Building a Disciplinary, World‐Wide Data Infrastructure

Authors: Françoise Genova, Christophe Arviset, Bridget M. Almas, Laura Bartolo, Daan Broeder, Emily Law, Brian McMahon

Sharing scientific data with the objective of making it discoverable, accessible, reusable, and interoperable requires work and presents challenges being faced at the disciplinary level to define in particular how the data should be formatted and described.

This paper represents the Proceedings of a session held at SciDataCon 2016 (Denver, 12–13 September 2016). It explores the way a range of disciplines, namely materials science, crystallography, astronomy, earth sciences, humanities and linguistics, get organized at the international level to address those challenges. T

he disciplinary culture with respect to data sharing, science drivers, organization, lessons learnt and the elements of the data infrastructure which are or could be shared with others are briefly described. Commonalities and differences are assessed.

Common key elements for success are identified: data sharing should be science driven; defining the disciplinary part of the interdisciplinary standards is mandatory but challenging; sharing of applications should accompany data sharing. Incentives such as journal and funding agency requirements are also similar.

For all, social aspects are more challenging than technological ones. Governance is more diverse, often specific to the discipline organization. Being problem‐driven is also a key factor of success for building bridges to enable interdisciplinary research.

Several international data organizations such as CODATA, RDA and WDS can facilitate the establishment of disciplinary interoperability frameworks. As a spin‐off of the session, a RDA Disciplinary Interoperability Interest Group is proposed to bring together representatives across disciplines to better organize and drive the discussion for prioritizing, harmonizing and efficiently articulating disciplinary needs.

URL : Building a Disciplinary, World‐Wide Data Infrastructure

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2017-016

 

Betweenness and diversity in journal citation networks as measures of interdisciplinarity—A tribute to Eugene Garfield

Authors : Loet Leydesdorff, Caroline S. Wagner, Lutz Bornmann

Journals were central to Eugene Garfield’s research interests. Among other things, journals are considered as units of analysis for bibliographic databases such as the Web of Science and Scopus. In addition to providing a basis for disciplinary classifications of journals, journal citation patterns span networks across boundaries to variable extents.

Using betweenness centrality (BC) and diversity, we elaborate on the question of how to distinguish and rank journals in terms of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity, however, is difficult to operationalize in the absence of an operational definition of disciplines; the diversity of a unit of analysis is sample-dependent. BC can be considered as a measure of multi-disciplinarity.

Diversity of co-citation in a citing document has been considered as an indicator of knowledge integration, but an author can also generate trans-disciplinary—that is, non-disciplined—variation by citing sources from other disciplines.

Diversity in the bibliographic coupling among citing documents can analogously be considered as diffusion  or differentiation of knowledge across disciplines. Because the citation networks in the cited direction reflect both structure and variation, diversity in this direction is perhaps the best available measure of interdisciplinarity at the journal level.

Furthermore, diversity is based on a summation and can therefore be decomposed; differences among (sub)sets can be tested for statistical significance. In the appendix, a general-purpose routine for measuring diversity in networks is provided.

URL : Betweenness and diversity in journal citation networks as measures of interdisciplinarity—A tribute to Eugene Garfield

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2528-2

 

 

Pursuing Best Performance in Research Data Management by Using the Capability Maturity Model and Rubrics

Authors : Jian Qin, Kevin Crowston, Arden Kirkland

Objective

To support the assessment and improvement of research data management (RDM) practices to increase its reliability, this paper describes the development of a capability maturity model (CMM) for RDM. Improved RDM is now a critical need, but low awareness of – or lack of – data management is still common among research projects.

Methods

A CMM includes four key elements: key practices, key process areas, maturity levels, and generic processes. These elements were determined for RDM by a review and synthesis of the published literature on and best practices for RDM.

Results

The RDM CMM includes five chapters describing five key process areas for research data management: 1) data management in general; 2) data acquisition, processing, and quality assurance; 3) data description and representation; 4) data dissemination; and 5) repository services and preservation.

In each chapter, key data management practices are organized into four groups according to the CMM’s generic processes: commitment to perform, ability to perform, tasks performed, and process assessment (combining the original measurement and verification).

For each area of practice, the document provides a rubric to help projects or organizations assess their level of maturity in RDM.

Conclusions

By helping organizations identify areas of strength and weakness, the RDM CMM provides guidance on where effort is needed to improve the practice of RDM.

