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Science-Software Linkage: The Challenges of Traceability between Scientific Knowledge and Software Artifacts

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Hideaki Hata, Jin L.C. Guo, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Christoph Treude

Although computer science papers are often accompanied by software artifacts, connecting research papers to their software artifacts and vice versa is not always trivial. First of all, there is a lack of well-accepted standards for how such links should be provided.

Furthermore, the provided links, if any, often become outdated: they are affected by link rot when pre-prints are removed, when repositories are migrated, or when papers and repositories evolve independently.

In this paper, we summarize the state of the practice of linking research papers and associated source code, highlighting the recent efforts towards creating and maintaining such links.

We also report on the results of several empirical studies focusing on the relationship between scientific papers and associated software artifacts, and we outline challenges related to traceability and opportunities for overcoming these challenges.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.05891

EN

Behavioral Reluctance in Adopting Open Access Publishing: Insights From a Goal-Directed Perspective

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Massimo Köster, Agnes Moors, Jan De Houwer, Tony Ross-Hellauer, Inge Van Nieuwerburgh, Frederick Verbruggen

Despite growing awareness of the benefits of large-scale open access publishing, individual researchers seem reluctant to adopt this behavior, thereby slowing down the evolution toward a new scientific culture.

We outline and apply a goal-directed framework of behavior causation to shed light on this type of behavioral reluctance and to organize and suggest possible intervention strategies. The framework explains behavior as the result of a cycle of events starting with the detection of a discrepancy between a goal and a status quo and the selection of behavior to reduce this discrepancy.

We list various factors that may hinder this cycle and thus contribute to behavioral reluctance. After that, we highlight potential remedies to address each of the identified barriers. We thereby hope to point out new ways to think about behavioral reluctances in general, and in relation to open access publishing in particular.

URL : Behavioral Reluctance in Adopting Open Access Publishing: Insights From a Goal-Directed Perspective

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.649915

EN

Web analytics for open access academic journals: justification, planning and implementation

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Alex Vitela Caraveo, Cristóbal Urbano

An overview is presented of resources and web analytics strategies useful in setting solutions for capturing usage statistics and assessing audiences for open access academic journals.

A set of complementary metrics to citations is contemplated to help journal editors and managers to provide evidence of the performance of the journal as a whole, and of each article in particular, in the web environment.

The measurements and indicators selected seek to generate added value for editorial management in order to ensure its sustainability. The proposal is based on three areas: counts of visits and downloads, optimization of the website alongside with campaigns to attract visitors, and preparation of a dashboard for strategic evaluation.

It is concluded that, from the creation of web performance measurement plans based on the resources and proposals analysed, journals may be in a better position to plan the data-driven web optimization in order to attract authors and readers and to offer the accountability that the actors involved in the editorial process need to assess their open access business model.

DOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.1344/BiD2020.45.20

EN

Citations are not opinions: a corpus linguistics approach to understanding how citations are made

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Domenic Rosati

Citation content analysis seeks to understand citations based on the language used during the making of a citation. A key issue in citation content analysis is looking for linguistic structures that characterize distinct classes of citations for the purposes of understanding the intent and function of a citation.

Previous works have focused on modeling linguistic features first and drawn conclusions on the language structures unique to each class of citation function based on the performance of a classification task or inter-annotator agreement.

In this study, we start with a large sample of a pre-classified citation corpus, 2 million citations from each class of the scite Smart Citation dataset (supporting, disputing, and mentioning citations), and analyze its corpus linguistics in order to reveal the unique and statistically significant language structures belonging to each type of citation.

By generating comparison tables for each citation type we present a number of interesting linguistic features that uniquely characterize citation type. What we find is that within citation collocates, there is very low correlation between citation type and sentiment.

Additionally, we find that the subjectivity of citation collocates across classes is very low. These findings suggest that the sentiment of collocates is not a predictor of citation function and that due to their low subjectivity, an opinion-expressing mode of understanding citations, implicit in previous citation sentiment analysis literature, is inappropriate.

