Authors : Authors : Elizabeth Jardine, Maureen Garvey, J. Silvia Cho
Is the Open Access movement meeting its goal of equalizing access to research worldwide? What we learned in libraries and archives during a delegation to Cuba inspired us to pursue this question.
Latin America has long used OA to share its research, but it still has not achieved parity in access and contribution with the developed world. We consider what the OA movement can do to relieve some of these global inequities.
Authors : Joachim Schöpfel, Coline Ferrant, Francis André, Renaud Fabre
The paper presents empirical evidence on the opinion and behaviour of French scientists (senior management level) regarding open access to scientific and technical information.
The results are part of a nationwide survey on scientific information and documentation with 432 directors of French public research laboratories conducted by the French Research Center CNRS in 2014.
1. The CNRS senior research managers (laboratory directors) globally share the positive opinion towards open access revealed by other studies with researchers from the UK, Germany, the United States and other countries. However, they are more supportive of open repositories (green road) than of OA journal publishing (gold).
2. The response patterns reveal a gap between generally positive opinions about open access and less supportive behaviours, principally publishing articles with APCs.
3. A small group of senior research managers does not seem to be interested in green or gold open access and reluctant to self-archiving and OA publishing.
4. Similar to other studies, the French survey confirms disciplinary differences, i.e. a stronger support for self-archiving of records and documents in HAL by scientists from
Mathematics, Physics and Informatics than from Biology, Earth Sciences and Chemistry; and more experience and positive feelings with open access publishing and payment of APCs in Biology than in Mathematics or in Social Sciences and Humanities. Disciplinary differences and specific French factors are discussed, in particular in the context of the new European policy in favour of Open Science.
For the first time, a nationwide survey was conducted with the senior research management level from all scientific disciplines.
The response rate was high (>30%), and the results provide good insight into the real awareness, support and uptake of open access by senior research managers who provide both models (examples for good practice) and opinion leadership.
Authors : Qing Ke, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Cassidy R. Sugimoto
Metrics derived from Twitter and other social media—often referred to as altmetrics—are increasingly used to estimate the broader social impacts of scholarship. Such efforts, however, may produce highly misleading results, as the entities that participate in conversations about science on these platforms are largely unknown.
For instance, if altmetric activities are generated mainly by scientists, does it really capture broader social impacts of science? Here we present a systematic approach to identifying and analyzing scientists on Twitter.
Our method can identify scientists across many disciplines, without relying on external bibliographic data, and be easily adapted to identify other stakeholder groups in science.
We investigate the demographics, sharing behaviors, and interconnectivity of the identified scientists.
We find that Twitter has been employed by scholars across the disciplinary spectrum, with an over-representation of social and computer and information scientists; under-representation of mathematical, physical, and life scientists; and a better representation of women compared to scholarly publishing.
Analysis of the sharing of URLs reveals a distinct imprint of scholarly sites, yet only a small fraction of shared URLs are science-related. We find an assortative mixing with respect to disciplines in the networks between scientists, suggesting the maintenance of disciplinary walls in social media.
Our work contributes to the literature both methodologically and conceptually—we provide new methods for disambiguating and identifying particular actors on social media and describing the behaviors of scientists, thus providing foundational information for the construction and use of indicators on the basis of social media metrics.
URL : A systematic identification and analysis of scientists on Twitter
Author :
Despite the growth of Open Access, illegally circumventing paywalls to access scholarly publications is becoming a more mainstream phenomenon. The web service Sci-Hub is amongst the biggest facilitators of this, offering free access to around 62 million publications.
So far it is not well studied how and why its users are accessing publications through Sci-Hub. By utilizing the recently released corpus of Sci-Hub and comparing it to the data of ~28 million downloads done through the service, this study tries to address some of these questions.
The comparative analysis shows that both the usage and complete corpus is largely made up of recently published articles, with users disproportionately favoring newer articles and 35% of downloaded articles being published after 2013.
These results hint that embargo periods before publications become Open Access are frequently circumnavigated using Guerilla Open Access approaches like Sci-Hub. On a journal level, the downloads show a bias towards some scholarly disciplines, especially Chemistry, suggesting increased barriers to access for these.
Comparing the use and corpus on a publisher level, it becomes clear that only 11% of publishers are highly requested in comparison to the baseline frequency, while 45% of all publishers are significantly less accessed than expected.
Despite this, the oligopoly of publishers is even more remarkable on the level of content consumption, with 80% of all downloads being published through only 9 publishers. All of this suggests that Sci-Hub is used by different populations and for a number of different reasons and that there is still a lack of access to the published scientific record.
A further analysis of these openly available data resources will undoubtedly be valuable for the investigation of academic publishing.
URL : Looking Into Pandora’s Box: The Content Of Sci-Hub And Its Usage
Authors : Monika Linne, Wolfgang Zenk-Möltgen
In the German social and economic sciences there is a growing awareness of flexible data distribution and research data reuse, especially as increasing numbers of research funders recommend publishing research data as the basis for scientific insight.
However, a data-sharing mentality has not yet been established in Germany attributable to researchers’ strong reservations about publishing their data.
This attitude is exacerbated by the fact that, at present, there is no trusted national data sharing repository that covers the particular requirements of institutions regarding research data.
This article discusses how this objective can be achieved with the project initiative SowiDataNet.
The development of a community-driven data repository is a logically consistent and important step towards an attitude shift concerning data sharing in the social and economic sciences.
Authors : Ralph Kenna, Olesya Mryglod, Bertrand Berche
Like it or not, attempts to evaluate and monitor the quality of academic research have become increasingly prevalent worldwide. Performance reviews range from at the level of individuals, through research groups and departments, to entire universities.
Many of these are informed by, or functions of, simple scientometric indicators and the results of such exercises impact onto careers, funding and prestige. However, there is sometimes a failure to appreciate that scientometrics are, at best, very blunt instruments and their incorrect usage can be misleading.
Rather than accepting the rise and fall of individuals and institutions on the basis of such imprecise measures, calls have been made for indicators be regularly scrutinised and for improvements to the evidence base in this area.
It is thus incumbent upon the scientific community, especially the physics, complexity-science and scientometrics communities, to scrutinise metric indicators. Here, we review recent attempts to do this and show that some metrics in widespread use cannot be used as reliable indicators research quality.
URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.10407
Authors : Simon Wakeling, Peter Willett, Claire Creaser, Jenny Fry , Stephen Pinfield, Valerie Spezi
Open-Access Mega-Journals (OAMJs) are a relatively new and increasingly important publishing phenomenon. The journal Medicine is in the unique position of having transitioned in 2014 from being a ‘traditional’ highly-selective journal to the OAMJ model.
This study compares the bibliometric profile of the journal Medicine before and after its transition to the OAMJ model. Three standard modes of bibliometric analysis are employed, based on data from Web of Science: journal output volume, author characteristics, and citation analysis.
The journal’s article output is seen to have grown hugely since its conversion to an OAMJ, a rise driven in large part by authors from China. Articles published since 2015 have fewer citations, and are cited by lower impact journals than articles published before the OAMJ transition.
The adoption of the OAMJ model has completely changed the bibliometric profile of the journal, raising questions about the impact of OAMJ peer-review practices. In many respects, the post-2014 version of Medicine is best viewed as a new journal rather than a continuation of the original title.