Ludo Waltman

1/2 📊 @cwtsnl.bsky.social published the 2025 release of its Leiden Ranking Open Edition: a real step toward open research information.
Built on OpenAlex, it:
• Uses transparent, reusable data
• Includes national & regional publishing (not only “core” journals)...

Very proud of the improvements made by the Leiden Ranking team to the Open Edition of the ranking.

This demonstrates our commitment at CWTS to @barcelonadori.bsky.social and the open research information transition.

Great work by @neesjanvaneck.bsky.social and the rest of the team!

Review of interactive open-access publishing with community-based open peer review for improved scientific discourse and quality assurance Abstract. Scientific discourse and quality assurance can be improved by open-access (OA) publishing with public peer review and community discussion. Over 25 years, the viability of this approach has ...

25 years interactive open access publishing with transparent peer review. >50,000 peer-reviewed preprints + reviewer, editor, community comments in 19 journals @egu.eu. Thanks to @ludowaltman.bsky.social for his peer review report.
#openaccess #openpeerreview #preprints
doi.org/10.5194/acp-...

Home - MetaROR MetaResearch Open Review MetaResearch Open Review MetaResearch Open Review A new platform designed to transform how we review and share metaresearch A new platform designed to transform

MetaROR, a platform for reviews of research on research, is a success! We have published 24 sets of reviews and have 16 submissions in process. MetaROR now has 9 partners - these are journals that agree to use our reviews when authors submit to them. metaror.org #metascience #openaccess

Help OpenCitations address the most pressing needs of the community. Provide your input through the OpenCitations Community Survey!

Who should control open access, the markets or the commons? - Impact of Social Sciences Publishing Beyond examines the ills of a marketised system of academic publishingand outlines how commons-based approaches could be an alternative.

💥New: Who should control open access, the markets or the commons?

✍️ @thomasgraves.bsky.social reviews Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons (@uofmpress.bsky.social) by @samuelmoore.org

#OpenAccess #OAWeek25 #ScholComms

1/2 Moving funding metadata forward: highlights from our round table (co-organized with @crossref.bsky.social)

New blog by @hldejonge.bsky.social , based on Working Group 3 (Funding Metadata)

• ~25% Crossref records have funding info ⬇️

It is very good to see reforming academic reward and recognition as the first point listed in this Publishing Futures from @universitypress.cambridge.org report in considering ways forward for the future of academic publishing 🤩 Read more below 👇

Open Reviews is a good first step. Pseudo-Anonymous Reviews can take it further.

Between open reviews and cases of abusing anonymity, the authors of our latest article argue for "pseudo-anonymous" (i.e., traceable) reviews.

The reviewers support the general idea while also offering amendments and alternative solutions.

👇 Read the assessment, reviews & full article now

I very much like this:

"organized peer review occupies a distinct role: it surfaces scholarly discourse around an article ... which are part of the intellectual scaffolding that supports further inquiry. To support cumulative, transparent scholarship, peer review should be visible and citable"

"... Because appraisal is initiated by authors, it is reasonable for them or their institutions to cover its cost, while readers fund curation, for example through subscription paywalls."

Food for thought!

There are some very interesting ideas in this post:

"This fee-for-service model disentangles two core functions that current business models conflate: author-facing appraisal and reader-facing curation ..."

Balancing opportunity and risk: rethinking China Scholarship Council programmes amid geopolitical tensions Amid international concerns over the China Scholarship Council (CSC), especially regarding academic freedom and sensitive knowledge transfer, our study analyses CSC-funded research (2009–2021) to reve...

🤝 Amid international concerns over the China Scholarship Council, our newest blog's authors Qianqian Xie & Alfredo Yegros look at the data. They reveal trends, collaborations and broader implications, and ultimately argue for a "balanced, evidence-based approach".

👇 Read it now on Leiden Madtrics

Launching the new Participation Reports, already available at crossref.org/members/prep. Read about what's new and why more transparency on #openmetadata is important for movements like @barcelonadori.bsky.social, not to mention insights for members themselves doi.org/10.64000/8d5... #Crossref2025

Special Seminar: Perspectives on the evaluation of science We are delighted to host a special seminar featuring the members of Eleonora Dagiene’s external PhD committee, held the day after her PhD defence. This session will bring together three distinguished ...

