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Higher Education as a Gift and as a Commons

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Author : Andreas Wittel

This paper takes as a starting point Lewis Hyde’s (2007, xvi) assertion that art is a gift and not a commodity: “Works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies’, a market economy and a gift economy.

Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without a market, but where there is no gift there is no art.” I want to argue that the same claim should be made for those aspects of academic labour that refer to teaching and education. Education can survive without a market, but where there is no gift there is no education.

However the gift that is part of all educational processes gets rather obscured in regimes where higher education is either a public good or a private good. In regimes of higher education as public good the gift gets obscured by the provision of a service by the state. In regimes of higher education as a private good (e.g. higher education in the UK) the gift gets even more obscured, obviously so.

It is only in a third educational regime, where education is a common good (e.g. the recent rise of the free universities), that the gift character of education can properly shine. Whilst this should be celebrated, the notion of a higher education commons poses some severe challenges.

The paper ends with an examination of possibilities of academic activists to rescue or even strengthen the gift-like character of education.

URL : Higher Education as a Gift and as a Commons

Alternative location : http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/892

The counting house: measuring those who count. Presence of Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, Informetrics, Webometrics and Altmetrics in the Google Scholar Citations, ResearcherID, ResearchGate, Mendeley & Twitter

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Authors : Alberto Martin-Martin, Enrique Orduna-Malea, Juan M. Ayllon, Emilio Delgado Lopez-Cozar

Following in the footsteps of the model of scientific communication, which has recently gone through a metamorphosis (from the Gutenberg galaxy to the Web galaxy), a change in the model and methods of scientific evaluation is also taking place.

A set of new scientific tools are now providing a variety of indicators which measure all actions and interactions among scientists in the digital space, making new aspects of scientific communication emerge.

In this work we present a method for capturing the structure of an entire scientific community (the Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, Informetrics, Webometrics, and Altmetrics community) and the main agents that are part of it (scientists, documents, and sources) through the lens of Google Scholar Citations.

Additionally, we compare these author portraits to the ones offered by other profile or social platforms currently used by academics (ResearcherID, ResearchGate, Mendeley, and Twitter), in order to test their degree of use, completeness, reliability, and the validity of the information they provide.

A sample of 814 authors (researchers in Bibliometrics with a public profile created in Google Scholar Citations was subsequently searched in the other platforms, collecting the main indicators computed by each of them.

The data collection was carried out on September, 2015. The Spearman correlation was applied to these indicators (a total of 31) , and a Principal Component Analysis was carried out in order to reveal the relationships among metrics and platforms as well as the possible existence of metric cluster.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02412

Science Metadata Management, Interoperability and Data Citations of the National Institute of Polar Research, Japan

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Authors : M. Kanao, M. Okada, J. Friddel, A. Kadokura

The Polar Data Centre (PDC) of the National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR) has a responsibility to manage polar science data as part of the National Antarctic Data Centre and the Science Committee on Antarctic Research. During the International Polar Year (IPY 2007–2008), a remarkable number of data/metadata involving multi-disciplinary science activities were compiled.

Although the long-term stewardship of the accumulation of metadata falls to the data center of NIPR, the work has been in collaboration with the Global Change Master Directory, the Polar Information Commons, the World Data System and other data science bodies/communities under the International Council for Science.

In addition, links with other data centers, such as the Data Integration and Analysis System Program of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems and the Polar Data Catalogue of Canada were initiated in 2014 using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. The metadata compiled by the PDC were recently modified using an automatic attributing system and DataCite through the Japan Link Center.

URL : Science Metadata Management, Interoperability and Data Citations of the National Institute of Polar Research, Japan

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2018-001

Recommendations to Improve Downloads of Large Earth Observation Data

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Authors : Rahul Ramachandran, Christopher Lynnes, Kathleen Baynes, Kevin Murphy, Jamie Baker, Jamie Kinney, Ariel Gold, Jed Sundwall, Mark Korver, Allison Lieber, William Vambenepe, Matthew Hancher,  Rebecca Moore, Tyler Erickson, Josh Henretig,
Brant Zwiefel, Heather Patrick-Ahlstrom, Matthew J. Smith

With the volume of Earth observation data expanding rapidly, cloud computing is quickly changing the way these data are processed, analyzed, and visualized. Collocating freely available Earth observation data on a cloud computing infrastructure may create opportunities unforeseen by the original data provider for innovation and value-added data re-use, but existing systems at data centers are not designed for supporting requests for large data transfers.

