FOR2026: OPENNESS AND SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

This conference session, chaired by Rena Alcalay, formed part of a broader meeting on the future of open research, with a particular emphasis on bibliometric and other data‑intensive investigations as well as infrastructures and tools supporting responsive and responsible open research. The session brought together empirical and conceptual contributions that examined the changing landscape of scholarly communication, including preprinting, registered reports, positionality statements, publishing infrastructures, and emerging models of peer review and open access practices. Across the session, speakers addressed the scholarly communication landscape from multiple disciplinary and geopolitical persepctives, highlighting how how policies, infrastructures, and community practices jointly shaped the uptake and consequences of open research. Topics included preprinting and its relationship to peer‑reviewed outputs, registered reports and funder–journal partnerships, open and post‑publication peer review, positionality statements in publishing, and tensions between commercial and grassroots publishing initiatives, particularly in relation to open access and equity.

Shlomit Hadad, Daphne Raban, and Noa Aharony presented “From Access to Equity: Sequential Bibliometric Analyses of Open Access, Funding, and Policy Across Israel, Austria, and Mexico,” drawing on sequential bibliometric studies to show how national policy, funding structures, and collaboration networks influenced citation impact and produced differentiated patterns of equity in open science across disciplines and regions. Their analysis offered evidence‑based insights for designing more responsible and inclusive frameworks that better aligned the ideals of open research with its actual outcomes in the global knowledge ecosystem.

Jacopo Ambrosj and Frédérique Bordignon, in “Navigating a Fragmented Landscape: A Taxonomy of Online Venues for Scholarly Communication,” introduced a taxonomy of the diverse ways online venues contribute to scholarly communication, based on the analysis of more than 450 venues. The taxonomy is meant to navigate the landscape of online scholarly communication and when combined with other methods such as discourse and economic analysis can serve as an analytical basis for further analysis. To illustrate this, they used the taxonomy to describe the evolution of ResearchGate’s strategies and communication patterns over time. 

In “When Journals Stand Still, Scientists Step In: The Rise of Post‑Publication Peer Review,” Paolo Vincenzo Leone and Philipp Tuertscher reported a qualitative study of loosely coordinated “science sleuths” who had driven the emergence of post‑publication peer review (PPPR). They showed how this community assembled a socio‑technical system of evaluative practices and tools that became integrated into journal workflows, reframing scientific evaluation as a more ongoing, distributed, and transparent process while also raising concerns about risks such as reputational harm from unverified claims.

Ties Nijssen and David Teira’s contribution, “Diamond Grassroots and Commercial Publishing,” examined how the incentives and practical requirements of editing and publishing journals differed from those of peer review alone, and how these differences shaped the challenges faced by Diamond Open Access initiatives. They questioned the expectation that scientists should undertake editing and publishing work themselves and what role market driven stakeholders should play in the development of Open Science.

Miranda Barnes presented her work with colleagues Samuel Moore, and Jenni Adams on “MORPHING‑Open Peer Review in the Humanities and Social Sciences,” reporting on the MORPHSS project, a multi‑institutional initiative exploring practices of open research in HSS disciplines. Their talk focused on experiments with open peer review for a special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, detailing two “opened-out” review processes and sharing early reflections from participating authors and reviewers.

In “Publishing Without the Market? Infrastructural Logics in Publishing Chemistry,” Marianne Noël analysed publishing infrastructures in chemistry as socio‑technical systems that coordinated the production and dissemination of journals. Drawing on a doctoral thesis based on historical and contemporary empirical studies, the presentation traced how editorial labour, value, and access devices contributed to the social construction of markets in chemistry publishing and illuminated key points in complex publishing markets.

Chris Hartgerink and Sarahanne Field, in “Positionality in Time and Over Time: Moving from Static Reflexivity to Dynamic Reflexivity,” discussed the limits of static positionality statements in article publishing and introduced the concept of process‑based publishing. They argued for dynamic positionality statements, enabled by publishing each research step as an output, and linked evolving positionality practices to alternative publishing formats and methodological transparency.

Finally, two contributions focused on infrastructures and data‑intensive analyses of open research practices. Pen‑Yuan Hsing, Anushka Kafle, Marcus Munafò, and Jackie Thompson, in “Evaluating the Frontiers of Registered Reports Infrastructure: Lessons from the Cancer Research UK Funding Partnership,” reported qualitative interviews with stakeholders in the CRUK Registered Reports Funding Partnership, identifying markers of research quality/integrity, barriers to adoption for Registered Reports, and implications for academic institutions in encouraging novel publication formats. Narmin Rzayeva, Stephen Pinfield, and Ludo Waltman’s presentation, “Matching Peer‑reviewed Outputs to Preprints at Scale: What the Links Reveal About Global and Disciplinary Adoption (1991–2023),” analysed large‑scale linkages between peer‑reviewed outputs  and preprints to show how disciplinary and regional factors shaped preprint adoption, while also highlighting the limitations of bibliometric data and metadata practices and underlining the need for the consistent use of persistent identifiers such as DOIs, as well as for more fine-grained  research document-type taxonomies.