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

Preprint citation practice in PLOS

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Authors : Marc Bertin, Iana Atanassova

The role of preprints in the scientific production and their part in citations have been growing over the past 10 years. In this paper we study preprint citations in several different aspects: the progression of preprint citations over time, their relative frequencies in relation to the IMRaD structure of articles, their distributions over time, per preprint database and per PLOS journal.

We have processed the PLOS corpus that covers 7 journals and a total of about 240,000 articles up to January 2021, and produced a dataset of 8460 preprint citation contexts that cite 12 different preprint databases.

Our results show that preprint citations are found with the highest frequency in the Method section of articles, though small variations exist with respect to journals. The PLOS Computational Biology journal stands out as it contains more than three times more preprint citations than any other PLOS journal.

The relative parts of the different preprint databases are also examined. While ArXiv and bioRxiv are the most frequent citation sources, bioRxiv’s disciplinary nature can be observed as it is the source of more than 70% of preprint citations in PLOS Biology, PLOS Genetics and PLOS Pathogens.

We have also compared the lexical content of preprint citation contexts to the citation content to peer-reviewed publications. Finally, by performing a lexicometric analysis, we have shown that preprint citation contexts differ significantly from citation contexts of peer-reviewed publications.

This confirms that authors make use of different lexical content when citing preprints compared to the rest of citations.

URL : Preprint citation practice in PLOS

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04388-5

Globally Accessible Distributed Data Sharing (GADDS): a decentralized FAIR platform to facilitate data sharing in the life sciences

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Authors : Pavel Vazquez, Kayoko Hirayama-Shoji, Steffen Novik, Stefan Krauss, Simon Rayner

Motivation

Technical advances have revolutionized the life sciences and researchers commonly face challenges associated with handling large amounts of heterogeneous digital data. The Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) principles provide a framework to support effective data management.

However, implementing this framework is beyond the means of most researchers in terms of resources and expertise, requiring awareness of metadata, policies, community agreements, and other factors such as vocabularies and ontologies.

Results

We have developed the Globally Accessible Distributed Data Sharing (GADDS) platform to facilitate FAIR-like data-sharing in cross-disciplinary research collaborations. The platform consists of (i) a blockchain based metadata quality control system, (ii) a private cloud-like storage system and (iii) a version control system. GADDS is built with containerized technologies, providing minimal hardware standards and easing scalability, and offers decentralized trust via transparency of metadata, facilitating data exchange and collaboration.

As a use case, we provide an example implementation in engineered living material technology within the Hybrid Technology Hub at the University of Oslo.

URL : Globally Accessible Distributed Data Sharing (GADDS): a decentralized FAIR platform to facilitate data sharing in the life sciences

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btac362