Catégorie : EN

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EN

Academic Social Networks and Open Access: French Researchers at the Crossroads

Researchers benefit from an increasing array of tools to enhance direct communication and the dissemination of their research findings. These include Open Access repositories, Open Access journals, or hybrid publishing. For some years, researchers have been using new ways to communicate and share their work by using academic social networks.

In an attempt to foster the development of Open Access in France, the French consortium COUPERIN (Unified Consortium of Higher Education and Research Organizations for Access to Numerical Publications) proposed that academic social networks could be used to convince researchers of becoming more involved in Open Access.

To test this hypothesis, a nationwide survey was launched in 2014 to explore whether and how these academic social networks are used to share content, but also how they compare to other Open Access classic tools. Within a month (20 May to 20 June), 1,898 researchers answered this 28-question survey. It was fully completed by 1,698 of them. This provides COUPERIN with considerable data for analysis. The respondents roughly reflect the composition of the French academic community in terms of gender and research fields, with a slight overrepresentation of young researchers/ PhD candidates.

This survey does not, however, cover the in-depth opinions of researchers on Open Access and academic social networks. It therefore only presents general tendencies. Nonetheless, the survey gives many indications as to how researchers apply Open Access. In addition, it shows how they feel about the usefulness of these networks compared to repositories when efficiently disseminating their work. This survey also takes the differences between disciplines into account and characterizes behaviour and opinions according to the different disciplinary communities and their research practices.

Finally, this survey allows us to define the main characteristics of a tool which could meet French researchers’ needs for scientific communication. The components of such an ideal tool dedicated to Open Science could include efficient repositories to easily disseminate work and improve visibility, a sharing network and the scientific stamp of peer-review.

URL : https://www.liberquarterly.eu/articles/10.18352/lq.10131/

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EN

Bibliometric and benchmark analysis of gold open access in Spain: big output and little impact

This bibliometric study analyzes the research output produced by Spain during the 2005-2014 time period in Open Access (OA) journals indexed in Web of Science. The aim of the paper is to determine if papers published in Open Access journals contribute to the improvement of citation impact and collaboration indicators in Spanish research.

The results are shown by scientific areas and compared with 17 European countries. Spain is the second highest ranking European country with gold OA publication output and the fourth highest in Open Access output (9%). In Spain OA output is especially high in the fields of Arts and Humanities (28%). Spain’s normalized citation impact in Open access (0.72) is lower than the world average and that of the main European countries. Finally, we discuss how these results differ from the so-called Open Access citation advantage.

URL :     http://www.elprofesionaldelainformacion.com/contenidos/2016/ene/03.html

Catégories
EN

Tweets Do Measure Non – Citational Intellectual Impact

Purpose

The aim of the paper is to identify the motive behind the social media indicators in focus to tweets and attempts to identify what is measured or indicated by tweets, based on these motives.

Design/methodology/approach

Documents with non zero tweets were manually collected from a source of 5 journals – Nature Biotechnology, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Physics, Nature Chemistry and Nature Communications for the period January 2014 – October 2014 so as to depict the contemporary trend, as tweets tends to have L shaped curve in time-wise distribution.

Findings

Investigations suggest that the motives behind the tweets are research reach, research acceptance and research usage. Further analysis revealed that the motive behind self – tweets are research visibility, which is one of the attributes of social media and therefore self tweets may not be a complex problem as expected seeing that documents are self tweeted not more than once in most cases.

Furthermore, identifying and classifying tweets based on users – Publishers, Frequent tweeters who apparently tweet all documents of an issue and Authors will increase the effectiveness of altmetrics in research evaluation. It was also found that association between subjects can be identified by the analysis of tweets pattern among subjects.

Originality/value

Study proposes an overall hierarchical structure of impact based on the change/advancement instigated. The study confirms that tweets do measure non – academic intellectual impact that is not captured by traditional metrics.

URL : http://www.itlit.net/v2n2art2.pdf

Catégories
EN

Open Data in Global Environmental Research: The Belmont Forum’s Open Data Survey

This paper presents the findings of the Belmont Forum’s survey on Open Data which targeted the global environmental research and data infrastructure community. It highlights users’ perceptions of the term “open data”, expectations of infrastructure functionalities, and barriers and enablers for the sharing of data. A wide range of good practice examples was pointed out by the respondents which demonstrates a substantial uptake of data sharing through e-infrastructures and a further need for enhancement and consolidation. Among all policy responses, funder policies seem to be the most important motivator. This supports the conclusion that stronger mandates will strengthen the case for data sharing.

URL : Open Data in Global Environmental Research: The Belmont Forum’s Open Data Survey

DOI :10.1371/journal.pone.0146695

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EN

Wikiometrics: A Wikipedia Based Ranking System

We present a new concept – Wikiometrics – the derivation of metrics and indicators from Wikipedia. Wikipedia provides an accurate representation of the real world due to its size, structure, editing policy and popularity. We demonstrate an innovative mining methodology, where different elements of Wikipedia – content, structure, editorial actions and reader reviews – are used to rank items in a manner which is by no means inferior to rankings produced by experts or other methods. We test our proposed method by applying it to two real-world ranking problems: top world universities and academic journals. Our proposed ranking methods were compared to leading and widely accepted benchmarks, and were found to be extremely correlative but with the advantage of the data being publically available.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.01058

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EN

Reproducible Research Practices and Transparency across the Biomedical Literature

There is a growing movement to encourage reproducibility and transparency practices in the scientific community, including public access to raw data and protocols, the conduct of replication studies, systematic integration of evidence in systematic reviews, and the documentation of funding and potential conflicts of interest.

In this survey, we assessed the current status of reproducibility and transparency addressing these indicators in a random sample of 441 biomedical journal articles published in 2000–2014. Only one study provided a full protocol and none made all raw data directly available. Replication studies were rare (n = 4), and only 16 studies had their data included in a subsequent systematic review or meta-analysis. The majority of studies did not mention anything about funding or conflicts of interest.

The percentage of articles with no statement of conflict decreased substantially between 2000 and 2014 (94.4% in 2000 to 34.6% in 2014); the percentage of articles reporting statements of conflicts (0% in 2000, 15.4% in 2014) or no conflicts (5.6% in 2000, 50.0% in 2014) increased.

Articles published in journals in the clinical medicine category versus other fields were almost twice as likely to not include any information on funding and to have private funding. This study provides baseline data to compare future progress in improving these indicators in the scientific literature.

URL : Reproducible Research Practices and Transparency across the Biomedical Literature

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002333

Catégories
EN

The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline

Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause.

This paper presents data that show that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia’s primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes of decreased newcomer retention.

Further, the community’s formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by newer editors.

URL : https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/The_Rise_and_Decline/halfaker13rise-preprint.pdf