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The Scientific Prize Network Predicts Who Pushes the Boundaries of Science

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Authors : Yifang Ma, Brian Uzzi

Scientific prizes are among the greatest recognition a scientist receives from their peers and arguably shape the direction of a field by conferring credibility to persons, ideas, and disciplines, providing financial rewards, and promoting rituals that reinforce scientific communities.

The proliferation of prizes and links among prizes suggest that the prize network embodies information about scientists and ideas poised to grow in acclaim. Using comprehensive new data on prizes and prizewinners worldwide and across disciplines, we examine the growth dynamics and interlocking relationships found in the worldwide scientific prize network.

We focus on understanding how the knowledge linkages among prizes and scientists’ propensities for prizewinning are related to knowledge pathways across disciplines and stratification within disciplines.

We find several key links between prizes and scientific advances.

First, despite a proliferation of diverse prizes over time and across the globe, prizes are more concentrated within a relatively small group of scientific elites, and ties within the elites are more clustered, suggesting that a relatively constrained number of ideas and scholars lead science.

Second, we find that certain prizes are strongly interlocked within and between disciplines by scientists who win multiple prizes, revealing the key pathways by which knowledge systematically gains credit and spreads through the network.

Third, we find that genealogical and co authorship networks strongly predict who wins one or more prizes and explains the high level of interconnections among acclaimed scientists and their path breaking ideas.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09412

Identifiers for Digital Objects: the Case of Software Source Code Preservation

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Authors : Roberto Di Cosmo, Morane Gruenpeter, Stefano Zacchiroli

In the very broad scope addressed by digital preservation initiatives, a special place belongs to the scientific and technical artifacts that we need to properly archive to enable scientific reproducibility.

For these artifacts we need identifiers that are not only unique and persistent, but also support integrity in an intrinsic way. They must provide strong guarantees that the object denoted by a given identifier will always be the same, without relying on third parties and external administrative processes.

In this article, we report on our quest for this identifiers for digital objects (IDOs), whose properties are different from, and complementary to, those of the various digital identifiers of objects (DIOs) that are in widespread use today.

We argue that both kinds of identifiers are needed and present the framework for intrinsic persistent identifiers that we have adopted in Software Heritage for preserving billions of software artifacts.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01865790

Open Access Policy in the UK: From Neoliberalism to the Commons

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Author : Stuart Andrew Lawson

This thesis makes a contribution to the knowledge of open access through a historically  and theoretically informed account of contemporary open access policy in the UK (2010–15).

It critiques existing policy by revealing the influence of neoliberal ideology on its creation, and proposes a commons-based approach as an alternative. The historical context in Chapters 2 and 3 shows that access to knowledge has undergone numerous changes over the centuries and the current push to increase access to research, and political  controversies around this idea, are part of a long tradition.

The exploration of the origins and meanings of ‘openness’ in Chapter 4 enriches the understanding of open access as a concept and makes possible a more nuanced critique of specific instantiations of open access in later chapters.

The theoretical heart of the thesis is Chapter 5, in which neoliberalism is analysed with a particular focus on neoliberal conceptions of liberty and openness. The subsequent examination of neoliberal higher education in Chapter 6 is therefore informed by a thorough grounding in the ideology that underlies policymaking in the neoliberal era.

This understanding then acts as invaluable context for the analysis of the UK’s open access policy in Chapter 7. By highlighting the neoliberal aspects of open access policy, the political tensions within open access advocacy are shown to have real effects on the way that open access is unfolding.

Finally, Chapter 8 proposes the commons as a useful theoretical model for conceptualising a future scholarly publishing ecosystem that is free from neoliberal ideology. An argument is made that a commons-based open access policy is possible, though must be carefully constructed with close attention paid to the power relations that exist between different scholarly communities.

URL : Open Access Policy in the UK: From Neoliberalism to the Commons

Alternative location : http://stuartlawson.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/2018-09-03-Lawson-thesis.pdf

Liberation through Cooperation: How Library Publishing Can Save Scholarly Journals from Neoliberalism

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Author : Dave S. Ghamandi

This commentary examines political and economic aspects of open access (OA) and scholarly journal publishing. Through a discourse of critique, neoliberalism is analyzed as an ideology causing many problems in the scholarly journal publishing industry, including the serials crisis.

