Juan Pablo Alperin
Biographic Data
| ID | 1629911 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Juan Pablo Alperin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Juan Pablo |
| FAMILY NAME | Alperin |
| SIGNATURE | ALPERIN J P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Simon Fraser University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9344-7439 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
How Moderation Makes Science
As preprint servers proliferate across scientific fields, moderation has emerged as a lightly structured form of gatekeeping that precedes—or bypasses—peer review. This article examines moderation as a site of precautionary valuation and boundary-making in the early circulation of research. Drawing on interviews with 14 individuals responsible for screening and oversight across 13 preprint servers, we analyze both the evaluative logics that organ…
On the open road to universal indexing
This study examines OpenAlex’s indexing of Journals Using Open Journal Systems (JUOJS), reflecting two open-source software initiatives supporting inclusive scholarly participation. By analyzing a data set of 47,625 active JUOJS, we reveal that 71% of these journals have at least one article indexed in OpenAlex. Our findings underscore the central role of Crossref DOIs in achieving indexing, with 96% of the journals using Crossref DOIs included i…
I’d Like to Think I’d Be Able to Spot One”
Open Data in Data Journalism
Background: In this commentary, we argue that it is time for communication scholars to turn their attention to how and why data journalists engage with the increasing amount of open research and government data available online. Analysis: We review the limited scholarship that has investigated data journalists’ engagement with open data and suggest directions for future research. Conclusions and implications: Research that explicitly examines dat…
The impact of Covid-19 on the debate on open science
This study is an analysis of the international debate on open science that took place during the pandemic. It addresses the question, how did the COVID-19 pandemic impact the debate on open science? The study takes the form of a qualitative analysis of a large corpus of key articles, editorials, blogs and thought pieces about the impact of COVID on open science, published during the pandemic in English, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. The findin…
Bridging science communication and open science—Working inclusively toward the common good
The 2020–2022 pandemic highlighted concerns about “information disorders”, pressing for approaches capable of guiding the science-society alliance toward a mutually beneficial direction. This essay advocates for and presents a framework proposing the combination of Open Science (OS) and Science Communication (SciComm) practices. OS encourages public access to scientific material, while SciComm has historically enabled public understanding of scie…
Unreviewed science in the news
It has been argued that preprint coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a paradigm shift in journalism norms and practices. This study examines whether and in what ways this is the case using a sample of 11,538 preprints posted on four preprint servers—bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and SSRN—that received coverage in 94 English-language media outlets between 2014 and 2021. We compared mentions of these preprints with mentions of a comparison…
We need to rethink the way we identify diamond open access journals in quantitative science studies
With the announcement of several new diamond open access (OA) related initiatives and the creation of the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, diamond OA is now at the forefront of the OA movement. However, while working on our recent Quantitative Science Studies publication and data sets, we noticed that temporarily waiving article processing charges (APCs) was a commonly used strategy by big publishers for some of their journals. In the absenc…
Second-order citations in altmetrics
The potential to capture the societal impact of research has been a driving motivation for the use and development of altmetrics. Yet, to date, altmetrics have largely failed to deliver on this potential because the primary audience that cites research on social media has been shown to be academics themselves. In response, our study investigates an extension of traditional altmetric approaches that goes beyond capturing direct mentions of researc…
Comunicado de imprensa como indicador de atenção social qualificada da ciência
Na última década, a altmetria contribuiu para abrir espaço para indicadores de atenção e impacto social da ciência, e a repaginar a cienciometria, embora ainda persista a centralidade das métricas de performance na produção científica. Nesse sentido, há uma demanda por outras fontes de dados que contribuam para conferir contexto e também fornecer substrato para a construção de outros indicadores, capazes de atuar na interface ciência-sociedade de…
Stark Decline in Journalists’ Use of Preprints Postpandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the use of preprints, aiding rapid research dissemination but also facilitating the spread of misinformation. This study analyzes media coverage of preprints from 2014 to 2023, revealing a significant postpandemic decline. Our findings suggest that heightened awareness of the risks associated with preprints has led to more cautious media practices. While the decline in preprint coverage may mitigate concerns abou…
Communicating Scientific Uncertainty in an Age of Covid-19
