EN

Research Data Management Among Life Sciences Faculty: Implications for Library Service

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Kelly A. Johnson, Vicky Steeves

Objective

This paper aims to inform on opportunities for librarians to assist faculty with research data management by examining practices and attitudes among life sciences faculty at a tier one research university.

Methods

The authors issued a survey to estimate actual and perceived research data management needs of New York University (NYU) life sciences faculty in order to understand how the library could best contribute to the research life cycle.

Results

Survey responses indicate that over half of the respondents were aware of publisher and funder mandates, and most are willing to share their data, but many indicated they do not utilize data repositories. Respondents were largely unaware of data services available through the library, but the majority were open to considering such services. Survey results largely mimic those of similar studies, in that storing data (and the subsequent ability to share it) is the most easily recognized barrier to sound data management practices.

Conclusions

At NYU, as with other institutions, the library is not immediately recognized as a valuable partner in managing research output. This study suggests that faculty are largely unaware of, but are open to, existent library services, indicating that immediate outreach efforts should be aimed at promoting them.

URL : Research Data Management Among Life Sciences Faculty: Implications for Library Service

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2019.1159

EN

Different Preservation Levels: The Case of Scholarly Digital Editions

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Elias Oltmanns, Tim Hasler, Wolfgang Peters-Kottig, Heinz-Günter Kuper

Ensuring the long-term availability of research data forms an integral part of data management services. Where OAIS compliant digital preservation has been established in recent years, in almost all cases the services aim at the preservation of file-based objects.

In the Digital Humanities, research data is often represented in highly structured aggregations, such as Scholarly Digital Editions. Naturally, scholars would like their editions to remain functionally complete as long as possible.

Besides standard components like webservers, the presentation typically relies on project specific code interacting with client software like webbrowsers. Especially the latter being subject to rapid change over time invariably makes such environments awkward to maintain once funding has ended.

Pragmatic approaches have to be found in order to balance the curation effort and the maintainability of access to research data over time. A sketch of four potential service levels aiming at the long-term availability of research data in the humanities is outlined: (1) Continuous Maintenance, (2) Application Conservation, (3) Application Data Preservation, and (4) Bitstream Preservation.

The first being too costly and the last hardly satisfactory in general, we suggest that the implementation of services by an infrastructure provider should concentrate on service levels 2 and 3. We explain their strengths and limitations considering the example of two Scholarly Digital Editions.

URL : Different Preservation Levels: The Case of Scholarly Digital Editions

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-051

FR

Les environnements personnels d’apprentissage au prisme des productions documentaires : Des intentions aux pratiques

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteurs/Authors : Fabrice Pirolli, Raphaëlle Crétin-Pirolli

La multiplicité des dispositifs numériques déployés dans le cadre institué de l’université s’ajoute à une offre sans cesse croissante, en particulier sur le Web, de services et d’outils qui modifient profondément les rapports individuels et collectifs à l’information et aux savoirs.

Afin d’étudier les logiques et les stratégies à l’œuvre dans l’agencement de l’Environnement Personnel d’Apprentissage des étudiants, nous proposons une approche centrée sur leurs pratiques documentaires ainsi que sur leurs usages courants des technologies de l’information et de la communication.

Sur la base d’une étude quantitative menée auprès d’étudiants d’une université française, croisée à une approche qualitative menée auprès d’enseignants, nous caractérisons les mouvements de recomposition des EPA, à la fois sur la base de leur hybridité et des processus de négociation et d’ajustement qui les guident, entre prescriptions d’usages et pratiques personnelles.

Cette démarche vise à questionner à la fois les éléments factuels ainsi que les intentions et les représentations qui y sont associées.

URL : https://journals.openedition.org/dms/3984

EN

Research integrity: environment, experience, or ethos?

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Bjørn Hofmann, Søren Holm

Background

Research integrity has gained attention in the general public as well as in the
research community. We wanted to investigate knowledge, attitudes, and practices amongst researchers that have recently finished their PhD and compare this to their responses during their PhD fellowship. In particular, we wanted to investigate whether their attitudes are related to their experiences of their immediate research environment.

Material and method

Researchers (n = 86) awarded the PhD degree at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Oslo in 2016 were invited to answer a questionnaire about knowledge, attitudes, and actions related to scientific dishonesty. Seventy-two responded (83.7%). The results were compared with results among first-year doctoral students who responded to the same questionnaire during 2010–2017.

Results

Overall, 13% of PhDs reported that they knew of people in their immediate research environment who had committed serious forms of scientific dishonesty. A small percentage of PhDs (1.4%) indicated that they themselves had committed such acts. About 3% of the candidates had experienced pressure to commit serious forms of dishonesty and nearly a third of respondents had experienced unethical pressure with respect to authorship during the course of their fellowship.

Thirteen percent reported that they had experienced unethical pressure in relation to other forms of dishonesty and 11% had experienced the consequences of some form of scientific dishonesty. Eighteen percent of the respondents believed that one or more actions, which in the literature were perceived as scientific misconduct, were not wrong. We find a connection between attitudes and the perceived research integrity of their research environment.

