Archives des catégories : EN

Academic criteria for promotion and tenure in biomedical sciences faculties: cross sectional analysis of international sample of universities

Posté le par

Authors : Danielle B Rice, Hana Raffoul, John P A Ioannidis, David Moher

Objective

To determine the presence of a set of pre-specified traditional and non-traditional criteria used to assess scientists for promotion and tenure in faculties of biomedical sciences among universities worldwide.

Design

Cross sectional study.

Setting

International sample of universities.

Participants

170 randomly selected universities from the Leiden ranking of world universities list.

Main outcome measure

Presence of five traditional (for example, number of publications) and seven non-traditional (for example, data sharing) criteria in guidelines for assessing assistant professors, associate professors, and professors and the granting of tenure in institutions with biomedical faculties.

Results

A total of 146 institutions had faculties of biomedical sciences, and 92 had eligible guidelines available for review. Traditional criteria of peer reviewed publications, authorship order, journal impact factor, grant funding, and national or international reputation were mentioned in 95% (n=87), 37% (34), 28% (26), 67% (62), and 48% (44) of the guidelines, respectively. Conversely, among non-traditional criteria, only citations (any mention in 26%; n=24) and accommodations for employment leave (37%; 34) were relatively commonly mentioned.

Mention of alternative metrics for sharing research (3%; n=3) and data sharing (1%; 1) was rare, and three criteria (publishing in open access mediums, registering research, and adhering to reporting guidelines) were not found in any guidelines reviewed.

Among guidelines for assessing promotion to full professor, traditional criteria were more commonly reported than non-traditional criteria (traditional criteria 54.2%, non-traditional items 9.5%; mean difference 44.8%, 95% confidence interval 39.6% to 50.0%; P=0.001).

Notable differences were observed across continents in whether guidelines were accessible (Australia 100% (6/6), North America 97% (28/29), Europe 50% (27/54), Asia 58% (29/50), South America 17% (1/6)), with more subtle differences in the use of specific criteria.

Conclusions

This study shows that the evaluation of scientists emphasises traditional criteria as opposed to non-traditional criteria. This may reinforce research practices that are known to be problematic while insufficiently supporting the conduct of better quality research and open science. Institutions should consider incentivising non-traditional criteria.

URL : Academic criteria for promotion and tenure in biomedical sciences faculties: cross sectional analysis of international sample of universities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m2081

 

Open Education Librarianship: A Position Description Analysis of the Newly Emerging Role in Academic Libraries

Posté le par

Author : Amanda C. Larson

According to the latest Babson Survey, Freeing the Textbook: Educational Resources in US Higher Education, “faculty awareness of OER has increased every year, with 46 percent of faculty now aware of open educational resources, up from 34 percent three years ago” (Seaman and Seaman 2018).

While open educational resources (OER) gain traction with faculty who are looking to lower costs for their students and re-engage with their pedagogy, academic libraries are creating a variety of open or affordable textbook programs to help increase the use of OER or low-cost materials as replacements for high-cost traditional materials. Some libraries are creating specific positions to support these initiatives that aim to help faculty who want to adopt, adapt, or author OER.

As more of these roles emerge, it raises questions about what the field perceives as the role of an Open Education or OER librarian, and the support that libraries provide OER initiatives.

To explore these concerns, I collected position descriptions for librarians whose role it is to support OER initiatives into a corpus. I applied deductive thematic analysis to code it while investigating four main questions: 1) What inspires academic libraries to hire OER-related support? 2) What skills do they anticipate applicants to possess? 3) Where do these positions fit within the organization chart of the library? 4) Is there a standard scope of work that emerges from the corpus?

In addition to these four questions, this research also explored the expectations for librarians in these roles to change faculty’s perception of OER through outreach and if they are expected to run burgeoning grant initiatives to launch adoption, adaptation, or authoring efforts at their institution.

URL : https://www.ijoer.org/open-education-librarianship-a-position-description-analysis-of-the-newly-emerging-role-in-academic-libraries/

‘At-risk articles’: the imperative to recover lost science

Posté le par

Author: Jeanette Hatherill

Deceptive publishers have been discussed and written about from a multitude of perspectives and in a variety of disciplines, but scant attention has been devoted to a particular aspect of the issue: How we as scholarly communities are dealing with the research that appears in these outlets.

It is problematic that the question is not being addressed, as this research is at risk of being lost. It is at risk because articles that appear in deceptive publications are not indexed, so they are less visible, discoverable and citable. Additionally, they are not preserved and therefore likely to disappear should the publisher cease its activities or neglect to carry out basic maintenance on their archives and servers.

Furthermore, it is particularly problematic because this lost science is potentially valuable. In this article, it is argued that, rather than continuing to risk the loss of this potentially important research by ignoring its existence, research disciplines should look at developments in open peer review and the increasing use of preprint servers for their potential to recover and reintegrate these at-risk articles into the scholarly record.

