EN

Global Data Quality Assessment and the Situated Nature of “Best” Research Practices in Biology

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Sabina Leonelli

This paper reflects on the relation between international debates around data quality assessment and the diversity characterising research practices, goals and environments within the life sciences.

Since the emergence of molecular approaches, many biologists have focused their research, and related methods and instruments for data production, on the study of genes and genomes.

While this trend is now shifting, prominent institutions and companies with stakes in molecular biology continue to set standards for what counts as ‘good science’ worldwide, resulting in the use of specific data production technologies as proxy for assessing data quality.

This is problematic considering (1) the variability in research cultures, goals and the very characteristics of biological systems, which can give rise to countless different approaches to knowledge production; and (2) the existence of research environments that produce high-quality, significant datasets despite not availing themselves of the latest technologies.

Ethnographic research carried out in such environments evidences a widespread fear among researchers that providing extensive information about their experimental set-up will affect the perceived quality of their data, making their findings vulnerable to criticisms by better-resourced peers. T

hese fears can make scientists resistant to sharing data or describing their provenance. To counter this, debates around Open Data need to include critical reflection on how data quality is evaluated, and the extent to which that evaluation requires a localised assessment of the needs, means and goals of each research environment.

URL : Global Data Quality Assessment and the Situated Nature of “Best” Research Practices in Biology

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2017-032

EN

Reproducibility2020: Progress and priorities

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Leonard P. Freedman, Gautham Venugopalan, Rosann Wisman

The preclinical research process is a cycle of idea generation, experimentation, and reporting of results. The biomedical research community relies on the reproducibility of published discoveries to create new lines of research and to translate research findings into therapeutic applications.

Since 2012, when scientists from Amgen reported that they were able to reproduce only 6 of 53 “landmark” preclinical studies, the biomedical research community began discussing the scale of the reproducibility problem and developing initiatives to address critical challenges.

Global Biological Standards Institute (GBSI) released the “Case for Standards” in 2013, one of the first comprehensive reports to address the rising concern of irreproducible biomedical research.

Further attention was drawn to issues that limit scientific self-correction, including reporting and publication bias, underpowered studies, lack of open access to methods and data, and lack of clearly defined standards and guidelines in areas such as reagent validation.

To evaluate the progress made towards reproducibility since 2013, GBSI identified and examined initiatives designed to advance quality and reproducibility. Through this process, we identified key roles for funders, journals, researchers and other stakeholders and recommended actions for future progress. This paper describes our findings and conclusions.

URL : Reproducibility2020: Progress and priorities

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11334.1

EN

A Preliminary Exploration of the Relationships Between Student-Created OER, Sustainability, and Students Success

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : David Wiley, Ashley Webb, Sarah Weston, DeLaina Tonks

This article explores the relationship between open educational resources (OER) created by students for use by other students, the long-term sustainability of the movement toward OER, and the success of students who use OER created by other students as part of their core curricular materials.

We begin by providing definitions and a broader context for thinking about the possibility of student-created OER. We then describe a course context in which student-created OER have been slowly integrated into an online class over several years and examine the impact on student learning associated with their introduction.

URL : http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3022/4222

EN

Research Data Management in Research Institutions in Zimbabwe

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Josiline Chigwada, Blessing Chiparausha, Justice Kasiroori

The research was aimed at evaluating how research data are being managed in research institutions in Zimbabwe. The study also sought to assess the challenges that are faced in research data management by research institutions in Zimbabwe.

Twenty five institutions of higher learning and other organisations that deal with research were selected using purposive sampling to participate in the study.

An online questionnaire on SurveyMonkey was sent to the selected participants and telephone interviews were done to follow up on participants who failed to respond on time. Data that were collected using interviews were entered manually into SurveyMonkey for easy analysis.

It was found out that proper research data management is not being done. Researchers were managing their own research data. Most of the research data were in textual and spreadsheet format. Graphical, audio, video, database, structured text formats and software applications research data were also available.

Lack of guidelines on good practice, inadequate human resources, technological obsolescence, insecure infrastructure, use of different vocabulary between librarians and researchers, inadequate financial resources, absence of research data management policies and lack of support by institutional authorities and researchers negatively impacted on research data management.

Authors recommend the establishment of research data repositories and use of existing research data repositories that are registered with the Registry of Research Data Repositories to ensure that research data standards are adhered to when doing research.

URL : Research Data Management in Research Institutions in Zimbabwe

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2017-031

 

EN

An Analysis of Federal Policy on Public Access to Scientific Research Data

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Adam Kriesberg, Kerry Huller, Ricardo Punzalan, Cynthia Parr

The 2013 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Memo on federally-funded research directed agencies with research and development budgets above $100 million to develop and release plans to increase and broaden access to research results, both published literature and data.

The agency responses have generated discussion and interest but are yet to be analyzed and compared. In this paper, we examine how 19 federal agencies responded to the memo, written by John Holdren, on issues of scientific data and the extent of their compliance to the directives outlined in the memo.

We present a varied picture of the readiness of federal science agencies to comply with the memo through a comparative analysis and close reading of the contents of these responses.

While some agencies, particularly those with a long history of supporting and conducting science, scored well, other responses indicate that some agencies have only taken a few steps towards implementing policies that comply with the memo.

These results are of interest to the data curation community as they reveal how different agencies across the federal government approach their responsibilities for research data management, and how new policies and requirements might continue to affect scientists and research communities.

URL : An Analysis of Federal Policy on Public Access to Scientific Research Data

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2017-027

EN

Usage Bibliometrics as a Tool to Measure Research Activity

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Edwin A. Henneken, Michael J. Kurtz

Measures for research activity and impact have become an integral ingredient in the assessment of a wide range of entities (individual researchers, organizations, instruments, regions, disciplines).

Traditional bibliometric indicators, like publication and citation based indicators, provide an essential part of this picture, but cannot describe the complete picture.

Since reading scholarly publications is an essential part of the research life cycle, it is only natural to introduce measures for this activity in attempts to quantify the efficiency, productivity and impact of an entity.

Citations and reads are significantly different signals, so taken together, they provide a more complete picture of research activity. Most scholarly publications are now accessed online, making the study of reads and their patterns possible.

Click-stream logs allow us to follow information access by the entire research community, real-time. Publication and citation datasets just reflect activity by authors. In addition, download statistics will help us identify publications with significant impact, but which do not attract many citations.

Click-stream signals are arguably more complex than, say, citation signals. For one, they are a superposition of different classes of readers. Systematic downloads by crawlers also contaminate the signal, as does browsing behavior.

We discuss the complexities associated with clickstream data and how, with proper filtering, statistically significant relations and conclusions can be inferred from download statistics.

We describe how download statistics can be used to describe research activity at different levels of aggregation, ranging from organizations to countries. These statistics show a correlation with socio-economic indicators.

A comparison will be made with traditional bibliometric indicators. We will argue that astronomy is representative of more general trends.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.02153

FR

Une brève histoire d’Okina

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteurs/Authors : Stéphanie Bouvier, Daniel Bourrion

Ouverte à sa communauté en février 2015, Okina, l’archive ouverte institutionnelle de l’Université d’Angers, a été développée au sein d’un projet global autour de l’Open Access.

Les lignes qui suivent retracent l’histoire de cette archive et la manière dont Okina est née puis a été portée politiquement. Elles se penchent également sur les choix techniques comme stratégiques ou humains effectués le long du chemin, qui ont permis que de vagues idées se concrétisent dans un objet fonctionnel né de (presque) rien.

URL : http://bbf.enssib.fr/contributions/une-breve-histoire-d-okina