In this article, we investigate the surge in use of COVID-19-related preprints by media outlets. Journalists are a main source of reliable public health information during crises and, until recently, journalists have been reluctant to cover preprints because of the associated scientific uncertainty. Yet, uploads of COVID-19 preprints and their uptake by online media have outstripped that of preprints about any other topic. Using an innovative app…
Identifying science in the news
The company Altmetric is often used to collect mentions of research in online news stories, yet there have been concerns about the quality of this data. This study investigates these concerns. Using a manual content analysis of 400 news stories as a comparison method, we analyzed the precision and recall with which Altmetric identified mentions of research in 8 news outlets. We also used logistic regression to identify the characteristics of rese…
Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing
By analyzing 25,671 journals largely absent from common journal counts, as well as Web of Science and Scopus, this study demonstrates that scholarly communication is more of a global endeavor than is commonly credited. These journals, employing the open-source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS), have published 5.8 million items; they are in 136 countries, with 79.9% in the Global South and 84.2% following the OA diamond model (chargin…
De la tecnocracia a la equidad y la sustentabilidad
Fue por medio de los estudios sobre softwares de periódicos científicos que Juan Pablo Alperin comenzó a desarrollar investigaciones sobre la comunicación científica, principalmente en relación a la temática de acceso abierto y su cuestión más amplia que envuelve la ciencia abierta. En entrevista con la Reciis, el profesor e investigador argumenta que es preciso pensar en cómo abrir el acceso al conocimiento y no apenas garantirlo. En ese sentido…
Framing Science
Popular news media play an instrumental role in shaping public perception of issues like the opioid crisis. Using a detailed coding instrument, we analyzed how opioid-related scholarly publications were covered in 149 news stories published by nine major US and Canadian online news outlets at the height of the crisis. We find that a small proportion of available studies receive coverage, mostly within issue-focused rather than science communicati…
How much research shared on Facebook happens outside of public pages and groups? A comparison of public and private online activity around PLOS ONE papers
Despite its undisputed position as the biggest social media platform, Facebook has never entered the main stage of altmetrics research. In this study, we argue that the lack of attention by altmetrics researchers is due, in part, to the challenges in collecting Facebook data regarding activity that takes place outside of public pages and groups. We present a new method of collecting aggregate counts of shares, reactions, and comments across the p…
Identifying diffusion patterns of research articles on Twitter
The growing presence of research shared on social media, coupled with the increase in freely available research, invites us to ask whether scientific articles shared on platforms like Twitter diffuse beyond the academic community. We explore a new method for answering this question by identifying 11 articles from two open access biology journals that were shared on Twitter at least 50 times and by analyzing the follower network of users who tweet…
The state of OA
Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles. We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigate OA in three populations: (1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, (2) r…
The evaluation of scholarship in academic promotion and tenure processes
Review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) processes significantly affect how faculty direct their own career and scholarly progression. Although RPT practices vary between and within institutions, and affect various disciplines, ranks, institution types, genders, and ethnicity in different ways, some consistent themes emerge when investigating what faculty would like to change about RPT. For instance, over the last few decades, RPT processes have gener…
The academic ethics of open access to research and scholarship
In this article, we present the case for regarding the principles by which scholarly publications are disseminated and shared as a matter of academic ethics. The ethics of access have to do with recognizing people's right to know what is known, as well as the value to humanity of having one of its best forms of arriving at knowledge as widely shared as possible. The level of access is often reduced by the financial interests of publishers in a ma…
Open access and scholarly publishing in Latin America
Throughout this article we argue that many scholars and scientific systems in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) share the ethical and epistemological motivations about the importance of increasing the "public presence" of academic research and lay out that many scholars and that many scholars and scientific systems in LAC are well positioned to take advantage of the increasing information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and …
Open access and scholarly publishing in Latin America
