Catégorie : EN

Catégories
EN

Assessment of and Response to Data Needs of Clinical and Translational Science Researchers and Beyond

Objective and Setting

As universities and libraries grapple with data management and “big data,” the need for data management solutions across disciplines is particularly relevant in clinical and translational science (CTS) research, which is designed to traverse disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

At the University of Florida Health Science Center Library, a team of librarians undertook an assessment of the research data management needs of CTS researchers, including an online assessment and follow-up one-on-one interviews.

Design and Methods

The 20-question online assessment was distributed to all investigators affiliated with UF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and 59 investigators responded. Follow-up in-depth interviews were conducted with nine faculty and staff members.

Results

Results indicate that UF’s CTS researchers have diverse data management needs that are often specific to their discipline or current research project and span the data lifecycle. A common theme in responses was the need for consistent data management training, particularly for graduate students; this led to localized training within the Health Science Center and CTSI, as well as campus-wide training.

Another campus-wide outcome was the creation of an action-oriented Data Management/Curation Task Force, led by the libraries and with participation from Research Computing and the Office of Research.

Conclusions

Initiating conversations with affected stakeholders and campus leadership about best practices in data management and implications for institutional policy shows the library’s proactive leadership and furthers our goal to provide concrete guidance to our users in this area.

URL : Assessment of and Response to Data Needs of Clinical and Translational Science Researchers and Beyond

Alternative location : http://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol5/iss1/2/

Catégories
EN

Comparing Published Scientific Journal Articles to Their Pre-print Versions

Academic publishers claim that they add value to scholarly communications by coordinating reviews and contributing and enhancing text during publication.

These contributions come at a considerable cost: U.S. academic libraries paid $1.7 billion for serial subscriptions in 2008 alone. Library budgets, in contrast, are flat and not able to keep pace with serial price inflation.

We have investigated the publishers’ value proposition by conducting a comparative study of pre-print papers and their final published counterparts.

This comparison had two working assumptions: 1) if the publishers’ argument is valid, the text of a pre-print paper should vary measurably from its corresponding final published version, and 2) by applying standard similarity measures, we should be able to detect and quantify such differences.

Our analysis revealed that the text contents of the scientific papers generally changed very little from their pre-print to final published versions. These findings contribute empirical indicators to discussions of the added value of commercial publishers and therefore should influence libraries’ economic decisions regarding access to scholarly publications.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05363

Catégories
EN

The Library as Publishing House

The academic library has taken on the new role of institutional publishing house, using institutional repository (IR) services to enable journal publishing and manage conference planning. Librarians taking on this new role as publisher must know the journal publishing work flow, including online article submission, peer review, publishing, marketing, and assessment.

They must understand international identifiers such as the electronic International Standard Serial Number (eISSN) and Digital Object Identifier (DOI). To manage conference planning functions, librarians need to understand event functions such as presentation submission, program scheduling, registration and third-party payment systems, proceedings publishing, and archiving.

In general, they need to be technologically savvy enough to configure and manage a specialized content management system, the institutional repository.

URL : http://commons.erau.edu/publication/141/

Catégories
EN

A Journal is a Club: A New Economic Model for Scholarly Publishing

A new economic model for analysis of scholarly publishing—journal publishing in particular—is proposed that draws on club theory. The standard approach builds on market failure in the private production (by research scholars) of a public good (new scholarly knowledge).

In that model publishing is communication, as the dissemination of information. But a club model views publishing differently: namely as group formation, where members form groups in order to confer externalities on each other, subject to congestion.

A journal is a self-constituted group, endeavouring to create new knowledge. In this sense ‘a journal is a club’. The knowledge club model of a journal seeks to balance the positive externalities due to a shared resource (readers, citations, referees) against negative externalities due to crowding (decreased prospect of publishing in that journal).

A new economic model of a journal as a ‘knowledge club’ is elaborated. We suggest some consequences for the management of journals and financial models that might be developed to support them.

URL : http://ssrn.com/abstract=2763975

Catégories
EN

Open peer review : from an experiment to a model. A narrative of an open peer review experimentation

This article narrates the development of the experimentation of an open peer review and open commentary protocols. This experiment concerns propositions of articles for the environmental sciences journal VertigO, digital and open access scientific publication.

This experiment did not last long enough (4 months) and was not deployed on a large enough corpus (10 preprints) to lead to firm quantitative conclusions. However, it highlights practical leads and thoughts about the potentialities and the limitations of the open review processes – in the broadest sense – for scientific publishing.

Based on the exemplary of the experiment and a participant observation as a copy-editor devoted to open peer review, the article finally proposes a model from the experimented prototype.

This model, named OPRISM, could be implemented on other publishing contexts for social sciences and humanities. Central and much debated activity in the academic world, peer review refers to different practices such as control, validation, allocation and contradiction exercised by the scientific community for itself.

Its scope is wide: from the allocation for funding to the relevance of a recruitment. According to common sense, the control of the scientific community by itself is a guarantee of scientific quality.

This issue became even more important in an international context of competition between universities and between scholars themselves.

URL : Open peer review : from an experiment to a model

Alternative location : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01302597

Catégories
EN

Innovations in scholarly communication – global survey on research tool usage

Many new websites and online tools have come into existence to support scholarly communication in all phases of the research workflow. To what extent researchers are using these and more traditional tools has been largely unknown.

This 2015-2016 survey aimed to fill that gap. Its results may help decision making by stakeholders supporting researchers and may also help researchers wishing to reflect on their own online workflows. In addition, information on tools usage can inform studies of changing research workflows.

The online survey employed an open, non-probability sample. A largely self-selected group of 20663 researchers, librarians, editors, publishers and other groups involved in research took the survey, which was available in seven languages.

The survey was open from May 10, 2015 to February 10, 2016. It captured information on tool usage for 17 research activities, stance towards open access and open science, and expectations of the most important development in scholarly communication.

Respondents’ demographics included research roles, country of affiliation, research discipline and year of first publication.

URL : Innovations in scholarly communication – global survey on research tool usage

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.8414.1

Catégories
EN

Data Management Plan Requirements for Campus Grant Competitions: Opportunities for Research Data Services Assessment and Outreach

Objective

To examine the effects of research data services (RDS) on the quality of data management plans (DMPs) required for a campus-level faculty grant competition, as well as to explore opportunities that the local DMP requirement presented for RDS outreach.

Methods

Nine reviewers each scored a randomly assigned portion of DMPs from 82 competition proposals. Each DMP was scored by three reviewers, and the three scores were averaged together to obtain the final score. Interrater reliability was measured using intraclass correlation.

Unpaired t-tests were used to compare mean DMP scores for faculty who utilized RDS services with those who did not. Unpaired t-tests were also used to compare mean DMP scores for proposals that were funded with proposals that were not funded. One-way ANOVA was used to compare mean DMP scores among proposals from six broad disciplinary categories.

Results

Analyses showed that RDS consultations had a statistically significant effect on DMP scores. Differences between DMP scores for funded versus unfunded proposals and among disciplinary categories were not significant. The DMP requirement also provided a number of both expected and unexpected outreach opportunities for RDS services.

Conclusions

Requiring DMPs for campus grant competitions can provide important assessment and outreach opportunities for research data services.

While these results might not be generalizable to DMP review processes at federal funding agencies, they do suggest the importance, at any level, of developing a shared understanding of what constitutes a high quality DMP among grant applicants, grant reviewers, and RDS providers.

URL : Data Management Plan Requirements for Campus Grant Competitions

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2016.1089