EN

Discovery and Reuse of Open Datasets: An Exploratory Study

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Sara Mannheimer, Leila Belle Sterman, Susan Borda

Objective

This article analyzes twenty cited or downloaded datasets and the repositories that house them, in order to produce insights that can be used by academic libraries to encourage discovery and reuse of research data in institutional repositories.

Methods

Using Thomson Reuters’ Data Citation Index and repository download statistics, we identified twenty cited/downloaded datasets. We documented the characteristics of the cited/downloaded datasets and their corresponding repositories in a self-designed rubric.

The rubric includes six major categories: basic information; funding agency and journal information; linking and sharing; factors to encourage reuse; repository characteristics; and data description.

Results

Our small-scale study suggests that cited/downloaded datasets generally comply with basic recommendations for facilitating reuse: data are documented well; formatted for use with a variety of software; and shared in established, open access repositories.

Three significant factors also appear to contribute to dataset discovery: publishing in discipline-specific repositories; indexing in more than one location on the web; and using persistent identifiers.

The cited/downloaded datasets in our analysis came from a few specific disciplines, and tended to be funded by agencies with data publication mandates.

Conclusions

The results of this exploratory research provide insights that can inform academic librarians as they work to encourage discovery and reuse of institutional datasets.

Our analysis also suggests areas in which academic librarians can target open data advocacy in their communities in order to begin to build open data success stories that will fuel future advocacy efforts.

URL : Discovery and Reuse of Open Datasets: An Exploratory Study

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2016.1091

EN

Chinese Postgraduate Medical Students Researching for Publication

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Yongyan Li

The value of including a research component in medical students’ training programs has been widely recognized. Nevertheless, examples of how this may be done are rarely found in the literature.

The case study reported in this short paper aimed to address this gap in the literature by investigating how a group of postgraduate students attached to the Orthopedics Department of a major hospital in China engaged in research for publication.

Fourteen students were interviewed, and their “mission lists” were analyzed to reveal the students’ research profiles, the sources of their research ideas, and their data collection activities.

The study showed that the students pursued more clinical than basic research topics, their research topics often fell under their immediate supervisors’ larger projects, and the students were actively engaged in the gathering of research data on the wards and at the outpatient clinic.

The reported study does not claim generalizability of its findings. More of such reports from various settings in different parts of the world are needed to enhance constructive exchanges and mutual learning.

URL : Chinese Postgraduate Medical Students Researching for Publication

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/publications4030025

EN

arXiv@25: Key findings of a user survey

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Oya Y. Rieger, Gail Steinhart, Deborah Cooper

As part of its 25th anniversary vision-setting process, the arXiv team at Cornell University Library conducted a user survey in April 2016 to seek input from the global user community about arXiv’s current services and future directions.

We were heartened to receive 36,000 responses from 127 countries, representing arXiv’s diverse, global community. The prevailing message is that users are happy with the service as it currently stands, with 95 percent of survey respondents indicating they are very satisfied or satisfied with arXiv.

Furthermore, 72 percent of respondents indicated that arXiv should continue to focus on its main purpose, which is to quickly make available scientific papers, and this will be enough to sustain the value of arXiv in the future.

This theme was pervasively reflected in the open text comments; a significant number of respondents suggested remaining focused on the core mission and enabling arXiv’s partners and related service providers to continue to build new services and innovations on top of arXiv.

URL : arXiv@25: Key findings of a user survey

Alternative location : http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.08212

EN

Write up! A Study of Copyright Information on Library-Published Journals

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Melanie Schlosser

INTRODUCTION

Libraries have a mission to educate users about copyright, and library publishing staff are often involved in that work. This article investigates a concrete point of intersection between the two areas – copyright statements on library-published journals.

METHODS

Journals published by members of the Library Publishing Coalition were examined for open access status, type and placement of copyright information, copyright ownership, and open licensing.

RESULTS

Journals in the sample were overwhelmingly (93%) open access. 80% presented copyright information of some kind, but only 30% of those included it at both the journal and the article level.

Open licensing was present in 38% of the journals, and the most common ownership scenario was the author retaining copyright while granting a nonexclusive license to the journal or publisher. 9% of the sample journals included two or more conflicting rights statements.

DISCUSSION

76% of the journals did not consistently provide accurate, easily-accessible rights information, and numerous problems were found with the use of open licensing, including conflicting licenses, incomplete licenses, and licenses not appearing at the article level.

CONCLUSION

Recommendations include presenting full copyright and licensing information at both the journal and the article level, careful use of open licenses, and publicly-available author agreements.

