Archives des catégories : EN

Notebook articles: towards a transformative publishing experience in nonlinear science

Posté le par

Authors : Cristel Chandre, Jonathan Dubois

Open Science, Reproducible Research, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data principles are long term goals for scientific dissemination. However, the implementation of these principles calls for a reinspection of our means of dissemination. In our viewpoint, we discuss and advocate, in the context of nonlinear science, how a notebook article represents an essential step toward this objective by fully embracing cloud computing solutions.

Notebook articles as scholar articles offer an alternative, efficient and more ethical way to disseminate research through their versatile environment. This format invites the readers to delve deeper into the reported research. Through the interactivity of the notebook articles, research results such as for instance equations and figures are reproducible even for non-expert readers.

The codes and methods are available, in a transparent manner, to interested readers. The methods can be reused and adapted to answer additional questions in related topics. The codes run on cloud computing services, which provide easy access, even to low-income countries and research groups.

The versatility of this environment provides the stakeholders – from the researchers to the publishers – with opportunities to disseminate the research results in innovative ways.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.05770

Why Won’t They Just Adopt Good Research Data Management Practices? An Exploration of Research Teams and Librarians’ Role in Facilitating RDM Adoption

Posté le par

Authors: Clara Llebot, Hannah Gascho Rempe

Adoption of good research data management practices is increasingly important for research teams. Despite the work the research community has done to define best data management practices, these practices are still difficult to adopt for many research teams.

Universities all around the world have been offering Research Data Services to help their research groups, and libraries are usually an important part of these services. A better understanding of the pressures and factors that affect research teams may help librarians serve these groups more effectively.

The social interactions between the members of a research team are a key element that influences the likelihood of a research group successfully adopting best practices in data management.

In this article we adapt the Unified Theory of the Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis, & Davis, 2003) to explain the variables that can influence whether new and better, data management practices will be adopted by a research group.

We describe six moderating variables: size of the team, disciplinary culture, group culture and leadership, team heterogeneity, funder, and dataset decisions.

We also develop three research group personas as a way of navigating the UTAUT model, and as a tool Research Data Services practitioners can use to target interactions between librarians and research groups to make them more effective.

URL : Why Won’t They Just Adopt Good Research Data Management Practices? An Exploration of Research Teams and Librarians’ Role in Facilitating RDM Adoption

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2321

The Most Widely Disseminated COVID-19-Related Scientific Publications in Online Media: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Top 100 Articles with the Highest Altmetric Attention Scores

Posté le par

Authors : Ji Yoon Moon, Dae Young Yoon, Ji Hyun Hong, Kyoung Ja Lim, Sora Baek, Young Lan Seo, Eun Joo Yun

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a global pandemic. This study’s aim was to identify and characterize the top 100 COVID-19-related scientific publications, which had received the highest Altmetric Attention Scores (AASs).

Hence, we searched Altmetric Explorer using search terms such as “COVID” or “COVID-19” or “Coronavirus” or “SARS-CoV-2” or “nCoV” and then selected the top 100 articles with the highest AASs. For each article identified, we extracted the following information: the overall AAS, publishing journal, journal impact factor (IF), date of publication, language, country of origin, document type, main topic, and accessibility.

The top 100 articles most frequently were published in journals with high (>10.0) IF (n = 67), were published between March and July 2020 (n = 67), were written in English (n = 100), originated in the United States (n = 45), were original articles (n = 59), dealt with treatment and clinical manifestations (n = 33), and had open access (n = 98).

Our study provides important information pertaining to the dissemination of scientific knowledge about COVID-19 in online media.

URL : The Most Widely Disseminated COVID-19-Related Scientific Publications in Online Media: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Top 100 Articles with the Highest Altmetric Attention Scores

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare9020239

Assessment of transparency indicators across the biomedical literature: How open is open?

Posté le par

Authors : Stylianos Serghiou, Despina G. Contopoulos-Ioannidis, Kevin W. Boyack, Nico Riedel, Joshua D. Wallach, John P. A. Ioannidis

Recent concerns about the reproducibility of science have led to several calls for more open and transparent research practices and for the monitoring of potential improvements over time. However, with tens of thousands of new biomedical articles published per week, manually mapping and monitoring changes in transparency is unrealistic.

