footprint of hearing healthcare. If you are in a hurry, please skip this message TLDR. Otherwise, it would be great to tap into your collective wisdom. 

 

In recent years, preprints have become increasingly popular to increase open access. Some preprints get cited a lot (e.g., https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.04.463034v2.abstract > 300 times). And especially in AI, some preprints will probably never get peer-reviewed. A well-known example is:  

Saon G, Kurata G, Sercu T, Audhkhasi K, Thomas S, Dimitriadis D, et al. English Conversational Telephone Speech Recognition by Humans and Machines. ArXiv170302136 Cs (2017). Available online at: http://arxiv.org/ abs/1703.02136 

 

There are multiple platforms to use. The most well-known is Biorxiv or Arxiv. But also OSF or Zenodo. I have used OSF since it has a broad scope and allows you to upload projects. It provides a preprint DOI, which remains the same if you update the preprint at a later stage. Also, you can link the DOI of the final peer-reviewed version of your paper. Zenodo can also be used for projects (data+paper), but every update will create a new DOI. 

 

Q1a How do you regard the status of preprints? 

Q1b Is it a missed opportunity if one decides not to go for a peer-review process of a preprint? 

 

Another new development is open community-driven peer review procedures. I found examples in other fields; see below.  

 

Q2a Do you know of examples of community-driven peer review in hearing sciences?  

Q2b Can you recommend a community-driven journal? 

 

Many scientists have responded to the new transparent consultative peer-review procedure by eLife (https://elifesciences.org/about/peer-review). This might be an exciting venue for those looking for new ways of peer review. However, the charges amount to $2000. The charges for open access can be enormous (Nature $7000?) and a barrier for early career researchers. 

 

So far, I have found the following examples of community journal/peer review processes: 

 

Pubpeer (The PubPeer Foundation is a California-registered public-benefit corporation with 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in the United States. The overarching goal of the Foundation is to improve the quality of scientific research by enabling innovative approaches for community interaction. The bylaws of the Foundation establish pubpeer.com as a service run for the benefit of its readers and commenters, who create its content. Our current focus is maintaining and developing the PubPeer online platform for post-publication peer review. https://pubpeer.com/static/about_) 

 

Here you can find our preprint on that platform 

https://pubpeer.com/publications/AE2235B5F9F35577B977F87F9834B8  

It looks like an easy platform to use. It can be used for creating special issues/collections (see https://pubpeer.com/publications/peeriodicals). At the start, I had trouble registering using my name/institution. An anonymous account was created quickly. Currently, PubPeer is used for post-publication review. I heard that in other disciplines, Pubpeer is used to flag suspicious publications (read fraud).  

 

Another exciting example is ReviewCommons (Review Commons provides authors with a Refereed Preprint, which includes the authors’ manuscript, reports from a single round of peer review and the authors’ response. These Refereed Preprints are transferred on the author’s behalf to bioRxiv. The most recently-completed Review Commons peer-reviews are listed below, with the most recently posted reviews at the top. https://www.reviewcommons.org/authors/) 

Unfortunately, auditory sciences and audiology are not within the scope of the peer-review initiative. 

 

The last example I know of is NBDT (NBDT is a community journal. If your handling editor sees it as in-scope it is appropriate. Editors are instructed to only handle papers that they consider running as a journal club paper for their own lab https://nbdt.scholasticahq.com/for-authors). It’s interesting to see their procedures, including “Can you propose reviewers? Short answer: no. Long answer: we did our own statistical analysis on a private dataset and have concluded that it produces huge undesirable biases without leading to better reviews.” 

 

 

The Carbon Footprint of Hearing Healthcare 

 

With Jan de Laat, I have just written a perspective paper/blog about the Carbon Footprint of Hearing Healthcare (see version 2, Preprint DOI 10.31219/osf.io/3sj5u). The hearing tracker will publish the content today/tomorrow as a blog. So far, we have extracted information from ESG reports and our contacts within the hearing healthcare industry. Ideally, we would like to organize a community-driven review process to collect comments from engineers, industry, sustainability officers, authors from ESG reports, and scientists. 

 

Q3a What would be a suitable platform to organize and publish a community-driven review process of a perspective paper about carbon footprint in hearing healthcare?  

 

Another ambition could be to create a carbon footprint tracker of hearing healthcare by annually updating table 1 from the preprint, including an assessment of whether climate ambitions by industry were updated and achieved. 

 

Q3b What would be a suitable approach to annually monitor the carbon footprint of the hearing healthcare industry? (Maybe not peer-reviewed?) 

 

Please let me know what you think is the best community journal for auditory sciences. Don't hesitate to let us know if you believe opinion pieces shouldn’t get into the review process. For me publishing this perspective paper is a low-risk experiment. If it goes well, I will consider submitting an original research manuscript. 

 

Thank you for your time. I am looking forward to your responses and advice. 

 

Best regards, 

Jan-Willem Wasmann  

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