La science (dé)confinée

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Autrice/Author : Clara Galliano

Plusieurs pays d’Asie, d’Afrique, d’Europe, d’Amérique latine et certains états américains ont mis en place des mesures de confinement pour lutter contre la propagation du virus et l’arrivée de nouveaux variants.

En France comme ailleurs, ces mesures ont provoqué de lourdes conséquences sur l’économie du pays, ainsi que sur le moral des populations. Cet article propose d’évaluer, à partir de plusieurs méthodes, les impacts du confinement sur la recherche en étudiant plusieurs éléments comme : les collaborations internationales, les efforts des éditeurs sur l’accessibilité aux ressources numériques et les différentes enquêtes menées au sein des communautés scientifiques.

La Science Ouverte, entre mouvement et norme, a été un point clé stratégique et libérateur pendant la crise sanitaire afin d’accéder aux résultats pour faire avancer les recherches sur le vaccin, mais aussi pour continuer à maintenir l’activité scientifique quand tout la contraignait.

URL : https://revue-cossi.numerev.com/articles/revue-11/2750-la-science-deconfinee

Open access and predatory publishing: a survey of the publishing practices of academic pharmacists and nurses in the United States

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Authors : Bridget C. Conlogue, Neyda V. Gilman, Louisa M. Holmes

Objective: Academics are under great pressure to publish their research, the rewards for which are well known (tenure, promotion, grant funding, professional prestige). As open access publishing gains acceptance as a publishing option, researchers may choose a “predatory publisher.” The purpose of this study is to investigate the motivations and rationale of pharmacy and nursing academics in the United States to publish in open access journals that may be considered “predatory.”

Methods: A 26-item questionnaire was programmed in Qualtrics and distributed electronically to approximately 4,500 academic pharmacists and nurses, 347 of whom completed questionnaires (~8%). Pairwise correlations were performed followed by a logistic regression to evaluate statistical associations between participant characteristics and whether participants had ever paid an article processing fee (APF).

Results: Participants who had published more articles, were more familiar with predatory publishing, and who were more concerned about research metrics and tenure were more likely to have published in open access journals. Moderate to high institutional research intensity has an impact on the likelihood of publishing open access. The majority of participants who acknowledged they had published in a predatory journal took no action after realizing the journal was predatory and reported no negative impact on their career for having done so.

Conclusion: The results of this study provide data and insight into publication decisions made by pharmacy and nursing academics. Gaining a better understanding of who publishes in predatory journals and why can help address the problems associated with predatory publishing at the root.

URL : Open access and predatory publishing: a survey of the publishing practices of academic pharmacists and nurses in the United States

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5195/jmla.2022.1377

Champions of Transparency in Education: What Journal Reviewers Can Do to Encourage Open Science Practices

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Authors : Rachel Renbarger, Jill L. Adelson, Joshua Rosenberg, Sondra M Stegenga, Olivia Lowrey, Pamela Rose Buckley, Qiyang Zhang

As the field of education and especially gifted education gradually moves towards open science, our research community increasingly values transparency and openness brought by open science practices.

Yet, individual researchers may be reluctant to adopt open science practices due to low incentives, barriers of extra workload, or lack of support to apply these in certain areas, such as qualitative research.

We encourage and give guidelines to reviewers to champion open science practices by warmly influencing authors to consider applying open science practices to quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research and providing ample support to produce higher-quality publications.

Instead of imposing open science practices on authors, we advocate reviewers suggest small, non-threatening, specific steps to support authors without making them feel overwhelmed, judged, or punished.

We believe that these small steps taken by reviewers will make a difference to create a more supportive environment for researchers to adopt better practices.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.35542/osf.io/xqfwb

An Open Social Scholarship Path for the Humanities

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Authors : Alyssa Arbuckle, Ray Siemens, Jon Bath, Constance Crompton, Laura Estill, Tanja Niemann, Jon Saklofkse, Lynne Siemens

Open digital scholarship is significant for facilitating public access to and engagement with research, and as a foundation for growing digital scholarly infrastructure around the world today and in the future. But the path to adopting open, digital scholarship on a national—never mind international—scale is challenged by several real, pragmatic issues. In this article, we consider these issues as well as proactive strategies for the realization of robust, inclusive, publicly engaged, open scholarship in digital form.

We draw on the INKE Partnership’s central goal of fostering open social scholarship (academic practice that enables the creation, dissemination, and engagement of open research by specialists and non-specialists in accessible and significant ways).

In doing so, we look to pursue more open, and more social, scholarly activities through knowledge mobilization, community training, public engagement, and policy recommendations in order to understand and address challenges facing digital scholarly communication.

We then provide tangible details, outlining how the INKE Partnership puts open social scholarship theory into practice, with an eye to a more open and engaged future.

