The Future of Scientific Publishing
Keywords: scientific communication, research transparency, knowledge dissemination, innovation in publishing, open science, peer review.
The landscape of academic publishing is rapidly evolving, driven by digital content growth, advances in artificial intelligence models, and increasing demand for equitable access to research findings. At the same time, researchers are recognizing the value of formally publishing code, data, tutorials, and other non-traditional formats.
How do we most effectively distribute an explosively growing amount of information while maintaining high standards, minimizing costs, and ensuring that authors receive appropriate credit? Longstanding practices of for-profit commercial publishers often conflict with the values of the scientific community and contribute to publication biases, reviewer fatigue, delayed peer review timelines, and the reproducibility crisis. The brain mapping community has always been at the forefront of innovation in data and code sharing, informatics structures, and open science. We are well positioned to drive change in knowledge dissemination, shaping how discoveries from our labs are shared with the world.
The Special Issue on the Future of Scientific Publishing aims to critically examine challenges in scientific publishing and explore innovative solutions. We invite you to provide your perspective on this topic. We welcome all types of submissions accepted by Aperture Neuro, including original research articles, editorials, reviews, commentaries, short communications, and more.
Potential topics for a manuscript submission include, but are not limited to:
- Open access and global access to knowledge
- Publishing biases
- Peer review reform
- Research and publishing integrity
- Improving attribution
- AI in publishing
- Decentralized publishing
- Novel review solutions
- Multimedia research outputs
- Sustainability of publishing models
- New metrics to track impact
- Curation of information
Timeline: January 20th – May 1st, 2025
Editors:
Satrajit Ghosh, PhD
McGovern Institute for Brain Research
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA, USA
Peter Bandettini, PhD
National Institute of Mental Health
Bethesda, MD, USA
Mallar Chakravarty, PhD
Cerebral Imaging Centre, Douglas Mental Health University Institute Department of Psychiatry, McGill University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Manuscript Submission: https://apertureneuro.org/for-authors
The cover letter should include a sentence stating that the submission is part of the ‘Special Issue on the Future of Scientific Publishing.’
Contact Information: journal.manager@apertureneuro.org
Open Datasets: Impact, Infrastructure, and Governance
Keywords: datasets, big data, repositories, data standards, data governance, data infrastructure, open science, data ethics, data privacy, data security, open data platforms, public sector data, data ecosystems, data value-added, data sustainability, real-world data
Sharing and re-use of open datasets offer substantial benefits for the neuroscientific community. Specifically, open neuroimaging datasets are increasingly used to answer fundamental neuroscientific questions such as discovering links between brain structure, brain function, and behaviour or creating normative models for future clinical use. Large open datasets offer significant advantages for testing hypotheses with considerable statistical power, allowing for more sophisticated modelling techniques. Smaller open datasets can be pulled together, increasing the generalizability of tested hypotheses and methods. Benefits further extend to promoting reproducibility, strengthening validation, and sharing resources.
However, using open neuroimaging datasets also comes with many challenges. For example, the widespread use of relatively homogeneous datasets can run the risk of overlooking underrepresented populations and potentially limit the generalizability of the identified principles of brain structure and function, suggesting an acute need for collection of future, more ethnically and geographically diverse open datasets. In addition, legal and ethical use and sharing of open data, especially of the clinical populations, requires a complex infrastructure regulated by community guidelines for governing the data and tools to support fair research practices. Thus, while the collection of such datasets has neuroscientific goals, improving our use of open datasets is a multidisciplinary effort spanning biomedical science, data science, economics, and law.
This special issue aims to critically discuss the status quo of open data, including its opportunities and challenges, and to showcase innovative tools and software to support open data governance and sharing. We welcome all types of submissions accepted by Aperture Neuro, including original research articles, review articles, case studies, methodological papers, short communications, and code submissions.
Potential topics for a manuscript submission include, but are not limited to:
- Challenges in collecting big (and small) open dataset
- Challenges in funding open datasets
- Data governance and its challenges
- Ethical and legal issues of data sharing, open data use (including privacy-related issues)
- Data standards, data acquisition guidelines, reporting standards
- Open platforms, solutions, and tools supporting open data collection, SOPs, standardisation, and sharing
- Big and small open datasets
- Geographically (continent) and politically specific trends and progress on open data
- Impact of open data repositories in research, artificial intelligence training, and clinical practice
- Data sustainability
Timeline: September 1, 2024 to April 30, 2025.
Guest Editors in alphabetical order (family name):
Andrea Gondová
Fetal Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Science Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States
Yi-Ju Lee
Institute of Statistical Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Selma Lugtmeijer
Centre for Human Brain Health, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom
Sina Mansour
Computational Brain Imaging Group, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Stefano Moia
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands
Ju-Chi Yu
Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics, Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Canada
Manuscript Submission: https://apertureneuro.org/for-authors
The cover letter should include a sentence stating that the submission is part of the ‘Special Issue on Open Datasets.’
Contact Information: ohbm.ossig.si@gmail.com