FR

Comment sauver l’ouverture de la science ? l’évaluation

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteur/Author : Denis Jerome

Les mondes de la recherche et celui des éditeurs encouragent une disponibilité des résultats de la recherche à tous et gratuitement. La transition vers une science ouverte se développe rapidement mais elle n’est pas sans poser de sérieux problèmes qui ne sont pas uniquement d’ordre budgétaire mais peuvent aussi porter atteinte à l’éthique et au bon fonctionnement de la recherche.

Les acteurs incontournables que sont les chercheurs individuellement ou via les sociétés savantes et les académies doivent reprendre le contrôle de cette transition en reconsidérant le rôle de l’évaluation qui est le nœud du problème. C’est la pratique de l’évaluation qu’il faut revoir.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03291013

EN

Is rapid scientific publication also high quality? Bibliometric analysis of highly disseminated COVID-19 research papers

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Amandeep Khatter, Michael Naughton, Hajira Dambha-Miller, Patrick Redmond

The impact of COVID-19 has underlined the need for reliable information to guide clinical practice and policy. This urgency has to be balanced against disruption to journal handling capacity and the continued need to ensure scientific rigour.

We examined the reporting quality of highly disseminated COVID-19 research papers using a bibliometric analysis examining reporting quality and risk of bias (RoB) amongst 250 top scoring Altmetric Attention Score (AAS) COVID-19 research papers between January and April 2020.

Method-specific RoB tools were used to assess quality. After exclusions, 84 studies from 44 journals were included. Forty-three (51%) were case series/studies, and only one was an randomized controlled trial.

Most authors were from institutions based in China (n = 44, 52%). The median AAS and impact factor was 2015 (interquartile range [IQR] 1,105–4,051.5) and 12.8 (IQR 5–44.2) respectively. Nine studies (11%) utilized a formal reporting framework, 62 (74%) included a funding statement, and 41 (49%) were at high RoB.

This review of the most widely disseminated COVID-19 studies highlights a preponderance of low-quality case series with few research papers adhering to good standards of reporting. It emphasizes the need for cautious interpretation of research and the increasingly vital responsibility that journals have in ensuring high-quality publications.

URL : Is rapid scientific publication also high quality? Bibliometric analysis of highly disseminated COVID-19 research papers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1403

EN

Total SciComm: A Strategy for Communicating Open Science

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Manh-Toan Ho, Manh-Tung Ho, Quan-Hoang Vuong

This paper seeks to introduce a strategy of science communication: Total SciComm or all-out science communication. We proposed that to maximize the outreach and impact, scientists should use different media to communicate different aspects of science, from core ideas to methods.

The paper uses an example of a debate surrounding a now-retracted article in the Nature journal, in which open data, preprints, social media, and blogs are being used for a meaningful scientific conversation.

The case embodied the central idea of Total SciComm: the scientific community employs every medium to communicate scientific ideas and engages all scientists in the process.

URL : Total SciComm: A Strategy for Communicating Open Science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9030031

EN

Data sharing practices and data availability upon request differ across scientific disciplines

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Leho tedersoo, Rainer Küngas, Ester Oras, Kajar Köster, Helen Eenmaa, Äli Leijen, Margus Pedaste, Marju Raju, Anastasiya Astapova, Heli Lukner, Karin Kogermann, Tuul Sepp

Data sharing is one of the cornerstones of modern science that enables large-scale analyses and reproducibility. We evaluated data availability in research articles across nine disciplines in Nature and Science magazines and recorded corresponding authors’ concerns, requests and reasons for declining data sharing.

Although data sharing has improved in the last decade and particularly in recent years, data availability and willingness to share data still differ greatly among disciplines. We observed that statements of data availability upon (reasonable) request are inefficient and should not be allowed by journals.

To improve data sharing at the time of manuscript acceptance, researchers should be better motivated to release their data with real benefits such as recognition, or bonus points in grant and job applications.

We recommend that data management costs should be covered by funding agencies; publicly available research data ought to be included in the evaluation of applications; and surveillance of data sharing should be enforced by both academic publishers and funders. These cross-discipline survey data are available from the plutoF repository.

