Putting FAIR principles in the context of research information: FAIRness for CRIS and CRIS for FAIRness

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Authors : Otmane Azeroual, Joachim Schöpfel, Janne Pölönen, Anastasija Nikiforova

Digitization in the research domain refers to the increasing integration and analysis of research information in the process of research data management. However, it is not clear whether it is used and, more importantly, whether the data are of sufficient quality, and value and knowledge could be extracted from them.

FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability) represent a promising asset to achieve this. Since their publication, they have rapidly proliferated and have become part of (inter-)national research funding programs.

A special feature of the FAIR principles is the emphasis on the legibility, readability, and understandability of data. At the same time, they pose a prerequisite for data for their reliability, trustworthiness, and quality. In this sense, the importance of applying FAIR principles to research information and respective systems such as Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), which is an underrepresented subject for research, is the subject of the paper.

Supporting the call for the need for a ”one-stop-shop and register-onceuse-many approach”, we argue that CRIS is a key component of the research infrastructure landscape, directly targeted and enabled by operational application and the promotion of FAIR principles.

We hypothesize that the improvement of FAIRness is a bidirectional process, where CRIS promotes FAIRness of data and infrastructures, and FAIR principles push further improvements to the underlying CRIS.

URL https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03836525

The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative : Sharing data on scholarly research performance

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Authors : Katie Wilson, Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon, Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang, Rebecca N. Handcock

In the current era of worldwide competition in higher education, universities are caught up in market processes that encourage compliance with the measurement systems applied by world university rankings.

Despite questions about the rankings’ methodologies and data sources, universities continue to adopt assessment and evaluation practices that require academic researchers to publish in sources indexed by the major commercial bibliographic databases used by world rankings.

Building on a critique of the limited bibliometric measures and underlying assumptions of rankings, the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative interdisciplinary research project aggregates and analyses scholarly research data including open access output from multiple open sources for more than 20,000 institutions worldwide.

To understand who is creating knowledge and how diversity is enacted through the transmission of knowledge we analyse workforce demographic data. In this article, we discuss the project’s rationale, methodologies and examples of data analysis that can enable universities to make independent assessments, ask questions about rankings, and contribute to open knowledge-making and sharing.

Expanding on our presentation to the LIBER Online 2021 Conference, we discuss collaboration with academic libraries and other scholarly communication stakeholders to develop and extend the open knowledge project.

URL : The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative : Sharing data on scholarly research performance

DOI : https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.11544

How Open Is the U15? A Preliminary Analysis of Open Access Publishing in Canadian Academic Libraries

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Authors : Nikki Tummon, Robin Desmeules

Introduction

This study offers insight into open access (OA) culture at Canadian university libraries by detailing the degree to which librarians working at Canada’s U15 (a collective of research-intensive institutions in Canada) make their research OA, as well as exploring the depth and reach of any OA mandates these institutions have.

Method

This study uses a combination of bibliometric analysis and a review of institutional OA policies, beginning with an examination of a six-year span (2014–2019) of librarian-authored publications, searching four key library and information science databases, followed by a systematic search for a university-wide or library OA statement, policy, or mandate on each of the U15 websites.

Results & Discussion

The data suggest that Canadian academic librarians are personally motivated to self-archive and make their research open. The high rate of publication in Gold OA journals, combined with the fact that several of the key library and information science journals for Canadian librarians are already OA, points to the importance of OA publishing for librarians as a community, as does the high number of expressions of commitment to OA publishing.

Given the lack of variance comparatively between schools with an expression and without, the authors cannot comment on whether the expressions of support correlate to higher proportions of OA articles.

Conclusion

This article provides a snapshot of a positive OA publishing culture at 15 Canadian university libraries by presenting data that show that most libraries have an expression of commitment to OA principles and most Canadian academic librarians working at U15 schools ensure that their research is OA.

URL : How Open Is the U15? A Preliminary Analysis of Open Access Publishing in Canadian Academic Libraries

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.13831

Choices of immediate open access and the relationship to journal ranking and publish-and-read deals

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Author : Lars Wenaas

The role of academic journals is significant in the reward system of science, which makes their rank important for the researcher’s choice in deciding where to submit. The study asks how choices of immediate gold and hybrid open access are related to journal ranking and how the uptake of immediate open access is affected by transformative publish-and-read deals, pushed by recent science policy.

