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

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

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An Open Social Scholarship Path for the Humanities

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

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

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

Publié le

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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/

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A Landscape of Open Science Policies Research

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