Stark Decline in Journalists’ Use of Preprints Postpandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the use of preprints, aiding rapid research dissemination but also facilitating the spread of misinformation. This study analyzes media coverage of preprints from 2014 to 2023, revealing a significant postpandemic decline. Our findings suggest that heightened awareness of the risks associated with preprints has led to more cautious media practices. While the decline in preprint coverage may mitigate concerns abou…
Open access and scholarly publishing in Latin America
Throughout this article we argue that many scholars and scientific systems in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) share the ethical and epistemological motivations about the importance of increasing the "public presence" of academic research and lay out that many scholars and that many scholars and scientific systems in LAC are well positioned to take advantage of the increasing information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure and …
Open access and scholarly publishing in Latin America
The academic ethics of open access to research and scholarship
In this article, we present the case for regarding the principles by which scholarly publications are disseminated and shared as a matter of academic ethics. The ethics of access have to do with recognizing people's right to know what is known, as well as the value to humanity of having one of its best forms of arriving at knowledge as widely shared as possible. The level of access is often reduced by the financial interests of publishers in a ma…
The state of OA
Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles. We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigate OA in three populations: (1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, (2) r…
The evaluation of scholarship in academic promotion and tenure processes
Review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) processes significantly affect how faculty direct their own career and scholarly progression. Although RPT practices vary between and within institutions, and affect various disciplines, ranks, institution types, genders, and ethnicity in different ways, some consistent themes emerge when investigating what faculty would like to change about RPT. For instance, over the last few decades, RPT processes have gener…
Identifying diffusion patterns of research articles on Twitter
The growing presence of research shared on social media, coupled with the increase in freely available research, invites us to ask whether scientific articles shared on platforms like Twitter diffuse beyond the academic community. We explore a new method for answering this question by identifying 11 articles from two open access biology journals that were shared on Twitter at least 50 times and by analyzing the follower network of users who tweet…
Framing Science
Popular news media play an instrumental role in shaping public perception of issues like the opioid crisis. Using a detailed coding instrument, we analyzed how opioid-related scholarly publications were covered in 149 news stories published by nine major US and Canadian online news outlets at the height of the crisis. We find that a small proportion of available studies receive coverage, mostly within issue-focused rather than science communicati…
How much research shared on Facebook happens outside of public pages and groups? A comparison of public and private online activity around PLOS ONE papers
Despite its undisputed position as the biggest social media platform, Facebook has never entered the main stage of altmetrics research. In this study, we argue that the lack of attention by altmetrics researchers is due, in part, to the challenges in collecting Facebook data regarding activity that takes place outside of public pages and groups. We present a new method of collecting aggregate counts of shares, reactions, and comments across the p…
Communicating Scientific Uncertainty in an Age of Covid-19
In this article, we investigate the surge in use of COVID-19-related preprints by media outlets. Journalists are a main source of reliable public health information during crises and, until recently, journalists have been reluctant to cover preprints because of the associated scientific uncertainty. Yet, uploads of COVID-19 preprints and their uptake by online media have outstripped that of preprints about any other topic. Using an innovative app…
Identifying science in the news
The company Altmetric is often used to collect mentions of research in online news stories, yet there have been concerns about the quality of this data. This study investigates these concerns. Using a manual content analysis of 400 news stories as a comparison method, we analyzed the precision and recall with which Altmetric identified mentions of research in 8 news outlets. We also used logistic regression to identify the characteristics of rese…
Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing
By analyzing 25,671 journals largely absent from common journal counts, as well as Web of Science and Scopus, this study demonstrates that scholarly communication is more of a global endeavor than is commonly credited. These journals, employing the open-source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS), have published 5.8 million items; they are in 136 countries, with 79.9% in the Global South and 84.2% following the OA diamond model (chargin…
De la tecnocracia a la equidad y la sustentabilidad
Fue por medio de los estudios sobre softwares de periódicos científicos que Juan Pablo Alperin comenzó a desarrollar investigaciones sobre la comunicación científica, principalmente en relación a la temática de acceso abierto y su cuestión más amplia que envuelve la ciencia abierta. En entrevista con la Reciis, el profesor e investigador argumenta que es preciso pensar en cómo abrir el acceso al conocimiento y no apenas garantirlo. En ese sentido…
