InfoDoc MicroVeille – Page 96 – Veille dédiée aux Sciences de l'Information et des Bibliothèques // Collecting and Sharing research papers in Library and Information science ISSN 2429-3938

Evaluation and Merit-Based Increase in Academia: A Case Study in the First Person

Posted on 21 janvier 2022 by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Christine Musselin

This article provides a reflexive account of the process of defining and implementing a mechanism to evaluate a group of academics in a French higher education institution. The situation is a rather unusual case for France, as the assessed academics are not civil servants but are employed by their university and this evaluation leads to merit-based salary increases.

To improve and implement this strategy was one of the author’s tasks, when she was vice-president for research at the institution in this case.

The article looks at this experience retrospectively, emphasizing three issues of particular relevance in the context of discussions about valuation studies and management proposed in this symposium: (1) the decision to distinguish between different types of profiles and thus categorize, or to apply the same criteria to all; (2) the concrete forms of commensuration to be developed in order to be able to evaluate and rank individuals from different disciplines; (3) the quantification of qualitative appreciation, i.e. their transformation into merit-based salary increases.

URL : Evaluation and Merit-Based Increase in Academia: A Case Study in the First Person

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2021.8.2.73-88

The Rise of the Guest Editor—Discontinuities of Editorship in Scholarly Publishing

Posted on 20 janvier 2022 by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Marcel Knöchelmann, Felicitas Hesselmann, Martin Reinhart, Cornelia Schendzielorz

Scholarly publishing lives on traditioned terminology that gives meaning to subjects such as authors, inhouse editors and external guest editors, artifacts such as articles, journals, special issues, and collected editions, or practices of acquisition, selection, and review.

These subjects, artifacts, and practices ground the constitution of scholarly discourse. And yet, the meaning ascribed to each of these terms shifts, blurs, or is disguised as publishing culture shifts, which becomes manifest in new digital publishing technology, new forms of publishing management, and new forms of scholarly knowledge production.

As a result, we may come to over- or underestimate changes in scholarly communication based on traditioned but shifting terminology. In this article, we discuss instances of scholarly publishing whose meaning shifted.

We showcase the cultural shift that becomes manifest in the new, prolific guest editor. Though the term suggests an established subject, this editorial role crystallizes a new cultural setting of loosened discourse communities and temporal structures, a blurring of publishing genres and, ultimately, the foundations of academic knowledge production.

URL : The Rise of the Guest Editor—Discontinuities of Editorship in Scholarly Publishing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.748171

Barriers to Full Participation in the Open Science Life Cycle among Early Career Researchers

Posted on 19 janvier 2022 by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Natasha J. Gownaris, Koen Vermeir, Martin-Immanuel Bittner, Lasith Gunawardena, Sandeep Kaur-Ghumaan, Robert Lepenies, Godswill Ntsomboh Ntsefong, Ibrahim Sidi Zakari

Open science (OS) is currently dominated by a small subset of practices that occur late in the scientific process. Early career researchers (ECRs) will play a key role in transitioning the scientific community to more widespread use of OS from pre-registration to publication, but they also face unique challenges in adopting these practices. Here, we discuss these challenges across the OS life cycle.

Our essay relies on the published literature, an informal survey of 32 ECRs from 14 countries, and discussions among members of the Global Working Group on Open Science (Global Young Academy and National Young Academies).

We break the OS life cycle into four stages—study design and tracking (pre-registration, open processes), data collection (citizen science, open hardware, open software, open data), publication (open access publishing, open peer review, open data), and outreach (open educational resources, citizen science)—and map potential barriers at each stage.

The most frequently discussed barriers across the OS life cycle were a lack of awareness and training, prohibitively high time commitments, and restrictions and/or a lack of incentives by supervisors.

We found that OS practices are highly fragmented and that awareness is particularly low for OS practices that occur during the study design and tracking stage, possibly creating ‘path-dependencies’ that reduce the likelihood of OS practices at later stages.

We note that, because ECRs face unique barriers to adopting OS, there is a need for specifically targeted policies such as mandatory training at the graduate level and promotion incentives.

URL : Barriers to Full Participation in the Open Science Life Cycle among Early Career Researchers

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-002

Two-dimensional books for the new Open Access academic publishing

Posted on 18 janvier 2022 by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Fulvio Guatelli

Metadata have become a key element of scientific communication. Indeed, the content of a publication – that is, what we love, discuss and judge – is no longer the alpha and omega of a scientific publication nor its exclusive centre of gravity. Books are gradually taking the form of an iceberg, whose visible part is represented by the content, while the submerged part is constituted by metadata.

In the current communication approach of scientific research, metadata and dissemination go hand in hand, as metadata provide a huge contribution to the success of the research itself.

In this paper, I will illustrate how – in the field of today’s scholarly publishing – best practices, simple metadata, and cataloguing indicators such as DOI and ORCID are taking on the task that was once accomplished by chariots pulled by sturdy horses coming out of Aldo Manuzio’s workshop: spreading books and the discoveries of scientific research all over the world.

