EN

Authorship of Retraction Notices: “If Names Are Not Rectified, Then Language Will Not Be in Accord with Truth.”

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Guangwei Hu

Retraction notices appear regularly in many scholarly journals, especially top-tier journals of science and engineering. One disconcerting feature of this emergent genre is evasion of authorship, that is, the deliberate obscuring of who has authored a particular retraction notice.

This communication illustrates and discusses problems of evaded authorship of retraction notices. To address these problems, it proposes that scholarly journals should require explicit authorship of retraction notices and the inclusion of core generic components such as the content to be retracted, the reason(s) for the retraction, the attribution of responsibility, and the expression of mortification.

URL : Authorship of Retraction Notices: “If Names Are Not Rectified, Then Language Will Not Be in Accord with Truth.”

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/publications5020010

EN

Data Management: New Tools, New Organization, and New Skills in a French Research Institute

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Caroline Martin, Colette Cadiou, Emmanuelle Jannès-Ober

In the context of E-science and open access, visibility and impact of scientific results and data have become important aspects for spreading information to users and to the society in general.

The objective of this general trend of the economy is to feed the innovation process and create economic value. In our institute, the French National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture, Irstea, the department in charge of scientific and technical information, with the help of other professionals (Scientists, IT professionals, ethics advisors…), has recently developed suitable services for the researchers and for their needs concerning the data management in order to answer European recommendations for open data.

This situation has demanded to review the different workflows between databases, to question the organizational aspects between skills, occupations, and departments in the institute.

In fact, the data management involves all professionals and researchers to asset their working ways together.

URL : Data Management: New Tools, New Organization, and New Skills in a French Research Institute

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10196

EN

Making Visualization Work for Institutional Repositories: Information Visualization as a means to browse electronic theses and dissertations

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Leila Belle Sterman, Susan Borda

INTRODUCTION

An attractive repository with clear, well-structured and accessible content can be a powerful recruitment and publicity tool for administrators, fundraisers, and others trying to bolster support for repositories.

Digitizing ETDs is a lengthy and often arduous process. Once that process is completed, it is often a victory that suffices. As a result, collections frequently receive no further treatment. We demonstrate the benefits of visualizing repository content.

DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT

The goal of the project was to create an interactive visualization to make our newly digitized theses and dissertations more discoverable.

By leveraging the institutional organization of College, Department and Year of Graduation, we visualized data to help users understand ETD content as a whole and find specific items more easily.

BUILDING THE VISUALIZATION

The process begins with data cleanup involving extracting and normalizing repository metadata, then the data is processed and the Data-Driven Documents (D3) JavaScript library is used to generate the actual visualization.

Benefits of Visualizations to Users: The visualization allows for the sort of happenstance discovery of materials that are celebrated about shelf browsing and a way to compare the productivity of each college and department at our university. It also illustrates our institution’s changes in emphasis over time.

NEXT STEPS

Visualizations have vast potential for creating engaging user interfaces for digital library content. We would like to explore how people are using the visualization as we move forward with this process to visualize multiple collections.

URL : Making Visualization Work for Institutional Repositories: Information Visualization as a means to browse electronic theses and dissertations

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2140

FR

Le défi de l’interopérabilité entre plates-formes pour la construction de savoirs augmentés en sciences humaines et sociales

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteurs/Authors : Camille Prime-Claverie, Annaïg Mahé

A l’ère numérique, le secteur de la recherche engendre une prolifération de contenus informatisés et garantir un meilleur accès aux résultats de recherche est un objectif qui pourrait paraître aisément réalisable.

Pourtant, depuis une décennie, le secteur de la communication scientifique traverse des mutations profondes qui se traduisent par des difficultés pour l’ensemble des acteurs à se positionner dans ce nouveau contexte.

L’information se retrouve disséminée au sein de plusieurs plateformes nées sous l’impulsion de différents types d’acteurs qui affichent des positions et intérêts parfois divergents.

Dans cet environnement largement distribué, la réalisation de l’interopérabilité devient un enjeu majeur pour un meilleur accès à l’IST, permettant en outre la circulation des données et leur enrichissement.

