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Open Access in the United Kingdom

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Martin Paul Eve

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has been a leader in the advance towards open access (OA) to scholarship and research. Indeed, a combination of centralized, state research-funding bodies, coupled with a nationwide openness and transparency agenda has created an economic and political climate in which discourses of open science and scholarship can flourish.

Although different parts of UK policy on open access have not been universally well received by those in the academy and those in publishing, there have also been two official parliamentary hearings into open access; a set of reviews and recommendations, headed by Professor Adam Tickell; and a variety of implementation strategies from different private and public funders and institutions.

In this chapter, I briefly cover the political and economic elements of open access as they have emerged in the UK, spanning: funders, politics, institutions, publishers, and academics. Please note that this chapter will be available openly one year after publication.

URL : http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/16684/

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Survey on open peer review: Attitudes and experience amongst editors, authors and reviewers

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Tony Ross-Hellauer, Arvid Deppe, Birgit Schmidt

Open peer review (OPR) is a cornerstone of the emergent Open Science agenda. Yet to date no large-scale survey of attitudes towards OPR amongst academic editors, authors, reviewers and publishers has been undertaken.

This paper presents the findings of an online survey, conducted for the OpenAIRE2020 project during September and October 2016, that sought to bridge this information gap in order to aid the development of appropriate OPR approaches by providing evidence about attitudes towards and levels of experience with OPR.

The results of this cross-disciplinary survey, which received 3,062 full responses, show the majority (60.3%) of respondents to be believe that OPR as a general concept should be mainstream scholarly practice (although attitudes to individual traits varied, and open identities peer review was not generally favoured). Respondents were also in favour of other areas of Open Science, like Open Access (88.2%) and Open Data (80.3%).

Among respondents we observed high levels of experience with OPR, with three out of four (76.2%) reporting having taken part in an OPR process as author, reviewer or editor.

There were also high levels of support for most of the traits of OPR, particularly open interaction, open reports and final-version commenting. Respondents were against opening reviewer identities to authors, however, with more than half believing it would make peer review worse.

Overall satisfaction with the peer review system used by scholarly journals seems to strongly vary across disciplines. Taken together, these findings are very encouraging for OPR’s prospects for moving mainstream but indicate that due care must be taken to avoid a “one-size fits all” solution and to tailor such systems to differing (especially disciplinary) contexts.

OPR is an evolving phenomenon and hence future studies are to be encouraged, especially to further explore differences between disciplines and monitor the evolution of attitudes.

URL : Survey on open peer review: Attitudes and experience amongst editors, authors and reviewers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189311

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A Data Citation Roadmap for Scholarly Data Repositories

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Martin Fenner, Mercè Crosas, Jeffrey S. Grethe, David Kennedy, Henning Hermjakob, Phillippe Rocca-Serra, Gustavo Durand, Robin Berjon, Sebastian Karcher, Maryann Martone, Tim Clark

This article presents a practical roadmap for scholarly data repositories to implement data citation in accordance with the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles, a synopsis and harmonization of the recommendations of major science policy bodies.

The roadmap was developed by the Repositories Expert Group, as part of the Data Citation Implementation Pilot (DCIP) project, an initiative of FORCE11.org and the NIH BioCADDIE (https://biocaddie.org) program.

The roadmap makes 11 specific recommendations, grouped into three phases of implementation: a) required steps needed to support the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles, b) recommended steps that facilitate article/data publication workflows, and c) optional steps that further improve data citation support provided by data repositories.

URL : A Data Citation Roadmap for Scholarly Data Repositories

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1101/097196

 

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Knowledge processes and information quality in open data context: conceptual considerations and empirical findings

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Matti Keränen

In this thesis, the knowledge processes of firms using open weather data and information from Finnish Meteorological Institute are studied. The goal is to describe and understand the knowledge processes and factors contributing to open data use, and at the same time, describe how information quality intertwines in these processes.

The theoretical framework builds on the knowledge management concept of absorptive capacity describing knowledge processes in firms. Explicit and tacit knowledge as well as practical knowledge and their different epistemological premises are noted in the framework.

As a third theoretical component, information quality is defined as both technical property of artifacts and a constructive concept of shared meaning between the data provider and user.

The research process included semi-structured interviews of five firms using open data and an abductive analysis of the empirical material. The outcome is a knowledge management based interpretation of the firms’ knowledge processes, contributing factors and information quality in the open data context.

Firms select different roles and thereby different knowledge domains when exploiting open data. The exploitation process is multidimensional including elements absorbed from the technical domain, weather information and local context.

The technical quality of information is defined dynamically in different phases of exploitation, while quality as a constructive concept is defined in the exploitation process where different knowledge domains intersect.

URL : http://www.doria.fi/handle/10024/147649

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Data Sharing and Cardiology : Platforms and Possibilities

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Pranammya Dey, Joseph S. Ross, Jessica D. Ritchie, Nihar R. Desai, Sanjeev P. Bhavnani, Harlan M. Krumholz

Sharing deidentified patient-level research data presents immense opportunities to all stakeholders involved in cardiology research and practice. Sharing data encourages the use of existing data for knowledge generation to improve practice, while also allowing for validation of disseminated research.

In this review, we discuss key initiatives and platforms that have helped to accelerate progress toward greater sharing of data. These efforts are being prompted by government, universities, philanthropic sponsors of research, major industry players, and collaborations among some of these entities.

As data sharing becomes a more common expectation, policy changes will be required to encourage and assist data generators with the process of sharing the data they create.

Patients also will need access to their own data and to be empowered to share those data with researchers. Although medicine still lags behind other fields in achieving data sharing’s full potential, cardiology research has the potential to lead the way.

URL : http://www.onlinejacc.org/content/70/24/3018

 

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Monitoring the transition to open access: December 2017

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The studies on which this report is based were undertaken by a team led by Michael Jubb and comprising Andrew Plume, Stephanie Oeben and Lydia Brammer, Elsevier; Rob Johnson and Cihan Bütün, Research Consulting; Stephen Pinfield, University of Sheffield.

Following the Finch Report in 2012, Universities UK established an Open Access Coordination Group to support the transition to open access (OA)  for articles in scholarly journals. The Group  commissioned an initial report published in 2015 to gather evidence on key features of that transition.

This second report aims to build on those findings, and to examine trends  over the period since the major funders of research in the UK established new policies to promote OA.

URL : Monitoring the transition to open access: December 2017

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Research Data Management Instruction for Digital Humanities

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Willow Dressel

eScience related library services at Princeton University started in response to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) data management plan requirements, and grew to encompass a range of services including data management plan consultation, assistance with depositing into a disciplinary or institutional repository, and research data management instruction.

These services were initially directed at science and engineering disciplines on campus, but the eScience Librarian soon realized the relevance of research data management instruction for humanities disciplines with digital approaches.

Applicability to the digital humanities was initially recognized by discovery of related efforts from the history department’s Information Technology (IT) manager in the form of a graduate-student workshop on file and digital-asset management concepts.

Seeing the common ground these activities shared with research data management, a collaboration was formed between the history department’s IT Manager and the eScience Librarian to provide a research data management overview to the entire campus community.

The eScience Librarian was then invited to participate in the history department’s graduate student file and digital asset management workshop to provide an overview of other research data management concepts. Based on the success of the collaboration with the history department IT, the eScience Librarian offered to develop a workshop for the newly formed Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton.

To develop the workshop, background research on digital humanities curation was performed revealing similarities and differences between digital humanities curation and research data management in the sciences. These similarities and differences, workshop results, and areas of further study are discussed.

URL : Research Data Management Instruction for Digital Humanities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2017.1115