Data consists of 186,621 articles published with a Norwegian affiliation in the period 2013–2021, all of which were published in journals ranked in a National specific ranking, on one of two levels according to their importance, prestige, and perceived quality within a discipline.

The results are that researchers chose to have their articles published as hybrid two times as often in journals on the most prestigious level compared with journals on the normal level. The opposite effect was found with gold open access where publishing on the normal level was chosen three times more than on the high level.

This can be explained by the absence of highly ranked gold open access journals in many disciplines. With the introduction of publish-and-read deals, hybrid open access has boosted and become a popular choice enabling the researcher to publish open access in legacy journals.

The results confirm the position of journals in the reward system of science and should inform policymakers about the effects of transformative arrangements and their costs against the overall level of open access.

URL : Choices of immediate open access and the relationship to journal ranking and publish-and-read deals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.943932

Five ways to optimize open access uptake after a signed read and publish contract: lessons learned from the Dutch UKB consortium

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Author : Arjan Schalken

Consortia and publishers invest a lot of time and expertise in the negotiation process. A well-drafted read and publish contract is, however, not enough to guarantee an optimal open access publishing service. The Dutch UKB consortium uses several tools and practices to actively monitor and manage open access uptake during an agreement.

Library help desks are provided with a knowledge base covering most frequently asked questions from authors. A journal list gives an integral overview of the more than 11,000 journals that are part of 16 consortium deals.

Because researchers wanted to know about open access publishing possibilities from a journal perspective, a journal browser was developed. Workflow improvement and retrospective open access are regular topics in mid-term meetings with publishers, resulting in increased open access uptake.

A purpose-built datahub provides the consortium and libraries with publication data that helps monitoring and managing output on both article and deal level. Finally, licence choice including funder compliance is taken into account, resulting in an increasing percentage of CC BY versus the more restricted CC BY-NC and CC BY-NC-ND options.

URL: Five ways to optimize open access uptake after a signed read and publish contract: lessons learned from the Dutch UKB consortium

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.595

Open Editors: A dataset of scholarly journals’ editorial board positions

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Authors : Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher, Tamara Heck, Kerstin Schoch

Editormetrics analyses the role of editors of academic journals and their impact on the scientific publication system. Such analyses would best rely on open, structured, and machine-readable data about editors and editorial boards, which still remains rare.

To address this shortcoming, the project Open Editors collects data about academic journal editors on a large scale and structures them into a single dataset. It does so by scraping the websites of 7,352 journals from 26 publishers (including predatory ones), thereby structuring publicly available information (names, affiliations, editorial roles, ORCID etc.) about 594,580 researchers.

The dataset shows that journals and publishers are immensely heterogeneous in terms of editorial board sizes, regional diversity, and editorial role labels. All codes and data are made available at Zenodo, while the result is browsable at a dedicated website (https://openeditors.ooir.org).

This dataset carries implications for both practical purposes of research evaluation and for meta-scientific investigations into the landscape of scholarly publications, and allows for critical inquiries regarding the representation of diversity and inclusivity across academia.

URL : Open Editors: A dataset of scholarly journals’ editorial board positions

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvac037

Deep Impact: A Study on the Impact of Data Papers and Datasets in the Humanities and Social Sciences

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Authors : Barbara McGillivray, Paola Marongiu, Nilo Pedrazzini, Marton Ribary, Mandy Wigdorowitz, Eleonora Zordan

The humanities and social sciences (HSS) have recently witnessed an exponential growth in data-driven research. In response, attention has been afforded to datasets and accompanying data papers as outputs of the research and dissemination ecosystem.

In 2015, two data journals dedicated to HSS disciplines appeared in this landscape: Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD) and Research Data Journal for the Humanities and Social Sciences (RDJ).

In this paper, we analyse the state of the art in the landscape of data journals in HSS using JOHD and RDJ as exemplars by measuring performance and the deep impact of data-driven projects, including metrics (citation count; Altmetrics, views, downloads, tweets) of data papers in relation to associated research papers and the reuse of associated datasets.

Our findings indicate: that data papers are published following the deposit of datasets in a repository and usually following research articles; that data papers have a positive impact on both the metrics of research papers associated with them and on data reuse; and that Twitter hashtags targeted at specific research campaigns can lead to increases in data papers’ views and downloads.

HSS data papers improve the visibility of datasets they describe, support accompanying research articles, and add to transparency and the open research agenda.

URL : Deep Impact: A Study on the Impact of Data Papers and Datasets in the Humanities and Social Sciences

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10040039