Où sont les données de la recherche ? : Essai de cartographie

par Hans Dillaerts | Laissez un commentaire

Auteur/Author : Cécile Delay-Artous

La question émergente en France des données de la recherche se situe dans un cadre institutionnel foisonnant mais rigide, délicat à cerner. La recherche est aussi financée et évaluée au niveau européen.

Cette organisation nationale et européenne se double d’un aspect international inhérent à la recherche et aux échanges d’informations rapides et répétés, accélérés par le développement d’Internet.

Le labyrinthe institutionnel franco-européen se superpose ainsi avec le millefeuille international et disciplinaire du monde de la recherche. Enfin, la proximité de deux mouvements qui ne sont pourtant pas synonyme, l’Open Access et l’Open Data, vient encore troubler la compréhension de ce panorama.

Il n’est donc pas aisé de comprendre les rôles de chacun des acteurs quant aux données de la recherche. C’est à une clarification de ce paysage que nous nous proposons de participer, en initiant une cartographie des initiatives et acteurs visibles en France concernant les données des sciences humaines et sociales.

URL : https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01369745

Apport et limites des Humanités Numériques (HN) dans la construction, la reconstitution des réseaux d’acteurs à partir de l’exploitation d’une revue numérisée : l’exemple des Annales d’hygiène et de médecine coloniales (1898- 1940)

par Hans Dillaerts | Laissez un commentaire

Auteur/Author : Isabelle Thiebau

Notre étude porte sur une revue médicale coloniale centenaire, ce qui s’avère relativement rare. Ce périodique est singulier non seulement parce qu’il dépend directement du ministère des Colonies, mais également parce qu’il traite de médecine, d’hygiène et de pharmacie coloniales et/ou tropicales, tandis que de nombreuses autres revues médicales se sont spécialisées autour d’une seule discipline.

De nombreuses questions se posent alors. Quelles spécificités relient une revue à un domaine colonial, médical et militaire ? Quel type de réseau peut-on établir autour d’une revue ? Quels sont les acteurs et leurs caractéristiques ? Quels sont les indicateurs significatifs et modélisant pour une revue ?

Pour y répondre, l’analyse des usages actuels des Humanités Numériques (HN) dans la construction ou la reconstitution de réseaux d’acteurs dans une revue médicale coloniale, semble pertinente. Néanmoins, il faut en souligner les apports, les modèles, les limites et les risques.

C’est ainsi, que nous prendrons position face à l’histoire des sciences, aux HN et à la médiation en fonction d’une prise de distance et d’une analyse réflexive de notre pratique, de nos essais et de nos besoins. Autrement dit, il y a bien sûr une part singulière et subjective à certaines de nos hypothèses de travail et de notre regard sur l’utilisation de certains outils et méthodes.

URL : http://memsic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/mem_01347103v1

Patterns of authors contribution in scientific manuscripts

par Hans Dillaerts | Laissez un commentaire

Authors : Edilson A. Corrêa Jr., Filipi N. Silv, Luciano da F. Costa, Diego R. Amancio

Science is becoming increasingly more interdisciplinary, giving rise to more diversity in the areas of expertise within research labs and groups. This also have brought changes to the role researchers in scientific works. As a consequence, multi-authored scientific papers have now became a norm for high quality research.

Unfortunately, such a phenomenon induces bias to existing metrics employed to evaluate the productivity and success of researchers. While some metrics were adapted to account for the rank of authors in a paper, many journals are now requiring a description of the specific roles of each author in a publication.

Surprisingly, the investigation of the relationship between the rank of authors and their contributions has been limited to a few studies. By analyzing such kind of data, here we show, quantitatively, that the regularity in the authorship contributions decreases with the number of authors in a paper.

Furthermore, we found that the rank of authors and their roles in papers follows three general patterns according to the nature of their contributions, such as writing, data analysis, and the conduction of experiments.

This was accomplished by collecting and analyzing the data retrieved from PLoS ONE and by devising an entropy-based measurement to quantify the effective number of authors in a paper according to their contributions.

The analysis of such patterns confirms that some aspects of the author ranking are in accordance with the expected convention, such as the fact that the first and last authors are more likely to contribute more in a scientific work.

Conversely, such analysis also revealed that authors in the intermediary positions of the rank contribute more in certain specific roles, such as the task of collecting data.

This indicates that the an unbiased evaluation of researchers must take into account the distinct types of scientific contributions.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05545

Cost hurdles to open access publishing: A citizen scientist perspective

par Hans Dillaerts | Laissez un commentaire

 Author : Wenfa Ng

Besides offering fun activities for non-scientists to explore the natural world through experiments, simulations or games, the evolving concept of citizen science is increasingly allowing some serious publication quality science to be published by the practitioners (citizen scientists) themselves.

The latter is in contrast to the common perception of citizen science, where most citizen science projects such as Foldit are distribution of piecemeal segments of complex projects suitable for solution by individuals, and where the results are pooled together, or used to inform the design and direction of more complex research initiatives.

