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

 

De l’héritage épistémologique de Paul Otlet à une théorie relationnelle de l’organisation des connaissances

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Auteur/Author : Arthur Perret

Cette thèse porte sur la relation entre le travail intellectuel et son outillage, à travers une étude de l’héritage épistémologique de Paul Otlet (1868-1944), le premier théoricien de la documentation. Elle traite du problème de l’organisation et de la gestion des connaissances savantes sous l’angle de la documentation personnelle.

Il s’agit à la fois d’un travail théorique en documentologie et en organisation des connaissances, et d’un travail réflexif basé sur la conception et l’utilisation d’un outil de visualisation de graphe documentaire nommé Cosma.

À travers l’analyse des écrits, schémas et réalisations documentaires d’Otlet, nous établissons que la logique de réseau qu’il propose n’est pas seulement de nature institutionnelle mais qu’elle s’applique également aux documents eux-mêmes. Nous reprenons une hypothèse émise par W. Boyd Rayward, jamais éprouvée, et qui consiste à établir un parallèle entre les composants fondamentaux du travail d’Otlet (principe monographique, classification décimale universelle) et ceux des systèmes hypertextuels (nœuds, liens).

Nous vérifions empiriquement ce parallèle en nous appuyant sur les réalisations du programme ANR HyperOtlet, et nous le généralisons à la notion de graphe pour proposer les éléments d’une théorie relationnelle de l’organisation des connaissances.

Nous caractérisons l’épistémologie de la documentation personnelle hypertextuelle comme réflexive et heuristique : la représentation du graphe met en évidence la nature réticulaire de certains processus d’écriture et, par là, de pensée ; elle sert d’aide-mémoire, avec une logique d’émergence informationnelle.

À partir de ce travail, nous proposons la notion de cosmographie comme mise en ordre d’un univers intellectuel par l’écriture, entre idiotexte (écriture comme mémoire prothétique singulière), hypertexte (écriture réticulaire) et architexte (écriture de l’écriture).

URL : https://these.arthurperret.fr/

A Landscape of Open Science Policies Research

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Author : Alejandra Manco

This literature review aims to examine the approach given to open science policy in the different studies. The main findings are that the approach given to open science has different aspects: policy framing and its geopolitical aspects are described as an asymmetries replication and epistemic governance tool.

The main geopolitical aspects of open science policies described in the literature are the relations between international, regional, and national policies. There are also different components of open science covered in the literature: open data seems much discussed in the works in the English language, while open access is the main component discussed in the Portuguese and Spanish speaking papers.

Finally, the relationship between open science policies and the science policy is framed by highlighting the innovation and transparency that open science can bring into it.

URL : A Landscape of Open Science Policies Research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440221140358

The status of the digital preservation policies and plans of the institutional repositories of selected public universities in Kenya

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Authors : Hellen Ndegwa, Emily Bosire, Damaris Odero

Institutional repositories (IRs) have a leading role in providing long-term access to the research output of universities. This study assessed the capabilities of institutional repositories in Kenya to support long-term preservation of digital content by reviewing digital preservation policies and plans.

Data was collected through face-to-face interviews from 19 respondents drawn from three public universities that were identified by their registration in OpenDOAR, ROARMAP and the number of items in their repositories.

Additional data was acquired through analysis of documents such as open access policies and mandates, as well as institutional websites. Findings revealed that the organizations were poorly prepared to support long-term digital preservation.

Policies were inadequate and plans to support the implementation of the policies were lacking. The study concluded that although the IRs were to undertake digital preservation, they lacked clearly defined actions from plans and policy.

This article offers recommendations, including identifying digital preservation goals that will guide policy formulation and multi-stakeholder involvement in the policy-making process. Effort should also be made to create awareness of the relationship between digital content selection and its successful long-term preservation.

URL : The status of the digital preservation policies and plans of the institutional repositories of selected public universities in Kenya

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.590

Enriching research quality: A proposition for stakeholder heterogeneity

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Authors : Thomas Franssen

Dominant approaches to research quality rest on the assumption that academic peers are the only relevant stakeholders in its assessment. In contrast, impact assessment frameworks recognize a large and heterogeneous set of actors as stakeholders. In transdisciplinary research non-academic stakeholders are actively involved in all phases of the research process and actor-network theorists recognize a broad and heterogeneous set of actors as stakeholders in all types of research as they are assigned roles in the socio-material networks, also termed ‘problematizations’, that researchers reconfigure.

Actor-network theorists consider research as a performative act that changes the reality of the stakeholders it, knowingly or unknowingly, involves. Established approaches to, and notions of, research quality do not recognize the heterogeneity of relevant stakeholders nor allow for reflection on the performative effects of research.

To enrich the assessment of research quality this article explores the problematization as a potential new object of evaluation. Problematizations are proposals for how the future might look. Hence, their acceptance does not only concern fellow academics but also all other human and other-than-human actors that figure in them.

To enrich evaluative approaches, this article argues for the inclusion of stakeholder involvement and stakeholder representation as dimensions of research quality.

It considers a number of challenges to doing so including the identification of stakeholders, developing quality criteria for stakeholder involvement and stakeholder representation, and the possibility of participatory research evaluation. It can alternatively be summarized as raising the question: for whose benefit do we conduct evaluations of research quality?

URL : Enriching research quality: A proposition for stakeholder heterogeneity

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvac012

Open access and its potential impact on public health – A South African perspective

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Authors : Adéle Strydom, Juanita Mellet, Jeanne Van Rensburg, Ignatius Viljoen, Anastasios Athanasiadis, Michael S. Pepper

Traditionally, access to research information has been restricted through journal subscriptions. This means that research entities and individuals who were unable to afford subscription costs did not have access to journal articles. There has however been a progressive shift toward electronic access to journal publications and subsequently growth in the number of journals available globally.

In the context of electronic journals, both open access and restricted access options exist. While the latter option is comparable to traditional, subscription-based paper journals, open access journal publications follow an “open science” publishing model allowing scholarly communications and outputs to be publicly available online at no cost to the reader.

However, for readers to enjoy open access, publication costs are shifted elsewhere, typically onto academic institutions and authors. SARS-CoV-2, and the resulting COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the benefits of open science through accelerated research and unprecedented levels of collaboration and data sharing. South Africa is one of the leading open access countries on the African continent.

This paper focuses on open access in the South African higher education research context with an emphasis on our Institution and our own experiences. It also addresses the financial implications of open access and provides possible solutions for reducing the cost of publication for researchers and their institutions.

Privacy in open access and the role of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) in medical research and secondary use of data in South Africa will also be discussed.

URL : Open access and its potential impact on public health – A South African perspective

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.975109