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Globally Accessible Distributed Data Sharing (GADDS): a decentralized FAIR platform to facilitate data sharing in the life sciences

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Authors : Pavel Vazquez, Kayoko Hirayama-Shoji, Steffen Novik, Stefan Krauss, Simon Rayner

Motivation

Technical advances have revolutionized the life sciences and researchers commonly face challenges associated with handling large amounts of heterogeneous digital data. The Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) principles provide a framework to support effective data management.

However, implementing this framework is beyond the means of most researchers in terms of resources and expertise, requiring awareness of metadata, policies, community agreements, and other factors such as vocabularies and ontologies.

Results

We have developed the Globally Accessible Distributed Data Sharing (GADDS) platform to facilitate FAIR-like data-sharing in cross-disciplinary research collaborations. The platform consists of (i) a blockchain based metadata quality control system, (ii) a private cloud-like storage system and (iii) a version control system. GADDS is built with containerized technologies, providing minimal hardware standards and easing scalability, and offers decentralized trust via transparency of metadata, facilitating data exchange and collaboration.

As a use case, we provide an example implementation in engineered living material technology within the Hybrid Technology Hub at the University of Oslo.

URL : Globally Accessible Distributed Data Sharing (GADDS): a decentralized FAIR platform to facilitate data sharing in the life sciences

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btac362

Presence of women on the editorial boards of the language and linguistics journals in Spain

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Authors : Cristina Rodríguez-Faneca, Alexander Maz-Machado, David Gutiérrez-Rubio, Cristina Pedrosa-Jesús

Many international studies have pointed out the under-representation of women on Editorial Boards of both Science and Social Science journals. Their presence as Editorial Board members is relevant as they influence and reflect the policies of the journal itself.

This study analyses the participation of women on the Editorial Boards of the Spanish Language and Linguistics journals in SCOPUS. To this end, 54 journals indexed in SCOPUS were analysed, thus discriminating the gender of all members and the role that each member plays on the Editorial Board.

The results show no significant differences in the participation of men and women in these Editorial Boards. It was not found any evidence of gender bias in these journals.

URL : Presence of women on the editorial boards of the language and linguistics journals in Spain

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04412-8

Should open access lead to closed research? The trends towards paying to perform research

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Authors : Lin Zhang, Yahui Wei, Ying Huang, Gunnar Sivertsen

Open Access (OA) emerged as an important transition in scholarly publishing worldwide during the past two decades. So far, this transition is increasingly based on article processing charges (APC), which create a new paywall on the researchers’ side. Publishing is part of the research process and thereby necessary to perform research.

This study analyses the global trends towards paying to perform research by combing observed trends in publishing from 2015 to 2020 with an APC price list. APC expenses have sharply increased among six countries with different OA policies: the USA, China, the UK, France, the Netherlands, and Norway.

The estimated global revenues from APC among major publishers now exceed 2 billion US dollars annually. Mergers and takeovers show that the industry is moving towards APC-based OA as the more profitable business model.

Research publishing will be closed to those who cannot make an institution or project money payment. Our results lead to a discussion of whether APC is the best way to promote OA.

URL : Should open access lead to closed research? The trends towards paying to perform research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04407-5

Global Diversity in Higher Education Workforces: Towards Openness

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Authors : Katie Wilson, Cameron Neylon, Lucy Montgomery, Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang, Rebecca N. Handcock, Aniek Roelofs, Richard Hosking, Alkim Ozaygen

In this article we discuss the collection and nature of diversity data relating to origin (ethnicity, race, nationality, indigeneity), gender/sex and disability in higher education institutional workforces across 24 locations within Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America and Oceania.

The research emerges from the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative project (n.d.), in which we analyse data relating to published research literature, its open access status, citations and collaborations for institutions, publishers and research funding bodies.

Our project explores demographic data relating to workforce diversity and research production; we examine who creates knowledge and how diversity is transmitted through research.

Collecting and analysing higher education workforce demographic diversity data reveals a global datascape with considerable variation in practices and data collected. The data reflect political and social histories, national and international policies and practices, priorities and funding.

The presence and absence of public data provide an opportunity to understand differing national situations and priorities beneath the statistics. We open a conversation about how the concepts of equity, diversity and inclusion differ between groups of countries, which makes global comparisons difficult.

By identifying higher education data and gaps, we also encourage institutions and countries to review their workforce demographics and their intersection with research production. Awareness of institutional diversity levels through data analysis can guide institutions towards knowledge openness.

