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

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Dear Jan-Willem.

Regarding your carbon footprint paper, which is very appreciated, I'd like to spin a couple of questions.

I have recently written a paper dealing with sustainability in the Internet of Sounds together with Luca Turchet. Other people have written papers in their related territory, but I suspect that the strategies are always the same, since we are dealing with the carbon footprint of electronics devices, no matter if you deal with auditory health, internet of things, consumer devices of some sort, etc.

So the strategies are: reduce battery usage, find new energy storage solutions, reuse devices, extend lifetime.

Therefore, it may seem plausible that we all join efforts and build one big initiative (something like a "sustainable electronic devices" initiative, for instance). On the other hand, in Science you can never embrace a too broad objective, otherwise there's the risk of saying nothing meaningful, or at least, of not being expert enough about a too broad domain. I feel that our paper was already a bit too broad in its target, so I am aware that some shortcomings arise when you try to factor too many disciplines together.

What do you think about this? Where's a good balance between a joint effort between multiple disciplines and being able to provide expertise about our own specific domain?

Another comment that I have. Carbon footprint is relatively easy to measure and is urgent to reduce due to global warming. However, it draws our whole attention, while other less measurable issues are taken out of the picture. Among these I'd say ecotoxicity is important (e.g. how wastes are correctly disposed, or how plants pollute during production) and the social burden of mass production in underdeveloped countries, where workers are more exposed to dangers and factories are more polluting/less regulated.

Thank you for your inputs.

BTW: here's the paper https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Luca-Turchet/publication/362066951_Towards_a_Sustainable_Internet_of_Sounds/links/62d4ffdafd347a451bc73164/Towards-a-Sustainable-Internet-of-Sounds.pdf

From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception <AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Wasmann, Jan-Willem <Jan-Willem.Wasmann@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, November 3, 2022 12:16 PM
To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [AUDITORY] preprints, community journals, and the carbon footprint of hearing healthcare

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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