InfoDoc MicroVeille – Page 285 – Veille dédiée aux Sciences de l'Information et des Bibliothèques // Collecting and Sharing research papers in Library and Information science ISSN 2429-3938

Understanding Factors that Encourage Research Productivity for Academic Librarians

Posted on 4 janvier 2018 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

Studying Conceptual Models for Publishing Library Data to the Semantic Web

Posted on 4 janvier 2018 by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Sofia Zapounidou

This thesis studies the library data and the way that linked data technologies may affect libraries. The thesis aims to contribute to the research regarding the devel-opment and implementation of a framework for the integration of bibliographic data in the semantic web.

It seeks to make sound propositions for the interopera-bility of conceptual bibliographic models, as well as for future library systems and search environments integrating bibliographic information.

DOI : http://eprints.rclis.org/32108/

The Dutch Approach to Achieving Open Access

Posted on 4 janvier 2018 by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Maria A.M. Heijne, Wilma J.S.M. van Wezenbeek

In this paper, the authors – both of whom are library directors and involved in the contract negotiations with the bigger scientific publishers – present the conditions that formed the Dutch approach in these negotiations.

A combination of clear political support, a powerful delegation, a unique bargaining model and fidelity to their principles geared the Dutch to their success in achieving open access. The authors put these joint license and open access negotiations in the perspective of open science and show that they are part of the transition towards open access.

URL : https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/handle/18452/19356

Automating semantic publishing

Posted on 4 janvier 2018 by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Silvio Peroni

Semantic Publishing involves the use of Web and Semantic Web technologies and standards for the semantic enhancement of a scholarly work so as to improve its discoverability, interactivity, openness and (re-)usability for both humans and machines.

Recently, people have suggested that the semantic enhancements of a scholarly work should be undertaken by the authors of that scholarly work, and should be considered as integral parts of the contribution subjected to peer review. However, this requires that the authors should spend additional time and effort adding such semantic annotations, time that they usually do not have available.

Thus, the most pragmatic way to facilitate this additional task is to use automated services that create the semantic annotation of authors’ scholarly articles by parsing the content that they have already written, thus reducing the additional time required of the authors to that for checking and validating these semantic annotations.

In this article, I propose a generic approach called compositional and iterative semantic enhancement (CISE) that enables the automatic enhancement of scholarly papers with additional semantic annotations in a way that is independent of the markup used for storing scholarly articles and the natural language used for writing their content.

URL : Automating semantic publishing

Alternative location : https://content.iospress.com/articles/data-science/ds012

Balancing the local and the universal in maintaining ethical access to a genomics biobank

Posted on 4 janvier 2018 by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Catherine Heeney, Shona M. Kerr

Background

Issues of balancing data accessibility with ethical considerations and governance of a genomics research biobank, Generation Scotland, are explored within the evolving policy landscape of the past ten years. During this time data sharing and open data access have become increasingly important topics in biomedical research.

Decisions around data access are influenced by local arrangements for governance and practices such as linkage to health records, and the global through policies for biobanking and the sharing of data with large-scale biomedical research data resources and consortia.

Methods

We use a literature review of policy relevant documents which apply to the conduct of biobanks in two areas: support for open access and the protection of data subjects and researchers managing a bioresource.

We present examples of decision making within a biobank based upon observations of the Generation Scotland Access Committee. We reflect upon how the drive towards open access raises ethical dilemmas for established biorepositories containing data and samples from human subjects.

Results

Despite much discussion in science policy literature about standardisation, the contextual aspects of biobanking are often overlooked. Using our engagement with GS we demonstrate the importance of local arrangements in the creation of a responsive ethical approach to biorepository governance.

We argue that governance decisions regarding access to the biobank are intertwined with considerations about maintenance and viability at the local level. We show that in addition to the focus upon ever more universal and standardised practices, the local expertise gained in the management of such repositories must be supported.

Conclusions

A commitment to open access in genomics research has found almost universal backing in science and health policy circles, but repositories of data and samples from human subjects may have to operate under managed access, to protect privacy, align with participant consent and ensure that the resource can be managed in a sustainable way.

Data access committees need to be reflexive and flexible, to cope with changing technology and opportunities and threats from the wider data sharing environment. To understand these interactions also involves nurturing what is particular about the biobank in its local context.

URL : Balancing the local and the universal in maintaining ethical access to a genomics biobank

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-017-0240-7

Biotea: semantics for Pubmed Central

Posted on 4 janvier 2018 by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Alexander Garcia, Federico Lopez, Leyla Garcia, Olga Giraldo, Victor Bucheli, Michel Dumontier

A significant portion of biomedical literature is represented in a manner that makes it difficult for consumers to find or aggregate content through a computational query. One approach to facilitate reuse of the scientific literature is to structure this information as linked data using standardized web technologies.

In this paper we present the second version of Biotea, a semantic, linked data version of the open-access subset of PubMed Central that has been enhanced with specialized annotation pipelines that uses existing infrastructure from the National Center for Biomedical Ontology.

We expose our models, services, software and datasets. Our infrastructure enables manual and semi-automatic annotation, resulting data are represented as RDF-based linked data and can be readily queried using the SPARQL query language.

We illustrate the utility of our system with several use cases. Our datasets, methods and techniques are available at http://biotea.github.io.

URL : Biotea: semantics for Pubmed Central

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4201