Top health research funders’ guidance on selecting journals for funded research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<ns4:p> <ns4:bold>Background:</ns4:bold> Funded health research is being published in journals that many regard as “predatory”, deceptive, and non-credible. We do not currently know whether funders provide guidance on how to select a journal in which to publish funded health research. </ns4:p> <ns4:p> <ns4:bold>Methods:</ns4:bold> We identified the largest 46 philanthropic, public, development assistance, public-private partnership, and multilateral funders of health research by expenditure, globally as well as four public funders from lower-middle income countries, from the list at <ns4:ext-link xmlns:ns5="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" ns5:href="https://healthresearchfunders.org">https://healthresearchfunders.org</ns4:ext-link> . One of us identified guidance on disseminating funded research from each funders’ website (August/September 2017), then extracted information about selecting journals, which was verified by another assessor. Discrepancies were resolved by discussion. Results were summarized descriptively. This research used publicly available information; we did not seek verification with funding bodies. </ns4:p> <ns4:p> <ns4:bold>Results:</ns4:bold> The majority (44/50) of sampled funders indicated funding health research. 38 (of 44, 86%) had publicly available information about disseminating funded research, typically called “policies” (29, 76%). Of these 38, 36 (95%) mentioned journal publication for dissemination of which 13 (36.11%) offer variable guidance on selecting a journal, all of which relate to the funder’s open access mandate. Six funders (17%) outlined publisher requirements or features by which to select a journal. One funder linked to a document providing features of journals to look for (e.g. listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals) and to be wary of (e.g., no journal scope statement, uses direct and unsolicited marketing). </ns4:p> <ns4:p> <ns4:bold>Conclusions:</ns4:bold> Few funders provided guidance on how to select a journal in which to publish funded research. Funders have a duty to ensure that the research they fund is discoverable by others. This research is a benchmark for funder guidance on journal selection prior to the January 2021 implementation of Plan S (a global, funder-led initiative to ensure immediate, open access to funded, published research). </ns4:p>
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.089 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".