Takeda funded project highlights importance of publication practice in Asia Pacific

Research update: Our new paper, “Contextualizing Data Collection in Central Asia: insights from local researchers’ experiences” co-authored with four Central Asian researchers, looks at the real challenges of doing fieldwork in the region. Using Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice, we explore how government control and fear of repercussions lead to self-censorship and ethical dilemmas during data collection. The study calls for more flexible and culturally sensitive research approaches that reflect local realities and improve the quality and credibility of data. https://lnkd.in/eHTUx89P

🌍 How transparent is science in small-language countries? In her thought-provoking abstract, “Issues of scientific transparency in small-language countries,” Milda Baltrimienė explores a complex dilemma: Publishing in English may strengthen transparency and quality — yet it can also weaken national scientific vocabularies and limit research on local, culturally rooted topics. How can small-language countries balance openness, integrity, and linguistic identity in research? 🤔 This reflection resonates strongly with promotion of open, sustainable, and knowledge-based development in the North and beyond. We value academic freedom, transparency, and diversity as driving forces for global collaboration — and local relevance. 💡 👉 Read Milda’s abstract and join the discussion at the Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing 2025 — where open science meets northern insight: https://lnkd.in/dQVTadzS #Munin2025 #OpenScience #ResearchIntegrity #ScientificTransparency #SmallLanguageCountries #UiT #ArcticUniversity #AcademicFreedom #KnowledgeForTheNorth

⚡At this week's project showcase Selina Galka presented "Tout Vienne me riait: Family and court relations in the memoirs of Countess Louise Charlotte von Schwerin (1684–1732)" The project is a research initiative (FWF 2022–2025, extended to 2026) conducted at the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the Department for Digital Humanities at the University of Graz. It focuses on a critical digital edition and analysis of the French memoirs of Countess Schwerin, preserved in two manuscript versions (Aix-en-Provence and Vienna). The edition follows TEI/XML standards and integrates computational approaches such as Named Entity Recognition, semantic annotation, and network visualization to explore the countess’s social, familial, and courtly relations. The project combines philological and digital methodologies: manuscript transcription and normalization, translation into German, and automatic annotation of entities using large language models. Complementary analyses include topic modeling for thematic indexing, prosopographical studies, and visualizations of person networks and genealogies. The project blog, memoiren.hypotheses.org. documents ongoing experiments and methodological reflections on editing, annotation transfer, and comparative text analysis within the broader context of early modern female autobiographical writing.

'Partner with Latin American scientific societies. They can help journals to identify scholars to invite onto editorial boards and as reviewers. Owing to the barriers they face, highly qualified Latin American candidates might not have built an international profile through publications or conference invitations — but they can be outstanding choices. Increased Latin American representation will also encourage more submissions.' https://lnkd.in/dX5zjcF3

"Terminological research is a research method used to clarify the meanings of terms and concepts and to enhance professional communication, however, it is a method that has been underused. [...] The authors argue that professionals in a variety of fields could benefit from terminological methods." https://lnkd.in/dHr9wyeF

Great work, Claudia Taubenheim 👏 Claudia is our research integrity consultant at PA EDitorial Ltd. In this guest post for The Scholarly Kitchen she raises a point that's not talked about enough: when papers are desk-rejected just because of language, valuable knowledge is lost — and in the process, the diversity of voices that drives scientific progress. She suggests the solution isn’t to lower standards for clarity, but to prioritise the science first and refine expression collaboratively. What do you think could make science more inclusive? Read her post here: https://lnkd.in/eBK5GDmz #ResearchIntegrity #EALResearchers #ScholarlyPublishing #InclusionInScience

Interested in internationalisation, higher education, and English-medium instruction (EMI)? Ever wonder how and why EMI comes about? 🔍 Check out the latest paper from the ELEMENTAL team, where we introduce Social Process Tracing (SPT) as a way to unpack the decision-making processes behind EMI implementation. Congratulations to Beatrice Zuaro for leading on this brilliant publication! 🥳 Out now in Applied Linguistics (open access): https://lnkd.in/gaTci59Q

The Involution of Chinese Academic Publishing At a recent conference at CityU Hong Kong, I found myself in a fascinating discussion with fellow journal editors: Nicole Ellison (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication), Zhou Shuhua (Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media), and Yan Sui (Editor-in-Chief of Modern Communication). The question was simple: How many manuscripts does your journal receive each year? JoBEM: ~450 manuscripts annually JCMC: ~1,000, Asian Journal of Communication (which I edit): 800 last year, and on track for at least 850 this year. And then came the striking number: Modern Communication receives 2,000 manuscripts in JUST ONE MONTH. Why? Because of a government policy in China: professors are incentivized—financially and professionally—to publish in Scopus-indexed journals. In effect, China has imported the KPI-driven culture of Western academia and amplified it at scale. The consequences are significant: Workloads for editors (like myself) have doubled since 2019. Desk-rejection rates now exceed 80%. Review timelines are stretched. This deluge must contain work of global significance. Even if only 0.5% of submissions are outstanding, that’s 10 strong papers a month from a single journal. It’s both daunting and promising. Daunting because of the sheer screening load. Promising because it suggests that within this tidal wave of submissions, there are valuable insights from China that deserve to enter international scholarly conversations. The question is: how do we, as editors, reviewers, and scholars, ensure that the best of this work gets seen—and not drowned in the involution of numbers?

Jin WANG published the second article of her PhD thesis in the peer-reviewed, international journal Brain Research. Together with Jurriaan Witteman 🟥 and Niels Schiller, she investigated classifier processing in speakers of Mandarin. Her findings provide further evidence that classifier information is automatically activated as a lexico-syntactic feature during lemma access when speakers access their mental lexicon during speaking, and that this activation is influenced by semantic processing. The present results contribute both conceptually and methodologically to advancing our understanding of classifier processing in Mandarin Chinese and lexical access during language production more generally. Jin WANG will defend her PhD thesis in public at Leiden University in December.

📢 New Publication from the SOLARIS Project Team! We are pleased to share that prof. Piero Polidoro, SOLARIS team member, has published a new open access article in Actes Sémiotiques: 📘 “Two Proposals for a Semiotic Taxonomy of Fake News and Deepfakes” 📰 Actes Sémiotiques, N° 133 | 2025 🔓 Open Access 🔍 The paper offers a semiotic taxonomy of fake news and deepfakes, examining them not just as media manipulations, but as deviant discursive devices that reshape social expectations around truth, authenticity, and legitimacy. ✅ Key contributions: 🔹Proposes a semiotic classification system based on expression, content, and communicative conditions. 🔹Compares current taxonomies to offer a more operational and enunciative model. 🔹Frames fake news and deepfakes as normative disruptions that challenge how veridiction (truth-telling) is socially constructed. 🔹Contributes to a semiotics of norms, illuminating how discursive pathologies affect digital interactions. 📍This work aligns with the broader SOLARIS mission to understand how synthetic media shape democratic communication, trust, and truth in the digital age. 👏 Congratulations to Piero for this significant contribution to the theoretical and methodological understanding of misinformation and synthetic media. 📄 Read more: http://bit.ly/3WPYCml #EU_Solaris #HorizonEU #FakeNews #Deepfakes #Semiotics #MediaStudies #AIGovernance #DigitalTruth #SyntheticMedia #academicresearch EU Science, Research and Innovation University of Amsterdam Economic.bg ECSA - European Citizen Science Association Università LUMSA Univerza v Mariboru Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Brand Media Bulgaria Albanian Institute for International Studies Ministria e Brendshme University of Exeter DEXAI Utrecht University ANSA Federica Russo