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Data-Sprinting: a Public Approach to Digital Research

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Tommaso Venturini, Anders Munk, Axel Meunier

This chapter is about the politics of interdisciplinarity. Not in the sense of the research politics fostering collaboration across disciplines, but in the stronger sense of transcending disciplinary boundaries to make significant political contributions.

In short: it is about making research public. To address this question, this chapter introduces (through a concrete example in climate debate research) an original research format, that we call data-sprinting.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01672288

EN

Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action: The Lessons that Olson can Teach us

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Cameron Neylon

The infrastructures that underpin scholarship and research, including repositories, curation systems, aggregators, indexes and standards, are public goods. Finding sustainability models to support them is a challenge due to free-loading, where someone who does not contribute to the support of an infrastructure nonetheless gains the benefit of it.

The work of Mancur Olson (1965) suggests that there are only three ways to address this for large groups: compelling all potential users, often through some form of taxation, to support the infrastructure; providing non-collective (club) goods to contributors that are created as a side-effect of providing the collective good; or implementing mechanisms that lower the effective number of participants in the negotiation (oligopoly).

In this paper, I use Olson’s framework to analyse existing scholarly infrastructures and proposals for the sustainability of new infrastructures. This approach provides some important insights.

First, it illustrates that the problems of sustainability are not merely ones of finance but of political economy, which means that focusing purely on financial sustainability in the absence of considering governance principles and community is the wrong approach.

The second key insight this approach yields is that the size of the community supported by an infrastructure is a critical parameter. Sustainability models will need to change over the life cycle of an infrastructure with the growth (or decline) of the community.

In both cases, identifying patterns for success and creating templates for governance and sustainability could be of significant value.

Overall, this analysis demonstrates a need to consider how communities, platforms, and finances interact and suggests that a political economic analysis has real value.

URL : Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action: The Lessons that Olson can Teach us

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/kula.7

 

EN

“Let the community decide”? The vision and reality of soundness-only peer review in open-access mega-journals

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Valerie Spezi, Simon Wakeling, Stephen Pinfield, Jenny Fry, Claire Creaser, Peter Willett

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the theory and practice of peer review in open-access mega-journals (OAMJs). OAMJs typically operate a “soundness-only” review policy aiming to evaluate only the rigour of an article, not the novelty or significance of the research or its relevance to a particular community, with these elements being left for “the community to decide” post-publication.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper reports the results of interviews with 31 senior publishers and editors representing 16 different organisations, including 10 that publish an OAMJ. Thematic analysis was carried out on the data and an analytical model developed to explicate their significance.

Findings

Findings suggest that in reality criteria beyond technical or scientific soundness can and do influence editorial decisions. Deviations from the original OAMJ model are both publisher supported (in the form of requirements for an article to be “worthy” of publication) and practice driven (in the form of some reviewers and editors applying traditional peer review criteria to OAMJ submissions). Also publishers believe post-publication evaluation of novelty, significance and relevance remains problematic.

Originality/value

The study is based on unprecedented access to senior publishers and editors, allowing insight into their strategic and operational priorities.

The paper is the first to report in-depth qualitative data relating specifically to soundness-only peer review for OAMJs, shedding new light on the OAMJ phenomenon and helping inform discussion on its future role in scholarly communication. The paper proposes a new model for understanding the OAMJ approach to quality assurance, and how it is different from traditional peer review.

URL : “Let the community decide”? The vision and reality of soundness-only peer review in open-access mega-journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-06-2017-0092

EN

Retraction Notices: Who Authored Them?

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Shaoxiong Brian Xu, Guangwei Hu

Unlike other academic publications whose authorship is eagerly claimed, the provenance of retraction notices (RNs) is often obscured presumably because the retraction of published research is associated with undesirable behavior and consequently carries negative consequences for the individuals involved.

The ambiguity of authorship, however, has serious ethical ramifications and creates methodological problems for research on RNs that requires clear authorship attribution. This article reports a study conducted to identify RN textual features that can be used to disambiguate obscured authorship, ascertain the extent of authorship evasion in RNs from two disciplinary clusters, and determine if the disciplines varied in the distributions of different types of RN authorship.

Drawing on a corpus of 370 RNs archived in the Web of Science for the hard discipline of Cell Biology and the soft disciplines of Business, Finance, and Management, this study has identified 25 types of textual markers that can be used to disambiguate authorship, and revealed that only 25.68% of the RNs could be unambiguously attributed to authors of the retracted articles alone or jointly and that authorship could not be determined for 28.92% of the RNs.

