How Can Science and Research Work Well? Toward a Critique of New Public Management Practices in Academia From a Socio-Philosophical Perspective

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Author : Jan-Philipp Kruse

While New Public Management practices (NPM) have been adopted in academia and higher education over the past two decades, this paper is investigating their role in a specifically socio-philosophical way: The preeminent question is what organization of science is likely to make science and research work well in the context of a complex society.

The starting point is an obvious intuition: that academia would be “economized” by NPM (basically, that something is coming from the outside and is disturbing the inside). Habermas provides a sophisticated theorization for this intuition.

In contrast, the thesis advanced here is that we should consider NPM potentially problematic—but not for descending from economics or administration outside academia. It is because NPM often cannot help research and science to function well. In this (rather “essayistic” than strictly deductive) consideration,

I will therefore tentatively discuss an alternative approach that takes up critical intuitions while transposing them into a different setting. If we understand science and research as a form of life, a different picture emerges that can still bring immanent standards to bear, but at the same time compose them more broadly.

This outlines a socio-philosophical critique of NPM. Accordingly, the decisive factor is not NPM’s provenance. What is decisive is that it addresses some organizational problems while at the same time creating new ones.

At the end, an outlook is sketched on how the specific situation of NPM allows some hypotheses on academy’s [by “academy”, I am referring to the whole research community (like “academia”)] future organization. Ex negativo, it seems likely that qualitative evaluation criteria and creative freedom will have to play a greater role.

URL : How Can Science and Research Work Well? Toward a Critique of New Public Management Practices in Academia From a Socio-Philosophical Perspective

Original location : https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2022.791114/full

Open Access in Geochemistry from Preprints to Data Sharing: Past, Present, and Future

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Authors : Olivier Pourret, Dasapta Erwin Irawan

In this short communication, we discuss the latest advances regarding Open Access in the earth sciences and geochemistry community from preprints to findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data following the 14f session held at Goldschmidt conference (4–9 July 2021) dedicated to “Open Access in Earth Sciences”.

URL : Open Access in Geochemistry from Preprints to Data Sharing: Past, Present, and Future

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10010003

Toward More Inclusive Metrics and Open Science to Measure Research Assessment in Earth and Natural Sciences

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Authors : Olivier Pourret, Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Najmeh Shaghaei, Elenora M. van Rijsingen, Lonni Besançon

The conventional assessment of scientists relies on a set of metrics which are mostly based on the production of scientific articles and their citations. These metrics are primarily established at the journal level (e.g., the Journal Impact Factor), the article-level (e.g., times cited), and the author level (e.g., h-index; Figure 1).

These metrics form the basis of criteria that have been widely used to measure institutional reputation, as well as that of authors and research groups. By relying mostly on citations (Langfeldt et al., 2021), however, they are inherently flawed in that they provide only a limited picture of scholarly production. Indeed, citations only count document use within scholarly works and thus provide a very limited view of the use and impact of an article.

Those reveal only the superficial dimensions of a research’s impact on society. Even within academia, citations are limited since the link they express does not hold any value (Tennant et al., 2019). As an example, one could be cited for the robustness of the presented work while the other could be cited for its main limitation (Aksnes et al., 2019).

As such, two articles could be cited the same number of times for very different reasons, and relying on citations to evaluate scientific work therefore displays obvious limitations (Tahamtan et al., 2016). Beyond this issue, however, the conventional assessment of scientists is clearly beneficial to some scientists more than others and does not reflect or encourage the dissemination of knowledge back to the public that is ultimately paying scientists.

This is visible in the Earth and natural sciences which has been organized to solve local community problems in dealing with the Earth system like groundwater hazards (Irawan et al., 2021; Dwivedi et al., 2022).

URL: Toward More Inclusive Metrics and Open Science to Measure Research Assessment in Earth and Natural Sciences

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.850333

Épistémologie des sciences de l’information : histoire intellectuelle des concepts, théories et paradigmes

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Auteur : Carlos Alberto Ávila Araújo

Cet article présente tout d’abord une histoire intellectuelle des sciences de l’information en trois temps : la période fondatrice (1960 et 1970), la période d’expansion des problématiques (1980 et 1990) et le moment contemporain (XXIe siècle), en mettant en évidence, dans chacun d’eux, les concepts, théories et paradigmes présents.

