On Thursday 5 December, we conducted our third webinar with academics from Asia-Pacific countries, and the discussion was divided into four main topics: Open access, government focus on R&D, where to publish and choosing what to read.
Rishi Kumar from India, Giulio Gabrieli from Singapore and Fei Gao from China offered their insight and opinion.
Open access
- Open Access was considered positively by our panellists, as it allows academics to make their research results more visible, helping others to access data and conduct further studies
- In China, Singapore and India, the government is now encouraging data sharing and reproducibility guidelines
In terms of challenges around open access:
- Our speakers agreed that lack of funding makes publishing open access really challenging
- In India, there is a general feeling that having to pay a fee to publish open access means that the journal or publisher does not have a great reputation
Government focus on R&D
- In developing countries, such as India, the government is asking to contribute to international research
- In China and Singapore, there is also a demand to publish in English for well-known international journals
- The panellists agreed that the future of publishing could change with a joint effort from the government and publishers
Where to publish
- Our panellists usually discussed with their group where to publish
- When deciding where to publish, our speakers took into account impact factor, journal reputation and index
- PI have the last word and strongly influence the final decision on publishing
- Journal accessibility has improved recently, with increased availability of research papers on different platforms
- When it comes to publishing in a new journal, caution was exercised by our speakers. Nevertheless, if the editor has a good reputation and the publisher is reliable, they felt more comfortable
- To determine the impact of a paper, our panellists used different methods such as statistics with views of the paper, paper repositories from universities, paper index and how many times a paper was shared across social networks
Choosing what to read
- Social media has a strong influence as academics usually check Twitter, Facebook and WeChat (mainly in China) to see the latest trends
- Together with social media, our speakers used a variety of tools: Researcher, ResearchGate, Mendeley, Endnote and university newsletters
- A selection of recommended articles was usually preferred by our speakers as this helped them decide what to read