Two major efforts in the open access movement that promote an increase in OA funded by article-processing charges (APC)—the Open Access 2020 (OA2020) and Pay It Forward (PIF) initiatives—are critiqued as neoliberal frameworks that would perpetuate existing systems of domination and exploitation.

In a discourse of possibility, ways of building a post-neoliberal system of journal publishing using new tactics and strategies, merging theory and praxis, and grounding in solidarity and cooperation are presented.

This includes organizing journal publishing democratically using cooperatives, which could decommodify knowledge and provide greater open access.

The article concludes with a vision for a New Fair Deal, which would revolutionize the system of scholarly journal publishing by transitioning journals to library publishing cooperatives.

URL : Liberation through Cooperation: How Library Publishing Can Save Scholarly Journals from Neoliberalism

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2223

Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015

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Authors : Colin F. Camerer, Anna Dreber, Felix Holzmeister, Teck-Hua Ho, Jürgen Huber, Magnus Johannesson, Michael Kirchler, Gideon Nave, Brian Nosek, Thomas Pfeiffer, Adam Altmejd, Nick Buttrick, Taizan Chan, Yiling Chen, Eskil Forsell, Anup Gampa, Emma Heikensten, Lily Hummer, Taisuke Imai, Siri Isaksson, Dylan Manfredi, Julia Rose, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Hang Wu

Being able to replicate scientific findings is crucial for scientific progress. We replicate 21 systematically selected experimental studies in the social sciences published in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015.

The replications follow analysis plans reviewed by the original authors and pre-registered prior to the replications. The replications are high powered, with sample sizes on average about five times higher than in the original studies.

We find a significant effect in the same direction as the original study for 13 (62%) studies, and the effect size of the replications is on average about 50% of the original effect size. Replicability varies between 12 (57%) and 14 (67%) studies for complementary replicability indicators.

Consistent with these results, the estimated true positive rate is 67% in a Bayesian analysis. The relative effect size of true positives is estimated to be 71%, suggesting that both false positives and inflated effect sizes of true positives contribute to imperfect reproducibility.

Furthermore, we find that peer beliefs of replicability are strongly related to replicability, suggesting that the research community could predict which results would replicate and that failures to replicate were not the result of chance alone.

URL : Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0399-z

Reproducible data citations for computational research

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Author : Christian Schulz

The general purpose of a scientific publication is the exchange and spread of knowledge. A publication usually reports a scientific result and tries to convince the reader that it is valid.

With an ever-growing number of papers relying on computational methods that make use of large quantities of data and sophisticated statistical modeling techniques, a textual description of the result is often not enough for a publication to be transparent and reproducible.

While there are efforts to encourage sharing of code and data, we currently lack conventions for linking data sources to a computational result that is stated in the main publication text or used to generate a figure or table.

Thus, here I propose a data citation format that allows for an automatic reproduction of all computations. A data citation consists of a descriptor that refers to the functional program code and the input that generated the result.

The input itself may be a set of other data citations, such that all data transformations, from the original data sources to the final result, are transparently expressed by a directed graph.

Functions can be implemented in a variety of programming languages since data sources are expected to be stored in open and standardized text-based file formats.

A publication is then an online file repository consisting of a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) document and additional data and code source files, together with a summarization of all data sources, similar to a list of references in a bibliography.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.07541

The rent’s too high: Self-archive for fair online publication costs

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Authors : Robert T. Thibault, Amanda MacPherson, Stevan Harnad, Amir Raz

The main contributors of scientific knowledge, researchers, generally aim to disseminate their findings far and wide. And yet, publishing companies have largely kept these findings behind a paywall.

With digital publication technology markedly reducing cost, this enduring wall seems disproportionate and unjustified; moreover, it has sparked a topical exchange concerning how to modernize academic publishing.

This discussion, however, seems to focus on how to compensate major publishers for providing open access through a “pay to publish” model, in turn transferring financial burdens from libraries to authors and their funders.

Large publishing companies, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, PLoS, and Frontiers, continue to earn exorbitant revenues each year, hundreds of millions of dollars of which now come from processing charges for open-access articles.

A less expensive and equally accessible alternative exists: widespread self-archiving of peer-reviewed articles. All we need is awareness of this alternative and the will to employ it.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.06130