URL : Two-dimensional books for the new Open Access academic publishing

Original location : https://jlis.fupress.net/index.php/jlis/article/view/425

Exploring the social activity of open research data on ResearchGate: implications for the data literacy of researchers

Posted on 14 janvier 2022 by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Juliana Elisa Raffaghelli, Stefania Manca

Purpose

Although current research has investigated how open research data (ORD) are published, researchers’ behaviour of ORD sharing on academic social networks (ASNs) remains insufficiently explored. The purpose of this study is to investigate the connections between ORDs publication and social activity to uncover data literacy gaps.

Design/methodology/approach

This work investigates whether the ORDs publication leads to social activity around the ORDs and their linked published articles to uncover data literacy needs. The social activity was characterised as reads and citations, over the basis of a non-invasive approach supporting this preliminary study.

The eventual associations between the social activity and the researchers’ profile (scientific domain, gender, region, professional position, reputation) and the quality of the ORD published were investigated to complete this picture.

A random sample of ORD items extracted from ResearchGate (752 ORDs) was analysed using quantitative techniques, including descriptive statistics, logistic regression and K-means cluster analysis.

Findings

The results highlight three main phenomena: (1) Globally, there is still an underdeveloped social activity around self-archived ORDs in ResearchGate, in terms of reads and citations, regardless of the published ORDs quality; (2) disentangling the moderating effects over social activity around ORD spots traditional dynamics within the “innovative” practice of engaging with data practices; (3) a somewhat similar situation of ResearchGate as ASN to other data platforms and repositories, in terms of social activity around ORD, was detected.

Research limitations/implications

Although the data were collected within a narrow period, the random data collection ensures a representative picture of researchers’ practices.

Practical implications

As per the implications, the study sheds light on data literacy requirements to promote social activity around ORD in the context of open science as a desirable frontier of practice.

Originality/value

Researchers data literacy across digital systems is still little understood. Although there are many policies and technological infrastructure providing support, the researchers do not make an in-depth use of them.

URL : Exploring the social activity of open research data on ResearchGate: implications for the data literacy of researchers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-05-2021-0255

The impact of the pandemic on early career researchers: what we already know from the internationally published literature

Posted on 14 janvier 2022 by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Eti Herman, David Nicholas, Anthony Watkinson, Blanca Rodríguez-Bravo, Abdullah Abrizah, Chérifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri, Hamid R. Jamali, David Sims, Suzie Allard, Carol Tenopir, Jie Xu, Marzena Świgoń, Galina Serbina, Leah Parke Cannon

In order to take account of the impact of the pandemic on the already changing scholarly communications and work-life of early career researchers (ECRs), the 4-year long Harbingers study was extended for another two years.

As a precursor to the study (featuring interviews and a questionnaire survey), currently underway, an analytic review of the pertinent literature was undertaken and its results are presented here.

The review focuses on the challenges faced by ECRs and how these compare to the ones more senior researchers have to tackle. In the examination of the literature three general questions are posed: Q1) What are the identifiable and forthcoming impacts of the pandemic-induced financial pressures felt in the Higher Education sector on ECRs’ employment and career development prospects? Q2) What are the identifiable and forthcoming pandemic-associated disruptions in the pace/focus/direction of the research undertaking? Have any disruptions been predicted to exert an impact on ECRs’ research activities, and if so, with what scholarly consequences? Q3) How is the work-life of ECRs shaping up under the virus-dictated rules of the ‘new normal’ in the research undertaking? What challenges, if any, arise from the changes in practices identified, and what might their potential consequences be for ECRs?

The broad conclusion of the study is that the literature leaves little room for doubt: junior researchers are already disproportionally affected by and bear the burden of the ongoing pandemic-incurred hardships and they are likely to remain similarly impacted when more trials, still unfolding, materialise.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2021.mar.08

We Can Make a Better Use of ORCID: Five Observed Misapplications

Posted on 13 janvier 2022 by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Miriam Baglioni, Paolo Manghi, Andrea Mannocci, Alessia Bardi

Since 2012, the “Open Researcher and Contributor ID” organisation (ORCID) has been successfully running a worldwide registry, with the aim of “providing a unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities”.

Any service in the scholarly communication ecosystem (e.g., publishers, repositories, CRIS systems, etc.) can contribute to a non-ambiguous scholarly record by including, during metadata deposition, referrals to iDs in the ORCID registry.

The OpenAIRE Research Graph is a scholarly knowledge graph that aggregates both records from the ORCID registry and publication records with ORCID referrals from publishers and repositories worldwide to yield research impact monitoring and Open Science statistics.

Graph data analytics revealed “anomalies” due to ORCID registry “misapplications”, caused by wrong ORCID referrals and misexploitation of the ORCID registry. Albeit these affect just a minority of ORCID records, they inevitably affect the quality of the ORCID infrastructure and may fuel the rise of detractors and scepticism about the service.

In this paper, we classify and qualitatively document such misapplications, identifying five ORCID registrant-related and ORCID referral-related anomalies to raise awareness among ORCID users.

We describe the current countermeasures taken by ORCID and, where applicable, provide recommendations. Finally, we elaborate on the importance of a community-steered Open Science infrastructure and the benefits this approach has brought and may bring to ORCID.

URL : We Can Make a Better Use of ORCID: Five Observed Misapplications

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2021-038