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Assessing Social Value in Open Data Initiatives: A Framework

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“Open data initiatives are characterized, in several countries, by a great extension of the number of data sets made available for access by public administrations, constituencies, businesses and other actors, such as journalists, international institutions and academics, to mention a few. However, most of the open data sets rely on selection criteria, based on a technology-driven perspective, rather than a focus on the potential public and social value of data to be published. Several experiences and reports confirm this issue, such as those of the Open Data Census. However, there are also relevant best practices. The goal of this paper is to investigate the different dimensions of a framework suitable to support public administrations, as well as constituencies, in assessing and benchmarking the social value of open data initiatives. The framework is tested on three initiatives, referring to three different countries, Italy, the United Kingdom and Tunisia. The countries have been selected to provide a focus on European and Mediterranean countries, considering also the difference in legal frameworks (civic law vs. common law countries).”

URL : Assessing Social Value in Open Data Initiatives: A Framework

Alternative URL : http://www.mdpi.com/1999-5903/6/3/498

 

The Research Data Alliance: globally co-ordinated action against barriers to data publishing and sharing

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“This article discusses the drivers behind the formation of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), its current state, the lessons learned from its first full year of operation, and its anticipated impact on data publishing and sharing. One of the pressing challenges in data infrastructure (taken here to include issues relating to hardware, software and content format, as well as human actors) is how best to enable data interoperability across boundaries. This is particularly critical as the world deals with bigger and more complex problems that require data and insights from a range of disciplines. The RDA has been set up to enable more data to be shared across barriers to address these challenges. It does this through focused Working Groups and Interest Groups, formed of experts from around the world, and drawing from the academic, industry, and government sectors.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20140503

Preserving the integrity of the scientific record: data citation and linking

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“The production of research data is increasing rapidly, meaning that it is now rarely possible to publish the data that underpins a piece of research within the article describing that research. Yet, if the conclusions drawn from the research are to stand up to scrutiny, then the data must be made available, and a permanent link made between the data and the publication. Data citation is promoted as an easily understood way of making this link, while at the same time providing the dataset creators with the attribution and credit they deserve for making their data available for verification checks and reproducibility tests. This paper discusses data citation principles and gives examples of data citation and other forms of data-publication linking in practice.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20140504

Altmetrics as a means of assessing scholarly output

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“Career progression for scientists involves an assessment of their contribution to their field and a prediction of their future potential. Traditional measures, such as the impact factor of the journal that a researcher publishes in, may not be an appropriate or accurate means of assessing the overall output of an individual. The development of altmetrics offers the potential for fuller assessments of a researcher’s output based on both their traditional and non-traditional scholarly outputs. New tools should make it easier to include non-traditional outputs such as data, software and contributions to peer review in the evaluation of early- and mid-career researchers.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20140505

Data and scholarly publishing: the transforming landscape

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“This article sets the scene for the special issue on research data and publishing. Research data – that material commonly accepted by the scholarly community as required evidence for hypotheses and insights, for verification and/or reproducibility of experiments – has become an increasingly critical issue for publishers given recent developments in funders’ mandates, technological advances, policymakers’ interests, and so forth. I outline some of the recent initiatives that are responding to policy directives, particularly Project ODE, and consider how publishers are working with data and integrating their practices with other collaborative efforts. A summary of the new policies, products, and partnerships demonstrates that the onus is now with scholarly publishers to gain an understanding of these developments and how they are affecting fellow key stakeholders within the research communications ecosystem.”

URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20140502

Modes of access: the influence of dissemination channels on the use of open access monographs

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“Introduction. This paper studies the effects of several dissemination channels in an open access environment by analysing the download data of the OAPEN Library.

Method. Download data were obtained containing the number of downloads and the name of the Internet provider. Based on public information, each Internet provider was categorised. The subject and language of each book were determined using metadata from the OAPEN Library.

Analysis. Quantitative analysis was done using Excel, while the qualitative analysis was carried out using the statistical package SPSS.

Results. Almost three quarters of all downloads come from users who do not use the Website www.oapen.org, but find the books by other means. Qualitative analysis found no evidence that channel use was influenced by user groups or the state of users’ Internet infrastructure; nor was any effect on channel use found for either the language or the subjects of the monographs.

Conclusions. The results show that most readers are using the “direct download” channel, which occur if the readers use systems other than the OAPEN Library Website. This implies that making the metadata available in the user’s systems, the infrastructure used on a daily basis, ensures the best results.”

URL : http://www.informationr.net/ir/19-3/paper638.html#.VBdGbhZkI9Q

The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast

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“This working paper explores the consequences for historians’ research practice of the twinned transnational and digital turns. The accelerating digitization of historians’ sources (scholarly, periodical, and archival) and the radical shift in the granularity of access to information within them has radically changes historians’ research practice. Yet this has incited remarkably little reflection regarding the consequences for individual projects or collective knowledge generation. What are the implications for international research in particular? This essay heralds the new kinds of historical knowledge-generation made possible by web access to digitized, text-searchable sources. It also attempts an accounting of all that we formerly, unwittingly, gained from the frictions inherent to international research in an analog world. What are the intellectual and political consequences of that which has been lost?”

URL : http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/20882/