ABSTRACT
Scientific publishing, with about 350-year historical background, has played a central role in advancing science by disseminating new findings, generalizing accepted theories, and sharing novel ideas. The number of scientific journals has exponentially grown from 10 at the end of the 17th century to 100,000 at the end of the 20th century. The publishing landscape has dramatically changed over time from printed journals to online publishing. Although scientific publishing was initially non-commercial, it has become a profitable industry with a significant global financial turnover, reaching $28 billion in annual revenue before the COVID-19 pandemic. However, scientific publishing has encountered several challenges and is suffering from unethical practices and some negative phenomena, like publish-or-perish, driven by the need to survive or get a promotion in academia. Developing a global landscape with collaborative non-commercial journals and platforms is a primary proposed model for the future of scientific publishing. Here, we provide a brief history of the foundation and development of scientific journals and their evolution over time. Furthermore, current challenges and future perspectives of scientific publishing are discussed.
ABSTRACT
This paper presents CovRelex, a scientific paper retrieval system targeting entities and relations via relation extraction on COVID-19 scientific papers. This work aims at building a system supporting users efficiently in acquiring knowledge across a huge number of COVID-19 scientific papers published rapidly. Our system can be accessed via https://www.jaist.ac.jp/is/labs/ nguyen-lab/systems/covrelex/.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has exerted a huge adverse influence on global teaching activities and students' psychological status. Veterinary microbiology is mainly concerned with bacterial and viral diseases, including coronavirus diseases. An innovative online-to-offline teaching approach for this course was established to stimulate students' learning initiative and mitigate their anxiety about COVID-19. A well-established massive open online course (MOOC) was first adopted as preview material before class, followed by in-person teaching. Additionally, COVID-19-related scientific papers were also used as pre-class reading material in veterinary microbiology and were further explained in class. The effect of this innovative teaching mode was systematically evaluated by final examination scores and questionnaires. The average score (81.75) and excellence score rating (> 85 scores, 37.3%) resulting from this blended teaching mode were not statistically higher than those of the online-only (79.19, p = .115; 28.6%, p = .317) or offline-only (79.47, p = .151; 27.9%, p = .269) teaching modes. This may be due to the sample size investigated; however, the results indicate that the innovative teaching mode did not decrease teaching quality. Additionally, most subjects (72.9%) were satisfied with the blended mode and supported its future use. Intriguingly, the introduction of COVID-19-related scientific papers helped students understand virology, relieve their anxiety, and increase their professional identity. Collectively, the innovative approach to teaching veterinary microbiology in this study provides a beneficial reference for other teachers to maintain and improve teaching quality.
ABSTRACT
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a case that can be used as a biochemistry learning resource in relation to the topic of viruses. Learning to use cases will be effective if students are assigned to produce reports, articles, or other scientific papers. Self-assessment can be used to assess the competencies that have been learnt in the writing process. This study aims to analyze the scientific papers and self-assessment of students using the COVID-19 pandemic case. It includes qualitative research with scientific paper and self-assessment questionnaire analyses. The research sample was chemistry education study program students (N = 57) following biochemistry course, out of a population of 87 students. The results show that the students have a good understanding of explaining COVID-19. Self-assessment analysis shows that 80% of the students responded positively to eight statements; those who gave positive responses to each questionnaire statement were able to produce scientific papers. Good self-assessment is in line with the ability of students to compile good scientific papers.