Data Management Plan Requirements for Campus Grant Competitions: Opportunities for Research Data Services Assessment and Outreach

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Objective

To examine the effects of research data services (RDS) on the quality of data management plans (DMPs) required for a campus-level faculty grant competition, as well as to explore opportunities that the local DMP requirement presented for RDS outreach.

Methods

Nine reviewers each scored a randomly assigned portion of DMPs from 82 competition proposals. Each DMP was scored by three reviewers, and the three scores were averaged together to obtain the final score. Interrater reliability was measured using intraclass correlation.

Unpaired t-tests were used to compare mean DMP scores for faculty who utilized RDS services with those who did not. Unpaired t-tests were also used to compare mean DMP scores for proposals that were funded with proposals that were not funded. One-way ANOVA was used to compare mean DMP scores among proposals from six broad disciplinary categories.

Results

Analyses showed that RDS consultations had a statistically significant effect on DMP scores. Differences between DMP scores for funded versus unfunded proposals and among disciplinary categories were not significant. The DMP requirement also provided a number of both expected and unexpected outreach opportunities for RDS services.

Conclusions

Requiring DMPs for campus grant competitions can provide important assessment and outreach opportunities for research data services.

While these results might not be generalizable to DMP review processes at federal funding agencies, they do suggest the importance, at any level, of developing a shared understanding of what constitutes a high quality DMP among grant applicants, grant reviewers, and RDS providers.

URL : Data Management Plan Requirements for Campus Grant Competitions

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2016.1089

Access to human, animal, and environmental journals is still limited for the One Health community

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Objective

“One Health” is an interdisciplinary approach to evaluating and managing the health and well-being of humans, animals, and the environments they share that relies on knowledge from the domains of human health, animal health, and the environmental sciences.

The authors’ objective was to evaluate the extent of open access (OA) to journal articles in a sample of literature from these domains. We hypothesized that OA to articles in human health or environmental journals was greater than access to animal health literature.

Methods

A One Health seminar series provided fifteen topics. One librarian translated each topic into a search strategy and searched four databases for articles from 2011 to 2012.

Two independent investigators assigned each article to human health, the environment, animal health, all, other, or combined categories. Article and journal-level OA were determined. Each journal was also assigned a subject category and its indexing evaluated.

Results

Searches retrieved 2,651 unique articles from 1,138 journals; 1,919 (72%) articles came from 406 journals that contributed more than 1 article. Seventy-seven (7%) journals dealt with all 3 One Health domains; the remaining journals represented human health 487 (43%), environment 172 (15%), animal health 141 (12%), and other/combined categories 261 (23%).

The proportion of OA journals in animal health (40%) differed significantly from journals categorized as human (28%), environment (28%), and more than 1 category (29%). The proportion of OA for articles by subject categories ranged from 25%–34%; only the difference between human (34%) and environment (25%) was significant.

Conclusions

OA to human health literature is more comparable to animal health than hypothesized. Environmental journals had less OA than anticipated.

URL : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4816484/

On the Marginal Cost of Scholarly Communication

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We assessed the marginal cost of scholarly communication from the perspective of an agent looking to start an independent, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. We found that various vendors can accommodate all of the services required for scholarly communication for a price ranging between $69 and $318 per article.

In contrast, if an agent had access to software solutions replacing the services provided by vendors, the marginal cost of scholarly communication would be reduced to the cloud infrastructure cost alone and drop to between $1.36 and $1.61 per article.

Incidentally, DOI registration alone accounts for between 82% and 98% of this cost. While vendor cost typically decreases with higher volume, new offerings in cloud computing exhibit the opposite trend, challenging the notion that large volume publishers benefit from economies of scales as compared to smaller publishers.

Given the current lack of software solutions fulfilling the functions of scholarly communication, we conclude that the development of high quality “plug-and-play” open source software solutions would have a significant impact in reducing the marginal cost of scholarly communication, making it more open to experimentation and innovation.

URL : https://research.science.ai/article/on-the-marginal-cost-of-scholarly-communication

The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review

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Ongoing debates surrounding Open Access to the scholarly literature are multifaceted and complicated by disparate and often polarised viewpoints from engaged stakeholders. At the current stage, Open Access has become such a global issue that it is critical for all involved in scholarly publishing, including policymakers, publishers, research funders, governments, learned societies, librarians, and academic communities, to be well-informed on the history, benefits, and pitfalls of Open Access.

In spite of this, there is a general lack of consensus regarding the advantages or disadvantages of Open Access at multiple levels. This review aims to to be a resource for current knowledge on the impacts of Open Access by synthesizing important research in three major areas of impact: academic, economic and societal.

While there is clearly much scope for additional research, several key trends are identified, including a broad citation advantage for researchers who publish openly, as well as additional benefits to the non-academic dissemination of their work.

