Étiquette : case study

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Open Access Perceptions, Strategies, and Digital Literacies: A Case Study of a Scholarly-Led Journal

Authors : Noella Edelmann, Judith Schoßböck

Open access (OA) publications play an important role for academia, policy-makers, and practitioners. Universities and research institutions set up OA policies and provide authors different types of support for engaging in OA activities. This paper presents a case study on OA publishing in a scholarly community, drawing on qualitative and quantitative data gained from workshops and a survey.

As the authors are the managing editors of the OA eJournal for eDemocracy and Open Government (JeDEM), the aim was to collect data and insights on the publication choices of authors interested in OA publishing and other crucial factors such as personal attitudes to publishing, institutional context, and digital literacy in order to improve the journal.

In the first phase, two workshops with different stakeholders were held at the Conference for e-Democracy and Open Government (CeDEM) held in Austria and in South Korea in 2016. In the second phase, an online survey was sent to all the users of the e-journal JeDEM in October 2019.

From the workshops, key differences regarding OA perception and strategies between the stakeholder groups were derived. Participants strongly perceived OA publishing as a highly individualist matter embedded within a publishing culture emphasizing reputation and rankings.

The survey results, however, showed that institutional support differs considerably for authors. Factors such as visibility, reputation, and impact play the biggest role for the motivation to publish OA.

The results from both inquiries provide a better understanding of OA publishing attitudes and the relevant digital literacies but also suggest the need to investigate further the enablers or difficulties of scholarship, particularly in a digital context.

They clearly point to the potential of regularly addressing the users of the journal as well as communicating with them the more nuanced aspects of OA publishing, non-traditional metrics, or respective digital literacies, in order to reduce misconceptions about OA and to support critical stances.

URL : Open Access Perceptions, Strategies, and Digital Literacies: A Case Study of a Scholarly-Led Journal

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8030044

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Our Study is Published, But the Journey is Not Finished!

Authors : Olivier Pourret, Katsuhiko Suzuki, Yoshio Takahashi

Each June, we receive e-mails from publishers welcoming the evolution of their journals’ journal impact factor (JIF). The JIF is a controversial metric (Callaway 2016), and it is worth asking, “What’s behind it?”

In this age of “publish or perish” (Harzing 2007), we take much time and effort to write our papers and get them published. But how much time and effort do we put into finding readers or ensuring that we are reaching the right audience? Are metrics, such as the JIF, good guides for how well we are doing at reaching our target audience?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2138/gselements.16.4.229

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Research Data Management for Master’s Students: From Awareness to Action

Authors: Daen Adriaan Ben Smits, Marta Teperek

This article provides an analysis of how sixteen recently graduated master’s students from the Netherlands perceive research data management. It is important to study the master’s students’ attitudes towards this, as students in this phase prepare themselves for their career. Some of them might become future academics or policymakers, thus, potentially, the future advocates of good data management and reproducible science.

In general, students were rather unsure what ‘data management’ meant and would often confuse it with data analysis, study design or methodology, or ethics and privacy. When students defined the concept, they focussed on privacy aspects. Concepts such as open data and the ‘FAIR’ principles were rarely mentioned, even though these are the cornerstones of contemporary data management efforts.

In practice, the students managed their own data in an ad hoc way, and only a few of them worked with a clear data management plan. Illustrative of this is that half of the interviewees did not know where to find their data anymore. Furthermore, their study programmes had diverse approaches to data management education.

Most of the classes offered were limited in scope. Nevertheless, the students seemed to be aware of the importance of data management and were willing to learn more about good data management practices.

This report helps to catch an important first glimpse of how master’s students (from different scientific backgrounds) think about research data management. Only by knowing this, accurate measures can be taken to improve data management awareness and skills.

The article also provides some useful recommendations on what such measures might be, and introduces some of the steps already taken by the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).

URL : Research Data Management for Master’s Students: From Awareness to Action

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-030

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The Adoption of Open Access Journals for Publishing Management Research: A Review of the Literature and the Experience of the University of the West Indies

Authors : Haven Allahar, Ron Sookram

The article reviews the literature in the field of academic journal publishing highlighting the phenomenon of the recent entry of Internet-driven open access journals into a field dominated by the traditional subscription journals.

The article has a twofold purpose of gaining an understanding of the main features and characteristics of the open access journal system through a review of the literature; and assessing the extent of adoption of open access by researchers in the management discipline through a review of the management publications by the University of the West Indies (UWI) researchers.

A sequential exploratory strategy of two phases was used. The first phase focused on the collection of secondary data on journal publishing and the second involved reviewing the publishing record of the UWI with particular reference to management research.

The main finding is that open access was not fully embraced as a publishing outlet because of academic resistance derived from questions of acceptability, and the existence of a system that assigns greater recognition to the established subscription journals.

The article concludes that open access journals have grown in respectability and quality and are a good option for publishing management research by authors located in developing regions, provided the operational characteristics of this mode of publishing are understood and caution in journal selection is exercised.

URL : https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1254820

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Showcasing Institutional Research: Curating Library Exhibits to Support Scholarly Communication

Authors : Devina Dandar, Jaime Clifton-Ross, Ann Dale, Rosie Croft

INTRODUCTION

To support faculty in communicating their research outcomes to the academic community and the wider public, the Royal Roads University (RRU) Library established Showcase, a physical venue in the library designed to promote institutional research.

While professional literature mainly focuses on the use of library exhibits for outreach and community engagement, more literature is needed on applying museum interpretation practices to the development of library exhibits, and the use of library exhibits for knowledge mobilization of research outcomes and promotion of institutional scholarship to the wider community.

DESCRIPTION OF SERVICE

This article discusses the Royal Roads University Library’s practices to develop the ‘Showcase’ brand by curating research-based exhibits as a scholarly communication initiative to support institutional research dissemination.

It provides a brief description of the Showcase venue and infrastructure. It then describes the processes, challenges, and lessons learned in developing three research exhibits, that is, 1) cultivating faculty partnerships; 2) reformatting academic research to multimedia formats; and 3) integrating technology to showcase scholarship.

NEXT STEPS

It concludes by outlining the next steps for developing this initiative and the practice of curating academic research exhibits.

URL : Showcasing Institutional Research: Curating Library Exhibits to Support Scholarly Communication

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2335

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Research Data Management as an Integral Part of the Research Process of Empirical Disciplines Using Landscape Ecology as an Example

Authors : Winfried Schröder, Stefan Nickel

Research Data Management (RDM) is regarded as an elementary component of empirical disciplines. Taking Landscape Ecology in Germany as an example the article demonstrates how to integrate RDM into the research design as a complement of the classic quality control and assurance in empirical research that has, so far, generally been limited to data production.

Sharing and reuse of empirical data by scientists as well as thorough peer reviews of knowledge produced by empirical research requires that the problem of the research in question, the operationalized definitions of the objects of investigation and their representative selection are documented and archived as well as the methods of data production including indicators for data quality and all data collected and produced.

On this basis, the extent to which this complemented design of research processes has already been realized is demonstrated by research projects of the Chair of Landscape Ecology at the University of Vechta, Germany.

This study is part of a joined research project on Research Data Management funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

URL : Research Data Management as an Integral Part of the Research Process of Empirical Disciplines Using Landscape Ecology as an Example

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-026