Altmetrics of “altmetrics” using Google Scholar, Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook, Google-plus, CiteULike, Blogs and Wiki

We measure the impact of “altmetrics” field by deploying altmetrics indicators using the data from Google Scholar, Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook, Google-plus, CiteULike, Blogs and Wiki during 2010- 2014.

To capture the social impact of scientific publications, we propose an index called alt-index, analogues to h-index. Across the deployed indices, our results have shown high correlation among the indicators that capture social impact.

While we observe medium Pearson’s correlation (\r{ho}= .247) among the alt-index and h-index, a relatively high correlation is observed between social citations and scholarly citations (\r{ho}= .646). Interestingly, we find high turnover of social citations in the field compared with the traditional scholarly citations, i.e. social citations are 42.2 % more than traditional citations.

The social mediums such as Twitter and Mendeley appear to be the most effective channels of social impact followed by Facebook and Google-plus. Overall, altmetrics appears to be working well in the field of “altmetrics”.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.07992

Towards a (De)centralization-Based Typology of Peer Production

Online peer-production platforms facilitate the coordination of creative work and services. Generally considered as empowering participatory tools and a source of common good, they can also be, however, alienating instruments of digital labour.

This paper proposes a typology of peer-production platforms, based on the centralization/decentralization levels of several of their design features. Between commons-based peer-production and crowdsourced, user-generated content “enclosed” by corporations, a wide range of models combine different social, political, technical and economic arrangements.

This combined analysis of the level of (de)centralization of platform features provides information on emancipation capabilities in a more granular way than a market-based qualification of platforms, based on the nature of ownership or business models only.

The five selected features of the proposed typology are: ownership of means of production, technical architecture/design, social organization/governance of work patterns, ownership of the peer-produced resource, and value of the output.

URL : Towards a (De)centralization-Based Typology of Peer Production

Alternative location : http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/728

Data publication with the structural biology data grid supports live analysis

Access to experimental X-ray diffraction image data is fundamental for validation and reproduction of macromolecular models and indispensable for development of structural biology processing methods. Here, we established a diffraction data publication and dissemination system, Structural Biology Data Grid (SBDG; data.sbgrid.org), to preserve primary experimental data sets that support scientific publications.

Data sets are accessible to researchers through a community driven data grid, which facilitates global data access. Our analysis of a pilot collection of crystallographic data sets demonstrates that the information archived by SBDG is sufficient to reprocess data to statistics that meet or exceed the quality of the original published structures.

SBDG has extended its services to the entire community and is used to develop support for other types of biomedical data sets. It is anticipated that access to the experimental data sets will enhance the paradigm shift in the community towards a much more dynamic body of continuously improving data analysis.

URL : Data publication with the structural biology data grid supports live analysis

DOI : 10.1038/ncomms10882

Open Access, Open Science, Open Society

Open Access’ main goal is not the subversion of publishers’ role as driving actors in an oligopolistic market characterised by reduced competition and higher prices. OA’s main function is to be found somewhere else, namely in the ability to subvert the power to control science’s governance and its future directions (Open Science), a power that is more often found within the academic institutions rather than outside.

By decentralising and opening-up not just the way in which scholarship is published but also the way in which it is assessed, OA removes the barriers that helped turn science into an intellectual oligopoly even before an economic one. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that Open Access is a key enabler of Open Science, which in turn will lead to a more Open Society.

Furthermore, the paper argues that while legislative interventions play an important role in the top-down regulation of Open Access, legislators currently lack an informed and systematic vision on the role of Open Access in science and society. In this historical phase, other complementary forms of intervention (bottom-up) appear much more “informed” and effective.

This paper, which intends to set the stage for future research, identifies a few pieces of the puzzle: the relationship between formal and informal norms in the field of Open Science and how these impact on intellectual property rights, the protection of personal data, the assessment of science and the technology employed for the communication of science.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2751741

Scientific Production on Open Access: A Worldwide Bibliometric Analysis in the Academic and Scientific Context

This research aims to diachronically analyze the worldwide scientific production on open access, in the academic and scientific context, in order to contribute to knowledge and visualization of its main actors.

As a method, bibliographical, descriptive and analytical research was used, with the contribution of bibliometric studies, especially the production indicators, scientific collaboration and indicators of thematic co-occurrence.

The Scopus database was used as a source to retrieve the articles on the subject, with a resulting corpus of 1179 articles. Using Bibexcel software, frequency tables were constructed for the variables, and Pajek software was used to visualize the collaboration network and VoSViewer for the construction of the keywords’ network.

As for the results, the most productive researchers come from countries such as the United States, Canada, France and Spain. Journals with higher impact in the academic community have disseminated the new constructed knowledge. A collaborative network with a few subnets where co-authors are from different countries has been observed.

As conclusions, this study allows identifying the themes of debates that mark the development of open access at the international level, and it is possible to state that open access is one of the new emerging and frontier fields of library and information science.

URL : Scientific Production on Open Access: A Worldwide Bibliometric Analysis in the Academic and Scientific Context

DOI : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/4/1/1

Wikidata as a semantic framework for the Gene Wiki initiative

Open biological data are distributed over many resources making them challenging to integrate, to update and to disseminate quickly. Wikidata is a growing, open community database which can serve this purpose and also provides tight integration with Wikipedia.

In order to improve the state of biological data, facilitate data management and dissemination, we imported all human and mouse genes, and all human and mouse proteins into Wikidata.

In total, 59 721 human genes and 73 355 mouse genes have been imported from NCBI and 27 306 human proteins and 16 728 mouse proteins have been imported from the Swissprot subset of UniProt. As Wikidata is open and can be edited by anybody, our corpus of imported data serves as the starting point for integration of further data by scientists, the Wikidata community and citizen scientists alike.

The first use case for these data is to populate Wikipedia Gene Wiki infoboxes directly from Wikidata with the data integrated above. This enables immediate updates of the Gene Wiki infoboxes as soon as the data in Wikidata are modified.

Although Gene Wiki pages are currently only on the English language version of Wikipedia, the multilingual nature of Wikidata allows for usage of the data we imported in all 280 different language Wikipedias.

Apart from the Gene Wiki infobox use case, a SPARQL endpoint and exporting functionality to several standard formats (e.g. JSON, XML) enable use of the data by scientists.

In summary, we created a fully open and extensible data resource for human and mouse molecular biology and biochemistry data. This resource enriches all the Wikipedias with structured information and serves as a new linking hub for the biological semantic web.

URL : Wikidata as a semantic framework for the Gene Wiki initiative

DOI : 10.1093/database/baw015