The economic case for Open Access is less well-understood, although it is clear that access to the research literature is key for innovative enterprises, and a range of governmental and non-governmental services.

Furthermore, Open Access has the potential to save publishers and research funders considerable amounts of financial resources. The social case for Open Access is strong, in particular for advancing citizen science initiatives, and leveling the playing field for researchers in developing countries.

Open Access supersedes all potential alternative modes of access to the scholarly literature through enabling unrestricted re-use, and long-term stability independent of financial constraints of traditional publishers that impede knowledge sharing.

Open Access remains only one of the multiple challenges that the scholarly publishing system is currently facing. Yet, it provides one foundation for increasing engagement with researchers regarding ethical standards of publishing.

We recommend that Open Access supporters focus their efforts on working to establish viable new models and systems of scholarly communication, rather than trying to undermine the existing ones as part of the natural evolution of the scholarly ecosystem. Based on this, future research should investigate the wider impacts of an ecosystem-wide transformation to a system of Open Research.

URL : The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review

Alternative location : http://f1000research.com/articles/5-632/v1

Archives Ouvertes de la Connaissance. Valoriser et diffuser les données de recherche

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Projet commun de l’Université de Strasbourg, l’Université de Haute-Alsace, l’Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA) et la Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire (BNU) de Strasbourg, les Archives Ouvertes de la Connaissance offriront aux (enseignants)-chercheurs et doctorants un service pour la valorisation de leurs données de recherche.

Ce mémoire propose, dans un premier temps, de replacer le projet dans le contexte des archives institutionnelles françaises et européennes, afin d’en dégager les spécificités ; dans un second temps, sont présentés les enjeux et les modalités de mise en forme et de diffusion des données de recherche, que produisent les établissements alsaciens partenaires et qui seront liées à l’archive ouverte.

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/66039-archives-ouvertes-de-la-connaissance-valoriser-et-diffuser-les-donnees-de-recherche.pdf

Alternative location : http://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/66039-archives-ouvertes-de-la-connaissance-valoriser-et-diffuser-les-donnees-de-recherche

OpenTrials: towards a collaborative open database of all available information on all clinical trials

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OpenTrials is a collaborative and open database for all available structured data and documents on all clinical trials, threaded together by individual trial.

With a versatile and expandable data schema, it is initially designed to host and match the following documents and data for each trial: registry entries; links, abstracts, or texts of academic journal papers; portions of regulatory documents describing individual trials; structured data on methods and results extracted by systematic reviewers or other researchers; clinical study reports; and additional documents such as blank consent forms, blank case report forms, and protocols.

The intention is to create an open, freely re-usable index of all such information and to increase discoverability, facilitate research, identify inconsistent data, enable audits on the availability and completeness of this information, support advocacy for better data and drive up standards around open data in evidence-based medicine.

The project has phase I funding. This will allow us to create a practical data schema and populate the database initially through web-scraping, basic record linkage techniques, crowd-sourced curation around selected drug areas, and import of existing sources of structured and documents.

It will also allow us to create user-friendly web interfaces onto the data and conduct user engagement workshops to optimise the database and interface designs.

Where other projects have set out to manually and perfectly curate a narrow range of information on a smaller number of trials, we aim to use a broader range of techniques and attempt to match a very large quantity of information on all trials. We are currently seeking feedback and additional sources of structured data.

URL : OpenTrials: towards a collaborative open database of all available information on all clinical trials

Alternative location : http://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-016-1290-8

Big data et bibliothèques : traitement et analyse informatiques des collections numériques

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Cette étude s’attache à présenter sous quels aspects les collections numériques des bibliothèques relèvent des problématiques propres aux données massives, et en quoi les techniques de fouille de données (text and data mining) représentent désormais une nécessité pour l’appropriation par les chercheurs des résultats de la littérature scientifique.

Ce travail, qui met au centre de son propos les techniques de fouille de données comme moyens de maîtriser la masse documentaire, identifie trois problématiques distinctes concernant les bibliothèques numériques et ces dispositifs de lecture algorithmiques : sont ainsi abordées successivement les démarches à mettre en oeuvre pour aider les chercheurs à faire usage de ces nouvelles méthodes de lecture, puis l’emploi de techniques de fouille de données sur les collections pour constituer de nouvelles formes d’instruments de recherche, et enfin l’usage de la fouille pour assister le traitement documentaire.

L’étude se conclut sur le détail des questions juridiques soulevées actuellement par la fouille de données, en rapport avec le droit de la propriété intellectuelle.

URL : Big data et bibliothèques : traitement et analyse informatiques des collections numériques

Alternative location : http://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/66017-big-data-et-bibliotheques-traitement-et-analyse-informatiques-des-collections-numeriques