Open access in Angola: a survey among higher education institutions

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Authors : Wileidys Artigas, Eurico Wongo Gungula, Mikael Laakso

Open access (OA) to research publications is of global relevance, both in terms of provision and consumption of scholarly content. However, much of the research, practice, and models surrounding OA have been centered around the Global North.

In this study we investigate how and to what degree higher education institutions (HEIs) in Angola interact with the concept of OA to journal publications through their policies and practices, a country where the end of the civil war in 2002 marked a new start for growth in teaching and research.

This study is based on an online survey conducted in 2020 among research management units of Angolan HEIs. 23 valid institutional responses were received of 44 invitations sent (52% response rate).

The results suggest that Angolan HEIs have moderate awareness of OA but practical incorporation into academic processes has remained slow, however, this can be seen to be connected to the overall slow progress in ramping up research intensity in the country.

Seven of the responding institutions reported to be involved in publishing scholarly journals, all of them OA. Overall Angolan HEIs have few institutional repositories, and have so far placed little value on OA in the context of academic career advancement.

URL : Open access in Angola: a survey among higher education institutions

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04410-w

La construction des légitimités d’une expertise scientifique au prisme de sa médiatisation : le cas de la « crise requin » à La Réunion

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Autrice : Barbara Losen

Cet article interroge l’évolution des légitimités de l’expertise scientifique qui a eu lieu de 2011 à 2015 dans le cadre de la gestion du risque requin à La Réunion, au prisme de sa construction médiatique.

L’analyse d’articles issus de la presse locale en ligne couplée à celle des discours de journalistes locaux et d’experts scientifiques recueillis en entretiens, révèle la façon dont les contraintes des champs scientifique et journalistique, en termes d’enjeux et de pratiques communicationnelles, participent à la dynamique des représentations du rapport entre légitimité médiatique et sociale des experts scientifiques.

URL : https://lesenjeux.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/2021/supplement-b/la-construction-des-legitimites-dune-expertise-scientifique-au-prisme-de-sa-mediatisation-le-cas-de-la-crise-requin-a-la-reunion/

Does Open Access Really Increase Impact? A Large-Scale Randomized Analysis

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Authors : Abdelghani Maddi, David Sapinho

The Open Access Citation Advantage (OACA) has been a major topic of discussion in the literature over the past twenty years. In this paper, we propose a method to constitute a control group to isolate the OACA effect. Thus, we compared citation impact (MNCS) of 2,458,378 publications in fully OA journals to that (weighted MNCS) of a control group of non-OA publications (#10,310,842).

Similarly, we did the same exercise for OA publications in hybrid journals (#1,024,430) and their control group (#11,533,001), over the period 2010-2020. The results showed that there is no OACA for publications in fully OA journals, and that there is rather a disadvantage. Conversely, the OACA seems to be a reality in hybrid journals, suggesting that a better accessibility tends to improve the impact of publications.

The lack of OACA for publications in fully OA journals is to be expected, as a great proportion of OA journals are newly created and less attractive to high-impact senior researchers. Another striking result of this paper is the fall of the OACA from 2016.

The citation advantage fell from 70% to 9% between 2016 and 2020 (for publications in hybrid journals). We wonder if this fall is linked to the increase in the notoriety of pirate sites (eg Sci-Hub) from 2016.

In other words, the democratization of pirate sites instantly cancels the positive effect of OA publication insofar as the question of access to scientific content no longer arises.

URL: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03694666

How transformative agreements are actually transforming the subscription system: a society publisher’s perspective

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Authors : Graham Anderson, Jade Heyman, Maggie Simmons

Transformative agreements (TAs) are useful tools to accelerate the growth in open access (OA) for small publishers with limited resources, such as the three discussing the advantages and impact of TAs in this article.

The Royal Society, the Microbiology Society and the Geological Society observe an uptake in OA output with the increase in demand for TAs. While TA models differ across publishers, successful and sustainable models are characterized by transparency in pricing and data, simplicity, equitability and above all a transformation objective of achieving full OA.

Collaboration with institutions and consortia is key to realizing mutual goals and managing the agreement and implementation of complex arrangements with limited resources. The Royal Society, with over 320 institutions opted in, the Microbiology Society with over 250 and the Geological Society with over 40, are all mobilizing their resources and improving their systems to move away from paywall and subscription models.

URL : How transformative agreements are actually transforming the subscription system: a society publisher’s perspective

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.579

The Role of Data in an Emerging Research Community : Environmental Health Research as an Exemplar

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Authors : Danielle Polloc, An Yan, Michelle Parker, Suzie Allard

Open science data benefit society by facilitating convergence across domains that are examining the same scientific problem. While cross-disciplinary data sharing and reuse is essential to the research done by convergent communities, so far little is known about the role data play in how these communities interact.

An understanding of the role of data in these collaborations can help us identify and meet the needs of emerging research communities which may predict the next challenges faced by science. This paper represents an exploratory study of one emerging community, the environmental health community, examining how environmental health research groups form, collaborate, and share data.

Five key insights about the role of data in emerging research communities are identified and suggestions are made for further research.

URL : The Role of Data in an Emerging Research Community : Environmental Health Research as an Exemplar

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v16i1.653

Partenariat, expertise du chercheur et visée émancipatoire : regard réflexif et analytique sur le récit d’une expérience de recherche collaborative

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Auteure : Roxane Meilleur

En recherche partenariale, le partage des expertises d’acteurs diversifiés – chercheurs, gestionnaires, professionnels, citoyens – est susceptible de contribuer à l’émancipation des personnes et des communautés.

À la fois agent de changement et coproducteur de connaissances, le chercheur est alors appelé à utiliser sa propre expertise, ce qui peut représenter un défi considérant les risques de reproduire des rapports de pouvoir asymétriques en recherche. Cet article présente le récit d’une expérience de recherche partenariale traversée par cette tension entre expertise et visée émancipatoire.

L’expérience est issue d’une recherche collaborative en logement social réalisée dans le cadre d’une thèse doctorale en psychologie organisationnelle. Le récit est analysé à partir de deux cadres de référence : l’épistémologie et les travaux de St-Arnaud (2003) portant sur la coopération et l’autorégulation en contexte d’interaction professionnelle. Les implications du récit présenté et des outils utilisés pour en faire l’analyse sont ensuite discutées.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1088800ar

Gender diversity of research consortia contributes to funding decisions in a multi-stage grant peer-review process

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Authors : Stefano Bianchini, Patrick Llerena, Sıla Öcalan-Öze, Emre Özel

This study seeks to draw connections between the grant proposal peer-review and the gender representation in research consortia.

We examined the implementation of a multi-disciplinary, pan-European funding scheme—EUROpean COllaborative RESearch Scheme (2003–2015)—and the reviewers’ materials that this generated. EUROCORES promoted investigator-driven, multinational collaborative research in multiple scientific areas and brought together 9158 Principal Investigators (PI) who teamed up in 1347 international consortia that were sequentially evaluated by 467 expert panel members and 1862 external reviewers.

We found systematically unfavourable evaluations for consortia with a higher proportion of female PIs. This gender effect was evident in the evaluation outcomes of both panel members and reviewers: applications from consortia with a higher share of female scientists were less successful in panel selection and received lower scores from external reviewers.

Interestingly, we found a systematic discrepancy between the evaluative language of written review reports and the scores assigned by reviewers that works against consortia with a higher share of female participants.

Reviewers did not perceive female scientists as being less competent in their comments, but they were negatively sensitive to a high female ratio within a consortium when scoring the proposed research project.

URL : Gender diversity of research consortia contributes to funding decisions in a multi-stage grant peer-review process

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01204-6