URL : Data sharing practices and data availability upon request differ across scientific disciplines

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00981-0

EN

Institutional Data Repository Development, a Moving Target

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Colleen Fallaw, Genevieve Schmitt, Hoa Luong, Jason Colwell, Jason Strutz

At the end of 2019, the Research Data Service (RDS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) completed its fifth year as a campus-wide service. In order to gauge the effectiveness of the RDS in meeting the needs of Illinois researchers, RDS staff developed a five-year review consisting of a survey and a series of in-depth focus group interviews.

As a result, our institutional data repository developed in-house by University Library IT staff, Illinois Data Bank, was recognized as the most useful service offering by our unit. When launched in 2016, storage resources and web servers for Illinois Data Bank and supporting systems were hosted on-premises at UIUC.

As anticipated, researchers increasingly need to share large, and complex datasets. In a responsive effort to leverage the potentially more reliable, highly available, cost-effective, and scalable storage accessible to computation resources, we migrated our item bitstreams and web services to the cloud. Our efforts have met with success, but also with painful bumps along the way.

This article describes how we supported data curation workflows through transitioning from on-premises to cloud resource hosting. It details our approaches to ingesting, curating, and offering access to dataset files up to 2TB in size–which may be archive type files (e.g., .zip or .tar) containing complex directory structures.

URL : https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/15821

EN

Article processing charge expenditure in Chile: The current situation

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Erwin Krauskopf

The National Agency of Research and Development from Chile is proposing, for the first time, a national OA policy aiming to ensure access to the scientific knowledge contained in publications resulting from research projects and graduate thesis.

Since no information regarding APC expenditure in Chile is available, this study examined the cost of APC for the 2019 publications that included at least one Chilean affiliation. The total expenditure for the year 2019 was estimated at USD 9,129,939.

The results confirm that almost one third of the total APC was spent on publications from Health & Medical Sciences, research area with the highest APC (USD 6000). Furthermore, five commercial publishers collected 52% of the total APC expenditure.

Unfortunately, the cost of publishing in some journals is so high that it causes detrimental effects on the research capacity of under resourced individuals. In the Chilean scenario, APC is not well suited to scale as most universities do not have an OA budget to support researchers that are eager to publish their work in OA journals.

Perhaps the implementation of an OA policy ought to be accompanied by sustainable APC funding grants aimed at supporting under resourced researchers that want to make their research freely available.

URL : Article processing charge expenditure in Chile: The current situation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1413

FR

Comment devenir un universitaire ? Le discours académique : une pratique de positionnement multi-niveaux

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteurs/Authors : Johannes Angermüller, Adèle Petitclerc

Dans ma contribution, je vais présenter l’approche savoir-pouvoir sur le discours universitaire en suivant la carrière d’un universitaire fictif, Jean le philosophe. S’inspirant des développements poststructuralistes et pragmatiques, cette approche met l’accent sur le défi pratique que les chercheurs doivent relever dans le discours universitaire : comment se faire une place dans le monde social de la recherche.

Les chercheurs qui participent au discours universitaire ont typiquement besoin de jouer simultanément sur des types de positions différentes. D’une part, ils doivent trouver leur place dans les nombreuses communautés scientifiques, c’est-à-dire dans le monde du savoir spécialisé. D’autre part, ils doivent s’insérer dans un établissement d’études supérieures avec ses fonctionnements bureaucratiques, ses statuts hiérarchiques et règles organisationnelles, c’est-à-dire dans le monde du pouvoir institutionnel.

Afin de réussir dans leurs carrières et d’occuper les positions les plus désirables dans le champ académique, les chercheurs doivent réussir dans ces deux mondes simultanément et consolider leurs places institutionnelles.

En s’engageant dans de nombreuses activités discursives dans leurs communautés, y compris la publication des textes académiques, ils s’adonnent à la pratique du discours universitaire en tant que pratique de positionnement multi-niveaux.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/semen.13939