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Science rules! A qualitative study of scientists’ approaches to grant lottery

Posté le 13 octobre 2021 par Hans Dillaerts

Author : Axel Philipps

Using peer review to assess the validity of research proposals has always had its fair share of critics, including a more-than-fair-share of scholars. The debate about this method of assessing these proposals now seems trivial when compared with assessing the validity for granting funding by lottery.

Some of the same scholars have suggested that the way grant lottery was being assessed has made random allocation seem even-handed, less biased and more supportive of innovative research.

But we know little of what researchers actually think about grant lottery and even less about the thoughts of those scientists who rely on funding. This paper examines scientists’ perspectives on selecting grants by ‘lots’ and how they justify their support or opposition.

How do they approach something scientifically that is, in itself, not scientific? These approaches were investigated with problem-centered interviews conducted with natural scientists in Germany.

The qualitative interviews for this paper reveal that scientists in dominated and dominating field positions are, more or less, open to the idea of giving a selection process by lots a try. Nonetheless, they are against pure randomization because from their point of view it is incompatible with scientific principles.

They rather favor a combination of grant lottery and peer review processes, assuming that only under these conditions could randomly allocated funding be an integral and legitimate part of science.

URL : Science rules! A qualitative study of scientists’ approaches to grant lottery

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvaa027

The role of metrics in peer assessments

Posté le 13 octobre 2021 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Liv Langfeldt, Ingvild Reymert, Dag W Aksnes

Metrics on scientific publications and their citations are easily accessible and are often referred to in assessments of research and researchers. This paper addresses whether metrics are considered a legitimate and integral part of such assessments. Based on an extensive questionnaire survey in three countries, the opinions of researchers are analysed.

We provide comparisons across academic fields (cardiology, economics, and physics) and contexts for assessing research (identifying the best research in their field, assessing grant proposals and assessing candidates for positions).

A minority of the researchers responding to the survey reported that metrics were reasons for considering something to be the best research. Still, a large majority in all the studied fields indicated that metrics were important or partly important in their review of grant proposals and assessments of candidates for academic positions.

In these contexts, the citation impact of the publications and, particularly, the number of publications were emphasized. These findings hold across all fields analysed, still the economists relied more on productivity measures than the cardiologists and the physicists. Moreover, reviewers with high scores on bibliometric indicators seemed more frequently (than other reviewers) to adhere to metrics in their assessments.

Hence, when planning and using peer review, one should be aware that reviewers—in particular reviewers who score high on metrics—find metrics to be a good proxy for the future success of projects and candidates, and rely on metrics in their evaluation procedures despite the concerns in scientific communities on the use and misuse of publication metrics.

URL : The role of metrics in peer assessments

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvaa032

Impact and visibility of Norwegian, Finnish and Spanish journals in the fields of humanities

Posté le 11 octobre 2021 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Elías Sanz-Casado, Daniela De Filippo, Rafael Aleixandre Benavent, Vidar Røeggen, Janne Pölönen

This article analyses the impact and visibility of scholarly journals in the humanities that are publishing in the national languages in Finland, Norway and Spain. Three types of publishers are considered: commercial publishers, scholarly society as publisher, and research organizations as publishers.

Indicators of visibility and impact were obtained from Web of Science, SCOPUS, Google Metrics, Scimago Journal Rank and Journal Citation Report.

The findings compiled show that in Spain the categories “History and Archaeology” and “Language and Literature” account for almost 70% of the journals analysed, while the other countries offer a more homogeneous distribution.

In Finland, the scholarly society publisher is predominant, in Spain, research organization as publishers, mostly universities, have a greater weighting, while in Norway, the commercial publishers take centre stage.

The results show that journals from Finland and Norway will have reduced possibilities in terms of impact and visibility, since the vernacular language appeals to a smaller readership. Conversely, the Spanish journals are more attractive for indexing in commercial databases. Distribution in open access ranges from 64 to 70% in Norwegian and Finish journals, and to 91% in Spanish journals.

The existence of DOI range from 31 to 41% in Nordic journals to 60% in Spanish journals and has a more widespread bearing on the citations received in all three countries (journals with DOI and open access are cited more frequently).