📣 Special seminar on 'Perspectives on the evaluation of science', with Emanuel Kulczycki, @alesiazuccala557.bsky.social, and Jochen Gläser.

🎧 Make sure to join!

📅 Friday, 31.10.2025
🕐 1:00-3:00 PM (CET)
📌 Online & at CWTS

More information 👉 www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/20...

Of particular interest to those interested in #preprints and #openscience , or anyone who has been thinking about the Engagement with Society aspects of OS cc. @asapbio.bsky.social @ludowaltman.bsky.social @stephenpinfield.bsky.social @jacoates.bsky.social

Less is more: academic publishing needs ‘radical change,’ Cambridge press report concludes Academic publishing needs “renewed focus and collective action” to embrace new approaches and ensure the future of the industry, concludes a report from Cambridge University Press, released last we…

“We fundamentally believe that publishing less – but better – is essential for the health of the entire research system worldwide,” the authors of the report state.

Replication studies meet #metaresarch!!

@vtraag.bsky.social and colleagues at @rorinstitute.bsky.social and elsewhere attempted to replicate two phenomena of interest to ECRs and funders: the Matthew effect and the early-career setback effect.
elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...; @elife.bsky.social

European grant applications are at record highs, success rates below 10%: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Time to rethink how we fund, assess and support research - not just increase competition.

I am grateful to you and your co-authors for preprinting your work!

Agreed!

When I am invited to review an article, I always publish my review report online.

Of course I can do this only if the article under review is already publicly available, for instance on a preprint server. Therefore I do not review articles that have not yet been made publicly available.

Preprinting and open peer review at the STI 2023 conference: Evaluation of an open science experiment At the STI 2023 conference, an experiment was performed with a more open approach to publication and peer review of conference submissions. In this post, the conference organisers present an evaluatio...

Also very nice to see the value of the open peer review organized by @cwtsnl.bsky.social for the STI 2023 conference!

www.leidenmadtrics.nl/articles/pre...

In addition to the interesting findings that the authors present about bibliometric reporting guidelines, the article also does a great job in showing the value of open peer review.

This study illustrates why openness should be the default in peer review!

@prereview.bsky.social
#PublishYourReviews

11 broad categories of peer review comments on bibliometric studies

I just reviewed the article 'Implicit reporting standards in bibliometric research: what can reviewers' comments tell us about reporting completeness?' by @dimitystephen.bsky.social and colleagues. I like the article a lot!

Article: arxiv.org/abs/2508.162...

Review: prereview.org/reviews/1739...

Get involved in an Open Science Monitor for the Netherlands! A consortium with @cwtsnl.bsky.social and Dialogic, funded by us, is developing a framework and dashboard in co-creation with the community. Your input is highly appreciated: www.openscience.nl/en/news/deve...

I guess there should be ways for Elsevier/SSRN to overcome the obstacle of resource constraints, so let's see if the completeness of Crossref metadata for SSRN preprints is going to improve!

See also the SSRN response at the bottom of the blog post:

"We are currently exploring ways to expand the range and quality of data we share with Crossref in a sustainable and efficient manner that makes the best use of our limited resources and can handle SSRN’s large number of preprints."

For its journals Elsevier indeed has the deeply problematic policy that it doesn't deposit abstracts and affiliation metadata to @crossref.bsky.social.

However, @ssrn.bsky.social told me they want to deposit more metadata to Crossref, but they haven't managed to do so yet due to limited resources.

"An important exception is SSRN, the largest preprint server in our analysis. Abstracts are not included in the Crossref metadata of SSRN preprints." For preprints from SSRN, less than half include reference list (at least 1 reference listed). " Sad.

Crossref as a source of open bibliographic metadata for preprints Crossref is a crucial source of open bibliographic metadata for articles published in scientific journals. Importantly, however, Crossref can also serve as a source of bibliographic metadata for prepr...

There is considerable discussion about the (lack of) openness of metadata of journal articles, but how do preprint servers perform in terms of openly available metadata?

@neesjanvaneck.bsky.social and I report our findings in a new @leidenmadtrics.bsky.social blog post doi.org/10.59350/te7....