Cette contribution propose d’aborder la question de la circulation et du partage de la littérature scientifique en sciences humaines et sociales en France à partir de données moissonnables par le protocole OAI-PMH.

Elle tente mettre en exergue ce qui constitue des opportunités ou des freins pour la réutilisation, l’éditorialisation et la construction de savoirs augmentées dans ce domaine.

L’étude menée se centre sur cinq plateformes françaises mettant à disposition des documents scientifiques dans le domaine des SHS et sur l’étude d’un fournisseur de services proposant des fonctionnalités d’enrichissement.

URL : https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01511618

EN

On the origin of nonequivalent states: How we can talk about preprints

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Cameron Neylon, Damian Pattinson, Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin

Increasingly, preprints are at the center of conversations across the research ecosystem. But disagreements remain about the role they play. Do they “count” for research assessment?

Is it ok to post preprints in more than one place? In this paper, we argue that these discussions often conflate two separate issues, the history of the manuscript and the status granted it by different communities.

In this paper, we propose a new model that distinguishes the characteristics of the object, its “state”, from the subjective “standing” granted to it by different communities.

This provides a way to discuss the difference in practices between communities, which will deliver more productive conversations and facilitate negotiation, as well as sharpening our focus on the role of different stakeholders on how to collectively improve the process of scholarly communications not only for preprints, but other forms of scholarly contributions.

URL : On the origin of nonequivalent states: How we can talk about preprints

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11408.1

EN

What is open peer review? A systematic review

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Tony Ross-Hellauer

Background

“Open peer review” (OPR), despite being a major pillar of Open Science, has neither a standardized definition nor an agreed schema of its features and implementations. The literature reflects this, with a myriad of overlapping and often contradictory definitions.

While the term is used by some to refer to peer review where the identities of both author and reviewer are disclosed to each other, for others it signifies systems where reviewer reports are published alongside articles.

For others it signifies both of these conditions, and for yet others it describes systems where not only “invited experts” are able to comment. For still others, it includes a variety of combinations of these and other novel methods.

Methods

Recognising the absence of a consensus view on what open peer review is, this article undertakes a systematic review of definitions of “open peer review” or “open review”, to create a corpus of 122 definitions.

These definitions are then systematically analysed to build a coherent typology of the many different innovations in peer review signified by the term, and hence provide the precise technical definition currently lacking.

Results

This quantifiable data yields rich information on the range and extent of differing definitions over time and by broad subject area. Quantifying definitions in this way allows us to accurately portray exactly how  ambiguously the phrase “open peer review”  has been used thus far, for the literature offers a total of 22 distinct configurations of seven traits, effectively meaning that there are 22 different definitions of OPR in the literature.

Conclusions

Based on this work, I propose a pragmatic definition of open peer review as an umbrella term for a number of overlapping ways that peer review models can be adapted in line with the ethos of Open Science, including making reviewer and author identities open, publishing review reports and enabling greater participation in the peer review process.

URL : What is open peer review? A systematic review

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.1

EN

A Multi-dimensional Investigation of the Effects of Publication Retraction on Scholarly Impact

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Xin Shuai, Isabelle Moulinier, Jason Rollins, Tonya Custis, Frank Schilder, Mathilda Edmunds

Over the past few decades, the rate of publication retractions has increased dramatically in academia. In this study, we investigate retractions from a quantitative perspective, aiming to answer two fundamental questions.

One, how do retractions influence the scholarly impact of retracted papers, authors, and institutions? Two, does this influence propagate to the wider academic community through scholarly associations?

Specifically, we analyzed a set of retracted articles indexed in Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS), and ran multiple experiments to compare changes in scholarly impact against a control set of non-retracted articles, authors, and institutions.

We further applied the Granger Causality test to investigate whether different scientific topics are dynamically affected by retracted papers occurring within those topics.

Our results show two key findings: first, the scholarly impact of retracted papers and authors significantly decreases after retraction, and the most severe impact decrease correlates to retractions based on proven purposeful scientific misconduct; second, this retraction penalty does not seem to spread through the broader scholarly social graph, but instead has a limited and localized effect.

Our findings may provide useful insights for scholars or science committees to evaluate the scholarly value of papers, authors, or institutions related to retractions.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.09123