Catégorie : EN

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EN

Dear Reviewer 2: Go F’ Yourself

Author : David A. M. Peterson

Objectives

The objective of this study was to empirically test the wide belief that Reviewer #2 is a uniquely poor reviewer.

Methods

The test involved analyzing the reviewer database from Political Behavior . There are two main tests. First, the reviewer’s categorical evaluation of the manuscript was compared by reviewer number. Second, the data were analyzed to test if Reviewer #2 was disproportionately likely to be more than one category below the mean of the other reviewers of the manuscript.

Results

There is no evidence that Reviewer #2 is either more negative about the manuscript or out of line with the other reviewers. There is, however, evidence that Reviewer #3 is more likely to be more than one category below the other reviewers.

Conclusions

Reviewer #2 is not the problem. Reviewer #3 is. In fact, he is such a bad actor that he even gets the unwitting Reviewer #2 blamed for his bad behavior.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12824

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EN

The role of metadata in reproducible computational research

Authors : Jeremy Leipzig, Daniel Nüst, Charles Tapley Hoyt, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Karthik Ram, Jane Greenberg

Reproducible computational research (RCR) is the keystone of the scientific method for in silico analyses, packaging the transformation of raw data to published results.

In addition to its role in research integrity, RCR has the capacity to significantly accelerate evaluation and reuse. This potential and wide-support for the FAIR principles have motivated interest in metadata standards supporting RCR.

Metadata provides context and provenance to raw data and methods and is essential to both discovery and validation. Despite this shared connection with scientific data, few studies have explicitly described the relationship between metadata and RCR.

This article employs a functional content analysis to identify metadata standards that support RCR functions across an analytic stack consisting of input data, tools, notebooks, pipelines, and publications.

Our article provides background context, explores gaps, and discovers component trends of embeddedness and methodology weight from which we derive recommendations for future work.

URL : The role of metadata in reproducible computational research

Original location : https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08589

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EN

Journal research data sharing policies: a study of highly-cited journals in neuroscience, physics, and operations research

Authors : Antti M. Rousi, Mikael Laakso

The practices for if and how scholarly journals instruct research data for published research to be shared is an area where a lot of changes have been happening as science policy moves towards facilitating open science, and subject-specific repositories and practices are established.

This study provides an analysis of the research data sharing policies of highly-cited journals in the fields of neuroscience, physics, and operations research as of May 2019. For these 120 journals, 40 journals per subject category, a unified policy coding framework was developed to capture the most central elements of each policy, i.e. what, when, and where research data is instructed to be shared.

The results affirm that considerable differences between research fields remain when it comes to policy existence, strength, and specificity. The findings revealed that one of the most important factors influencing the dimensions of what, where and when of research data policies was whether the journal’s scope included specific data types related to life sciences which have established methods of sharing through community-endorsed public repositories.

The findings surface the future research potential of approaching policy analysis on the publisher-level as well as on the journal-level. The collected data and coding framework is provided as open data to facilitate future research and journal policy monitoring.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03467-9

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EN

Charting the Open Access scholarly journals landscape in the UAE

Author : Mohamed Boufarss

The purpose of this study is to chart the scholarly journal landscape in the UAE in order to provide a scientific perspective on research productivity, distribution, and access in the country and lay the foundations for further research in this area.

The study aims also to contribute to research endeavoring to paint a global picture of scholarly publishing. We carried out a mapping of scholarly journals published in the UAE compiled from international and local sources.

The resulting journal list was studied focusing on the share of OA titles, language of publication, discipline, and type of publisher.

Our results show that: (1) 534 journals are published in the UAE and that the share of OA is quite noteworthy with about 64% of all online journals; (2) the APC-based OA model is prevalent with around 75% of OA journals levying a publication fee; (3) UAE journals are predominantly in English while the number of Arabic-language journals is marginal; (4) science, technology and medicine prevail as the most prevalent subject areas of the journals; and (5) commercial publishers control most of the publications especially in the medical field.

The study lays a foundation for further studies on scholarly journals in the UAE. The combination of regional indexes and international directories to measure the country’s scholarly journal output can also be replicated and built upon for other countries where the major international bibliometric databases do not provide a comprehensive representation of scholarly publishing activities.

URL : Charting the Open Access scholarly journals landscape in the UAE

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03349-0

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EN

Open Sesame? Open access priorities, incentives, and policies among higher education institutions in the United Arab Emirates

Authors : Mohamed Boufarss, Mikael Laakso

Higher education institutions (HEIs) have an instrumental role in the move towards Open Access (OA) by shaping the national strategies, policies, and agendas.

This study sets out to explore the role of HEIs in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) OA uptake and reflect on the ongoing international initiatives pushing for universal OA to research.

The study is based on an online survey targeted at UAE higher education institutions research management units. In order to measure the institutional views, only one response was solicited from each institution.

A total of 19 valid responses were received, making up 47% of HEIs included in the population of organisations. Our results suggest that there is low commitment to OA among UAE HEIs as attested by the low number of OA policies, scarce OA funding, limited proliferation of institutional repositories, perceived lack of urgency to migrate from current access models, and little consideration of OA for promotion purposes.

The study is the first of its kind in the UAE, Arab and Middle Eastern countries, providing rare insight into a growing phenomenon that is global, yet most vocally discussed from a western perspective and context.

The study contributes to the debate on the role of HEIs in the transition to OA and in shaping national and regional OA policies, as well as informing international initiatives about the current status of OA in the region.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03529-y

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EN

Why You Need Soft and Non-Technical Skills for Successful Data Librarianship

Author : Margaret Henderson

There are many courses available to teach research data management to librarians and researchers. While these courses can help with technical skills, like programming or statistics, and practical knowledge of data life cycles or data sharing policies, there are “soft skills” and non-technical skills that are needed to successfully start and run data services.

While there are many important characteristics of a good data librarian, reference skills, relationship building, collaboration, listening, and facilitation are some of the most important. Giving consideration to these skills will help any data librarian with their multifaceted job.

URL : Skills for Data Librarianship

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2020.1183

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EN

The relationship between bioRxiv preprints, citations and altmetrics

Authors : Nicholas Fraser, Fakhri Momeni, Philipp Mayr, Isabella Peters

A potential motivation for scientists to deposit their scientific work as preprints is to enhance its citation or social impact. In this study we assessed the citation and altmetric advantage of bioRxiv, a preprint server for the biological sciences.

We retrieved metadata of all bioRxiv preprints deposited between November 2013 and December 2017, and matched them to articles that were subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals.

Citation data from Scopus and altmetric data from Altmetric.com were used to compare citation and online sharing behavior of bioRxiv preprints, their related journal articles, and nondeposited articles published in the same journals. We found that bioRxiv-deposited journal articles had sizably higher citation and altmetric counts compared to nondeposited articles.

Regression analysis reveals that this advantage is not explained by multiple explanatory variables related to the articles’ publication venues and authorship. Further research will be required to establish whether such an effect is causal in nature.

bioRxiv preprints themselves are being directly cited in journal articles, regardless of whether the preprint has subsequently been published in a journal. bioRxiv preprints are also shared widely on Twitter and in blogs, but remain relatively scarce in mainstream media and Wikipedia articles, in comparison to peer-reviewed journal articles.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00043