Archives des catégories : EN

Branding Scholarly Journals: Transmuting Symbolic Capital into Economic Capital

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Auteurs/Authors : Mahdi Khelfaoui, Yves Gingras

In this paper, we analyze a relatively recent commercial strategy devised by large academic publishers, consisting in the branding of their most prestigious scientific journals. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s model of capital conversion, we show how publishers transfer the symbolic capital of an already prestigious journal to derivative journals that capture part of the prestige of the original brand and transform it into new economic capital.

As shown by their high impact factors, these new journals, bearing the mark of the original journal in their titles, are rapidly adopted by researchers. Through manuscript transfer mechanisms, publishers also use part of the papers rejected by their flagship and highly selective jour-nals to recycle and monetize them inlower impactor open access derivativejournals of their lists.

URL : https://cirst2.openum.ca/files/sites/179/2020/08/Note_2020-03-branding.pdf

Navigating Open Science as Early Career Feminist Researchers

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Authors : Madeleine Pownall, Catherine Talbot, Anna Henschel, Alexandra Lautarescu, Kelly Lloyd, Helena Hartmann, Kohinoor Darda, Karen Tang, Parise Carmichael-Murphy, Jaclyn Siegel

Open Science aims to improve the rigour, robustness, and reproducibility of psychological research. Despite resistance from some academics, the Open Science movement has been championed by some Early Career Researchers (ECRs), who have proposed innovative new tools and methods to promote and employ open research principles.

Feminist ECRs have much to contribute to this emerging way of doing research. However, they face unique barriers, which may prohibit their full engagement with the Open Science movement.

We, ten feminist ECRs in psychology, from a diverse range of academic and personal backgrounds, explore Open Science through a feminist lens, to consider how voice and power may be negotiated in unique ways for ECRs. Taking a critical and intersectional approach, we discuss how feminist early career research may be complemented or challenged by shifts towards Open Science.

We also propose how ECRs can act as grassroots changemakers within the context of academic precarity. We identify ways in which Open Science can benefit from feminist epistemology and end with six practical recommendations for feminist ECRs who wish to engage with Open Science practices in their own research.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/f9m47

‘I Updated the ‘: The Evolution of References in the English Wikipedia and the Implications for Altmetrics

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Authors : Olga Zagovora, Roberto Ulloa, Katrin Weller, Fabian Flöck

With this work, we present a publicly available dataset of the history of all the references (more than 55 million) ever used in the English Wikipedia until June 2019. We have applied a new method for identifying and monitoring references in Wikipedia, so that for each reference we can provide data about associated actions: creation, modifications, deletions, and reinsertions.

The high accuracy of this method and the resulting dataset was confirmed via a comprehensive crowdworker labelling campaign. We use the dataset to study the temporal evolution of Wikipedia references as well as users’ editing behaviour.

We find evidence of a mostly productive and continuous effort to improve the quality of references: (1) there is a persistent increase of reference and document identifiers (DOI, PubMedID, PMC, ISBN, ISSN, ArXiv ID), and (2) most of the reference curation work is done by registered humans (not bots or anonymous editors).

We conclude that the evolution of Wikipedia references, including the dynamics of the community processes that tend to them should be leveraged in the design of relevance indexes for altmetrics, and our dataset can be pivotal for such effort.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.03083

The measurement of “interdisciplinarity” and “synergy” in scientific and extra‐scientific collaborations

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Authors : Loet Leydesdorff, Inga Ivanova

Problem solving often requires crossing boundaries, such as those between disciplines. When policy‐makers call for “interdisciplinarity,” however, they often mean “synergy.” Synergy is generated when the whole offers more possibilities than the sum of its parts. An increase in the number of options above the sum of the options in subsets can be measured as redundancy; that is, the number of not‐yet‐realized options.

The number of options available to an innovation system for realization can be as decisive for the system’s survival as the historically already‐realized innovations. Unlike “interdisciplinarity,” “synergy” can also be generated in sectorial or geographical collaborations. The measurement of “synergy,” however, requires a methodology different from the measurement of “interdisciplinarity.”

In this study, we discuss recent advances in the operationalization and measurement of “interdisciplinarity,” and propose a methodology for measuring “synergy” based on information theory.

The sharing of meanings attributed to information from different perspectives can increase redundancy. Increasing redundancy reduces the relative uncertainty, for example, in niches.

The operationalization of the two concepts—“interdisciplinarity” and “synergy”—as different and partly overlapping indicators allows for distinguishing between the effects and the effectiveness of science‐policy interventions in research priorities.

URL : The measurement of “interdisciplinarity” and “synergy” in scientific and extra‐scientific collaborations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24416

Do researchers use open research data? Exploring the relationships between usage trends and metadata quality across scientific disciplines from the Figshare case

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Authors : Alfonso Quarati, Juliana E Raffaghelli

Open research data (ORD) have been considered a driver of scientific transparency. However, data friction, as the phenomenon of data underutilisation for several causes, has also been pointed out.

A factor often called into question for ORD low usage is the quality of the ORD and associated metadata. This work aims to illustrate the use of ORD, published by the Figshare scientific repository, concerning their scientific discipline, their type and compared with the quality of their metadata.

Considering all the Figshare resources and carrying out a programmatic quality assessment of their metadata, our analysis highlighted two aspects. First, irrespective of the scientific domain considered, most ORD are under-used, but with exceptional cases which concentrate most researchers’ attention.

Second, there was no evidence that the use of ORD is associated with good metadata publishing practices. These two findings opened to a reflection about the potential causes of such data friction.

URL : Do researchers use open research data? Exploring the relationships between usage trends and metadata quality across scientific disciplines from the Figshare case

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551520961048

Evaluating the impact of open access policies on research institutions

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Authors : Chun-kai (karl) Huang, Cameron Neylon, Richard Hosking, Lucy Montgomery, Katie S Wilson, Alkim Ozaygen, Chloe Brookes-Kenworthy

The proportion of research outputs published in open access journals or made available on other freely-accessible platforms has increased over the past two decades, driven largely by funder mandates, institutional policies, grass-roots advocacy, and changing attitudes in the research community.

However, the relative effectiveness of these different interventions has remained largely unexplored. Here we present a robust, transparent and updateable method for analysing how these interventions affect the open access performance of individual institutes.

We studied 1,207 institutions from across the world, and found that, in 2017, the top-performing universities published around 80–90% of their research open access.

The analysis also showed that publisher-mediated (gold) open access was popular in Latin American and African universities, whereas the growth of open access in Europe and North America has mostly been driven by repositories.

URL : Evaluating the impact of open access policies on research institutions

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.57067

Global electronic thesis and dissertation repositories – collection diversity and management issues

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Authors: Fayaz Ahmad Loan, Ufaira Yaseen Shah

This article discovers the collection diversity of electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) repositories based on key parameters such as regional distribution, subject classification, language diversity, etc. and identifies the critical management issues of the ETD repositories related to collection management, software management, content management and metadata policies.

The ETD repositories were identified in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR). The required data were manually collected from the OpenDOAR and websites of repositories to achieve the prescribed objectives of the study. The data were later tabulated, analysed and interpreted using simple arithmetic techniques.

The study was limited to the ETD repositories available in the OpenDOAR, and findings cannot be generalized across repositories and directories. It provides insights about ETD repositories worldwide, highlights their critical management issues and suggests mechanisms for their sustainable growth and development.

This article is purely based on research and its findings are valid for scholars, faculty members, institutions – as well as administrators and managers of the ETD repositories.

URL : Global electronic thesis and dissertation repositories – collection diversity and management issues

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.524