Antti M. Rousi – InfoDoc MicroVeille

Authors : Antti M. Rousi, Xiaolong Li, Lara Ejtehadia, Richard Dars, Pedro E.S. Silv, Udayanto Dwi Atmoj

Data stewardship is a key expertise needed for the transformation towards more open and transparent science. This is particularly relevant in research institutions, where data stewards play a direct role in supporting research under open science requirements.

However, the absence of established frameworks and merits for assessing this expertise has hindered recognition, professional development, and the integration of data stewardship into institutional practices.

This work aims to examine how multidisciplinary data stewardship work transpires through the Open Science Career Assessment Matrix (OS-CAM); a tool designed to assess open science contributions across various dimensions. Using a case study approach, we report findings from a workshop where a multidisciplinary team of experts engaged in data stewardship described their work in relation to OS-CAM.

This work presents a summary of the CV narratives and suggested merits for data stewardship developed in the workshop. Assessing data stewardship through OS-CAM provides a structured framework for evaluating, recognising, and rewarding these contributions, thereby increasing their visibility in academic and professional evaluations.

However, our study also reveals notable gaps in OS-CAM’s coverage of data stewardship, particularly the underrepresentation of infrastructure-related activities such as the management of data repositories.

It is important to note that while OS-CAM may offer value in academic research settings, it is less applicable for data stewardship roles that extend beyond research or open science.

Therefore, we recommend further research to include diverse institutions and participants, combined with other complementary frameworks, for a more comprehensive understanding of data stewardship’s contribution to science and its recognition in or beyond academic communities.

URL : Data stewardship through the lens of Open Science Career Assessment Matrix

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v19i1.1088

Authors : Antti M. Rousi, Mikael Laakso

The practices for if and how scholarly journals instruct research data for published research to be shared is an area where a lot of changes have been happening as science policy moves towards facilitating open science, and subject-specific repositories and practices are established.

This study provides an analysis of the research data sharing policies of highly-cited journals in the fields of neuroscience, physics, and operations research as of May 2019. For these 120 journals, 40 journals per subject category, a unified policy coding framework was developed to capture the most central elements of each policy, i.e. what, when, and where research data is instructed to be shared.

The results affirm that considerable differences between research fields remain when it comes to policy existence, strength, and specificity. The findings revealed that one of the most important factors influencing the dimensions of what, where and when of research data policies was whether the journal’s scope included specific data types related to life sciences which have established methods of sharing through community-endorsed public repositories.

The findings surface the future research potential of approaching policy analysis on the publisher-level as well as on the journal-level. The collected data and coding framework is provided as open data to facilitate future research and journal policy monitoring.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03467-9