The impact of Covid-19 on the debate on open science
This study is an analysis of the international debate on open science that took place during the pandemic. It addresses the question, how did the COVID-19 pandemic impact the debate on open science? The study takes the form of a qualitative analysis of a large corpus of key articles, editorials, blogs and thought pieces about the impact of COVID on open science, published during the pandemic in English, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. The findin…
Bridging science communication and open science—Working inclusively toward the common good
The 2020–2022 pandemic highlighted concerns about “information disorders”, pressing for approaches capable of guiding the science-society alliance toward a mutually beneficial direction. This essay advocates for and presents a framework proposing the combination of Open Science (OS) and Science Communication (SciComm) practices. OS encourages public access to scientific material, while SciComm has historically enabled public understanding of scie…
Unreviewed science in the news
It has been argued that preprint coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a paradigm shift in journalism norms and practices. This study examines whether and in what ways this is the case using a sample of 11,538 preprints posted on four preprint servers—bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and SSRN—that received coverage in 94 English-language media outlets between 2014 and 2021. We compared mentions of these preprints with mentions of a comparison…
We need to rethink the way we identify diamond open access journals in quantitative science studies
With the announcement of several new diamond open access (OA) related initiatives and the creation of the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access, diamond OA is now at the forefront of the OA movement. However, while working on our recent Quantitative Science Studies publication and data sets, we noticed that temporarily waiving article processing charges (APCs) was a commonly used strategy by big publishers for some of their journals. In the absenc…
Second-order citations in altmetrics
The potential to capture the societal impact of research has been a driving motivation for the use and development of altmetrics. Yet, to date, altmetrics have largely failed to deliver on this potential because the primary audience that cites research on social media has been shown to be academics themselves. In response, our study investigates an extension of traditional altmetric approaches that goes beyond capturing direct mentions of researc…
Comunicado de imprensa como indicador de atenção social qualificada da ciência
Na última década, a altmetria contribuiu para abrir espaço para indicadores de atenção e impacto social da ciência, e a repaginar a cienciometria, embora ainda persista a centralidade das métricas de performance na produção científica. Nesse sentido, há uma demanda por outras fontes de dados que contribuam para conferir contexto e também fornecer substrato para a construção de outros indicadores, capazes de atuar na interface ciência-sociedade de…
Stark Decline in Journalists’ Use of Preprints Postpandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the use of preprints, aiding rapid research dissemination but also facilitating the spread of misinformation. This study analyzes media coverage of preprints from 2014 to 2023, revealing a significant postpandemic decline. Our findings suggest that heightened awareness of the risks associated with preprints has led to more cautious media practices. While the decline in preprint coverage may mitigate concerns abou…
On the open road to universal indexing
This study examines OpenAlex’s indexing of Journals Using Open Journal Systems (JUOJS), reflecting two open-source software initiatives supporting inclusive scholarly participation. By analyzing a data set of 47,625 active JUOJS, we reveal that 71% of these journals have at least one article indexed in OpenAlex. Our findings underscore the central role of Crossref DOIs in achieving indexing, with 96% of the journals using Crossref DOIs included i…
I’d Like to Think I’d Be Able to Spot One”
Open Data in Data Journalism
Background: In this commentary, we argue that it is time for communication scholars to turn their attention to how and why data journalists engage with the increasing amount of open research and government data available online. Analysis: We review the limited scholarship that has investigated data journalists’ engagement with open data and suggest directions for future research. Conclusions and implications: Research that explicitly examines dat…
How Moderation Makes Science
As preprint servers proliferate across scientific fields, moderation has emerged as a lightly structured form of gatekeeping that precedes—or bypasses—peer review. This article examines moderation as a site of precautionary valuation and boundary-making in the early circulation of research. Drawing on interviews with 14 individuals responsible for screening and oversight across 13 preprint servers, we analyze both the evaluative logics that organ…
Computer Science (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · scientometrics and bibliometrics research (15 works) · World Wide Web (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Academic Publishing and Open Access (8 works) · Public relations (8 works) · Medicine (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Psychology (6 works)