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Data Management: New Tools, New Organization, and New Skills in a French Research Institute

Authors : Caroline Martin, Colette Cadiou, Emmanuelle Jannès-Ober

In the context of E-science and open access, visibility and impact of scientific results and data have become important aspects for spreading information to users and to the society in general.

The objective of this general trend of the economy is to feed the innovation process and create economic value. In our institute, the French National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture, Irstea, the department in charge of scientific and technical information, with the help of other professionals (Scientists, IT professionals, ethics advisors…), has recently developed suitable services for the researchers and for their needs concerning the data management in order to answer European recommendations for open data.

This situation has demanded to review the different workflows between databases, to question the organizational aspects between skills, occupations, and departments in the institute.

In fact, the data management involves all professionals and researchers to asset their working ways together.

URL : Data Management: New Tools, New Organization, and New Skills in a French Research Institute

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10196

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Making Visualization Work for Institutional Repositories: Information Visualization as a means to browse electronic theses and dissertations

Authors : Leila Belle Sterman, Susan Borda

INTRODUCTION

An attractive repository with clear, well-structured and accessible content can be a powerful recruitment and publicity tool for administrators, fundraisers, and others trying to bolster support for repositories.

Digitizing ETDs is a lengthy and often arduous process. Once that process is completed, it is often a victory that suffices. As a result, collections frequently receive no further treatment. We demonstrate the benefits of visualizing repository content.

DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT

The goal of the project was to create an interactive visualization to make our newly digitized theses and dissertations more discoverable.

By leveraging the institutional organization of College, Department and Year of Graduation, we visualized data to help users understand ETD content as a whole and find specific items more easily.

BUILDING THE VISUALIZATION

The process begins with data cleanup involving extracting and normalizing repository metadata, then the data is processed and the Data-Driven Documents (D3) JavaScript library is used to generate the actual visualization.

Benefits of Visualizations to Users: The visualization allows for the sort of happenstance discovery of materials that are celebrated about shelf browsing and a way to compare the productivity of each college and department at our university. It also illustrates our institution’s changes in emphasis over time.

NEXT STEPS

Visualizations have vast potential for creating engaging user interfaces for digital library content. We would like to explore how people are using the visualization as we move forward with this process to visualize multiple collections.

URL : Making Visualization Work for Institutional Repositories: Information Visualization as a means to browse electronic theses and dissertations

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2140

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On the origin of nonequivalent states: How we can talk about preprints

Authors : Cameron Neylon, Damian Pattinson, Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin

Increasingly, preprints are at the center of conversations across the research ecosystem. But disagreements remain about the role they play. Do they “count” for research assessment?

Is it ok to post preprints in more than one place? In this paper, we argue that these discussions often conflate two separate issues, the history of the manuscript and the status granted it by different communities.

In this paper, we propose a new model that distinguishes the characteristics of the object, its “state”, from the subjective “standing” granted to it by different communities.

This provides a way to discuss the difference in practices between communities, which will deliver more productive conversations and facilitate negotiation, as well as sharpening our focus on the role of different stakeholders on how to collectively improve the process of scholarly communications not only for preprints, but other forms of scholarly contributions.

URL : On the origin of nonequivalent states: How we can talk about preprints

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11408.1

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What is open peer review? A systematic review

Author : Tony Ross-Hellauer

Background

“Open peer review” (OPR), despite being a major pillar of Open Science, has neither a standardized definition nor an agreed schema of its features and implementations. The literature reflects this, with a myriad of overlapping and often contradictory definitions.

While the term is used by some to refer to peer review where the identities of both author and reviewer are disclosed to each other, for others it signifies systems where reviewer reports are published alongside articles.

For others it signifies both of these conditions, and for yet others it describes systems where not only “invited experts” are able to comment. For still others, it includes a variety of combinations of these and other novel methods.

Methods

Recognising the absence of a consensus view on what open peer review is, this article undertakes a systematic review of definitions of “open peer review” or “open review”, to create a corpus of 122 definitions.

