Linking Behavior in the PER Coauthorship Network

Authors : Katharine A. Anderson, Matthew Crespi, Eleanor C. Sayre

There is considerable long-term interest in understanding the dynamics of collaboration networks, and how these networks form and evolve over time. Most of the work done on the dynamics of social networks focuses on well-established communities.

Work examining emerging social networks is rarer, simply because data is difficult to obtain in real time. In this paper, we use thirty years of data from an emerging scientific community to look at that crucial early stage in the development of a social network.

We show that when the field is very young, islands of individual researchers labored in relative isolation, and the co authorship network is disconnected. Thirty years later, rather than a cluster of individuals, we find a true collaborative community, bound together by a robust collaboration network.

However, this change did not take place gradually — the network remained a loose assortment of isolated individuals until the mid-2000s, when those smaller parts suddenly knit themselves together into a single whole.

In the rest of this paper, we consider the role of three factors in these observed structural changes: growth, changes in social norms, and the introduction of institutions such as field-specific conferences and journals.

We have data from the very earliest years of the field, and thus are able to observe the introduction of two different institutions: the first field-specific conference, and the first field-specific journals.

We also identify two relevant behavioral shifts: a discrete increase in co authorship coincident with the first conference, and a shift among established authors away from collaborating with outsiders, towards collaborating with each other. The interaction of these factors gives us insight into the formation of collaboration networks more broadly.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.09339

Open Access in Context: Connecting Authors, Publications and Workflows Using ORCID Identifiers

Authors : Josh Brown, Tom Demeranville, Alice Meadows

As scholarly communications became digital, Open Access and, more broadly, open research, emerged among the most exciting possibilities of the academic Web.

However, these possibilities have been constrained by phenomena carried over from the print age. Information resources dwell in discrete silos. It is difficult to connect authors and others unambiguously to specific outputs, despite advances in algorithmic matching.

Connecting funding information, datasets, and other essential research information to individuals and their work is still done manually at great expense in time and effort. Given that one of the greatest benefits of the modern web is the rich array of links between digital objects and related resources that it enables, this is a significant failure.

The ability to connect, discover, and access resources is the underpinning premise of open research, so tools to enable this, themselves open, are vital. The increasing adoption of resolvable, persistent identifiers for people, digital objects, and research information offers a means of providing these missing connections.

This article describes some of the ways that identifiers can help to unlock the potential of open research, focusing on the Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID), a person identifier that also serves to link other identifiers.

URL : Open Access in Context: Connecting Authors, Publications and Workflows Using ORCID Identifiers

Alternative location : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/4/4/30

How subscription-based scholarly journals can convert to open access: A review of approaches

Authors : Mikael Laakso, David Solomon, Bo-Christer Björk

This article reviews the ways through which subscription-based scholarly journals have converted to open access. The methodology included a comprehensive literature review of both published and ‘grey’ literature, such as blog posts and press releases.

Eight interviews were also conducted with stakeholders representing different parts of the scholarly publishing landscape. Strategies of conversion for different types of journals are presented at multiple levels (publishers, national, research funders, organizational, and so on).

The identified scenarios are split into two main categories, those that rely heavily on article processing charges and those that can operate without relying on author-side financing.

Despite there being interesting and important shared traits among many converted journals, individual circumstances largely dictate what options for conversion are viable for a journal. There is no single solution that works for every journal but rather a broad selection of different solutions, among which selection should be well informed.

URL : How subscription-based scholarly journals can convert to open access: A review of approaches

Alternative location : http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/leap.1056/full

Où sont les données de la recherche ? : Essai de cartographie

Auteur/Author : Cécile Delay-Artous

La question émergente en France des données de la recherche se situe dans un cadre institutionnel foisonnant mais rigide, délicat à cerner. La recherche est aussi financée et évaluée au niveau européen.

Cette organisation nationale et européenne se double d’un aspect international inhérent à la recherche et aux échanges d’informations rapides et répétés, accélérés par le développement d’Internet.

Le labyrinthe institutionnel franco-européen se superpose ainsi avec le millefeuille international et disciplinaire du monde de la recherche. Enfin, la proximité de deux mouvements qui ne sont pourtant pas synonyme, l’Open Access et l’Open Data, vient encore troubler la compréhension de ce panorama.

Il n’est donc pas aisé de comprendre les rôles de chacun des acteurs quant aux données de la recherche. C’est à une clarification de ce paysage que nous nous proposons de participer, en initiant une cartographie des initiatives et acteurs visibles en France concernant les données des sciences humaines et sociales.

URL : https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01369745

Apport et limites des Humanités Numériques (HN) dans la construction, la reconstitution des réseaux d’acteurs à partir de l’exploitation d’une revue numérisée : l’exemple des Annales d’hygiène et de médecine coloniales (1898- 1940)

Auteur/Author : Isabelle Thiebau

Notre étude porte sur une revue médicale coloniale centenaire, ce qui s’avère relativement rare. Ce périodique est singulier non seulement parce qu’il dépend directement du ministère des Colonies, mais également parce qu’il traite de médecine, d’hygiène et de pharmacie coloniales et/ou tropicales, tandis que de nombreuses autres revues médicales se sont spécialisées autour d’une seule discipline.