Il présente ensuite les six dimensions du concept d’information à partir desquelles les plus grandes avancées ont pu être menées en Sciences de l’information au cours de ces décennies. Finalement, ces éléments sont mis en relation avec certains apports des travaux menés dans le cadre des Sciences de l’information et de la communication.

La diversité des théories apparaît alors comme un facteur d’enrichissement du domaine tout en nécessitant des travaux de systématisation et de cartographie.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.12443

Corpus d’enquêtes sur les pratiques d’information scientifique des chercheurs. Constitution et exploitation des données

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Autrices : Florence Thiault, Marie-Laure Malingre

Ce projet a pour ambition de recenser les principales enquêtes menées en France et à l’étranger sur les pratiques des chercheurs relatives à l’Information Scientifique et Technique (IST) dans une perspective méthodologique.

Ce data paper a pour objectif principal de présenter la constitution de notre corpus d’étude. Nous rappelons les différents choix de l’équipe projet quant à la collecte et au traitement des données.

Nous indiquons les possibilités de réutilisation et d’exploitation des fichiers qui sont associés au corpus initial. Nous exposons également les questionnements apparus lors de l’étude du corpus, ainsi que les perspectives d’analyse finale et méthodologique pour l’observation des pratiques d’information scientifique des chercheurs.

URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rfsic/12228

Opening Up of Editorials Activities at Chemistry Journals. What Does Editorship Mean and What Does It Involve?

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Author : Marianne Noel

The article unpacks the publishing practices and focuses on the curating work carried out by the editors of chemistry journals. Based on a qualitative analysis of multiple sources in two publishing houses (the American Chemical Society, ACS and Nature Research), it first shows that the role of editor-in-chief covers a wide range of realities and is far from being limited to that of a gatekeeper (the most common metaphor in the literature).

In journals that are part of the Nature Research portfolio, in-house editors, who are no longer active scientists, work full time for the journals. The article describes the professional trajectories and skills required to join the publishing house.

Interviews highlight collective identity-based actions, attention to the growth and the flow of manuscripts, but also specific epistemic properties of outputs in chemistry. Besides tasks that editors outline “as really the same as they were 100 years ago,” as they spend most of their time handling manuscripts and providing quality assurance, they also travel to conferences to support journals and encourage submissions, visit labs where researchers pitch their work or ask questions about journals, and “educate the actors themselves” about new fields.

In both cases studied, the publishing houses partner with institutions to offer events (ACS on Campus programme, Nature masterclass) that a university or department can freely host or buy, where editors organize workshops on all aspects of manuscript preparation. Second, publishing houses, whether non-for-profit or commercial, have embraced a catalog logic, where the journals are not necessarily in competition and have an assumed place and hierarchy.

At Nature Research, editors-in-chief head business units inscribed in the company’s organization. Despite standardized processes imposed by the procedural chain, there is still room to maneuver in these relatively autonomous structures that are ultimately evaluated on their results (the annual production of a certain number of high-quality papers).

On the other hand, ACS is seen as a vessel whose course cannot easily be deviated. The conclusion calls for extending this type of investigation to other contexts or types of journals.

URL : Opening Up of Editorials Activities at Chemistry Journals. What Does Editorship Mean and What Does It Involve?

Original location : https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frma.2022.747846/full

Diamond Open Access in Norway 2017–2020

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Author : Jan Erik Frantsvåg

We see from information published elsewhere that Gold OA is on the increase globally. The OA Diamond study indicates that Diamond OA is an important component of scholarly communications, with an estimated 8–9% of the total global scholarly output.

These numbers, however, are on a global scale and are not necessarily representative of any given country; country case studies are needed to find this information. Norway is a country where the government has declared a 100% OA goal and most research has public funding. Norway has good financing structures for various models of OA, and it has a national CRIS system.

This study tries to find and present numbers for articles in scholarly journals to describe both recent developments and relative numbers for Norway as a whole, and for scholarly fields in Norway, with regards to Diamond OA. Numbers for and development of Gold OA will also be given and commented upon to some extent.

URL : Diamond Open Access in Norway 2017–2020

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10010013