URL : Write up! A Study of Copyright Information on Library-Published Journals

DOI: http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2110

EN

The Journal Article as a Means to Share Data: a Content Analysis of Supplementary Materials from Two Disciplines

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Jeremy Kenyon, Nancy Sprague, Edward Flathers

INTRODUCTION

The practice of publishing supplementary materials with journal articles is becoming increasingly prevalent across the sciences.

We sought to understand better the content of these materials by investigating the differences between the supplementary materials published by authors in the geosciences and plant sciences.

METHODS

We conducted a random stratified sampling of four articles from each of 30 journals published in 2013. In total, we examined 297 supplementary data files for a range of different factors.

RESULTS

We identified many similarities between the practices of authors in the two fields, including the formats used (Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs) and the small size of the files.

There were differences identified in the content of the supplementary materials: the geology materials contained more maps and machine-readable data; the plant science materials included much more tabular data and multimedia content.

DISCUSSION

Our results suggest that the data shared through supplementary files in these fields may not lend itself to reuse. Code and related scripts are not often shared, nor is much ‘raw’ data. Instead, the files often contain summary data, modified for human reading and use.

CONCLUSION

Given these and other differences, our results suggest implications for publishers, librarians, and authors, and may require shifts in behavior if effective data sharing is to be realized.

URL : The Journal Article as a Means to Share Data: a Content Analysis of Supplementary Materials from Two Disciplines

DOI : http://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2112

EN

Academic Publishing: Making the Implicit Explicit

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Cecile Badenhorst, Xiaolin Xu

For doctoral students, publishing in peer-reviewed journals is a task many face with anxiety and trepidation. The world of publishing, from choosing a journal, negotiating with editors and navigating reviewers’ responses is a bewildering place.

Looking in from the outside, it seems that successful and productive academic writers have knowledge that is inaccessible to novice scholars. While there is a growing literature on writing for scholarly publication, many of these publications promote writing and publishing as a straightforward activity that anyone can achieve if they follow the rules.

We argue that the specific and situated contexts in which academic writers negotiate publishing practices is more complicated and messy. In this paper, we attempt to make explicit our publishing processes to highlight the complex nature of publishing.

We use autoethnographic narratives to provide discussion points and insights into the challenges of publishing peer reviewed articles. One narrative is by a doctoral student at the beginning of her publishing career, who expresses her desires, concerns and anxieties about writing for publication.

The other narrative focuses on the publishing practices of a more experienced academic writer. Both are international scholars working in the Canadian context. The purpose of this paper is to explore academic publishing through the juxtaposition of these two narratives to make explicit some of the more implicit processes.

Four themes emerge from these narratives. To publish successfully, academic writers need: (1) to be discourse analysts; (2) to have a critical competence; (3) to have writing fluency; and (4) to be emotionally intelligent.

URL : Academic Publishing: Making the Implicit Explicit

Alternative location  : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/4/3/24

EN

Contours du document numérique connecté

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteur/Author : Evelyne Broudoux

Cette introduction à Cide s’attache à cerner une tendance de l’évolution du document numérique depuis sa théorisation interdisciplinaire par l’auteur collectif Pédauque en 2006, en un triangle constitué par la forme, le signe, la médiation.

La première observation est que les limites internes et externes au document numérique se sont modifiées depuis une dizaine d’années.

Trois types de documents en apportent la preuve : le document publié, connecté sur la toile ; le document-processus, support d’une collaboration ; le document support d’écrilecture.

Au document connecté sont associés des collections virtuelles que les moteurs de recommandations sont capables de constituer et diverses modalités d’annotations. Dans le document processus d’une collaboration, ce sont les éléments internes au document-container qui vont constituer des instances actualisables du document.

Le document support d’écrilecture est un document qui s’inscrit dans la tradition de la lecture-commentaire héritée des pratiques érudites d’exégèse des textes. Si l’annotation sémantique est un procédé qui vise à indexer une portion de texte à un thésaurus externe et à le relier à de futurs contextes de lecture, la commentarisation vise à procurer un feedback immédiat à l’auteur investi dans un travail d’écriture ou de publication.

L’examen de l’évolution de l’outillage de lecture d’articles scientifiques en ligne, des outils d’annotation et de commentarisation prouve qu’ils s’inscrivent dans la sémantisation du web. Nous ferons le constat qu’il existe une convergence entre l’approche structurelle et l’approche communicationnelle de Pédauque dans les projets d’humanités numériques.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01327851