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Research Data Reusability: Conceptual Foundations, Barriers and Enabling Technologies

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Author : Costantino Thanos

High-throughput scientific instruments are generating massive amounts of data. Today, one of the main challenges faced by researchers is to make the best use of the world’s growing wealth of data. Data (re)usability is becoming a distinct characteristic of modern scientific practice.

By data (re)usability, we mean the ease of using data for legitimate scientific research by one or more communities of research (consumer communities) that is produced by other communities of research (producer communities).

Data (re)usability allows the reanalysis of evidence, reproduction and verification of results, minimizing duplication of effort, and building on the work of others. It has four main dimensions: policy, legal, economic and technological. The paper addresses the technological dimension of data reusability.

The conceptual foundations of data reuse as well as the barriers that hamper data reuse are presented and discussed. The data publication process is proposed as a bridge between the data author and user and the relevant technologies enabling this process are presented.

URL : Research Data Reusability: Conceptual Foundations, Barriers and Enabling Technologies

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/publications5010002

Open access articles receive more citations in hybrid marine ecology journals

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Author : Jeff C. Clements

The accumulation of evidence that open access publishing can increase citation rates highlights one benefit of universal accessibility to scholarly works. However, studies investigating the effect of open access publishing on citations are typically conducted across a wide variety of journals and disciplines, introducing a number of potential issues and limiting their utility for specific disciplines.

Here, I used three primary marine ecology journals with an open access option as a “microcosm” of scientific publishing to determine whether or not open access articles received more citations than non-open access articles during the same time frame, controlling for self-citations, article type, and journal impact factor.

I also tested for the effects of time since publication and the number of authors. Citations were positively correlated with time since publication and differed across the three journals. In addition, open access articles received significantly more citations than non-open access articles.

Self-citations increased with author number and were affected by a complex interaction between open access, journal, and time since publication. This study demonstrates that open access articles receive more citations in hybrid marine ecology journals, although the causal factors driving this trend are unknown.

URL : Open access articles receive more citations in hybrid marine ecology journals

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1139/facets-2016-0032

Elsevier: Among the World’s Largest Open Access Publishers as of 2016

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Author : Heather Morrison

Highlights of this broad-brush case study of Elsevier’s Open Access (OA) journals as of 2016: Elsevier offers 511 fully OA journals and 2,149 hybrids. Most fully OA journals do not charge article processing charges (APCs). APCs of fully OA journals average $660 US ($1,731 excluding no-fee journals); hybrid OA averages $2,500.

A practice termed author nominal copyright is observed, where copyright is in the name of the author although the author contract is essentially a copyright transfer. The prospects for a full Elsevier flip to OA via APC payments for articles going forward are considered and found to be problematic.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5260/chara.18.3.53

Decentralized provenance-aware publishing with nanopublications

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Authors : Tobias Kuhn, Christine Chichester, Michael Krauthammer, Núria Queralt-Rosinach, Ruben Verborgh, George Giannakopoulos, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Raffaele Viglianti, Michel Dumontier

Publication and archival of scientific results is still commonly considered the responsability of classical publishing companies. Classical forms of publishing, however, which center around printed narrative articles, no longer seem well-suited in the digital age.

In particular, there exist currently no efficient, reliable, and agreed-upon methods for publishing scientific datasets, which have become increasingly important for science. In this article, we propose to design scientific data publishing as a web-based bottom-up process, without top-down control of central authorities such as publishing companies.

Based on a novel combination of existing concepts and technologies, we present a server network to decentrally store and archive data in the form of nanopublications, an RDF-based format to represent scientific data.

We show how this approach allows researchers to publish, retrieve, verify, and recombine datasets of nanopublications in a reliable and trustworthy manner, and we argue that this architecture could be used as a low-level data publication layer to serve the Semantic Web in general.

Our evaluation of the current network shows that this system is efficient and reliable.

URL : Decentralized provenance-aware publishing with nanopublications

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.78

Managing Digital Rights in Open Access Works

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Authors : Benjamin J. Keele, Jere D. Odell

Librarians, researchers using scholarly works, and consumers using popular media generally think of digital rights management (DRM) as only a limitation on their access and use of digital resources. DRM and open access (OA) works would strike one as a very unlikely combination. In almost all cases, we would agree; however, we note two instances in which DRM and OA may be compatible.

The first case is DRM used to enable more accessible and durable rights information and proper attribution for a work. The second case is DRM that limits some uses as an appropriate part of a compromise to make works OA that would not otherwise be so.

This overlap between DRM and OA is narrow compared to the set ofnonOA works equipped with DRM, but understanding this overlap is useful for at least three reasons. First, librarians may use DRM to better manage rights in OA works; second, librarians may persuade a reluctant author or publisher to make a work OA with appropriate DRM; and, third, librarians may recognize when DRM negates access to an ostensibly OA work.

This chapter will review OA and discuss cases in which DRM can complement OA objectives. We organize these cases by two roles played by many academic librarians: collectors and publishers. By considering the relationship between DRM and OA, one may better recognize when DRM should be adopted or resisted in projects involving OA materials.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/1805/10918

Knowledge Sharing as a Social Dilemma in Pharmaceutical Innovation

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Author : Daria Kim

The article addresses the problem of restricted access to industry-sponsored clinical trial data. In particular, it analyses the intersection of the competing claims that mandatory disclosure of pharmaceutical test data impedes innovation incentives, and that access facilitates new drug development.

These claims are characterised in terms of public-good and common-resource dilemmas. The analysis finds that confidentiality protection of primary research data plays an ambiguous role.

While secrecy, as such, does not solve the public-good problem in pharmaceutical innovation (in the presence of regulatory instruments that protect the originator drug against generic competition), it is likely to exacerbate the common-resource problem, in view of data as a source of verified and new knowledge.

It is argued that the claim of the research-based industry that disclosure of clinical data impedes innovation incentives is misplaced and should not be leveraged against the pro-access policies. The analysis proposes that regulation should adhere to the principle that protection should be confined to competition by imitation.

This implies that the rules of access should be designed in such a way that third-party use of data does not interfere with protection against generic competition. At the same time, the long-term collective benefit can be maximised when the ‘cooperative choice’ – i.e. when everyone shares data – becomes the ‘dominant strategy’.

This can be achieved only when access is not subject to the authorisation of the initial trial sponsors, and when primary data is aggregated, refined and managed on the collective basis.

URL : https://ssrn.com/abstract=2834493