EN

Open Science in Africa: What policymakers should consider

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Elisha R. T. Chiware, Lara Skelly

As Open Science (OS) is being promoted as the best avenue to share and drive scientific discoveries at much lower costs and in transparent and credible ways, it is imperative that African governments and institutions take advantage of the momentum and build research infrastructures that are responsive to this movement.

This paper aims to provide useful insight into the importance and implementation of OS policy frameworks. The paper uses a systematic review approach to review existing literature and analyse global OS policy development documents. The approach includes a review of existing OS policy frameworks that can guide similar work by African governments and institutions.

This critical review also makes recommendations on key issues that Africa should consider in the process of OS policy development. These approaches can be widely used as further foundations for future developments in OS practices on the continent.

URL : Open Science in Africa: What policymakers should consider

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.950139

FR

Des voix plurielles dans l’écriture de la recherche : Pour une réflexivité incarnée

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Auteur/Author : Philippe Hert

L’approche qui est développée ici se situe entre les sciences de l’information et de la communication et les études de sciences. Elle met en dialogue une réflexion sur l’écriture d’un terrain que j’ai mené pendant plusieurs années sur le clown, avec la manière dont le terrain peut « prendre la parole » dans l’écriture.

Cet article est constitué de plusieurs voix : celle de la théorie, du chercheur, celle sur l’écriture qui est réflexive, celle du terrain et de l’expérience vécue. Ces trois voix sont apparues au fil de la rédaction de cet article. J’étais habitué à la première, une analyse à partir de lectures et d’expériences de terrain. La deuxième est apparue rapidement à partir du moment où je me suis demandé comment écrire sur l’écriture sans tomber dans un abyme de réflexivité. C’est la troisième qui a été plus surprenante : le terrain dont j’avais décidé de parler, le clown, faisait des apparitions soudaines, en venant défaire ce que j’essayais péniblement d’écrire.

Comme ce terrain n’est pas qu’un objet extérieur, mais que j’en fais partie, en tant qu’apprenti clown, j’ai bien dû lui laisser la parole. C’est de cette parole dont j’aimerais rendre compte, car elle porte selon moi la marque du désir.

La question que je pose est la suivante : comment articuler l’écriture scientifique avec le désir qui s’y manifeste. En effet, l’écriture scientifique est une pratique qui peut être angoissante, crispante, et qui n’est pas source de plaisir, alors même qu’elle est également alimentée par un désir d’écrire (avant de commencer…) et se nourrit de terrains de recherche qui sont souvent très engageants, passionnants et qui donnent envie d’en transmettre quelque chose par l’écriture.

Comment expliquer cette tension, et comment réintroduire du désir dans l’écriture des sciences. Ma contribution sera d’explorer ici, théoriquement et en pratique, la question de la réflexivité, ce qu’elle engage et ce qu’elle révèle du désir du chercheur, pour essayer de dégager quelques leçons pratiques.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/communication.16445

EN

ORCID coverage in research institutions—Readiness for partially automated research reporting

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Kathrin Schnieders, Sandra Mierz, Sabine Boccalini, Wibke Meyer zu Westerhausen, Christian Hauschke, Stephanie Hagemann-Wilholt, Sonja Schulze

Reporting and presentation of research activities and outcome for research institutions in official, normative standards are more and more important and are the basis to comply with reporting duties. Institutional Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) serve as important databases or data sources for external and internal reporting, which should ideally be connected with interfaces to the operational systems for automated loading routines to extract relevant research information.

This investigation evaluates whether (semi-) automated reporting using open, public research information collected via persistent identifiers (PIDs) for organizations (ROR), persons (ORCID), and research outputs (DOI) can reduce effort of reporting.

For this purpose, internally maintained lists of persons to whom an ORCID record could be assigned (internal ORCID person lists) of two different German research institutions—Osnabrück University (UOS) and the non-university research institution TIB—Leibniz Information Center for Science and Technology Hannover—are used to investigate ORCID coverage in external open data sources like FREYA PID Graph (developed by DataCite), OpenAlex and ORCID itself. Additionally, for UOS a detailed analysis of discipline specific ORCID coverage is conducted. Substantial differences can be found for ORCID coverage between both institutions and for each institution regarding the various external data sources.

A more detailed analysis of ORCID distribution by discipline for UOS reveals disparities by research area—internally and in external data sources. Recommendations for future actions can be derived from our results: Although the current level of coverage of researcher IDs which could automatically be mapped is still not sufficient to use persistent identifier-based extraction for standard (automated) reporting, it can already be a valuable input for institutional CRIS.

URL : ORCID coverage in research institutions—Readiness for partially automated research reporting

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.1010504

EN

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

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

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

EN

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

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

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

EN

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

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

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

EN

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

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

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