Furthermore, the study has found marked disciplinary differences in the different categories of RN authorship. These results point to the need for more explicit editorial requirements about RN authorship and their strict enforcement.

URL : Retraction Notices: Who Authored Them?

Alternative location : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/6/1/2

EN

Advancing Scientific Knowledge: Ethical Issues in the Journal Publication Process

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Richard H. McCuen

The goal of this paper is to assess the journal publication process from value and ethical perspectives.

The specific objectives are: (1) To define fundamental values relevant to scientific journal publication; (2) To identify stakeholders involved in professional journals and their value rights and responsibilities; (3) To discuss the steps of the journal publication process where ethical dilemmas arise and the potential influences of such dilemmas on the advancement of knowledge; and (4) To summarize actions that can minimize unethical practices throughout the steps of the publication process.

Values such as honesty, efficiency, accountability, and fairness will be discussed. Issues related to the various stakeholders such as self-citation, plagiarism, dual publication, a lack of timeliness, and issues related to authorship will be a primary focus.

URL : Advancing Scientific Knowledge: Ethical Issues in the Journal Publication Process

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/publications6010001

EN

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Data Management Training: DataONE’s Survey Instrument

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Chung-Yi Hou, Heather Soyka, Vivian Hutchison, Isis Sema, Chris Allen, Amber Budden

Effective management is a key component for preparing data to be retained for future long term access, use, and reuse by a broader community. Developing the skills to plan and perform data management tasks is important for individuals and institutions.

Teaching data literacy skills may also help to mitigate the impact of data deluge and other effects of being overexposed to and overwhelmed by data.

The process of learning how to manage data effectively for the entire research data lifecycle can be complex. There are often multiple stages involved within a lifecycle for managing data, and each stage may require specific knowledge, expertise, and resources.

Additionally, although a range of organizations offers data management education and training resources, it can often be difficult to assess how effective the resources are for educating users to meet their data management requirements.

In the case of Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE), DataONE’s extensive collaboration with individuals and organizations has informed the development of multiple educational resources. Through these interactions, DataONE understands that the process of creating and maintaining educational materials that remain responsive to community needs is reliant on careful evaluations.

Therefore, the impetus for a comprehensive, customizable Education EVAluation instrument (EEVA) is grounded in the need for tools to assess and improve current and future training and educational resources for research data management.

In this paper, the authors outline and provide context for the background and motivations that led to creating EEVA for evaluating the effectiveness of data management educational resources. The paper details the process and results of the current version of EEVA.

Finally, the paper highlights the key features, potential uses, and the next steps in order to improve future extensions and revisions of EEVA.

URL : Evaluating the Effectiveness of Data Management Training: DataONE’s Survey Instrument

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v12i2.508

EN

Understanding Factors that Encourage Research Productivity for Academic Librarians

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Kristin Hoffmann, Selinda Berg, Denise Koufogiannakis

Objective

This project identifies the factors that contribute to the success of librarians as active researchers. Research success is generally aligned with productivity and output, and the authors are therefore interested in understanding the factors that encourage research productivity. This fills a gap in the literature on librarians as researchers, which has tended to focus on barriers rather than enablers.

Methods

For this quantitative study, we distributed an online survey to 1,653 potential participants across Canada and received 453 usable responses for a 27% response rate. The survey asked participants to report their research outputs and to answer questions that addressed three categories of factors: Individual Attributes, Peers and Community, and Institutional Structures and Supports.

We then statistically analyzed participant responses in order to identify relationships between the research output variables (weighted output score and number of peer-reviewed articles) and the three categories, the factors within those categories, and the constituent components.

Results

Participants’ research output consisted largely of presentations, non-peer-reviewed articles, peer-reviewed articles, and posters. All three categories of factors were significantly related to research output, both for a calculated weighted output score and for number of peer-reviewed articles.

All of the factors identified within those categories were also significant when tested against weighted output score, but Intrinsic Motivations was not a significant factor when tested against number of peer-reviewed articles.

Several components of factors were also not significant for number of peer-reviewed articles. Age was the only significant component of Demographics. Three components of Education and Experience were significant: whether participants had received research training after completing their MLIS, whether they were working on an advanced degree, and the institution where they had obtained their MLIS.

Conclusions

Research productivity is significantly impacted by all three categories: Individual Attributes, Peers and Community, and Institutional Structures and Supports. Fostering an environment that focuses on all of these areas will be most likely to promote research output for librarians. At the same time, this study’s findings point to particular aspects that warrant further investigation, such as the nature and effect of institutional support and librarians’ motivations for doing research.

URL : Understanding Factors that Encourage Research Productivity for Academic Librarians

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.18438/B8G66F