URL : Impact and visibility of Norwegian, Finnish and Spanish journals in the fields of humanities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04169-6

FAIR Forever? Accountabilities and Responsibilities in the Preservation of Research Data

Posté le 11 octobre 2021 par Hans Dillaerts

Author : Amy Currie, William Kilbride

Digital preservation is a fast-moving and growing community of practice of ubiquitous relevance, but in which capability is unevenly distributed. Within the open science and research data communities, digital preservation has a close alignment to the FAIR principles and is delivered through a complex specialist infrastructure comprising technology, staff and policy.

However, capacity erodes quickly, establishing a need for ongoing examination and review to ensure that skills, technology, and policy remain fit for changing purpose. To address this challenge, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) conducted the FAIR Forever study, commissioned by the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Sustainability Working Group and funded by the EOSC Secretariat Project in 2020, to assess the current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to the preservation of research data across EOSC, and the feasibility of establishing shared approaches, workflows and services that would benefit EOSC stakeholders.

This paper draws from the FAIR Forever study to document and explore its key findings on the identified strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to the preservation of FAIR data in EOSC, and to the preservation of research data more broadly.

It begins with background of the study and an overview of the methodology employed, which involved a desk-based assessment of the emerging EOSC vision, interviews with representatives of EOSC stakeholders, and focus groups with digital preservation specialists and data managers in research organizations.

It summarizes key findings on the need for clarity on digital preservation in the EOSC vision and for elucidation of roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities to mitigate risks of data loss, reputation, and sustainability. It then outlines the recommendations provided in the final report presented to the EOSC Sustainability Working Group.

To better ensure that research data can be FAIRer for longer, the recommendations of the study are presented with discussion on how they can be extended and applied to various research data stakeholders in and outside of EOSC, and suggest ways to bring together research data curation, management, and preservation communities to better ensure FAIRness now and in the long term.

URL : FAIR Forever? Accountabilities and Responsibilities in the Preservation of Research Data

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v16i1.768

Do I-PASS for FAIR? Measuring the FAIR-ness of Research Organizations

Posté le 8 octobre 2021 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Jacquelijn Ringersma, Margriet Miedema

Given the increased use of the FAIR acronym as adjective for other contexts than data or data sets, the Dutch National Coordination Point for Research Data Management initiated a Task Group to work out the concept of a FAIR research organization.

The results of this Task Groups are a definition of a FAIR enabling organization and a method to measure the FAIR-ness of a research organization (The Do-I-PASS for FAIR method). The method can also aid in developing FAIR-enabling Road Maps for individual research institutions and at a national level.

This practice paper describes the development of the method and provides a couple of use cases for the application of the method in daily research data management practices in research organizations.

URL : Do I-PASS for FAIR? Measuring the FAIR-ness of Research Organizations

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2021-030

Sharing published short academic works in institutional repositories after six months : The implementation of the article 25fa (Taverne Amendment) in the Dutch Copyright Act

Posté le 7 octobre 2021 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Jeroen Sondervan, Arjan Schalken, Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer

The ambition of the Netherlands, laid down in the National Plan Open Science, is to achieve 100% open access for academic publications. The ambition was to be achieved by 2020. However, it is to be expected that for the year 2020 between 70% and 75% of the articles will be open access.

Until recently, the focus of the Netherlands has been on the gold route – open access via journals and publishers’ platforms. This is likely to be costly and it is also impossible to cover all articles and other publication types this way.

Since 2015, Dutch Copyright Act has offered an alternative with the implementation of Article 25fa (also known as the ‘Taverne Amendment’), facilitating the green route, i.e. open access via (trusted) repositories.

This amendment allows researchers to share short scientific works (e.g. articles and book chapters in edited collections), regardless of any restrictive guidelines from publishers. From February 2019 until August 2019 all Dutch universities participated in the pilot ‘You Share, we Take Care!’ to test how this copyright amendment could be interpreted and implemented by institutions as a policy instrument to enhance green open access and “self-archiving”.

In 2020 steps were taken to scale up further implementation of the amendment. This article describes the outcomes of this pilot and shares best practices on implementation and awareness activities in the period following the pilot until early 2021, in which libraries have played an instrumental role in building trust and working on effective implementations on an institutional level.

It concludes with some possible next steps for alignment, for example on a European level.

URL : Sharing published short academic works in institutional repositories after six months : The implementation of the article 25fa (Taverne Amendment) in the Dutch Copyright Act

DOI : https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.10915