Towards Open Data for the Citation Content Analysis

Authors : Jose Manuel Barrueco, Thomas Krichel, Sergey Parinov, Victor Lyapunov, Oxana Medvedeva, Varvara Sergeeva

The paper presents first results of the CitEcCyr project funded by RANEPA. The project aims to create a source of open citation data for research papers written in Russian.

Compared to existing sources of citation data, CitEcCyr is working to provide the following added values: a) a transparent and distributed architecture of a technology that generates the citation data; b) an openness of all built/used software and created citation data; c) an extended set of citation data sufficient for the citation content analysis; d) services for public control over a quality of the citation data and a citing activity of researchers.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.00302

Bounded Rationality in Scholarly Knowledge Discovery

Authors : Kristina Lerman, Nathan Hodas, Hao Wu

In an information-rich world, people’s time and attention must be divided among rapidly changing information sources and the diverse tasks demanded of them. How people decide which of the many sources, such as scientific articles or patents, to read and use in their own work affects dissemination of scholarly knowledge and adoption of innovation.

We analyze the choices people make about what information to propagate on the citation networks of Physical Review journals, US patents and legal opinions. We observe regularities in behavior consistent with human bounded rationality: rather than evaluate all available choices, people rely on simply cognitive heuristics to decide what information to attend to.

We demonstrate that these heuristics bias choices, so that people preferentially propagate information that is easier to discover, often because it is newer or more popular. However, we do not find evidence that popular sources help to amplify the spread of information beyond making it more salient.

Our paper provides novel evidence of the critical role that bounded rationality plays in the decisions to allocate attention in social communication.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.00269

How to responsibly acknowledge research work in the era of big data and biobanks: ethical aspects of the Bioresource Research Impact Factor (BRIF)

Authors : Heidi Carmen Howard, Deborah Mascalzoni, Laurence Mabile, Gry Houeland, Emmanuelle Rial-Sebbag, Anne Cambon-Thomsen

Currently, a great deal of biomedical research in fields such as epidemiology, clinical trials and genetics is reliant on vast amounts of biological and phenotypic information collected and assembled in biobanks.

While many resources are being invested to ensure that comprehensive and well-organised biobanks are able to provide increased access to, and sharing of biomedical samples and information, many barriers and challenges remain to such responsible and extensive sharing.

Germane to the discussion herein is the barrier to collecting and sharing bioresources related to the lack of proper recognition of researchers and clinicians who developed the bioresource. Indeed, the efforts and resources invested to set up and sustain a bioresource can be enormous and such work should be easily traced and properly recognised.

However, there is currently no such system that systematically and accurately traces and attributes recognition to those doing this work or the bioresource institution itself. As a beginning of a solution to the “recognition problem”, the Bioresource Research Impact Factor/Framework (BRIF) initiative was proposed almost a decade and a half ago and is currently under further development.

With the ultimate aim of increasing awareness and understanding of the BRIF, in this article, we contribute the following: (1) a review of the objectives and functions of the BRIF including the description of two tools that will help in the deployment of the BRIF, the CoBRA (Citation of BioResources in journal Articles) guideline, and the Open Journal of Bioresources (OJB); (2) the results of a small empirical study on stakeholder awareness of the BRIF and (3) a brief analysis of the ethical dimensions of the BRIF which allow it to be a positive contribution to responsible biobanking.

URL : How to responsibly acknowledge research work in the era of big data and biobanks: ethical aspects of the Bioresource Research Impact Factor (BRIF)

Alternative locaton : https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12687-017-0332-6

Altmetrics and Archives

Author : Elizabeth Joan Kelly

Altmetrics are an alternative to traditional measurement of the impact of published resources. While altmetrics are primarily used by researchers and institutions to measure the impact of scholarly publications online, they can also be used by archives to measure the impact of their diverse online holdings, including digitized and born-digital collections, digital exhibits, repository websites, and online finding aids.

Furthermore, altmetrics may fill a need for user engagement assessments for cultural heritage organizations. This article introduces the concept of altmetrics for archives and discusses barriers to adoption, best practices for collection, and potential further areas of study.

URL : http://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol4/iss1/1/

Open Access Scholarly Journal Publishing in Chinese

Author : Cenyu Shen

The research literature on open access (OA) publishing has mainly dealt with journals publishing in English, and studies focusing on OA journals in other languages are less common. This article addresses this gap via a case study focusing on Chinese-language OA journals.

It starts with the identification of the major characteristics of this market, followed by eight semi-structured interviews to explore the key motivations behind Chinese-language OA publishing and perceived barriers. The majority of Chinese OA journals are published in Chinese, and most of them are published by universities and scholarly societies.

Nearly 80% of journals were launched before the digital age and were converted to OA later. The subject distribution is highly skewed towards the science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM) fields. Publishers are motivated to convert journals to OA by an expected increase in academic impact, which would also attract more submissions.

The lack of a sufficient number of high-quality submissions is perceived as the largest barrier to the successful publishing of journals. The financial instability of journals is identified as the main obstacle hindering internationalisation.

The central conclusions of the study are that Chinese-language OA journals need to increase their visibility in journal indexes such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and that an OA publishing platform (similar to the Latin American SciELO) should be established for Chinese-language OA journals.

URL : Open Access Scholarly Journal Publishing in Chinese

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/publications5040022

Growth of hybrid open access, 2009–2016

Author : Bo-Christer Björk

Hybrid Open Access is an intermediate form of OA, where authors pay scholarly publishers to make articles freely accessible within journals, in which reading the content otherwise requires a subscription or pay-per-view.

Major scholarly publishers have in recent years started providing the hybrid option for the vast majority of their journals. Since the uptake usually has been low per journal and scattered over thousands of journals, it has been very difficult to obtain an overview of how common hybrid articles are.

This study, using the results of earlier studies as well as a variety of methods, measures the evolution of hybrid OA over time. The number of journals offering the hybrid option has increased from around 2,000 in 2009 to almost 10,000 in 2016.

The number of individual articles has in the same period grown from an estimated 8,000 in 2009 to 45,000 in 2016. The growth in article numbers has clearly increased since 2014, after some major research funders in Europe started to introduce new centralized payment schemes for the article processing charges (APCs).

URL : Growth of hybrid open access, 2009–2016

Alternative location : https://peerj.com/articles/3878/

How Korean Language Arts Teachers Adopt and Adapt Open Educational Resources: A Study of Teachers’ and Students’ Perspectives

Author : SuBeom Kwak

Since 2005, open educational resources (OER) have played a key role in K-12 education in South Korea; so far, however, there has been little discussion about OER efficacy in South Korean K-12 education.

In the meantime, South Korean education has been attracting a lot of interest around the world. Former U.S. President Obama’s comments about South Korean education might also be caused by South Korean students’ academic performance evaluated by international large-scale assessments such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).

This article uses an ethnographic perspective to explore the experiences of teachers and students in the Korean context. The analysis of the findings shows how teachers adopt and adapt OER for their 12th grade (the final year of secondary school) Korean language arts classes.

Through classroom observations, interviews, and questionnaires, this exploration revealed that nearly 92% of the students perceived OER as beneficial to their studies and that teachers were spurred on to orchestrate differentiated instructional plans by OER.

We argue that there is significant value to using OER in the formal educational curriculum, but that a lack of knowledge of how to adapt OER restricts how their potential is realized in practice. We identify implications for maximizing OER adaptation and successful usage of OER in K-12 education.

URL : How Korean Language Arts Teachers Adopt and Adapt Open Educational Resources: A Study of Teachers’ and Students’ Perspectives

Alternative location : http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/2977