We present an open-source, automated approach to identify 5 indicators of transparency (data sharing, code sharing, conflicts of interest disclosures, funding disclosures, and protocol registration) and apply it across the entire open access biomedical literature of 2.75 million articles on PubMed Central (PMC).

Our results indicate remarkable improvements in some (e.g., conflict of interest [COI] disclosures and funding disclosures), but not other (e.g., protocol registration and code sharing) areas of transparency over time, and map transparency across fields of science, countries, journals, and publishers.

This work has enabled the creation of a large, integrated, and openly available database to expedite further efforts to monitor, understand, and promote transparency and reproducibility in science.

URL : Assessment of transparency indicators across the biomedical literature: How open is open?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001107

Attracting new users or business as usual? A case study of converting academic subscription-based journals to open access

Posté le par

Author : Lars Wenaas

This paper studies a selection of 11 Norwegian journals in the humanities and social sciences and their conversion from subscription to open access, a move heavily incentivized by governmental mandates and open access policies.

By investigating the journals’ visiting logs in the period 2014–2019, the study finds that a conversion to open access induces higher visiting numbers; all journals in the study had a significant increase, which can be attributed to the conversion.

Converting a journal had no spillover in terms of increased visits to previously published articles still behind the paywall in the same journals. Visits from previously subscribing Norwegian higher education institutions did not account for the increase in visits, indicating that the increase must be accounted for by visitors from other sectors.

The results could be relevant for policymakers concerning the effects of strict policies targeting economically vulnerable national journals, and could further inform journal owners and editors on the effects of converting to open access.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00126

The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects

Posté le par

Authors : Richard Geiger, Dorothy Howard, Lilly Irani

Free and/or open-source software (or F/OSS) projects now play a major and dominant role in society, constituting critical digital infrastructure relied upon by companies, academics, non-profits, activists, and more. As F/OSS has become larger and more established, we investigate the labor of maintaining and sustaining those projects at various scales.

We report findings from an interview-based study with contributors and maintainers working in a wide range of F/OSS projects. Maintainers of F/OSS projects do not just maintain software code in a more traditional software engineering understanding of the term: fixing bugs, patching security vulnerabilities, and updating dependencies.

F/OSS maintainers also perform complex and often-invisible interpersonal and organizational work to keep their projects operating as active communities of users and contributors. We particularly focus on how this labor of maintaining and sustaining changes as projects and their software grow and scale across many dimensions.

In understanding F/OSS to be as much about maintaining a communal project as it is maintaining software code, we discuss broadly applicable considerations for peer production communities and other socio-technical systems more broadly.

URL : The Labor of Maintaining and Scaling Free and Open-Source Software Projects

Original location : https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3mz2d0kk

Digital commons

Posté le par

Authors : Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, Felix Stalder

Commons are holistic social institutions to govern the (re)production of resources, articulated through interrelated legal, socio-cultural, economic and institutional dimensions. They represent a comprehensive and radical approach to organise collective action, placing it “beyond market and state” (Bollier & Helfrich, 2012).

They form a third way of organising society and the economy that differs from both market-based approaches, with their orientation toward prices, and from bureaucratic forms of organisation, with their orientation toward hierarchies and commands. This governance model has been applied to tangible and intangible resources, to local initiatives (garden, educational material), and to resources governed by global politics (climate, internet infrastructure).

Digital commons are a subset of the commons, where the resources are data, information, culture and knowledge which are created and/or maintained online. The notion of the digital commons is an important concept for countering legal enclosure and fostering equitable access to these resources.

This article presents the history of the movement of the digital commons, from free software, free culture, and public domain works, to open data and open access to science. It then analyses its foundational dimensions (licensing, authorship, peer production, governance) and finally studies newer forms of the digital commons, urban democratic participation and data commons.

URL : Digital commons

DOI : https://doi.org/10.14763/2020.4.1530