Archives des mots-clés : Earth Sciences

The rise of preprints in earth sciences

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Authors : Olivier Pourret, Daniel Enrique Ibarra

The rate of science information’s spread has accelerated in recent years. In this context, it appears that many scientific disciplines are beginning to recognize the value and possibility of sharing open access (OA) online manuscripts in their preprint form.

Preprints are academic papers that are published but have not yet been evaluated by peers. They have existed in research at least since the 1960s and the creation of ArXiv in physics and mathematics. Since then, preprint platforms—which can be publisher- or community-driven, profit or not for profit, and based on proprietary or free and open source software—have gained popularity in many fields (for example, bioRxiv for the biological sciences).

Today, there are many platforms that are either disciplinary-specific or cross-domain, with exponential development over the past ten years. Preprints as a whole still make up a very small portion of scholarly publishing, but a large group of early adopters are testing out these value-adding tools across a much wider range of disciplines than in the past.

In this opinion article, we provide perspective on the three main options available for earth scientists, namely EarthArXiv, ESSOAr/ESS Open Archive and EGUsphere.

URL : The rise of preprints in earth sciences

The Role of Metadata and Vocabulary Standards in Enabling Scientific Data Interoperability: A Study of Earth System Science Data Facilities

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Authors : Matthew S. Mayernik, Yauheniya Liapich

Objective

Journal publishers within many sciences are increasingly expecting data to be deposited into repositories that support the FAIR principles. Data repositories are thus needing to determine what implications the FAIR principles have on their existing services and systems. Metadata standards and controlled vocabularies are specifically called out as core components of the FAIR principles related to interoperability.

Methods

This paper looks specifically at the ways that metadata standards and controlled vocabularies are used by Earth system science data repositories. Data sets from 55 data facilities were examined to determine which metadata standards and controlled subject / keyword vocabularies were used.

Results

The findings indicate that only the ISO 19115:2003 and DataCite metadata standards are used by more than 40% of the data facilities, and the NASA Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) keywords are the only keyword vocabulary of broad use within this community.

Conclusions

These findings raise questions about the extent to which metadata standards and keyword vocabularies can facilitate interoperability beyond narrow sub-sections of the data facility communities. This study also points to systematic challenges related to migration to new standards.

URL : The Role of Metadata and Vocabulary Standards in Enabling Scientific Data Interoperability: A Study of Earth System Science Data Facilities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.619

International disparities in open access practices in the Earth Sciences

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Authors : Olivier Pourret, David William Hedding, Daniel Enrique Ibarra, Dasapta Erwin Irawan, Haiyan Liu, Jonathan Peter Tennant

Background

Open access (OA) implies free and unrestricted access to and re-use of research articles. Recently, OA publishing has seen a new wave of interest, debate, and practices surrounding that mode of publishing.

Objectives

To provide an overview of publication practices and to compare them among six countries across the world to stimulate further debate and to raise awareness about OA to facilitate decision-making on further development of OA practices in earth sciences.

Methods

The number of OA articles, their distribution among the six countries, and top ten journals publishing OA articles were identified using two databases, namely Scopus and the Web of Science, based mainly on the data for 2018.

Results

In 2018, only 24%–31% of the total number of articles indexed by either of the databases were OA articles. Six of the top ten earth sciences journals that publish OA articles were fully OA journals and four were hybrid journals. Fully OA journals were mostly published by emerging publishers and their article processing charges ranged from $1000 to $2200.

Conclusions

The rise in OA publishing has potential implications for researchers and tends to shift article-processing charges from organizations to individuals. Until the earth sciences community decides to move away from journal-based criteria to evaluate researchers, it is likely that such high costs will continue to maintain financial inequities within this research community, especially to the disadvantage of researchers from the least developed countries.

However, earth scientists, by opting for legal self- archiving of their publications, could help to promote equitable and sustainable access to, and wider dissemination of, their work.

URL : International disparities in open access practices in the Earth Sciences

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3897/ese.2021.e63663

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

The Data Life Aquatic: Oceanographers’ Experience with Interoperability and Re-usability: Oceanographers’ Experience with Interoperability and Re-usability

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Authors : Bradley Wade Bishop, Carolyn F Hank, Joel T Webster

This paper assesses data consumers’ perspectives on the interoperable and re-usable aspects of the FAIR Data Principles. Taking a domain-specific informatics approach, ten oceanographers were asked to think of a recent search for data and describe their process of discovery, evaluation, and use.

The interview schedule, derived from the FAIR Data Principles, included questions about the interoperability and re-usability of data. Through this critical incident technique, findings on data interoperability and re-usability give data curators valuable insights into how real-world users access, evaluate, and use data.

Results from this study show that oceanographers utilize tools that make re-use simple, with interoperability seamless within the systems used. The processes employed by oceanographers present a good baseline for other domains adopting the FAIR Data Principles.

URL : The Data Life Aquatic: Oceanographers’ Experience with Interoperability and Re-usability: Oceanographers’ Experience with Interoperability and Re-usability

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v16i1.635

A Discussion of Value Metrics for Data Repositories in Earth and Environmental Sciences

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Authors : Cynthia Parr, Corinna Gries, Margaret O’Brien, Robert R. Downs, Ruth Duerr, Rebecca Koskela, Philip Tarrant, Keith E. Maull, Nancy Hoebelheinrich, Shelley Stall

Despite growing recognition of the importance of public data to the modern economy and to scientific progress, long-term investment in the repositories that manage and disseminate scientific data in easily accessible-ways remains elusive. Repositories are asked to demonstrate that there is a net value of their data and services to justify continued funding or attract new funding sources.

Here, representatives from a number of environmental and Earth science repositories evaluate approaches for assessing the costs and benefits of publishing scientific data in their repositories, identifying various metrics that repositories typically use to report on the impact and value of their data products and services, plus additional metrics that would be useful but are not typically measured.

We rated each metric by (a) the difficulty of implementation by our specific repositories and (b) its importance for value determination. As managers of environmental data repositories, we find that some of the most easily obtainable data-use metrics (such as data downloads and page views) may be less indicative of value than metrics that relate to discoverability and broader use.

Other intangible but equally important metrics (e.g., laws or regulations impacted, lives saved, new proposals generated), will require considerable additional research to describe and develop, plus resources to implement at scale.

As value can only be determined from the point of view of a stakeholder, it is likely that multiple sets of metrics will be needed, tailored to specific stakeholder needs. Moreover, economically based analyses or the use of specialists in the field are expensive and can happen only as resources permit.

URL : A Discussion of Value Metrics for Data Repositories in Earth and Environmental Sciences

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2019-058