What senior academics can do to support reproducible and open research: a short, three-step guide

Authors : Olivia Kowalczyk, Alexandra Lautarescu, Elisabet Blok, Lorenza Dall’Aglio, Samuel Westwood

Increasingly, policies are being introduced to reward and recognise open research practices, while the adoption of such practices into research routines is being facilitated by many grassroots initiatives.

However, despite this widespread endorsement and support, open research is yet to be widely adopted, with early career researchers being the notable exception. For open research to become the norm, initiatives should engage academics from all career stages, particularly senior academics (namely senior lecturers, readers, professors) given their routine involvement in determining the quality of research.

Senior academics, however, face unique challenges in implementing policy change and supporting grassroots initiatives. Given that – like all researchers – senior academics are in part motivated by self-interest, this paper lays out three feasible steps that senior academics can take to improve the quality and productivity of their research, that also serve to engender open research.

These steps include a) change hiring criteria, b) change how scholarly outputs are credited, and c) change to funding and publishing with open research. The guidance we provide is accompanied by live, crowd-sourced material for further reading.

URL : What senior academics can do to support reproducible and open research: a short, three-step guide

Original location : https://psyarxiv.com/jyfr7

Research data management policy and practice in Chinese university libraries

Authors : Yingshen Huang, Andrew M. Cox, Laura Sbaffi

On April 2, 2018, the State Council of China formally released a national Research Data Management (RDM) policy “Measures for Managing Scientific Data”. In this context and given that university libraries have played an important role in supporting RDM at an institutional level in North America, Europe, and Australasia, the aim of this article is to explore the current status of RDM in Chinese universities, in particular how university libraries have been involved in taking the agenda forward.

This article uses a mixed‐methods data collection approach and draws on a website analysis of university policies and services; a questionnaire for university librarians; and semi‐structured interviews. Findings indicate that Research Data Service at a local level in Chinese Universities are in their infancy.

There is more evidence of activity in developing data repositories than support services. There is little development of local policy. Among the explanations of this may be the existence of a national‐level infrastructure for some subject disciplines, the lack of professionalization of librarianship, and the relatively weak resonance of openness as an idea in the Chinese context.

URL : Research data management policy and practice in Chinese university libraries

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24413

Les archives de la recherche : enjeux et perspectives pour les bibliothèques universitaires

Auteur/Author : Cédric Mercier

Entre archives privées et publiques, archives scientifiques et administratives, les archives de la recherche recouvrent une variété de documents conservés dans le but de témoigner de l’activité scientifique des universités et les grandes écoles.

Diversement réparties dans les collections des bibliothèques universitaires, leur gestion, à l’heure du numérique, ne va pas sans poser question aux bibliothécaires. Pourquoi et comment penser en BU une offre documentaire s’élargissant aux archives ?

Dans un contexte de développement des services à la recherche, le sujet invite à mener une réflexion sur le rôle et le positionnement des bibliothèques au sein de l’université, alors que les collections d’archives stimulent les projets de recherche et connectent la bibliothèque à un vaste réseau d’acteurs.

URL : Les archives de la recherche : enjeux et perspectives pour les bibliothèques universitaires

Original location : https://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/69638-les-archives-de-la-recherche-enjeux-et-perspectives-pour-les-bibliotheques-universitaires

De la labellisation Marianne à la certification ISO 9001: mesure d’efficacité en bibliothèque universitaire

Auteur/Author : Frédérique Laugrost

Dans un contexte de modernisation des services publics et d’évolutions de l’enseignement supérieur, les bibliothèques universitaires, en recherche d’outils pour évaluer et améliorer leurs services, se sont tournées vers les démarches qualité, notamment la démarche Marianne.

Comment ces démarches permettent-elles de mesurer l’efficacité et la performance des services en BU ? Après avoir étudié le déploiement du référentiel Marianne pour améliorer l’accueil en BU, nous nous intéresserons à la recherche de performance par l’adoption d’un système de management de la qualité de type ISO 9001.