De nombreuses questions se posent alors. Quelles spécificités relient une revue à un domaine colonial, médical et militaire ? Quel type de réseau peut-on établir autour d’une revue ? Quels sont les acteurs et leurs caractéristiques ? Quels sont les indicateurs significatifs et modélisant pour une revue ?

Pour y répondre, l’analyse des usages actuels des Humanités Numériques (HN) dans la construction ou la reconstitution de réseaux d’acteurs dans une revue médicale coloniale, semble pertinente. Néanmoins, il faut en souligner les apports, les modèles, les limites et les risques.

C’est ainsi, que nous prendrons position face à l’histoire des sciences, aux HN et à la médiation en fonction d’une prise de distance et d’une analyse réflexive de notre pratique, de nos essais et de nos besoins. Autrement dit, il y a bien sûr une part singulière et subjective à certaines de nos hypothèses de travail et de notre regard sur l’utilisation de certains outils et méthodes.

URL : http://memsic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/mem_01347103v1

Patterns of authors contribution in scientific manuscripts

Authors : Edilson A. Corrêa Jr., Filipi N. Silv, Luciano da F. Costa, Diego R. Amancio

Science is becoming increasingly more interdisciplinary, giving rise to more diversity in the areas of expertise within research labs and groups. This also have brought changes to the role researchers in scientific works. As a consequence, multi-authored scientific papers have now became a norm for high quality research.

Unfortunately, such a phenomenon induces bias to existing metrics employed to evaluate the productivity and success of researchers. While some metrics were adapted to account for the rank of authors in a paper, many journals are now requiring a description of the specific roles of each author in a publication.

Surprisingly, the investigation of the relationship between the rank of authors and their contributions has been limited to a few studies. By analyzing such kind of data, here we show, quantitatively, that the regularity in the authorship contributions decreases with the number of authors in a paper.

Furthermore, we found that the rank of authors and their roles in papers follows three general patterns according to the nature of their contributions, such as writing, data analysis, and the conduction of experiments.

This was accomplished by collecting and analyzing the data retrieved from PLoS ONE and by devising an entropy-based measurement to quantify the effective number of authors in a paper according to their contributions.

The analysis of such patterns confirms that some aspects of the author ranking are in accordance with the expected convention, such as the fact that the first and last authors are more likely to contribute more in a scientific work.

Conversely, such analysis also revealed that authors in the intermediary positions of the rank contribute more in certain specific roles, such as the task of collecting data.

This indicates that the an unbiased evaluation of researchers must take into account the distinct types of scientific contributions.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05545

Cost hurdles to open access publishing: A citizen scientist perspective

 Author : Wenfa Ng

Besides offering fun activities for non-scientists to explore the natural world through experiments, simulations or games, the evolving concept of citizen science is increasingly allowing some serious publication quality science to be published by the practitioners (citizen scientists) themselves.

The latter is in contrast to the common perception of citizen science, where most citizen science projects such as Foldit are distribution of piecemeal segments of complex projects suitable for solution by individuals, and where the results are pooled together, or used to inform the design and direction of more complex research initiatives.

Usually novices in science publishing but nonetheless aware of the importance of journal articles as the primary medium for communicating new research to the wider community (scientific and general public), citizen scientists do encounter significant challenges in science publication.

One challenge is in navigating the lengthy and time-consuming peer review process of most journals. But, as benefactors of open access publishing where most journal articles are within pay walls inaccessible to citizen scientists without any research funding, open access publishing is one platform sought after or exist as an option for citizen scientists.

Is the option open? Yes, at the preprint level where figshare, and PeerJ Preprints help provide an avenue for citizen scientists to have a published non peer reviewed article online, but no at the higher end “journal article” level where the manuscript needs to be peer reviewed. Even the biological sciences preprint server, bioRxiv, is closed to citizen scientists as publication on the server requires an institution affiliation with either a university or research institute. Most open access publishers (except eLife) charge a publication fee (in the thousands of dollars per article) to defray the cost of maintaining an online presence for a peer reviewed manuscript as well as those for copyediting during final stages of journal publication.

This is a significant barrier to cost constrained citizen scientists who want to contribute to the scientific discourse. For the scientific enterprise, this represent a loss, whose magnitude or severity cannot be quantified since ideas help seed new research or entirely new fields.

Thus, can we as a community provide citizen scientists worldwide a chance to publish open access peer reviewed articles without significant cost through a competitive publication fee subsidy scheme where each application is reviewed by the national science funding agency?

If the above is possible, it would open up another area where ideas from citizen scientists could percolate into the scientific mainstream, where, as always, vibrancy and diversity of ideas power science forward.

URL : Cost hurdles to open access publishing: A citizen scientist perspective

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2463v1