Complementary, alternative, and integrative medicine researchers' practices and perceived barriers related to open science: An international, cross-sectional survey.

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: Open science (OS) aims to make the dissemination of knowledge and the research process transparent and accessible to everyone. With the increasing popularity of complementary, alternative, and integrative medicine (CAIM), our goal was to explore what are CAIM researchers' practices and perceived barriers related to OS. METHODS: We conducted an anonymous online survey of researchers who published in journals listed in Scopus containing the words "complementary", "alternative", or "integrative" medicine in their names. We emailed 6040 researchers our purpose-built electronic survey after extracting their email address from one of their publications in our sample of journals. We questioned their familiarity with different OS concepts, along with their experiences and challenges engaging in these practices over the last 12 months. RESULTS: The survey was completed by 392 researchers (6.5% response rate, 97.1% completion rate). Most respondents were CAIM researchers familiar with the overall concept of OS, indicated by those actively publishing open access (OA) (n = 244, 76.0%), registering a study protocol (n = 148, 48.0%), and using reporting guidelines (n = 181, 59.0%) in the past 12 months. Preprinting, sharing raw data, and sharing study materials were less popular. A lack of funding was reported as the greatest barrier to publishing OA by most respondents (n = 252, 79.0%), and that additional funding is the most significant incentive in applying more OS practices to their research (n = 229,72.2%). With respect to preprinting barriers, 36.3% (n = 110) participants believed there are potential harms in sharing non-peer-reviewed work and 37.0% (n = 112) feared preprinting would reduce the likelihood of their manuscript being accepted by a journal. Respondents were also concerned about intellectual property control regarding sharing data (n = 94, 31.7%) and research study materials (n = 80, 28.7%). CONCLUSIONS: Although many participants were familiar with and practiced aspects of OS, many reported facing barriers relating to lack of funding to enable OS and perceived risks of revealing research ideas and data prior to publication. Future research should monitor the adoption and implementation of OS interventions in CAIM.

Recommendations and guidelines for creating scholarly biomedical journals: A scoping review.

BACKGROUND: Scholarly journals play a key role in the dissemination of research findings. However, little focus is given to the process of establishing new, credible journals and the obstacles faced in achieving this. This scoping review aimed to identify and describe existing recommendations for starting a biomedical scholarly journal. METHODS: We searched five bibliographic databases: OVID Medline + Medline in Process, Embase Classic + Embase, ERIC, APA PsycINFO, and Web of Science on January 14, 2022. A related grey literature search was conducted on March 19, 2022. Eligible sources were those published in English in any year, of any format, and that described guidance for starting a biomedical journal. Titles and abstracts of obtained sources were screened. We extracted descriptive characteristics including author name, year and country of publication, journal name, and source type, and any recommendations from the included sources discussing guidance for starting a biomedical journal. These recommendations were categorized and thematically grouped. RESULTS: A total of 5626 unique sources were obtained. Thirty-three sources met our inclusion criteria. Most sources were blog posts (10/33; 30.30%), and only 10 sources were supported by evidence. We extracted 51 unique recommendations from these 33 sources, which we thematically classified into nine themes which were: journal operations, editorial review processes, peer review processes, open access publishing, copyediting/typesetting, production, archiving/indexing/metrics, marketing/promotion, and funding. CONCLUSIONS: There is little formal guidance regarding how to start a scholarly journal. The development of an evidence-based guideline may help uphold scholarly publishing quality, provide insight into obstacles new journals will face, and equip novice publishers with the tools to meet best practices.