A lack of common methodology necessitates that each data center handle such requests from different cloud vendors differently. Guidelines are needed to support enabling all cloud vendors to utilize a common methodology for bulk-downloading data from data centers, thus preventing the providers from building custom capabilities to meet the needs of individual vendors.

This paper presents recommendations distilled from use cases provided by three cloud vendors (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) and are based on the vendors’ interactions with data systems at different Federal agencies and organizations.

These specific recommendations range from obvious steps for improving data usability (such as ensuring the use of standard data formats and commonly supported projections) to non-obvious undertakings important for enabling bulk data downloads at scale.

These recommendations can be used to evaluate and improve existing data systems for high-volume data transfers, and their adoption can lead to cloud vendors utilizing a common methodology.

URL : Recommendations to Improve Downloads of Large Earth Observation Data

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2018-002

 

Open access availability of scientific publications

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Author : Science-Metrix Inc.

This report details population-level measurements of the open access (OA) availability of publications indexed in two bibliometric databases—the Web of Science (WoS) by Clarivate Analytics and Scopus by Elsevier. This was achieved by matching the bibliometric database populations to the 1science database to determine the availability of the papers in OA form.

A comparative analysis of the recall and precision levels of the 1science database was performed using Scopus and the WoS. This helped to characterize the 1science database. Two policy-relevant indicators were selected for in-depth analyses: country affiliation of authors on publications, and scientific disciplines. These indicators were selected because they are very frequently used in bibliometric studies, including those performed by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and they appear in the NSF’s Science and Engineering Indicators.

URL : http://www.science-metrix.com/sites/default/files/science-metrix/publications/science-metrix_open_access_availability_scientific_publications_report.pdf

Open access policies of high impact medical journals: a cross-sectional study

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Authors : Tim Ellison, Tim Koder, Laura Schmidt, Amy Williams, Christopher Winchester

Introduction

Journal publishers increasingly offer governmental and charitable research funders the option to pay for open access with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, which allows sharing and adaptation of published materials for commercial as well as non-commercial use.

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association recommends this licence as the least restrictive Creative Commons licence available. We set out to investigate whether pharmaceutical companies are offered the same options.

Methods

Using Journal Selector (Sylogent, Newtown, PA, USA), we identified journals with a 2015 impact factor of at least 15 on 24 May 2017, and excluded journals that only publish review articles from the analysis.

Between 29 June 2017 and 26 July 2017, we collected information about the journals’ open access policies from their websites and/or by email contact. We contacted the journals by email again between 6 December 2017 and 2 January 2018 to confirm our findings.

Results

Thirty-seven non-review journals listed in the Journal Selector database, from 14 publishers, had a 2015 impact factor of at least 15. All 37 journals offered some form of access with varying embargo periods of up to 12 months.

Of these journals, 23 (62%) offered immediate open access with a CC BY licence under certain circumstances (e.g. to specific research funders). Of these 23, only one journal confirmed that it offered a CC BY licence to commercial funders/pharmaceutical companies.

Conclusion

The open access policies of most medical journals with high impact factors restrict the dissemination of medical research funded by the pharmaceutical industry.

To give the scientific community freedom to read, reuse and adapt medical publications, publishers and academic journal editors would ideally allow pharmaceutical companies to fund unrestricted and immediate open access with a CC BY licence.

URL : Open access policies of high impact medical journals: a cross-sectional study

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/250613

Open scientific journals: Emerging practices and approaches

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Authors : Andre Luiz Appel, Sarita Albagli, Maria Lucia Maciel

This study aims to show how the concept of openness has been manifested and amplified in the universe of open access scholarly journals, pointing out emerging characteristics and practices linked to processes of submission, evaluation, revision, editing, publishing, editing, distribution, access and use of texts for publication.

We proceeded to an overview and discussion of the pertinent literature and the identification and analysis of open access journals which have addressed the issue, and to the identification and analysis of cases of open access journals which have been adopting innovative practices, based on information on editorial policies available on their websites.

Among the results, we have pointed out aspects of the publications examined, such as the types of licenses used, policies regarding access to research data, publishing formats, charges and alternative metrics of evaluation.

URL : Open scientific journals: Emerging practices and approaches

Alternative location : https://content.iospress.com/articles/information-services-and-use/isu862