EN

Stepping up Open Science Training for European Research

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Birgit Schmidt, Astrid Orth, Gwen Franck, Iryna Kuchma, Petr Knoth, José Carvalho

Open science refers to all things open in research and scholarly communication: from publications and research data to code, models and methods as well as quality evaluation based on open peer review.

However, getting started with implementing open science might not be as straightforward for all stakeholders. For example, what do research funders expect in terms of open access to publications and/or research data?

Where and how to publish research data? How to ensure that research results are reproducible? These are all legitimate questions and, in particular, early career researchers may benefit from additional guidance and training.

In this paper we review the activities of the European-funded FOSTER project which organized and supported a wide range of targeted trainings for open science, based on face-to-face events and on a growing suite of e-learning courses.

This article reviews the approach and experiences gained from the first two years of the project.

URL : Stepping up Open Science Training for European Research

Alternative location : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/4/2/16

EN

Open access – the rise and fall of a community-driven model of scientific communication

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Joachim Schöpfel

In 25 years, open access, i.e. free and unrestricted access to scientific information, has become a significant part of scientific communication. However, its success story should not conceal a fundamental change of its nature.

Open access started, together with the Web, at the grassroots, as a bottom-up, community-driven model of open journals and repositories. Today the key driving forces are no longer community-driven needs and objectives but commercial, institutional and political interests.

This development serves the needs of the scientific community insofar as more and more content becomes available through open journals and repositories. Yet, the fall of open access as a community-driven model is running the risk of becoming dysfunctional for the scientists and may create new barriers and digital divides.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/hal-01282744v1

EN

Are Wikipedia Citations Important Evidence of the Impact of Scholarly Articles and Books?

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Kayvan Koush, Mike Thelwall

Individual academics and research evaluators often need to assess the value of published research. Whilst citation counts are a recognised indicator of scholarly impact, alternative data is needed to provide evidence of other types of impact, including within education and wider society.

Wikipedia is a logical choice for both of these because the role of a general encyclopaedia is to be an understandable repository of facts about a diverse array of topics and hence it may cite research to support its claims.

To test whether Wikipedia could provide new evidence about the impact of scholarly research, this article counted citations to 302,328 articles and 18,735 monographs in English indexed by Scopus in the period 2005 to 2012.

The results show that citations from Wikipedia to articles are too rare for most research evaluation purposes, with only 5% of articles being cited in all fields. In contrast, a third of monographs have at least one citation from Wikipedia, with the most in the arts and humanities.

Hence, Wikipedia citations can provide extra impact evidence for academic monographs. Nevertheless, the results may be relatively easily manipulated and so Wikipedia is not recommended for evaluations affecting stakeholder interests.

URL : http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1993/papers/WikipediaCitations.pdf

FR

Le développement du réseau Mir@bel pour le signalement et l’accès aux revues francophones en SHS : Un exemple d’adaptation aux transformations du numérique

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteurs/Authors : Bernard Teissier, Sophie Fotiadi

Liée à la transition numérique, l’évolution des modalités de diffusion des revues en Sciences humaines et sociales (SHS) entraîne une évolution des méthodes et outils mis en œuvre par les professionnels de l’information pour signaler les accès en ligne et faire face à la très grande quantité d’information disponible, à sa dispersion, aux modèles économiques variés et à la question de l’accès ouvert.

La nécessité de maîtriser les métadonnées opérées et d’acquérir des compétences spécifiques a conduit à la mise en place du projet Mir@bel. Ce réseau documentaire produit une base de connaissance mutualisée, porte d’entrée sur les revues, qui intègre les bouquets commerciaux comme les revues en libre accès.

L’information sur les accès en ligne disponibles (texte intégral, résumés, sommaires) est enrichie de liens rebonds complémentaires. Les partenaires se partagent la veille sur les revues et contrôlent les flux de données agrégés automatiquement depuis les quatre principaux portails francophones (Cairn.info, Érudit, Persée, Revues.org).

Le développement et l’organisation du réseau, son ouverture internationale et la diversification des partenariats, comme l’évolution des pratiques professionnelles, sont d’autres acquis significatifs du projet.

Mir@bel esquisse ce que pourrait être un outil documentaire pour les revues, étendu à toutes les facettes de leur présence numérique.

URL :Le développement du réseau Mir@bel pour le signalement et l’accès aux revues francophones en SHS : Un exemple d’adaptation aux transformations du numérique

Alternative location : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01330303

EN

Cloud-Based Big Data Management and Analytics for Scholarly Resources: Current Trends, Challenges and Scope for Future Research

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Samiya Khan, Kashish A. Shakil, Mansaf Alam

With the shifting focus of organizations and governments towards digitization of academic and technical documents, there has been an increasing need to use this reserve of scholarly documents for developing applications that can facilitate and aid in better management of research.

In addition to this, the evolving nature of research problems has made them essentially interdisciplinary. As a result, there is a growing need for scholarly applications like collaborator discovery, expert finding and research recommendation systems.

This research paper reviews the current trends and identifies the challenges existing in the architecture, services and applications of big scholarly data platform with a specific focus on directions for future research.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01808

EN

Big Data Refinement

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Eerke A. Boiten

« Big data » has become a major area of research and associated funding, as well as a focus of utopian thinking. In the still growing research community, one of the favourite optimistic analogies for data processing is that of the oil refinery, extracting the essence out of the raw data. Pessimists look for their imagery to the other end of the petrol cycle, and talk about the « data exhausts » of our society.

Obviously, the refinement community knows how to do « refining ». This paper explores the extent to which notions of refinement and data in the formal methods community relate to the core concepts in « big data ». In particular, can the data refinement paradigm can be used to explain aspects of big data processing?

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.02017

EN

Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Electronic Publishing

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Editors : Fernando Loizides, Birgit Schmidt

The field of electronic publishing has grown exponentially in the last two decades, but we are still in the middle of this digital transformation. With technologies coming and going for all kinds of reasons, the distribution of economic, technological and discursive power continues to be negotiated.

This book presents the proceedings of the 20th Conference on Electronic Publishing (Elpub), held in Göttingen, Germany, in June 2016.

This year’s conference explores issues of positioning and power in academic publishing, and it brings together world leading stakeholders such as academics, practitioners, policymakers, students and entrepreneurs from a wide variety of fields to exchange information and discuss the advent of innovations in the areas of electronic publishing, as well as reflect on the development in the field over the last 20 years.

Topics covered in the papers include how to maintain the quality of electronic publications, modeling processes and the increasingly prevalent issue of open access, as well as new systems, database repositories and datasets. This overview of the field will be of interest to all those who work in or make use of electronic publishing.

URL : Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Electronic Publishing

Alternative location : http://ebooks.iospress.nl/ISBN/978-1-61499-648-4