The abstract is known to be a promotional genre where researchers tend to exaggerate the benefit of their research and use a promotional discourse to catch the reader's attention. The COVID‐19 pandemic has prompted intensive research and has changed traditional publishing with the massive adoption of preprints by researchers. Our aim is to investigate whether the crisis and the ensuing scientific and economic competition have changed the lexical content of abstracts. We propose a comparative study of abstracts associated with preprints issued in response to the pandemic relative to abstracts produced during the closest pre‐pandemic period. We show that with the increase (on average and in percentage) of positive words (especially effective ) and the slight decrease of negative words, there is a strong increase in hedge words (the most frequent of which are the modal verbs can and may ). Hedge words counterbalance the excessive use of positive words and thus invite the readers, who go probably beyond the ‘usual’ audience, to be cautious with the obtained results. The abstracts of preprints urgently produced in response to the COVID‐19 crisis stand between uncertainty and over‐promotion, illustrating the balance that authors have to achieve between promoting their results and appealing for caution.

An abstract is not only a mirror of the full article; it also aims to draw attention to the most important information of the document it summarizes. Many studies have compared abstracts with full texts for their informativeness. In contrast to previous studies, we propose to investigate this relation based not only on the amount of information given by the abstract but also on its importance. The main objective of this paper is to introduce a new metric called GEM to measure the "generosity" or representativeness of an abstract. Schematically speaking, a generous abstract should have the best possible score of similarity for the sections important to the reader. Based on a questionnaire gathering information from 630 researchers, we were able to weight sections according to their importance. In our approach, seven sections were first automatically detected in the full text. The accuracy of this classification into sections was above 80% compared with a dataset of documents where sentences were assigned to sections by experts. Second, each section was weighted according to the questionnaire results. The GEM score was then calculated as a sum of weights of sections in the full text corresponding to sentences in the abstract normalized over the total sum of weights of sections in the full text. The correlation between GEM score and the mean of the scores assigned by annotators was higher than the correlation between scores from different experts. As a case study, the GEM score was calculated for 36,237 articles in environmental sciences retrieved from the French ISTEX database. The main result was that GEM score has increased over time. Moreover, this trend depends on subject area and publisher. No correlation was found between GEM score and citation rate or open access status of articles. We conclude that abstracts are more generous in recent publications and cannot be considered as mere teasers. This research should be pursued in greater depth, particularly by examining structured abstracts. GEM score could be a valuable indicator for exploring large numbers of abstracts, by guiding the reader in his/her choice of whether or not to obtain and read full texts.

International audienceScience and technology studies (STS) is now a mature field in many countries, and it is important to understand its historical and political roots in a wide variety of national contexts. The present contribution to such a vast project links a number of South Korean activist groups involved in a critical reflection upon science and technology in the 1970s and the 1980s to the academic developments of the STS field in the 1990s. A focus on the activist roots of South Korea’s STS counterbalances more institutional and less politicized histories of the field; it also enlightens the specificity of critical approaches to science in the context of an emerging power that was a military dictatorship. The authors describe how a group of students and professors, most of whom had been trained as scientists and engineers, created a discussion circle to foster a critical and political discourse on science. They then trace the emergence of the new field through the dissemination of texts and their reception. The academic aspects of Korean STS are then compared, over three periods, with similar currents in Europe and the United States. The conclusion shows that the critique of science that emerged in South Korea took a form substantially different from critiques elsewhere, linking this difference to political and institutional causes

Based on a case study, this article explores the stability of publication regimes (as defined by Hilgartner (2015, 2017)) in chemistry. Starting with a slight detour via open access (OA) policies, it concentrates on the conditions of editorial production and trade of a scholarly journal, from an historical perspective enriched by a sociology of valuation and pricing. Prices are seen as social constructs as I consider the modalities of market coordination among actors of the publishing enterprise in a major scholarly society, the American Chemical Society (ACS). The study focuses on the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), a periodical that was founded in 1879 by the ACS, of which it is the "flagship" journal. The investigation relies mainly on a detailed examination of the JACS imprint from a diachronic perspective (1879-2010). I describe how scientific papers (as singular entities) gradually entered into a commodity market, first with the page-charge mechanism and the imposition of authors' fees, up to the emergence of the Article Processing Charge (APC) model, where the authors/institutions pay fees to have the electronic versions of their articles in OA. The proposed timeline in five periods is marked by two points of rupture that correspond to State intervention and the adoption of federal laws. Inherited from the deployment of science regimes in the post-WWII period, revenue collection models were collectively invented by the ACS and its members as successive adjustments to address massive imbalances caused by changes in scientific, institutional, and regulatory environments. Specific market mechanisms and modes of coordination have been put in place to support the development and guarantee the continuity of a disciplinary program (that of chemistry) in the frame of what I call a disciplinary publication regime.

This article attempts to examine the highest tier of elite tennis through a technological lens in order to understand the several imbrications of tennis and technology in Grand Slam events. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, this article studies the version of tennis that exists today—replete with RFID chips, screen interfaces, more powerful racquets than ever before and the ubiquity of social media. As the relationship between players and fans, organisers and visitors, and even gameplay and umpiring have evolved to allow the use of several technologies, Grand Slam tennis has embraced the era of social media and technologically mediated sport. This article views this transformation through the lens of Science Technology and Society in order to better understand the influence that technologies have in shaping the relationships between spectators, players, matches, tournaments and indeed the sport itself.

The article unpacks the publishing practices and focuses on the curating work carried out by the editors of chemistry journals. Based on a qualitative analysis of multiple sources in two publishing houses (the American Chemical Society, ACS and Nature Research), it first shows that the role of editor-in-chief covers a wide range of realities and is far from being limited to that of a gatekeeper (the most common metaphor in the literature). In journals that are part of the Nature Research portfolio, in-house editors, who are no longer active scientists, work full time for the journals. The article describes the professional trajectories and skills required to join the publishing house. Interviews highlight collective identity-based actions, attention to the growth and the flow of manuscripts, but also specific epistemic properties of outputs in chemistry. Besides tasks that editors outline “as really the same as they were 100 years ago,” as they spend most of their time handling manuscripts and providing quality assurance, they also travel to conferences to support journals and encourage submissions, visit labs where researchers pitch their work or ask questions about journals, and “educate the actors themselves” about new fields. In both cases studied, the publishing houses partner with institutions to offer events (ACS on Campus programme, Nature masterclass) that a university or department can freely host or buy, where editors organize workshops on all aspects of manuscript preparation. Second, publishing houses, whether non-for-profit or commercial, have embraced a catalog logic, where the journals are not necessarily in competition and have an assumed place and hierarchy. At Nature Research, editors-in-chief head business units inscribed in the company's organization. Despite standardized processes imposed by the procedural chain, there is still room to maneuver in these relatively autonomous structures that are ultimately evaluated on their results (the annual production of a certain number of high-quality papers). On the other hand, ACS is seen as a vessel whose course cannot easily be deviated. The conclusion calls for extending this type of investigation to other contexts or types of journals.

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