Auteur/autrice : Hans Dillaerts

Catégories
EN

Open access levels: a quantitative exploration using Web of Science and oaDOI data

Authors : Jeroen Bosman, Bianca Kramer

Across the world there is growing interest in open access publishing among researchers, institutions, funders and publishers alike. It is assumed that open access levels are growing, but hitherto the exact levels and patterns of open access have been hard to determine and detailed quantitative studies are scarce.

Using newly available open access status data from oaDOI in Web of Science we are now able to explore year-on-year open access levels across research fields, languages, countries, institutions, funders and topics, and try to relate the resulting patterns to disciplinary, national and institutional contexts.

With data from the oaDOI API we also look at the detailed breakdown of open access by types of gold open access (pure gold, hybrid and bronze), using universities in the Netherlands as an example.

There is huge diversity in open access levels on all dimensions, with unexpected levels for e.g. Portuguese as language, Astronomy & Astrophysics as research field, countries like Tanzania, Peru and Latvia, and Zika as topic.

We explore methodological issues and offer suggestions to improve conditions for tracking open access status of research output. Finally, we suggest potential future applications for research and policy development. We have shared all data and code openly.

URL : Open access levels: a quantitative exploration using Web of Science and oaDOI data

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3520v1

Catégories
EN

Who Wrote This? Creator Metadata Quality on Academia.Edu

Author : Zachary Schoenberger

Academic social networking services (SNSs) such as ResearchGate.com or Academia.Edu have recently experienced a surge in popularity (Ortega, 2016). Existing research into academic SNSs have focused on population parameters and social networking usage patterns. Currently, no research has been conducted on the quality of bibliographic metadata on academic SNSs.

Bibliographic metadata functions to support user tasks, including finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining information resources. “Creator” metadata, which describes resource authorship, helps users find and identify digital works in a repository.

Additionally, academic researchers rely on author attribution for their professional promotion and prestige, and they are accustomed to scholarly environments which implement standards that support accurate author attribution.

This study therefore examines “creator” metadata for University of Alberta publications posted on Academia.Edu, and compares these with publisher created records of the same titles. Metadata quality is assessed through the measurement of completeness, consistency, and accuracy.

The study reveals that Academia.Edu “creator” metadata is significantly incomplete compared to publisher metadata, and the frequency of incomplete records increases in proportion to the size of the author cohort. This incompleteness is evidence of poor metadata quality on Academia.Edu.

Academia.Edu “creator” metadata is, however, much more consistent than publisher metadata. Finally, accuracy is found to be an inadequate determiner of metadata quality, as the presence of user generated metadata calls into question the conceptual stability of “authenticity” and “authority,” upon which a measure of accuracy depends.

This study of metadata quality therefore reveals the complexity and contradiction that underlies this topic. In terms of completeness, Academia.Edu metadata is poor in quality. In terms of consistency, Academia.Edu metadata excels in quality.

Finally, the study recommends further investigation into the definition of authority in relation to user-contributed metadata.

URL : https://era.library.ualberta.ca/files/csj139229z#

Catégories
FR

Edition et publication des contenus : regard transversal sur la transformation des modèles

Auteur/Author : Ghislaine Chartron

L’Internet a installé une transformation profonde des modèles d’édition et de publication des contenus inscrits, jusqu’alors, dans des filières bien identifiées : la presse, la littérature, la musique, l’édition de jeunesse, l’édition de recherche…

Le numérique a brouillé les frontières, déstabilisé les modèles en place, transformé en partie les pratiques des usagers. De multiples projets innovants ont émergé, plus ou moins plébiscités, plus ou moins pérennes notamment par leur modèle économique, une fois passé le temps des subventions.

Dans un premier temps nous rappelons les caractéristiques majeures du contexte au sein duquel évoluent ces offres : économie de l’Internet, évolutivité des technologies associées et des pratiques socio-numériques.

De façon transversale, nous identifierons de nouvelles propositions de valeurs liées au numérique. Nous nous intéresserons aux modalités de remontées des recettes, à leur hybridation, ainsi qu’à la stratégie déployée par les géants du web dans ce secteur et, conjointement, au renouvellement des régulations.