These definitions are then systematically analysed to build a coherent typology of the many different innovations in peer review signified by the term, and hence provide the precise technical definition currently lacking.

Results

This quantifiable data yields rich information on the range and extent of differing definitions over time and by broad subject area. Quantifying definitions in this way allows us to accurately portray exactly how  ambiguously the phrase “open peer review”  has been used thus far, for the literature offers a total of 22 distinct configurations of seven traits, effectively meaning that there are 22 different definitions of OPR in the literature.

Conclusions

Based on this work, I propose a pragmatic definition of open peer review as an umbrella term for a number of overlapping ways that peer review models can be adapted in line with the ethos of Open Science, including making reviewer and author identities open, publishing review reports and enabling greater participation in the peer review process.

URL : What is open peer review? A systematic review

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.1

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A Multi-dimensional Investigation of the Effects of Publication Retraction on Scholarly Impact

Authors : Xin Shuai, Isabelle Moulinier, Jason Rollins, Tonya Custis, Frank Schilder, Mathilda Edmunds

Over the past few decades, the rate of publication retractions has increased dramatically in academia. In this study, we investigate retractions from a quantitative perspective, aiming to answer two fundamental questions.

One, how do retractions influence the scholarly impact of retracted papers, authors, and institutions? Two, does this influence propagate to the wider academic community through scholarly associations?

Specifically, we analyzed a set of retracted articles indexed in Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS), and ran multiple experiments to compare changes in scholarly impact against a control set of non-retracted articles, authors, and institutions.

We further applied the Granger Causality test to investigate whether different scientific topics are dynamically affected by retracted papers occurring within those topics.

Our results show two key findings: first, the scholarly impact of retracted papers and authors significantly decreases after retraction, and the most severe impact decrease correlates to retractions based on proven purposeful scientific misconduct; second, this retraction penalty does not seem to spread through the broader scholarly social graph, but instead has a limited and localized effect.

Our findings may provide useful insights for scholars or science committees to evaluate the scholarly value of papers, authors, or institutions related to retractions.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.09123

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A Century of Science: Globalization of Scientific Collaborations, Citations, and Innovations

Authors : Yuxiao Dong, Hao Ma, Zhihong Shen, Kuansan Wang

Progress in science has advanced the development of human society across history, with dramatic revolutions shaped by information theory, genetic cloning, and artificial intelligence, among the many scientific achievements produced in the 20th century. However, the way that science advances itself is much less well-understood.

In this work, we study the evolution of scientific development over the past century by presenting an anatomy of 89 million digitalized papers published between 1900 and 2015.

We find that science has benefited from the shift from individual work to collaborative effort, with over 90% of the world-leading innovations generated by collaborations in this century, nearly four times higher than they were in the 1900s.

We discover that rather than the frequent myopic- and self-referencing that was common in the early 20th century, modern scientists instead tend to look for literature further back and farther around.

Finally, we also observe the globalization of scientific development from 1900 to 2015, including 25-fold and 7-fold increases in international collaborations and citations, respectively, as well as a dramatic decline in the dominant accumulation of citations by the US, the UK, and Germany, from 95% to 50% over the same period.

Our discoveries are meant to serve as a starter for exploring the visionary ways in which science has developed throughout the past century, generating insight into and an impact upon the current scientific innovations and funding policies.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05150

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Should biomedical research be like Airbnb?

Authors : Vivien R. Bonazzi, Philip E. Bourne

The thesis presented here is that biomedical research is based on the trusted exchange of services. That exchange would be conducted more efficiently if the trusted software platforms to exchange those services, if they exist, were more integrated.

While simpler and narrower in scope than the services governing biomedical research, comparison to existing internet-based platforms, like Airbnb, can be informative.

We illustrate how the analogy to internet-based platforms works and does not work and introduce The Commons, under active development at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and elsewhere, as an example of the move towards platforms for research.

URL : Should biomedical research be like Airbnb?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2001818