• 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. 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 revision): 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. 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:
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.