Instead, we suggest that citations can be better understood as claims-making devices where the citation type can be explained by understanding how two claims are being compared. By presenting this approach, we hope to inspire similar corpus linguistic studies on citations that derive a more robust theory of citation from an empirical basis using citation corpora.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.08087

EN

Increasing visibility and discoverability of scholarly publications with academic search engine optimization

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Lisa Schilhan, Christian Kaier, Karin Lackner

With the help of academic search engine optimization (ASEO), publications can more easily be found in academic search engines and databases. Authors can improve the ranking of their publications by adjusting titles, keywords and abstracts.

Carefully considered wording makes publications easier to find and, ideally, cited more often. This article is meant to support authors in making their scholarly publications more visible. It provides basic information on ranking mechanisms as well as tips and tricks on how to improve the findability of scholarly publications while also pointing out the limits of optimization.

This article, authored by three scholarly communications librarians, draws on their experience of hosting journals, providing workshops for researchers and individual publication support, as well as on their investigations of the ranking algorithms of search engines and databases.

URL : Increasing visibility and discoverability of scholarly publications with academic search engine optimization

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.534

EN

Scaling Small; Or How to Envision New Relationalities for Knowledge Production

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors: Janneke Adema, Samuel A. Moore

Within the field of open access (OA) publishing, community-led publishing projects are experimenting increasingly with new forms of collaboration and organisation. They do so by focusing on setting up horizontal alliances between independent projects within a certain sector (e.g., scholar-led presses), or vertically across sectors with other not-for-profit organisations (e.g., through collaborations with libraries, universities, and funders), in order to create multi-stakeholder ecologies within scholarly publishing.

Yet at the same time, imaginaries for future modes of OA knowledge production are still controlled through demands for ‘scalability’ and ‘sustainability’, which are both seen as preconditions for scholarly communication models and practices to succeed and to be efficient. But they are also prerequi­sites to receive funding for publishing projects or infrastructure development.

The scalability of open models is perceived as essential to compete in a landscape dominated by a handful of major corporate players.Drawing on our work with the Radical Open Access Collective, the ScholarLed consortium, and the Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Mono­graphs (COPIM) project, this article outlines an alternative organisational prin­ciple for governing community-led publishing projects based on mutual reliance, care, and other forms of commoning.

Termed ‘scaling small’, this principle eschews standard approaches to organisational growth that tend to flatten community diversity through economies of scale. Instead, it puts forward the idea that scale can be nurtured through intentional collaborations between community-driven pro­jects that promote a bibliodiverse ecosystem while providing resilience through resource sharing and other kinds of collaboration.

Following Anna Tsing’s recom­mendations to keep in mind how reimagining our knowledge practices requires we pay particular attention to articulations between the scalable and the nonscalable (Tsing, 2012), what is needed to enable this is, first and foremost, a rethinking of existing systems and infrastructures and how they currently function – systems that have historically developed and been continuously remade to encourage fur­ther scalability.

We further explore the possibilities of scaling small with particular reference to Anna Tsing’s work on the ‘latent commons’ and Massimo De Angelis’ discussion of ‘boundary commoning’, examining how these concepts are on display within the Radical Open Access Collective, ScholarLed and the COPIM project.

As we will argue, reimagining the relations within publishing beyond a mere calcula­tive logic, i.e., one that is focused on assessing the sustainability of alternative models, is essential in not-for-profit OA publishing environments, particularly if we want new forms of collaboration to arise and to redefine the future of scholarly publishing in communal settings.

URL : Scaling Small; Or How to Envision New Relationalities for Knowledge Production

DOI : https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.918

EN

Value-added services in institutional repositories in Spanish public universities

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Andrés Fernández-Ramos, Leticia Barrionuevo

Introduction

The aim of the present study was to analyse the value-added services offered by institutional repositories in Spanish public universities.

Method

Information was collected on the main characteristics of repositories in Spanish public universities and the value-added services they offered, using a checklist with twenty-five items divided into three dimensions: information on the repository; information on the records; and instructions for use and dissemination.

Analysis

We determined the frequency of each value-added service in the repositories included in the study and analysed the main modalities in which these services were offered. We also analysed the similarity between repositories using multidimensional scaling methods.

Results

We found high variability between repositories and indicated that some value-added services were widely offered whereas others were only provided by a few repositories.

Conclusions

We believe that the provision of value-added services could have a direct impact on repository use because such services are related to many of the reasons that explain repository under-utilisation, such as low perceived usefulness, difficulties depositing work and lack of knowledge about what should or can be deposited.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.47989/irpaper895