URL : An Open Social Scholarship Path for the Humanities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.1973

An iterative and interdisciplinary categorisation process towards FAIRer digital resources for sensitive life-sciences data

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Authors : Romain David, Christian Ohmann, Jan‑Willem Boiten, Mónica Cano Abadía, Florence Bietrix, Steve Canham, Maria Luisa Chiusano, Walter Dastrù, Arnaud Laroquette, Dario Longo, Michaela Th. Mayrhofer, Maria Panagiotopoulou, Audrey S. Richard, Sergey Goryanin, Pablo Emilio Verde

For life science infrastructures, sensitive data generate an additional layer of complexity. Cross-domain categorisation and discovery of digital resources related to sensitive data presents major interoperability challenges. To support this FAIRification process, a toolbox demonstrator aiming at support for discovery of digital objects related to sensitive data (e.g., regulations, guidelines, best practice, tools) has been developed.

The toolbox is based upon a categorisation system developed and harmonised across a cluster of 6 life science research infrastructures. Three different versions were built, tested by subsequent pilot studies, finally leading to a system with 7 main categories (sensitive data type, resource type, research field, data type, stage in data sharing life cycle, geographical scope, specific topics).

109 resources attached with the tags in pilot study 3 were used as the initial content for the toolbox demonstrator, a software tool allowing searching of digital objects linked to sensitive data with filtering based upon the categorisation system.

Important next steps are a broad evaluation of the usability and user-friendliness of the toolbox, extension to more resources, broader adoption by different life-science communities, and a long-term vision for maintenance and sustainability.

URL : An iterative and interdisciplinary categorisation process towards FAIRer digital resources for sensitive life-sciences data

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-25278-z

Challenges of Promoting Open Science within the NI4OS-Europe Project in Hungary

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Authors : Ákos Lencsés, Péter Sütő

National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe (NI4OS-Europe) is a Horizon 2020 project related to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). One of the project objectives is promoting EOSC and open science in 15 Central and East European EU states and EU-associated countries.

This paper describes the variety of promoting activities carried out in Hungary as part of the NI4OS-Europe project by the Governmental Agency for IT Development (KIFÜ). Identifying good practices will give us the chance to find the best communication channels and methods to promote open science and to manage expectations of funders, researchers and librarians. The audience diversity of organized NI4OS events was analyzed in this study.

The anonymized dataset based on registration forms was filtered by profession. Results suggest that events are generally visited by more librarians than researchers. The only exception is the third forum where the main Hungarian research fund as co-organizer might have attracted researchers’ attention.

This suggests that librarians are considered to be in charge of open science issues in general. Usage data of the open science news feed were also studied. The 130 posts between May 2021 and April 2022 and 2500 visitors until the end of June 2022 give us the chance to learn about the characteristics of the most visited posts.

We can conclude that the focus of communication is on open and FAIR data management, while other areas receive less attention. The results show that despite more international posts being published, the target group is more interested in local information.

URL : Challenges of Promoting Open Science within the NI4OS-Europe Project in Hungary

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10040051

 

Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientists’ productivity in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM), and medicine fields

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Authors : Seulkee Heo, Alisha Yee Chan, Pedro Diaz Peralta, Lan Jin, Claudia Ribeiro Pereira Nunes, Michelle L. Bell

While studies suggested adverse impacts of COVID-19 on scientific outputs and work routines for scientists, more evidence is required to understand detailed obstacles challenging scientists’ work and productivity during the pandemic, including how different people are affected (e.g., by gender).

This online survey-based thematic analysis investigated how the pandemic affected scientists’ perception of scientific and academic productivity in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and medicine fields.

The analysis examined if inequitable changes in duties and responsibilities for caregiving for children, family, and/or households exist between scientists who are mothers compared to scientists who are fathers or non-parents.

The survey collected data from 2548 survey responses in six languages across 132 countries. Results indicate that many scientists suffered from delays and restrictions on research activities and administrations due to the lockdown of institutions, as well as increased workloads from adapting to online teaching environment.

Caregiving responsibility for children and family increased, which compromised time for academic efforts, especially due to the temporary shutdown of social supports. Higher percentages of female parent participants than male parent participants expressed such increased burdens indicating unequal divisions of caregiving between women and men.

A range of physical and mental health issues was identified mainly due to overworking and isolation. Despite numerous obstacles, some participants reported advantages during the pandemic including the efficiency of online teaching, increased funding for COVID-related research, application of alternative research methodologies, and fluidity of the workday from not commuting.

Findings imply the need for rapid institutional support to aid various academic activities and diminish gender inequity in career development among academicians, highlighting how crisis can exacerbate existing inequalities.

URL : Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on scientists’ productivity in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM), and medicine fields

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01466-0