Abstract
Can open access play a role to fight fake news?
The subject of fake news is very topical. With social networks, and the advances of artificial intelligence, fake news are created and circulate faster and faster. Health and sciences are particularly nasty topics for fake news and the current context of Covid19 pandemic has made this crisis in the scientific information even more obvious.
Building on the results that were presented at the Open Science Conference 2020, a prototype that analyzes automatically open access research articles to help verify scientific claims was built.
This prototype takes a claim such as : “does coffee cause cancer ?” as an input, and builds three indicators to evaluate the truth behind this claim. The first indicator assesses whether the claim has been extensively studied. The second indicator is based on an NLP pipeline, and analyzes whether the articles generally agree or disagree with the claim. The third indicator is based on the retrieval and analysis of numerical values from the pertinent articles.
In this session, we would like to present our methodology, discuss the results that we have obtained and extend the discussion to the role that Open Access scholarly literature can play to fight false scientific claims and to help inform the public.
Connecting the dots: A cross-industry discussion on retracted research
Issues around the capturing, acknowledgement, classification, and tracking of retracted research are shared by academic institutions, publishing organizations, and the technology providers who support them. This cross-industry panel, moderated by a researcher and comprised of representatives from a non-profit publisher, an academic library, and a publishing platform provider, will examine shared obstacles and opportunities in processing, documenting, and communicating retractions, and will provide practical strategies for cross-industry collaboration. The panel will be moderated by Jodi Schneider, Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jodi and other members of her research team have been spending significant time in 2020 bringing together representatives from all areas of the scholarly communication ecosystem as part of a Sloan-funded agenda-setting project. This moderated conversation will be one deliverable from a series of multiple workshops, interviews, and white papers.
Supporting sound and open science standards at the preprint stage
Preprint deposition and consumption has experienced exponential growth over the past year, particularly during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Problems with clarity, transparency, and reproducibility are pervasive in preprints and published articles alike. Given that preprints are often the earliest public-facing outputs of research, preprint platforms are in an ideal position to support, incentivize, and guide authors in the adoption of established standards for improving clarity, openness, and rigor in research reporting. This session discusses the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of some preprints during the pandemic and the unique role that preprint platforms can play in curbing disinformation and cultivating best practices at this critical point in the manuscript development process.
