« University presses currently exist in the dual worlds of print and digital publishing. Current staffing needs require that they hire personnel with skills and experience that mirror that present duality. Training and maintaining a skilled workforce requires a commitment to flexibility and an openness to the ever-changing nature of scholarly communication. As the scholarly publishing ecosystem continues to evolve, university presses will need to look to a future workforce that has additional training, knowledge, and experience beyond the traditional skills associated with academic publishing, one that fully embraces the realities of a digital world, the habits of new generations of researchers, and the increasing role of technology in scholarly communication. This article looks at what the future might look like, what skills might be required, and how one might prepare for that future. »
ResearchGate: Disseminating, communicating, and measuring Scholarship?
« ResearchGate is a social network site for academics to create their own profiles, list their publications, and interact with each other. Like Academia.edu, it provides a new way for scholars to disseminate their work and hence potentially changes the dynamics of informal scholarly communication. This article assesses whether ResearchGate usage and publication data broadly reflect existing academic hierarchies and whether individual countries are set to benefit or lose out from the site. The results show that rankings based on ResearchGate statistics correlate moderately well with other rankings of academic institutions, suggesting that ResearchGate use broadly reflects the traditional distribution of academic capital. Moreover, while Brazil, India, and some other countries seem to be disproportionately taking advantage of ResearchGate, academics in China, South Korea, and Russia may be missing opportunities to use ResearchGate to maximize the academic impact of their publications. »
URL : http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1993/papers/ResearchGate.pdf
Les débats du numérique
« Le « plissement numérique » du monde est en cours et ce processus affecte les socles anthropologiques de nos sociétés. Le tissage continu, des écritures, des flux et des données, des êtres et des objets, de leurs pratiques, bref l’écologie de ces relations, de ces nouveaux territoires, ne cesse de croître sous ces conditions. Ces transformations sont loin d’être consensuelles et elles mettent en tension les agencements socio-techniques, cognitifs, économiques, environnementaux, culturels, professionnels… Cet ouvrage a pour but d’appréhender des « débats du numérique » en les éclairant de regards issus de champs disciplinaires différents.
Sont ici rassemblées des contributions de chercheurs et de praticiens analysant le passage à de nouveaux modes de gouvernance du web et des collectifs numériques, à de nouvelles économies politiques des savoirs et des « Data » : la régulation d’Internet et la complication croissante de ses infrastructures et des acteurs qui les produisent ; le renouvellement puissant des « Commons » et des intelligences collectives soutenu par le mouvement hétérogène de l’Open Data ; le web des données et la question politico-cognitive des écritures ; l’hegemon du Datamining au coeur du marketing ; la montée du Data journalisme.
De même, le déploiement récent de dispositifs socio-numériques en organisation est examiné en appelant à une mise en débat des sémio-politiques qui caractérisent le management et les modes d’existences au travail. Est également interrogé, le monde militaire, sa quête insomniaque d’efficience et de performativité. Enfin, le monde de l’art est lui aussi ébranlé par la matière numérique comme nouvelle substance d’expression. »
The NSF/NIH Effect: Surveying the Effect of Data Management Requirements on Faculty, Sponsored Programs, and Institutional Repositories
« The scholarly communication landscape is rapidly changing and nowhere is this more evident than in the field of data management. Mandates by major funding agencies, further expanded by executive order and pending legislation in 2013, require many research grant applicants to provide data management plans for preserving and making their research data openly available. However, do faculty researchers have the requisite skill sets and are their institutions providing the necessary infrastructure to comply with these mandates? To answer these questions, three groups were surveyed in 2012: research and teaching faculty, sponsored programs office staff, and institutional repository librarians. Survey results indicate that while faculty desire to share their data, they often lack the skills to do this effectively. Similarly, while repository managers and sponsored programs offices often provide the necessary infrastructure and knowledge, these resources are not being promoted effectively to faculty. The study offers important insights about services academic libraries can provide to support faculty in their data management efforts: providing tools for sharing research data; assisting with describing, finding, or accessing research data; providing information on copyright and ownership issues associated with data sets; and assisting with writing data management plans. »
Why Do We Still Have Journals?
« The Web has greatly reduced the barriers to entry for new journals and other platforms for communicating scientific output, and the number of journals continues to multiply. This leaves readers and authors with the daunting cognitive challenge of navigating the literature and discerning contributions that are both relevant and significant. Meanwhile, measures of journal impact that might guide the use of the literature have become more visible and consequential, leading to “impact gamesmanship” that renders the measures increasingly suspect. The incentive system created by our journals is broken. In this essay, I argue that the core technology of journals is not their distribution but their review process. The organization of the review process reflects assumptions about what a contribution is and how it should be evaluated. Through their review processes, journals can certify contributions, convene scholarly communities, and curate works that are worth reading. Different review processes thereby create incentives for different kinds of work. It’s time for a broader dialogue about how we connect the aims of the social science enterprise to our system of journals. »
The Zen of Multidisciplinary Team Recommendation
« In order to accomplish complex tasks, it is often necessary to compose a team consisting of experts with diverse competencies. However, for proper functioning, it is also preferable that a team be socially cohesive. A team recommendation system, which facilitates the search for potential team members can be of great help both for (i) individuals who need to seek out collaborators and (ii) managers who need to build a team for some specific tasks.
A decision support system which readily helps summarize such metrics, and possibly rank the teams in a personalized manner according to the end users’ preferences, can be a great tool to navigate what would otherwise be an information avalanche.
In this work we present a general framework of how to compose such subsystems together to build a composite team recommendation system, and instantiate it for a case study of academic teams. »