The results also show a difference between PhD students and graduated PhDs in terms of scientific dishonesty. In some areas, the PhDs’ norms are stricter, such as for the use of statistical analysis methods, while there is little change in others, such as in misconduct in order to expedite publications.

Conclusion

Many PhDs knew about serious forms of scientific misconduct from the research environment in which they are trained, and some also report misconduct themselves.

Some experienced pressure to serious forms of misconduct and a large proportion of the respondents had experienced unethical pressure with respect to authorship during their fellowship. Attitudes change during the PhD studies, but ambiguously. Scientific misconduct seems to be an environmental issue as much as a matter of personal integrity.

URL : Research integrity: environment, experience, or ethos?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1747016119880844

 

EN

Public Microbial Resource Centers: Key Hubs for Findable,Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) Microorganismsand Genetic Materials

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : P. Becker, M. Bosschaerts, P. Chaerle, H.-M. Daniel, A. Hellemans, A. Olbrechts, L. Rigouts, A. Wilmotte, M. Hendrickx

In the context of open science, the availability of research materials is essential for knowledge accumulation and to maximize the impact of scientific research. In microbiology, microbial domain biological resource centers (mBRCs) have long-standing experience in preserving and distributing authenticated microbial strains and genetic materials (e.g., recombinant plasmids and DNA libraries) to support new discoveries and follow-on studies.

These culture collections play a central role in the conservation of microbial biodiversity and have expertise in cultivation, characterization, and taxonomy of microorganisms. Information associated with preserved biological resources is recorded in databases and is accessible through online catalogues.

Legal expertise developed by mBRCs guarantees end users the traceability and legality of the acquired material, notably with respect to the Nagoya Protocol. However, awareness of the advantages of depositing biological materials in professional repositories remains low, and the necessity of securing strains and genetic resources for future research must be emphasized.

This review describes the unique position of mBRCs in microbiology and molecular biology through their history, evolving roles, expertise, services, challenges, and international collaborations. It also calls for an increased deposit of strains and genetic resources, a responsibility shared by scientists, funding agencies, and publishers.

Journal policies requesting a deposit during submission of a manuscript represent one of the measures to make more biological materials available to the broader community, hence fully releasing their potential and improving openness and reproducibility in scientific research.

URL : https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/240381/1/Applied%20and%20Environmental%20Microbiology-2019-Becker-e01444-19.full-1.pdf

EN

The institutional repository landscape in medical schools and academic health centers: a 2018 snapshot view and analysis

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Daniel G. Kipnis, Lisa A. Palmer, Ramune K. Kubilius

Objective

This study uses survey research methods to gain a deeper understanding of the institutional repository (IR) landscape in medical schools and academic health centers.

Methods

Members of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) were surveyed about their IRs. The authors used a mixed-methods approach of a survey and qualitative content analysis to identify common themes.

Results

Survey results indicate that a large majority of responding medical schools and academic health centers have or are implementing an IR (35 out of 50, 70%). Of these, 60% (21 institutions) participate in an institution-wide IR rather than administer their own repositories.

Much of the archived content is grey literature that has not already been published, but the percentage of original content varies greatly among institutions. The majority (57.1%) of respondent institutions are not considering an open access policy or mandate. Most institutions (71.4%) reported that repository staff are depositing materials on behalf of users.

DSpace and bepress Digital Commons are the most popular repository platforms in this community. The planned enhancements that were most frequently reported were implementing a discovery layer and ORCID integration. The majority of respondents (54.3%) do not plan to migrate to a different platform in the foreseeable future.

Analysis of respondent comments identified the following themes: integration, redundancy, and reporting; alternatives and exploration; uniqueness; participation; and funding and operations.

Conclusions

The study results capture a view of the IR landscape in medical schools and academic health centers and help readers understand what services their peers have in place as well as their plans for future developments.

URL : The institutional repository landscape in medical schools and academic health centers: a 2018 snapshot view and analysis

DOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.5195%2Fjmla.2019.653

EN

From Academia to Software Development: Publication Citations in Source Code Comments

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Akira Inokuchi, Yusuf Sulistyo Nugroho, Fumiaki Konishi, Hideaki Hata, Akito Monden, Kenichi Matsumoto

Academic publications have been evaluated with the impact on research communities based on the number of citations. On the other hand, the impact of academic publications on industry has been rarely studied.

This paper investigates how academic publications contribute to software development by analyzing publication citations in source code comments in open source software repositories.

We propose an automated approach of detecting academic publications based on Named Entity Recognition, and achieve 0.90 in F1 as detection accuracy. We conduct a large-scale study of publication citations with 319,438,977 comments collected from active 25,925 repositories written in seven programming languages.

Our findings indicate that academic publications can be knowledge sources of software development, and there can be potential issues of obsoleting knowledge.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.06932