URL : Pursuing Best Performance in Research Data Management by Using the Capability Maturity Model and Rubrics

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2017.1113

Processus de diffusion des mémoires de Master. Littérature grise et accessibilité : un enjeu majeur dans le domaine de la Recherche. Étude de cas : projet MemorySID

Auteur/Author : Sylvain Vanacker

Ce mémoire a été élaboré à la suite d’un stage ayant eu lieu à l’Atelier National de Reproduction de Thèses de Villeneuve d’Ascq. Il s’agit d’une étude de cas concernant le Projet MemorySID et s’intéressant aux processus de traitement et de diffusion de mémoires de stage d’étudiants de Master en Sciences de l’Information et de la Documentation.

L’environnement de travail y est décrit ainsi que les missions confiées et la méthodologie mise en place. Ce mémoire de stage évoque les phases d’indexation et de vérification des méta-données de mémoires sur la plate-forme Nuxeo ainsi que les étapes de diffusion dans l’ENT de Lille 3 et en Libre Accès dans l’archive ouverte DUMAS.

Enfin, une analyse étudiant l’impact et l’importance qu’engendre l’accès aux mémoires de Master et à la Littérature Grise dans le domaine de la Recherche complète ce mémoire et permet de s’interroger sur l’intérêt de cette démarche.

URL : https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-01558312

 

A landscape study on open access and monographs : Policies, funding and publishing in eight European countries

Authors : Eelco Ferwerda, Frances Pinter, Niels Stern

The report builds on i.a. 73 in-depth conversations, conducted across eight different countries (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom, France, Norway and Austria) to understand current developments among three stakeholder groups: Publishers, funders and libraries. The importance of author attitudes, scholarly reward and incentive systems is also raised throughout the study by numerous interviewees.

The study shows that although the main OA policies do not include monographs, conversations about OA and monographs are surfacing and are expected to be accelerating over the next few years. The general explanation for monographs not being included in policies is the global focus on journal publishing and the perception that monographs are more complex to deal with than journals. Some also point to a lack of demand yet from authors.

In general, OA book publishers will comply with gold OA policies from funders and institutions. This is not the case for green OA. It appears that the current self archiving policies from publishers for books are largely restricted to book chapters.

The report also points towards the fact that funding schemes for books are lagging behind schemes for articles and their availability to fund the publishing process is somewhat ad hoc across the countries we’ve surveyed. Nevertheless the authors are ‘cautiously optimistic’ about the prospects for OA and monographs.

The report creates an overview of both the OA monographs policies, funding streams and publishing models for all eight countries for the first time.

URL : A landscape study on open access and monographs : Policies, funding and publishing in eight European countries

Alternative location : http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/id/eprint/6693

 

Visibilité numérique d’une revue scientifique en Sciences Humaines et Sociales. Une nouvelle opportunité pour les métiers du social média management

Auteur/Author : Flavien Cartiaux

Ce mémoire est le travail de six semaines de stage qui ont abouti à la création de document permettant la mise en place d’outils afin d’augmenter considérablement la visibilité et la réputation de la revue scientifique Anthropologie des Connaissances.

Ce mémoire soulève la question de l’utilité des outils de média sociaux pour les revues scientifiques, principalement dans le domaine des sciences humaines et sociales. Il sert à montrer que si les médias sociaux sont majoritairement utilisés pour les entreprises à des fins commerciales ainsi que pour surveiller leur e-réputation, ils peuvent également être des atouts importants pour des organismes à but non-lucratifs qui souhaiteraient augmenter leurs réseaux de connaissances via le web ou alors être plus visible par une plus grande communauté afin d’améliorer la diffusion de leurs savoirs sur Internet.

Ce mémoire est donc un ensemble de réflexions portant sur l’utilisation des médias sociaux en général ainsi que sur la mise en place d’une visibilité web pour les organismes scientifiques, par la création de compte sur les réseaux sociaux, mais aussi par le référencement dans des bases de données ou par la recherche de sociétés savantes en ligne.

Je cherche à démontrer que les métiers du social média management sont indispensables dans une stratégie de communication digitale et que des organismes provenant d’un milieu académique pourraient profiter de ces outils pour accroître leur présence sur le web et diffuser leurs contenus à un plus large public de chercheurs, mais aussi de personnes intéressées par les travaux de la recherche.

URL : https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-01611559

 

Towards Open Data for the Citation Content Analysis

Authors : Jose Manuel Barrueco, Thomas Krichel, Sergey Parinov, Victor Lyapunov, Oxana Medvedeva, Varvara Sergeeva

The paper presents first results of the CitEcCyr project funded by RANEPA. The project aims to create a source of open citation data for research papers written in Russian.

Compared to existing sources of citation data, CitEcCyr is working to provide the following added values: a) a transparent and distributed architecture of a technology that generates the citation data; b) an openness of all built/used software and created citation data; c) an extended set of citation data sufficient for the citation content analysis; d) services for public control over a quality of the citation data and a citing activity of researchers.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.00302