Archives des auteurs : Hans Dillaerts

Game theory and scholarly publishing: premises for an agreement around open access

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Author : Abdelghani Maddi

Stakeholders in research and scientific publishing are gradually joining the Open-Access (OA) movement, which is gaining momentum to become nowadays at the heart of scientific policies in high-income countries.

The rise of OA generates profound changes in the chain of production and dissemination of knowledge. Free access to peer-reviewed research methods and results has contributed to the dynamics of science observed in recent years.

The modes of publication and access have also evolved; the classic model, based on journal subscriptions is gradually giving way to new economic models that have appeared with the arrival of OA.

The objective of this article is twofold. First, propose a model for the publishing market based on the literature as well as on changes in open science policies. Second, analyze publishing strategies of publishers and institutions.

To do so, we relied on game theory in economics. Results show that in the short term, the publisher’s equilibrium strategy is to adopt a hybridpublishing model, while the institutions’ equilibrium strategy is to publish in OA.

This equilibrium is not stable and that in the medium/long term, the two players will converge on an OA publishing strategy. The analysis of the equilibrium in mixed-strategies confirms this result.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03265171v2

Digital humanities—A discipline in its own right? An analysis of the role and position of digital humanities in the academic landscape

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Authors : Jan Luhmann, Manuel Burghardt

Although digital humanities (DH) has received a lot of attention in recent years, its status as “a discipline in its own right” (Schreibman et al., A companion to digital humanities (pp. xxiii–xxvii). Blackwell; 2004) and its position in the overall academic landscape are still being negotiated.

While there are countless essays and opinion pieces that debate the status of DH, little research has been dedicated to exploring the field in a systematic and empirical way (Poole, Journal of Documentation; 2017:73).

This study aims to contribute to the existing research gap by comparing articles published over the past three decades in three established English-language DH journals (Computers and the Humanities, Literary and Linguistic Computing, Digital Humanities Quarterly) with research articles from journals in 15 other academic disciplines (corpus size: 34,041 articles; 299 million tokens).

As a method of analysis, we use latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling, combined with recent approaches that aggregate topic models by means of hierarchical agglomerative clustering.

Our findings indicate that DH is simultaneously a discipline in its own right and a highly interdisciplinary field, with many connecting factors to neighboring disciplines—first and foremost, computational linguistics, and information science.

Detailed descriptive analyses shed some light on the diachronic development of DH and also highlight topics that are characteristic for DH.

URL : Digital humanities—A discipline in its own right? An analysis of the role and position of digital humanities in the academic landscape

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24533

Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?

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Authors : Pantea Kamrani, Isabelle Dorsch, Wolfgang G. Stock

The h-index is a widely used scientometric indicator on the researcher level working with a simple combination of publication and citation counts. In this article, we pursue two goals, namely the collection of empirical data about researchers’ personal estimations of the importance of the h-index for themselves as well as for their academic disciplines, and on the researchers’ concrete knowledge on the h-index and the way of its calculation.

We worked with an online survey (including a knowledge test on the calculation of the h-index), which was finished by 1081 German university professors. We distinguished between the results for all participants, and, additionally, the results by gender, generation, and field of knowledge.

We found a clear binary division between the academic knowledge fields: For the sciences and medicine the h-index is important for the researchers themselves and for their disciplines, while for the humanities and social sciences, economics, and law the h-index is considerably less important.

Two fifths of the professors do not know details on the h-index or wrongly deem to know what the h-index is and failed our test. The researchers’ knowledge on the h-index is much smaller in the academic branches of the humanities and the social sciences.

As the h-index is important for many researchers and as not all researchers are very knowledgeable about this author-specific indicator, it seems to be necessary to make researchers more aware of scholarly metrics literacy.

URL : Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03968-1

TeamTree analysis: A new approach to evaluate scientific production

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Author : Frank W. Pfrieger

Advances in science and technology depend on the work of research teams and the publication of results through peer-reviewed articles representing a growing socio-economic resource. Current methods to mine the scientific literature regarding a field of interest focus on content, but the workforce credited by authorship remains largely unexplored.

Notably, appropriate measures of scientific production are debated. Here, a new bibliometric approach named TeamTree analysis is introduced that visualizes the development and composition of the workforce driving a field.

A new citation-independent measure that scales with the H index estimates impact based on publication record, genealogical ties and collaborative connections.

This author-centered approach complements existing tools to mine the scientific literature and to evaluate research across disciplines.

URL : TeamTree analysis: A new approach to evaluate scientific production

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253847

Bringing Policymakers to Science Through Communication: A Perspective From Latin America

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Authors : Marta Pulido-Salgado, Fátima Antonethe Castaneda Mena

Scientific knowledge should be shared beyond academic circles in order to promote science in policymaking. Science communication increases the understanding of how the natural world works and the capacity to make informed decisions.

However, not every researcher has the ability to master the art of communicating, and even less in a clear, concise, and easy to understand language that society representatives appreciate.

Within the huge and extraordinarily diverse Latin American region, science communication has been going on for at least 200 years, when the first science stories appeared in the newspapers, as well as the first science museums and botanical gardens were founded.

Nevertheless, resources are limited, and notably time, which researchers spend mostly in mentoring, ensuring funding, publication of their results and laboratory work, while science journalists are an endangered species.

This perspective article aims at providing some recommendations to build bridges between science and decision-making parties through communication, by exploring how Latin American diplomats and policymakers engage with scientific knowledge.

URL : Bringing Policymakers to Science Through Communication: A Perspective From Latin America

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.654191

Characteristics of Spanish citizen participation practices in science

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Authors : Carolina Llorente, Gema Revuelta, Mar Carrió

A new regime of science production is emerging from the involvement of non-scientists. The present study aims to improve understanding of this phenomenon with an analysis of 16 interviews with Spanish coordinators of participatory science practices.

The results indicate a majority of strategic and captive publics and point to communication as a key tool for the development of successful practices.

Five key elements of the degree of integration required to develop a citizen participation in science practice were analysed: derived outputs, level of participant contribution, participation assessment, practice replicability, and participant and facilitator training. Proposals for strategies to remove barriers to citizen participation are the study’s principal contribution.

URL : Characteristics of Spanish citizen participation practices in science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.22323/2.20040205

Science communicators intimidated: researchers’ freedom of expression and the rise of authoritarian populism

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Authors : Esa Valiverronen, Sampsa Saikkonen

In this article, we explore scientists’ freedom of expression in the context of authoritarian populism. Our particular case for this analysis is Finland, where the right-wing populist Finns Party entered the government for the first time in 2015.

More recently, after leaving the government in 2017, the party has been the most popular party in opinion polls in 2021. We illustrate the current threats to Finnish researchers’ freedom of expression using their responses on three surveys, made in 2015, 2017 and 2019. We focus on politically motivated disparagement of scientists and experts, and the scientists’ experiences with online hate and aggressive feedback.

Further, we relate these findings to the recent studies on authoritarian populism and science-related populism. We argue that this development may affect researchers’ readiness to communicate their research and expertise in public.

URL : Science communicators intimidated: researchers’ freedom of expression and the rise of authoritarian populism

DOI : https://doi.org/10.22323/2.20040208