URL : De la labellisation Marianne à la certification ISO 9001: mesure d’efficacité en bibliothèque universitaire

Original location : https://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/69613-de-la-labellisation-marianne-a-la-certification-iso-9001-mesure-d-efficacite-en-bibliotheque-universitaire

Directory of Open Access Journals in Keywords. Distribution and Themes of Articles

Authors : Rosangela Schwarz Rodrigues, Breno Kricheldorf Hermes de Araújo, Laura Lavinia Sabino dos Santos, Ana Lidia Campos Brizola

Researchers depend on consultation with previous work in their field, most of which is published in scientific journals. The open access movement has affected journals and articles, providing new alternatives for accessing scientific content, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is the most specialized and multidisciplinary database of open access journals.

The main goal of this study is to analyze publications that include “DOAJ” in their keywords, to determine how researchers in the areas of Library and Information Science and Social Science are studying it.

The specific objectives are: a) to describe the characteristics of journals indexed in the Web of Science, DOAJ, or SCOPUS that have published articles with “DOAJ” as a keyword; b) to identify the institutional affiliations of the authors of those articles; and c) to classify the articles according to subject area.

We identified 39 articles from 29 journals. The countries with the largest numbers of journals are the United States and the United Kingdom (six journals each). Most of the journals were open access, of which universities were the biggest publishers.

The countries with the largest numbers of authors were India (12), and Italy and Russia (11 each), and the journal that published the most articles was the University of Nebraska’s Library Philosophy and Practice (four articles).

Most articles analyze the quality (65.5%), followed by the growth (25.6%), of the Open Access Movement. An analysis of the subject areas covered revealed significant gaps, as the economic, legal and technological aspects of DOAJ were not represented.

URL : Directory of Open Access Journals in Keywords. Distribution and Themes of Articles

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4403/jlis.it-12630

Open Data and Open Access Articles: Exploring Connections in the Life Sciences

Author : Sarah C. Williams

Objectives

This small-scale study explores the current state of connections between open data and open access (OA) articles in the life sciences.

Methods

This study involved 44 openly available life sciences datasets from the Illinois Data Bank that had 45 related research articles. For each article, I gathered the OA status of the journal and the article on the publisher website and checked whether the article was openly available via Unpaywall and Research Gate. I also examined how and where the open data was included in the HTML and PDF versions of the related articles.

Results

Of the 45 articles studied, less than half were published in Gold/Full OA journals, and while the remaining articles were published in Gold/Hybrid journals, none of them were OA. This study found that OA articles pointed to the Illinois Data Bank datasets similarly to all of the related articles, most commonly with a data availability statement containing a DOI.

Conclusions

The findings indicate that Gold OA in hybrid journals does not appear to be a popular option, even for articles connected to open data, and this study emphasizes the importance of data repositories providing DOIs, since the related articles frequently used DOIs to point to the Illinois Data Bank datasets. This study also revealed concerns about free (not licensed OA) access to articles on publisher websites, which will be a significant topic for future research.

URL : Open Data and Open Access Articles: Exploring Connections in the Life Sciences

DOI : https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol9/iss1/3/

Publication strategies under the Publish or Perish Paradigm – using Kolb’s ELT to understand PhD students’ needs

Authors : Charlotte Nordahl Wien, Bertil F. Dorch, Lone Bredahl, Mette Brandt Eriksen

Having a viable publication strategy at an early stage of the career can nowadays make a researcher. Not having one appears to break them. We as librarians are in a unique position to guide them in their endeavours to create a viable publication strategy.

In this paper we use Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory as our theoretical framework for understanding learning processes related to the development of a publication strategy.

We compare a set of publication strategies developed by newly enrolled PhD students 4 to 5 years ago to articles retrieved from PubMed and Scopus using the PhD students’ ORCID as identifier. We subdivide the publication strategies into three categories (fulfilled, partially fulfilled, abandoned).

We find evidence that the more realistic the publication plan is, the more likely it is to be followed.

This indicates that it is of importance that PhD schools support students’ efforts in developing their publication strategy at an early stage of their career.

URL : Publication strategies under the Publish or Perish Paradigm – using Kolb’s ELT to understand PhD students’ needs

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10349