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Establishing, Developing, and Sustaining a Community of Data Champions

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Authors : James L. Savage, Lauren Cadwallader

Supporting good practice in Research Data Management (RDM) is challenging for higher education institutions, in part because of the diversity of research practices and data types across disciplines.

While centralised research data support units now exist in many universities, these typically possess neither the discipline-specific expertise nor the resources to offer appropriate targeted training and support within every academic unit.

One solution to this problem is to identify suitable individuals with discipline-specific expertise that are already embedded within each unit, and empower these individuals to advocate for good RDM and to deliver support locally.

This article focuses on an ongoing example of this approach: the Data Champion Programme at the University of Cambridge, UK.

We describe how the Data Champion programme was established; the programme’s reach, impact, strengths and weaknesses after two years of operation; and our anticipated challenges and planned strategies for maintaining the programme over the medium- and long-term.

URL : Establishing, Developing, and Sustaining a Community of Data Champions

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-023

Data Sharing Practices among Researchers at South African Universities

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Authors : Siviwe Bangani, Mathew Moyo

Research data management practices have gained momentum the world over. This is due to increased demands by governments and other funding agencies to have research data archived and shared as widely as possible.

This paper sought to establish the data sharing practices of researchers in South Africa. The study further sought to establish the level of collaboration among researchers in sharing research data at the university level.

The outcomes of the survey will help the researchers to develop appropriate data literacy awareness programmes meant to stimulate growth in data sharing practices for the benefit of research, not only in South Africa, but the world at large.

A survey research method was used to gather data from willing public universities in South Africa. A similar study was conducted in other countries such as the United Kingdom, France and Turkey but the Researchers believe that circumstances in the developed world may differ with the South African research environment, hence the current study.

The major finding of this study was that most researchers preferred to use data produced by others but less keen on sharing their own data.

This study is the first of its kind in South Africa which investigates data sharing practices of researchers from multi-disciplinary fields at the university level and will contribute immensely to the growing body of literature in the area of research data management.

URL : Data Sharing Practices among Researchers at South African Universities

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-028

The Landscape of Rights and Licensing Initiatives for Data Sharing

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Authors : Sam Grabus, Jane Greenberg

Over the last twenty years, a wide variety of resources have been developed to address the rights and licensing problems inherent with contemporary data sharing practices.

The landscape of developments is this area is increasingly confusing and difficult to navigate, due to the complexity of intellectual property and ethics issues associated with sharing sensitive data.

This paper seeks to address this challenge, examining the landscape and presenting a Version 1.0 directory of resources. A multi-method study was pursued, with an environmental scan examining 20 resources, resulting in three high-level categories: standards, tools, and community initiatives; and a content analysis revealing the subcategories of rights, licensing, metadata & ontologies.

A timeline confirms a shift in licensing standardization priorities from open data to more nuanced and technologically robust solutions, over time, to accommodate for more sensitive data types.

This paper reports on the research undertaking, and comments on the potential for using license-specific metadata supplements and developing data-centric rights and licensing ontologies.

URL : The Landscape of Rights and Licensing Initiatives for Data Sharing

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-029

Perceived publication pressure in Amsterdam: Survey of all disciplinary fields and academic ranks

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Authors : Tamarinde L. Haven, Lex M. Bouter, Yvo M. Smulders, Joeri K. Tijdink

Publications determine to a large extent the possibility to stay in academia (“publish or perish”). While some pressure to publish may incentivise high quality research, too much publication pressure is likely to have detrimental effects on both the scientific enterprise and on individual researchers.

Our research question was: What is the level of perceived publication pressure in the four academic institutions in Amsterdam and does the pressure to publish differ between academic ranks and disciplinary fields?

Investigating researchers in Amsterdam with the revised Publication Pressure Questionnaire, we find that a negative attitude towards the current publication climate is present across academic ranks and disciplinary fields.

Postdocs and assistant professors (M = 3.42) perceive the greatest publication stress and PhD-students (M = 2.44) perceive a significant lack of resources to relieve publication stress. Results indicate the need for a healthier publication climate where the quality and integrity of research is rewarded.

URL : Perceived publication pressure in Amsterdam: Survey of all disciplinary fields and academic ranks

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217931

Plan S in Latin America: A precautionary note

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Authors : Humberto Debat​, Dominique Babini

Latin America has historically led a firm and rising Open Access movement and represents the worldwide region with larger adoption of Open Access practices.

Argentina has recently expressed its commitment to join Plan S, an initiative from a European consortium of research funders oriented to mandate Open Access publishing of scientific outputs.

Here we suggest that the potential adhesion of Argentina or other Latin American nations to Plan S, even in its recently revised version, ignores the reality and tradition of Latin American Open Access publishing, and has still to demonstrate that it will encourage at a regional and global level the advancement of non-commercial Open Access initiatives.

URL : Plan S in Latin America: A precautionary note

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27834v2

Strengthening bibliodiversity: The current situation in France at national and institutional levels

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Authors : Jean-François Lutz, Jacques Lafait

Almost one year after the announcement of the French National Plan for Open Science, the intervention aims at presenting a progress report on achievements in strengthening bibliodiversity and setting up a National Open Science Fund, two of the objectives of the Plan.

At the national level, the work was carried out within a working group the Open Science Committee.

Four complementary aspects were taken into account:

  • the establishment of exemplary criteria to assess infrastructures and platforms in terms of governance, ethics, openness and sustainability. These 40 criteria are to be used in the evaluation of the initiatives that will apply to the National Open Science Fund.
  • support for the strategic orientation of the National Open Science Fund.
  • the drafting of recommendations for the implementation of Plan S by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), which is member of cOAlition S.
  • information exchange and coordination with other initiatives such as OA2020 and SCOSS.

URL : https://elpub.episciences.org/5529

Citation.js: a format-independent, modular bibliography tool for the browser and command line

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Author : Lars G Willighagen

Background

Given the vast number of standards and formats for bibliographical data, any program working with bibliographies and citations has to be able to interpret such data. This paper describes the development of Citation.js (https://citation.js.org/), a tool to parse and format according to those standards.

The program follows modern guidelines for software in general and JavaScript in specific, such as version control, source code analysis, integration testing and semantic versioning.

Results

The result is an extensible tool that has already seen adaption in a variety of sources and use cases: as part of a server-side page generator of a publishing platform, as part of a local extensible document generator, and as part of an in-browser converter of extracted references.

Use cases range from transforming a list of DOIs or Wikidata identifiers into a BibTeX file on the command line, to displaying RIS references on a webpage with added Altmetric badges to generating “How to cite this” sections on a blog.

The accuracy of conversions is currently 27 % for properties and 60 % for types on average and a typical initialization takes 120 ms in browsers and 1 s with Node.js on the command line.

Conclusions

Citation.js is a library supporting various formats of bibliographic information in a broad selection of use cases and environments. Given the support for plugins, more formats can be added with relative ease.

URL : Citation.js: a format-independent, modular bibliography tool for the browser and command line

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27466v2