fairpub: How fair are you when you publish/cite scientific works?

• Overview
• Features
• Limitation
• Installation
• Get started
• Citation
• Contributing
• Acknowledgments
• References

Overview

Scientific journals operate over a broad spectrum of publishing strategies, from strictly for-profit, to non-profit, and in-between business models (e.g. for-profit but academic friendly journals). Scientific publishing is increasingly dominated by for-profit journals, many of which attract prestige and submissions through high impact factors (McGill 2024). In contrast, non-profit journals – those that reinvest revenue into the academic community – struggle to maintain visibility despite offering more equitable publishing models.

The R package fairpub aims to provide a user-friendly toolbox to investigate the fairness of a research (article, bibliographic list, citation list, etc.). The fairness is measured according to two dimensions:

• the business model of the journal: for-profit vs. non-profit
• the academic friendly status of the journal: yes or no

A journal with a non-profit business model is fairer than an academic friendly journal with a for-profit business model. But the later is still fairer than a non-academic friendly journal with a for-profit business model.

This information comes from the DAFNEE initiative, a Database of Academia Friendly jourNals in Ecology and Evolution.

The package fairpub also implements the method proposed by Beck et al. (in prep): the strategic citation. By deliberately choosing to cite relevant articles from non-profit journals when multiple references would be equally valid, researchers can contribute to increasing their visibility and future impact factor. This method is implemented in the fp_compute_ratio() function and can answer the question How fair am I when I cite previous works? by computing the fairness ratio on the references cited in a manuscript.

The package can also answer the question How fair is my publication list?. See the Get started vignette for more information.

Features

The fairpub package can:

• retrieve the fairness status of a journal with the fp_journal_fairness() function
• retrieve the fairness status of an article with the fp_article_fairness() function and by querying the OpenAlex bibliographic database
• compute the fairness ratio of a list references cited in a manuscript with the fp_compute_ratio() function
• compute the fairness ratio of all publications of an author (or a team) with the fp_compute_ratio() function

In addition, the fp_doi_from_bibtex() function helps user to easily extract DOI from a BibTeX file. The list of DOI can then be pass to the fp_compute_ratio() function.

Limitation

The package fairpub provides a small subset of the journals indexed in the DAFNEE database (fields “Ecology”, “Evolution/Systematics”, “General” and “Organisms”). We are currently working to increase this list of journals.

Installation

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

# Install < remotes > package (if not already installed) ----
if (!requireNamespace("remotes", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("remotes")
}

# Install < fairpub > from GitHub ----
remotes::install_github("frbcesab/fairpub")

Then you can attach the package fairpub:

library("fairpub")

Get started

The main function of fairpub is fp_compute_ratio(). From a vector of article DOI, this function will report the following metrics:

fp_compute_ratio(doi = list_of_doi)

## $summary
##                                     metric value
##                           Total references    33
##                        References with DOI    33
##                    Deduplicated references    33
##               References found in OpenAlex    30
##                 References found in DAFNEE    10
##     Non-profit & acad. friendly references     9
##     For-profit & acad. friendly references     1
## For-profit & non-acad. friendly references     0
## 
## $ratios
## Non-profit & acad. friendly  For-profit & acad. friendly  For-profit & non-acad. friendly 
##                         0.9                          0.1                              0.0 

In this example, this list of references has a fairness ratio (Non-profit and academic friendly) of 90%. But this value must be interpreted with caution. Indeed this ratio has been computed on 26% (10 over 38) of the references, because the journal of 20 articles is not indexed in the DAFNEE database.

Visit the Get started vignette for a complete usage of the fairpub package.

Citation

Please cite fairpub as:

Casajus Nicolas (2025) fairpub: How fair are you when you publish/cite scientific works? R package version 1.0.0. https://github.com/frbcesab/fairpub/

Contributing

All types of contributions are encouraged and valued. For more information, check out our Contributor Guidelines.

Please note that the fairpub project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

Acknowledgments

This project is a collaborative work among FRB-CESAB scientific team.

We want to thanks the DAFNEE team for his incredible work in gathering information about scientific journals.

References

Beck M et al. (in prep) Strategic citations for a fairer academic landscape. Submitted to Proc B - Biological Science Practices.

McGill B (2024) The state of academic publishing in 3 graphs, 6 trends, and 4 thoughts. URL: https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/the-state-of-academic-publishing-in-3-graphs-5-trends-and-4-thoughts/