A Case Study of Scholars’ Open and Sharing Practices

Statut

Although the open scholarship movement has successfully captured the attention and interest of higher education stakeholders, researchers currently lack an understanding of the degree to which open scholarship is enacted in institutions that lack institutional support for openness. I help fill this gap in the literature by presenting a descriptive case study that illustrates the variety of open and sharing practices enacted by faculty members at a North American university. Open and sharing practices enacted at this institution revolve around publishing manuscripts in open ways, participating on social media, creating and using open educational resources, and engaging with open teaching.

This examination finds that certain open practices are favored over others. Results also show that even though faculty members often share scholarly materials online for free, they frequently do so without associated open licenses (i.e. without engaging in open practices). These findings suggest that individual motivators may significantly affect the practice of openness, but that environmental factors (e.g., institutional contexts) and technological elements (e.g., YouTube’s default settings) may also shape open practices in unanticipated ways.

URL : A Case Study of Scholars’ Open and Sharing Practices

Related URL : http://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/view/206

Research Data Practices in Veterinary Medicine: A Case Study

Statut

Objective
To determine trends in research data output, reuse, and sharing of the college of veterinary medicine faculty members at a large academic research institution.
Methods
This bibliographic study was conducted by examining original research articles for indication of the types of data produced, as well as evidence that the authors reused data or made provision for sharing their own data. Findings were recorded in the categories of research type, data type, data reuse, data sharing, author collaboration, and grants/funding and were analyzed to determine trends.
Results
A variety of different data types were encountered in this study, even within a single article, resulting primarily from clinical and laboratory animal studies. All of the articles resulted from author collaboration, both within the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign, as well as with researchers outside the institution. There was little indication that data was reused, except some instances where the authors acknowledged that data was obtained directly from a colleague. There was even less indication that the research data was shared, either as a supplementary file on the publisher’s website or by submission to a repository, except in the case of genetic data.
Conclusions
Veterinary researchers are prolific producers and users of a wide variety of data. Despite the large amount of collaborative research occurring in veterinary medicine, this study provided little evidence that veterinary researchers are reusing or sharing their data, except in an informal manner. Wider adoption of data management plans may serve to improve researchers’ data management practices.