URL : Global Diversity in Higher Education Workforces: Towards Openness

DOI : https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.4809

OA isn’t free, it costs folks like you and me. How open access ideology obscures labour inequity in academia

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Author : John Bryans

Despite the framing of open access (OA) as a progressive movement that challenges neoliberalism and champions the public good, academic labour is often left out of these analyses (Eve, 2017).

In a bid to liberate academic labour from the neoliberal hands of commercial publishing, advocates of OA have argued that making scholarly work “free” can help to establish an academic commons (de Rosnay, 2021).

However initiatives to mandate OA in academia like “Plan S” set the stage for academic labourers to be compelled to give up rights to their intellectual property (Frantzvag & Stromme, 2019). In this essay I argue that the broad acceptance of OA as the liberatory savior of academic publishing is misguided, as it obscures the right-wing libertarian roots of the movement and would see academics voluntarily alienate themselves from their labour (Golumbia, 2016).

Drawing on Golumbia’s (2016) Marxist reading of the political economy of OA, I argue that devaluing academic labour by characterizing it as unproductive and immaterial negates the abstract labour that produces scholarly works.

Undoubtedly, libraries have an important role to play in the OA “revolution” (Burns, 2018), although not as assenting boosters but as critical voices that advocate for the rights of workers.

URL : OA isn’t free, it costs folks like you and me. How open access ideology obscures labour inequity in academia

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5206/elip.v5i1.14524

Organized Scientific Diaspora and Its Contributions to Science Diplomacy in Emerging Economies: The Case of Latin America and the Caribbean

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Authors : Luisa F. Echeverría-King, Reina Camacho Toro, Pedro Figueroa, Laura A. Galvis, Alejandra González, Verónica Rossana Suárez, Ivonne Torres Atencio, Claudia Natalie Widmaier Müller

The current knowledge society has driven an unprecedented mobility of people, especially scientists, from emerging economies to developed countries. This mobility can allow the development of human talent and the access to first class infrastructure and resources, but it can also mean a loss for emerging economies due to the phenomenon of brain drain.

To counteract this situation, some countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have developed models for the articulation of their scientific diaspora in projects and programs, with the aim of exchanging knowledge and capitalizing on human and technical resources to advance science, technology and innovation systems.

Likewise, science diplomacy has become a tool for interlinking the work of various actors in order to advance the solution of national, transnational or global problems through scientific advice. Scientific diasporas are vital in new structures of cooperation, enabling them to innovate and solve problems jointly, advising their countries of origin and articulating policies and programs.

This research seeks to analyze the interactions and initiatives identified between the organized scientific diaspora from Latin America and the Caribbean and their countries of origin in relation to science diplomacy processes, providing recommendations and proposals for public policy to improve the interaction between the diaspora and the governments of their countries of origin.

Results show that diaspora organizations from Latin America and the Caribbean engage with governmental and non-state actors and are active science diplomacy stakeholders promoting the scientific developments of their country or their researchers, as well as enabling access to research resources creating alliances for scientific, institutional and academic collaborations.

In the cases studied, these efforts are planned and executed by the diaspora without responding to any science diplomacy strategy of the country. Policies and programs are needed to effectively link the scientific diaspora organizations to the interests of the countries.

URL : Organized Scientific Diaspora and Its Contributions to Science Diplomacy in Emerging Economies: The Case of Latin America and the Caribbean

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.893593

Institutional repositories and copyright in Greek academic libraries

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Authors : Konstantinos Kyprianos, Ekaterini Lygnou

Institutional repositories were created to collect, preserve, and make available the academic institution’s scientific output. The purpose of this study is to investigate and illustrate how Greek academic libraries with institutional repositories deal with copyright challenges.

The study aims to identify and describe if institutional repository managers apply a certain copyright clearance protocol, the problems they encounter, and how they deal with them. For this study, a quantitative research method based on questionnaires was employed.

The questionnaire consisted of twenty-nine (29) questions separated into three (3) sections and was sent to thirty-one (31) academic libraries.

According to the survey results, the majority of academic libraries have an institutional repository and provide open access to its content. It was found that academic institutional repositories face intellectual property difficulties.

The biggest issue highlighted was a lack of knowledge of the notion of copyright. Finally, communication amongst libraries seems to be the foundation for developing a common policy and addressing the difficulties that have arisen in institutional repositories as a result of Greek copyright legislation limits.

URL : Institutional repositories and copyright in Greek academic libraries

DOI : https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-449