Usually novices in science publishing but nonetheless aware of the importance of journal articles as the primary medium for communicating new research to the wider community (scientific and general public), citizen scientists do encounter significant challenges in science publication.

One challenge is in navigating the lengthy and time-consuming peer review process of most journals. But, as benefactors of open access publishing where most journal articles are within pay walls inaccessible to citizen scientists without any research funding, open access publishing is one platform sought after or exist as an option for citizen scientists.

Is the option open? Yes, at the preprint level where figshare, and PeerJ Preprints help provide an avenue for citizen scientists to have a published non peer reviewed article online, but no at the higher end “journal article” level where the manuscript needs to be peer reviewed. Even the biological sciences preprint server, bioRxiv, is closed to citizen scientists as publication on the server requires an institution affiliation with either a university or research institute. Most open access publishers (except eLife) charge a publication fee (in the thousands of dollars per article) to defray the cost of maintaining an online presence for a peer reviewed manuscript as well as those for copyediting during final stages of journal publication.

This is a significant barrier to cost constrained citizen scientists who want to contribute to the scientific discourse. For the scientific enterprise, this represent a loss, whose magnitude or severity cannot be quantified since ideas help seed new research or entirely new fields.

Thus, can we as a community provide citizen scientists worldwide a chance to publish open access peer reviewed articles without significant cost through a competitive publication fee subsidy scheme where each application is reviewed by the national science funding agency?

If the above is possible, it would open up another area where ideas from citizen scientists could percolate into the scientific mainstream, where, as always, vibrancy and diversity of ideas power science forward.

URL : Cost hurdles to open access publishing: A citizen scientist perspective

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2463v1

État des lieux et perspectives des jeux vidéo dans les bibliothèques de lecture publique

par Hans Dillaerts | Laissez un commentaire

Auteur/Author : Sarah Perreau

Première industrie culturelle mondiale, le jeu vidéo prend une place de plus en plus importante dans notre société. Les transformations des pratiques des lecteurs amènent de nombreuses bibliothèques françaises à s’intéresser à ce nouveau support. Le jeu vidéo étant un secteur évoluant très rapidement, son rapport aux bibliothèques a beaucoup changé au cours des dernières années.

Ce mémoire abordera ainsi le contexte actuel des jeux vidéo dans le monde et en France, la place actuelle du jeu vidéo au sein des bibliothèques françaises et les perspectives et l’avenir du jeu vidéo au sein des bibliothèques.

URL : État des lieux et perspectives des jeux vidéo dans les bibliothèques de lecture publique

Alternative location : http://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/66791-etat-des-lieux-et-perspectives-des-jeux-video-dans-les-bibliotheques-de-lecture-publique

Hybrid open access—A longitudinal study

par Hans Dillaerts | Laissez un commentaire

Authors : Mikael Laakso, Bo-Christer Björk

This study estimates the development of hybrid open access (OA), i.e. articles published openly on the web within subscription-access journals. Included in the study are the five largest publishers of scholarly journals; Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, and Sage.

Since no central indexing or standardized metadata exists for identifying hybrid OA an explorative bottom-up methodological approach was developed. The individual search and filtering features of each publisher website and a-priori availability of data were leveraged to the extent possible.

The results indicate a strong sustained growth in the volume of articles published as hybrid OA during 2007 (666 articles) to 2013 (13 994 articles). The share of hybrid articles was at 3.8% of total published articles for the period of 2011–2013 for journals with at least one identified hybrid OA article.

Journals within the Scopus discipline categorization of Health and Life Sciences, in particular the field of Medicine, were found to be among the most frequent publishers of hybrid OA content.

The study surfaces the many methodological challenges involved in obtaining metrics regarding hybrid OA, a growing business for journal publishers as science policy pressures for reduced access barriers to research publications.

URL : Hybrid open access—A longitudinal study

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2016.08.002

Managing an Open Access Fund: Tips from the Trenches and Questions for the Future

par Hans Dillaerts | Laissez un commentaire

Authors : Heidi Zuniga, Lilian Hoffecker

The authors describe the process and results of an ongoing Open Access Fund program at the Health Sciences Library of the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. The fund has helped students and other early career researchers pay for the article processing charge or APC to publish their articles in an OA journal since 2013.

In the three years since, the fund has paid the APC for 39 applicants with a total expenditure of $37,576. Most applicants were students as intended, however the fund supported a surprisingly large number of medical residents and junior faculty.

Individuals associated with the School of Medicine overwhelmingly represented the awardees compared to other units, and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals were the most common journal they published in.

While acknowledging the undeniable benefit of the fund to the awardees, the authors also pose challenging questions about the future role of libraries in subsidizing open access journals.

URL : Managing an Open Access Fund: Tips from the Trenches and Questions for the Future

Alternative location : https://www.jcel-pub.org/index.php/jcel/article/view/5920