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Adaptable Methods for Training in Research Data Management

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Authors: Katarzyna Biernacka, Kerstin Helbig, Petra Buchholz

The management of research data has become an essential aspect of good scientific practice. Education in research data management is, however, scarce. The low number of trainers can be attributed on the one hand to a lack of educational paths. On the other hand, qualification opportunities for academics who have already completed their studies and are in employment are missing.

Within the research project FDMentor a Train-the-Trainer programme was therefore developed to teach potential multipliers of research data management, and at the same time impart basic didactic knowledge.

The resulting concept was created, in addition to freely re-usable materials, to support researchers and research support staff in passing on this knowledge. In addition, the generic development and free licensing of the concept enables transferability to other thematic contexts, such as Open Access or Open Science.

URL : Adaptable Methods for Training in Research Data Management

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2021-014

Preprint Abstracts in Times of Crisis: a Comparative Study with the Pre-pandemic Period

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Authors : Frédérique Bordignon, Liana Ermakova, Marianne Noel

The urgency to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak has driven an unprecedented surge in preprints that aim to speed up knowledge dissemination as they are available much sooner than peer-reviewed publications.

In this study we consider abstracts of research articles and preprints as main entry points that draw attention to the most important information of the document and that try to entice us to read the whole article. In this paper, we try to capture and examine shifts in scientific abstract writing produced at the very beginning of the pandemic.

We made a comparative study of abstracts in terms of their informativeness associated with preprints issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and those produced in 2019, the closest pre-pandemic period. Our results clearly differ from one preprint server to another and show that there are community-centered habits as regards writing and reporting results.

The preprints issued from the arXiv, ChemRxiv and Research Square servers tend to have more informative (generous) abstracts than the ones submitted to the other servers. In four servers, the ratio of structured abstracts decreases with the pandemic.

URL : Preprint Abstracts in Times of Crisis: a Comparative Study with the Pre-pandemic Period

Original location : https://hal-enpc.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03187900

Open Access Models, Pirate Libraries and Advocacy Repertoires: Policy Options for Academics to Construct and Govern Knowledge Commons

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Author : Melanie Dulong de Rosnay

In this article, I propose exploring open access publishing through the lenses of Knowledge Commons. Instead of focusing on users’ rights to access and reuse the output under open copyright licensing conditions, I study the governance of the academic publishing ecosystem, and its political economy, technical and labour infrastructure. Based on selected examples, I discuss how they comply with the concept of the commons.

I use analytical frameworks from the Ostromian literature of the governance of Knowledge Commons to provide insights on the various steps of academic publishing work as a process. I then analyse a scope of open access publishing projects, including gold, green, diamond, platinum and pirate libraries. Finally, I draw from practices a repertoire of advocacy actions and I make recommendations for academics to develop policies supporting Academic Commons.

URL : Open Access Models, Pirate Libraries and Advocacy Repertoires: Policy Options for Academics to Construct and Govern Knowledge Commons

DOI : https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.913

What happens when a journal converts to Open Access? A bibliometric analysis

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Authors : Fakhri Momeni, Philipp Mayr, Nicholas Fraser, Isabella Peters

In recent years, increased stakeholder pressure to transition research to Open Access has led to many journals converting, or ‘flipping’, from a closed access (CA) to an open access (OA) publishing model.

Changing the publishing model can influence the decision of authors to submit their papers to a journal, and increased article accessibility may influence citation behaviour. In this paper we aimed to understand how flipping a journal to an OA model influences the journal’s future publication volumes and citation impact.

We analysed two independent sets of journals that had flipped to an OA model, one from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and one from the Open Access Directory (OAD), and compared their development with two respective control groups of similar journals. For bibliometric analyses, journals were matched to the Scopus database.

We assessed changes in the number of articles published over time, as well as two citation metrics at the journal and article level: the normalised impact factor (IF) and the average relative citations (ARC), respectively. Our results show that overall, journals that flipped to an OA model increased their publication output compared to journals that remained closed.

Mean normalised IF and ARC also generally increased following the flip to an OA model, at a greater rate than was observed in the control groups. However, the changes appear to vary largely by scientific discipline. Overall, these results indicate that flipping to an OA publishing model can bring positive changes to a journal.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14522

Civil disobedience in scientific authorship: Resistance and insubordination in science

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Authors : Bart Penders, David M. Shaw

The distribution of credit, resources and opportunities in science is heavily skewed due to unjust practices and incentives, hardwired into science’s rules, guidelines and conventions. A form of resistance widely available is to break those rules.

We review instances of rule-breaking in scientific authorship to allow for a redefinition of the concept of civil disobedience in the context of academic research, as well as the conditions on which the label applies.

We show that, in contrast to whistleblowing or conscientious objection, civil disobedience targets science’s injustice on a more systemic level. Its further development will ease critical evaluation of deviant actions as well as helping us evaluate deviance, defiance and discontent in science beyond issues of authorship.

However, empirically, civil disobedience in science engenders uncertainties and disagreements on the local status of both act and label.

URL : Civil disobedience in scientific authorship: Resistance and insubordination in science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2020.1756787

What Have We Learned from OpenReview?

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Authors : Gang Wang, Qi Peng, Yanfeng Zhang, Mingyang Zhang

Anonymous peer review is used by the great majority of computer science conferences. OpenReview is such a platform that aims to promote openness in peer review process. The paper, (meta) reviews, rebuttals, and final decisions are all released to public. We collect 5,527 submissions and their 16,853 reviews from the OpenReview platform.

We also collect these submissions’ citation data from Google Scholar and their non-peer-reviewed versions from arXiv.org. By acquiring deep insights into these data, we have several interesting findings that could help understand the effectiveness of the public-accessible double-blind peer review process.

Our results can potentially help writing a paper, reviewing it, and deciding on its acceptance.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.05885v4

Novelty, Disruption, and the Evolution of Scientific Impact

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Authors : Yiling Lin, James Allen Evans, Lingfei Wu

Since the 1950s, citation impact has been the dominant metric by which science is quantitatively evaluated. But research contributions play distinct roles in the unfolding drama of scientific debate, agreement and advance, and institutions may value different kinds of advances.

Computational power, access to citation data and an array of modeling techniques have given rise to a widening portfolio of metrics to extract different signals regarding their contribution. Here we unpack the complex, temporally evolving relationship between citation impact alongside novelty and disruption, two emerging measures that capture the degree to which science not only influences, but transforms later work.

Novelty captures how research draws upon unusual combinations of prior work. Disruption captures how research comes to eclipse the prior work on which it builds, becoming recognized as a new scientific direction.

We demonstrate that: 1) novel papers disrupt existing theories and expand the scientific frontier; 2) novel papers are more likely to become “sleeping beauties” and accumulate citation impact over the long run; 3) novelty can be reformulated as distance in journal embedding spaces to map the moving frontier of science.

The evolution of embedding spaces over time reveals how yesterday’s novelty forms today’s scientific conventions, which condition the novelty–and surprise–of tomorrow’s breakthroughs.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.03398