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Integration of a National E-Theses Online Service with Institutional Repositories

Authors : Vasily Bunakov, Frances Madden

We present an information resource prototype that was developed by the FREYA project for the integration of a national e-thesis service and institutional repositories supported by a large national laboratory.

The integration allows us to mutually enrich the metadata in the e-thesis service and institutional repositories with new entities and attributes, and can offer novel ways of reasoning over research outcomes that are supported by direct funding and funding-in-kind by large research facilities.

The integrated information resource can be presented as a labeled-property graph for its exploration with a declarative query language and visualizations. We emphasize the role of persistent identifiers (PIDs), including for entities that are currently not necessarily or not consistently assigned PIDs.

URL : Integration of a National E-Theses Online Service with Institutional Repositories

Alternative location : https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/8/2/20/htm

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EN

Toward a Critical Approach for OER: A Case Study in Removing the ‘Big Five’ from OER Creation

Authors : Kris Joseph, Julia Guy, Michael B McNally

This paper examines the role of proprietary software in the production of open educational resources (OER). Using a single case study, the paper explores the implications of removing proprietary software from an OER project, with the aim of examining how complicated such a process is and whether removing such software meaningfully advances a critical approach to OER.

The analysis reveals that software from the Big Five technology companies (Apple, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft) are deeply embedded in OER production and distribution, and that complete elimination of software or services from these companies is not feasible.

The paper concludes by positing that simply rejecting Big Five technology introduces too many challenges to be justified on a pragmatic basis; however, it encourages OER creators to remain critical in their use of technology and continue to try to advance a critical approach to OER.

URL : Toward a Critical Approach for OER: A Case Study in Removing the ‘Big Five’ from OER Creation

Alternative location : https://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/view/1020

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EN

Collaborating for public access to scholarly publications: A case study of the partnership between the US Department of Energy and CHORUS

Authors : H. Frederick Dylla, Jeffrey Salmon

Key points

  • The success of the CHORUS and DOE relationship is the result of nearly two decades of interactions between the DOE and a group of scientific publishers.
  • The relationship between CHORUS and the US federal agencies required understanding of different motivations, operations, and philosophies.
  • Although achieving public access was simple in principle, it required considerable effort to develop systems that satisfied all parties.
  • Publishers had been working with federal agencies to achieve open access before the 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, but this helped to create a path for a more fruitful relationship.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1298

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EN

Access to Scientific Literature by the Conservation Community

Authors : Daisy Larios, Thomas M. Brooks, Nicholas B.W. Macfarlane, Sugoto Roy

Access to the scientific literature is perceived to be a challenge to the biodiversity conservation community, but actual level of literature access relative to needs has never been assessed globally.

We examined this question by surveying the constituency of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as a proxy for the conservation community, generating 2,285 responses. Of these respondents, ∼97% need to use the scientific literature in order to support their IUCN-related conservation work, with ∼50% needing to do so at least once per week.

The crux of the survey revolved around the question, “How easy is it for you currently to obtain the scientific literature you need to carry out your IUCN-related work?” and revealed that roughly half (49%) of the respondents find it not easy or not at all easy to access scientific literature.

We fitted a binary logistic regression model to explore factors predicting ease of literature access. Whether the respondent had institutional literature access (55% do) is the strongest predictor, with region (Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and gender (male) also significant predictors.

Approximately 60% of respondents from Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have institutional access compared to ∼50% in Asia and Latin America, and ∼40% in Eastern Europe and in Africa. Nevertheless, accessing free online material is a popular means of accessing literature for both those with and without institutional access.

The four journals most frequently mentioned when asked which journal access would deliver the greatest improvements to the respondent’s IUCN-related work were Conservation Biology, Biological Conservation, Nature, and Science.

The majority prefer to read journal articles on screen but prefer to read books in hard copy. Overall, it is apparent that access to the literature is a challenge facing roughly half of the conservation community worldwide.

URL : Access to Scientific Literature by the Conservation Community

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.30.010058

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EN

Lessons From the Open Library of Humanities

Authors : Martin Paul Eve, Paula Clemente Vega, Caroline Edwards

The Open Library of Humanities was launched almost half a decade ago with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In this article, we outline the problems we set out to address and the lessons we learned.

Specifically, we note that, as we hypothesized, academic libraries are not necessarily classical economic actors; that implementing consortial funding models requires much marketing labour; that there are substantial governance and administrative overheads in our model; that there are complex tax and VAT considerations for consortial arrangements; and that diverse revenue sources remain critical to our success.

URL : Lessons From the Open Library of Humanities

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10327

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EN

Comfortably Numb? Researchers’ Satisfaction with the Publication System and a Proposal for Radical Change

Authors : Hans van Dijk, Marino van Zelst

In this preregistered study we evaluate current attitudes towards, and experiences with, publishing research and propose an alternative system of publishing. Our main hypothesis is that researchers tend to become institutionalized, such that they are generally discontent with the current publication system, but that this dissatisfaction fades over time as they become tenured.

A survey was distributed to the first authors of papers published in four recent issues of top-15 Work and Organizational Psychology (WOP) journals. Even among this positively biased sample, we found that the time it takes to publish a manuscript is negatively associated with whether authors perceive this time to be justifiable and worthwhile relative to the amount their manuscript has changed. Review quality and tenure buffer the negative relationship with perceived justifiability, but not for perceived worth.

The findings suggest that untenured (WOP) researchers are dissatisfied with the publishing times of academic journals, which adds to the pile of criticisms of the journal-based publication system. Since publishing times are inherent to the journal-based publication system, we suggest that incremental improvements may not sufficiently address the problems associated with publishing times.

We therefore propose the adoption of a modular publication system to improve (WOP) publishing experiences.

URL : Comfortably Numb? Researchers’ Satisfaction with the Publication System and a Proposal for Radical Change

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8010014

Catégories
EN

Who reviews for predatory journals? A study on reviewer characteristics

Authors : Anna Severin, Michaela Strinzel, Matthias Egger, Marc Domingo, Tiago Barros

Background

While the characteristics of scholars who publish in predatory journals are relatively well-understood, nothing is known about the scholars who review for these journals.

We aimed to answer the following questions: Can we observe patterns of reviewer characteristics for scholars who review for predatory journals and for legitimate journals? Second, how are reviews for potentially predatory journals distributed globally?

Methods

We matched random samples of 1,000 predatory journals and 1,000 legitimate journals of the Cabells Scholarly Analytics’ journal lists with the Publons database of review reports, using the Jaro-Winkler string metric.

For reviewers of matched reviews, we descriptively analysed meta-data on reviewing and publishing behaviour.

Results

We matched 183,743 unique Publons reviews that were claimed by 19,598 reviewers. 6,077 reviews were conducted for 1160 unique predatory journals (3.31% of all reviews). 177,666 were claimed for 6,403 legitimate journals (96.69% of all reviews).

The vast majority of scholars either never or only occasionally submitted reviews for predatory journals to Publons (89.96% and 7.55% of all reviewers, respectively). Smaller numbers of scholars claimed reviews predominantly or exclusively for predatory journals (0.26% and 0.35% of all reviewers, respectively).

The two latter groups of scholars are of younger academic age and have fewer publications and fewer reviews than the first two groups of scholars.Developing regions feature larger shares of reviews for predatory reviews than developed regions.

Conclusion

The characteristics of scholars who review for potentially predatory journals resemble those of authors who publish their work in these outlets. In order to combat potentially predatory journals, stakeholders will need to adopt a holistic approach that takes into account the entire research workflow.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.09.983155