Enfin, au regard de la comparaison transversale engagée, la contribution s’attachera à proposer une typologie revisitée des modèles de publication.

URL : https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01522295

Catégories
EN

Social Media Attention Increases Article Visits: An Investigation on Article-Level Referral Data of PeerJ

Authors : Xianwen Wang, Yunxue Cui, Qingchun Li, Xinhui Guo

In order to better understand the effect of social media in the dissemination of scholarly articles, employing the daily updated referral data of 110 PeerJ articles collected over a period of 345 days, we analyze the relationship between social media attention and article visitors directed by social media.

Our results show that social media presence of PeerJ articles is high. About 68.18% of the papers receive at least one tweet from Twitter accounts other than @PeerJ, the official account of the journal.

Social media attention increases the dissemination of scholarly articles. Altmetrics could not only act as the complement of traditional citation measures but also play an important role in increasing the article downloads and promoting the impacts of scholarly articles. There also exists a significant correlation among the online attention from different social media platforms.

Articles with more Facebook shares tend to get more tweets. The temporal trends show that social attention comes immediately following publication but does not last long, so do the social media directed article views.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.02383

Catégories
EN

Attitudes and norms affecting scientists’ data reuse

Authors : Renata Gonçalves Curty, Kevin Crowston, Alison Specht, Bruce W. Grant, Elizabeth D. Dalton

The value of sharing scientific research data is widely appreciated, but factors that hinder or prompt the reuse of data remain poorly understood. Using the Theory of Reasoned Action, we test the relationship between the beliefs and attitudes of scientists towards data reuse, and their self-reported data reuse behaviour.

To do so, we used existing responses to selected questions from a worldwide survey of scientists developed and administered by the DataONE Usability and Assessment Working Group (thus practicing data reuse ourselves).

Results show that the perceived efficacy and efficiency of data reuse are strong predictors of reuse behaviour, and that the perceived importance of data reuse corresponds to greater reuse. Expressed lack of trust in existing data and perceived norms against data reuse were not found to be major impediments for reuse contrary to our expectations.

We found that reported use of models and remotely-sensed data was associated with greater reuse. The results suggest that data reuse would be encouraged and normalized by demonstration of its value.

We offer some theoretical and practical suggestions that could help to legitimize investment and policies in favor of data sharing.

URL : Attitudes and norms affecting scientists’ data reuse

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189288

Catégories
EN

Data-Sprinting: a Public Approach to Digital Research

Authors : Tommaso Venturini, Anders Munk, Axel Meunier

This chapter is about the politics of interdisciplinarity. Not in the sense of the research politics fostering collaboration across disciplines, but in the stronger sense of transcending disciplinary boundaries to make significant political contributions.

In short: it is about making research public. To address this question, this chapter introduces (through a concrete example in climate debate research) an original research format, that we call data-sprinting.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01672288

Catégories
EN

Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action: The Lessons that Olson can Teach us

Author : Cameron Neylon

The infrastructures that underpin scholarship and research, including repositories, curation systems, aggregators, indexes and standards, are public goods. Finding sustainability models to support them is a challenge due to free-loading, where someone who does not contribute to the support of an infrastructure nonetheless gains the benefit of it.

The work of Mancur Olson (1965) suggests that there are only three ways to address this for large groups: compelling all potential users, often through some form of taxation, to support the infrastructure; providing non-collective (club) goods to contributors that are created as a side-effect of providing the collective good; or implementing mechanisms that lower the effective number of participants in the negotiation (oligopoly).

In this paper, I use Olson’s framework to analyse existing scholarly infrastructures and proposals for the sustainability of new infrastructures. This approach provides some important insights.

First, it illustrates that the problems of sustainability are not merely ones of finance but of political economy, which means that focusing purely on financial sustainability in the absence of considering governance principles and community is the wrong approach.

The second key insight this approach yields is that the size of the community supported by an infrastructure is a critical parameter. Sustainability models will need to change over the life cycle of an infrastructure with the growth (or decline) of the community.

In both cases, identifying patterns for success and creating templates for governance and sustainability could be of significant value.

Overall, this analysis demonstrates a need to consider how communities, platforms, and finances interact and suggests that a political economic analysis has real value.

URL : Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action: The Lessons that Olson can Teach us

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/kula.7