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The Landscape of Rights and Licensing Initiatives for Data Sharing

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Sam Grabus, Jane Greenberg

Over the last twenty years, a wide variety of resources have been developed to address the rights and licensing problems inherent with contemporary data sharing practices.

The landscape of developments is this area is increasingly confusing and difficult to navigate, due to the complexity of intellectual property and ethics issues associated with sharing sensitive data.

This paper seeks to address this challenge, examining the landscape and presenting a Version 1.0 directory of resources. A multi-method study was pursued, with an environmental scan examining 20 resources, resulting in three high-level categories: standards, tools, and community initiatives; and a content analysis revealing the subcategories of rights, licensing, metadata & ontologies.

A timeline confirms a shift in licensing standardization priorities from open data to more nuanced and technologically robust solutions, over time, to accommodate for more sensitive data types.

This paper reports on the research undertaking, and comments on the potential for using license-specific metadata supplements and developing data-centric rights and licensing ontologies.

URL : The Landscape of Rights and Licensing Initiatives for Data Sharing

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-029

EN

Perceived publication pressure in Amsterdam: Survey of all disciplinary fields and academic ranks

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Tamarinde L. Haven, Lex M. Bouter, Yvo M. Smulders, Joeri K. Tijdink

Publications determine to a large extent the possibility to stay in academia (“publish or perish”). While some pressure to publish may incentivise high quality research, too much publication pressure is likely to have detrimental effects on both the scientific enterprise and on individual researchers.

Our research question was: What is the level of perceived publication pressure in the four academic institutions in Amsterdam and does the pressure to publish differ between academic ranks and disciplinary fields?

Investigating researchers in Amsterdam with the revised Publication Pressure Questionnaire, we find that a negative attitude towards the current publication climate is present across academic ranks and disciplinary fields.

Postdocs and assistant professors (M = 3.42) perceive the greatest publication stress and PhD-students (M = 2.44) perceive a significant lack of resources to relieve publication stress. Results indicate the need for a healthier publication climate where the quality and integrity of research is rewarded.

URL : Perceived publication pressure in Amsterdam: Survey of all disciplinary fields and academic ranks

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217931

EN

Plan S in Latin America: A precautionary note

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Humberto Debat​, Dominique Babini

Latin America has historically led a firm and rising Open Access movement and represents the worldwide region with larger adoption of Open Access practices.

Argentina has recently expressed its commitment to join Plan S, an initiative from a European consortium of research funders oriented to mandate Open Access publishing of scientific outputs.

Here we suggest that the potential adhesion of Argentina or other Latin American nations to Plan S, even in its recently revised version, ignores the reality and tradition of Latin American Open Access publishing, and has still to demonstrate that it will encourage at a regional and global level the advancement of non-commercial Open Access initiatives.

URL : Plan S in Latin America: A precautionary note

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27834v2

EN

Strengthening bibliodiversity: The current situation in France at national and institutional levels

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Jean-François Lutz, Jacques Lafait

Almost one year after the announcement of the French National Plan for Open Science, the intervention aims at presenting a progress report on achievements in strengthening bibliodiversity and setting up a National Open Science Fund, two of the objectives of the Plan.

At the national level, the work was carried out within a working group the Open Science Committee.

Four complementary aspects were taken into account:

  • the establishment of exemplary criteria to assess infrastructures and platforms in terms of governance, ethics, openness and sustainability. These 40 criteria are to be used in the evaluation of the initiatives that will apply to the National Open Science Fund.
  • support for the strategic orientation of the National Open Science Fund.
  • the drafting of recommendations for the implementation of Plan S by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), which is member of cOAlition S.
  • information exchange and coordination with other initiatives such as OA2020 and SCOSS.

URL : https://elpub.episciences.org/5529

EN

Citation.js: a format-independent, modular bibliography tool for the browser and command line

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Lars G Willighagen

Background

Given the vast number of standards and formats for bibliographical data, any program working with bibliographies and citations has to be able to interpret such data. This paper describes the development of Citation.js (https://citation.js.org/), a tool to parse and format according to those standards.

The program follows modern guidelines for software in general and JavaScript in specific, such as version control, source code analysis, integration testing and semantic versioning.

Results

The result is an extensible tool that has already seen adaption in a variety of sources and use cases: as part of a server-side page generator of a publishing platform, as part of a local extensible document generator, and as part of an in-browser converter of extracted references.

Use cases range from transforming a list of DOIs or Wikidata identifiers into a BibTeX file on the command line, to displaying RIS references on a webpage with added Altmetric badges to generating « How to cite this » sections on a blog.

The accuracy of conversions is currently 27 % for properties and 60 % for types on average and a typical initialization takes 120 ms in browsers and 1 s with Node.js on the command line.

Conclusions

Citation.js is a library supporting various formats of bibliographic information in a broad selection of use cases and environments. Given the support for plugins, more formats can be added with relative ease.

URL : Citation.js: a format-independent, modular bibliography tool for the browser and command line

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27466v2

EN

Open collaborative writing with Manubot

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Daniel S. Himmelstein, Vincent Rubinetti, David R. Slochower, Dongbo Hu, Venkat S. Malladi, Casey S. Greene, Anthony Gitter

Open, collaborative research is a powerful paradigm that can immensely strengthen the scientific process by integrating broad and diverse expertise. However, traditional research and multi-author writing processes break down at scale.

We present new software named Manubot, available at https://manubot.org, to address the challenges of open scholarly writing. Manubot adopts the contribution workflow used by many large-scale open source software projects to enable collaborative authoring of scholarly manuscripts.

With Manubot, manuscripts are written in Markdown and stored in a Git repository to precisely track changes over time. By hosting manuscript repositories publicly, such as on GitHub, multiple authors can simultaneously propose and review changes.

A cloud service automatically evaluates proposed changes to catch errors. Publication with Manubot is continuous: When a manuscript’s source changes, the rendered outputs are rebuilt and republished to a web page.

Manubot automates bibliographic tasks by implementing citation by identifier, where users cite persistent identifiers (e.g. DOIs, PubMed IDs, ISBNs, URLs), whose metadata is then retrieved and converted to a user-specified style.

Manubot modernizes publishing to align with the ideals of open science by making it transparent, reproducible, immediate, versioned, collaborative, and free of charge.

URL : Open collaborative writing with Manubot

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007128

EN

Share or perish: Social media and the International Journal of Mental Health Nursing

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Paul McNamara, Kim Usher

The impact of published research is sometimes measured by the number of citations an individual article accumulates. However, the time from publication to citation can be extensive. Years may pass before authors are able to measure the impact of their publication. Social media provides individuals and organizations a powerful medium with which to share information.

The power of social media is sometimes harnessed to share scholarly works, especially journal article citations and quotes. A non‐traditional bibliometric is required to understand the impact social media has on disseminating scholarly works/research.

The International Journal of Mental Health Nursing (IJMHN) appointed a social media editor as of 1 January 2017 to implement a strategy to increase the impact and reach of the journal’s articles.

To measure the impact of the IJMHN social media strategy, quantitative data for the eighteen months prior to the social media editor start date, and the eighteen months after that date (i.e.: from 01 July 2015 to 30 June 2018) were acquired and analysed.

Quantitative evidence demonstrates the effectiveness of one journal’s social media strategy in increasing the reach and readership of the articles it publishes.

This information may be of interest to those considering where to publish their research, those wanting to amplify the reach of their research, those who fund research, and journal editors and boards.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.12600