URL : ‘At-risk articles’: the imperative to recover lost science

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.514

University journals. Consolidating institutional repositories in a digital, free, open access publication platform for all scholarly output

Posté le par

Authors : Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer, Eva Méndez Rodríguez, Jeroen Sondervan, Frans J. Oort

Funders increasingly mandate researchers to publish their scientific articles in open access and to retain their copyright. Universities all over the world have set up institutional repositories and use repositories for the preservation and dissemination of academic production of their institutions, including scientific articles, reports, datasets, and other research outputs.

However, in general, authors do not find institutional repositories very attractive and accessible as an open access publication platform since repositories and open access are not part of the rewarding system.

We expect that researchers are more likely to publish and deposit their scientific papers in a repository, once they have the appearance, recognition and dissemination of a scientific journal.

That is why we took the initiative to set up a repository based journal ‘University Journals’ in which universities collaborate. The paper will explain the University Journals project and how the involved universities want to facilitate a valuable alternative publication platform that complies with Plan S principles and enables publication and dissemination of all research outcomes.

By establishing University Journals as a publication platform, university libraries are instrumental (and crucial) in achieving the ambitions of Open Science, and universities gain control over the publication process.

URL : University journals. Consolidating institutional repositories in a digital, free, open access publication platform for all scholarly output

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10323

On the Potential of Preprints in Geochemistry: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Posté le par

Authors : Olivier Pourret, Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Jonathan P. Tennant

In recent years, the pace of the dissemination of scientific information has increased. In this context, the possibility and value of sharing open access (OA) online manuscripts in their preprint form seem to be growing in many scientific fields. More and more platforms are especially dedicated to free preprint publishing.

They are published, non-peer-reviewed scholarly papers that typically precede publication in a peer-reviewed journal. They have been a part of science since at least the 1960s.

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web to help researchers share knowledge easily. A few months later, in August 1991, as a centralized web-based network, arXiv was created. arXiv is arguably the most influential preprint platform and has supported the fields of physics, mathematics and computer science for over 30 years.

Since, preprint platforms have become popular in many disciplines (e.g., bioRxiv for biological sciences) due to the increasing drive towards OA publishing, and can be publisher- or community-driven, profit or not for profit, and based on proprietary or free and open source software. A range of discipline-specific or cross-domain platforms now exist, with exponential growth these last five years.

While preprints as a whole still represent only a small proportion of scholarly publishing, a strong community of early adopters is already beginning to experiment with such value-enhancing tools in many more disciplines than before.

The two main options for geochemists are EarthArXiv and ESSOAr. A “one size fits all” model for preprints would never work across the entire scientific community. The geochemistry community needs to develop and sustain their own model.

URL : On the Potential of Preprints in Geochemistry: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/su12083360

The growth of open access publishing in geochemistry

Posté le par

Authors : Olivier Pourret, Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Jonathan P. Tennant, Andrew Hursthouse, Eric D. van Hullebusch

In this communication, we look at Open Access (OA) publishing practices in geochemistry.

We examine a list of 56 journals and assess whether Article Processing Charges (APCs) and Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) appear to influence publication or not. More than 40% of articles in 2018-2019 were published OA, and about 70% of that portion in fully OA journals.

These had a mean APC of US$ 900, whereas the remaining were published in hybrid journals with a higher mean APC of more than $US 1,800. A moderate and positive correlation is found between the number of OA articles published in hybrids journals and their JIF, whereas there is a stronger positive relationship between the number of OA articles published in fully OA journals and the APC.

For OA articles published in hybrid journals, it seems that the proportion of OA articles tends to increase in journals with higher JIF.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ringeo.2020.100001

The Democratisation Myth: Open Access and the Solidification of Epistemic Injustices

Posté le par

Author : Marcel Knöchelmann

Open access (OA) is considered to solve an accessibility problem in scholarly communication. But this accessibility is restricted to consumption of Western knowledge.

Epistemic injustices inhering in the scholarly communication of a global production of knowledge remain unchanged. This underscores that the commercial and “big deal” OA dominating Europe and North America has little revolutionary potential to democratise knowledge.

Western academia, driven by politics of progressive neoliberalism, can even reinforce its hegemonic power by solidifying and legitimating the contemporary hierarchies of scholarly communication through OA.

I approach the accessibility problem dialectically to arrive at a critique of the commercial large-scale implementations of OA. I propose a threefold conceptualisation of epistemic injustices comprising of testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, and epistemic objectification.

As these injustices prevail, the notion of a democratisation of knowledge through OA is but another form of technological determinism that neglects the intricacies of culture and hegemonial order.

URL : The Democratisation Myth: Open Access and the Solidification of Epistemic Injustices

DOI : https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/hw7at