Étiquette : Germany

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Understanding differences of the OA uptake within the German university landscape (2010–2020): part 1—journal-based OA

Authors : Niels Taubert, Anne Hobert, Najko Jahn, Andre Bruns, Elham Iravan

This study investigates the determinants for the uptake of Full and Hybrid Open Access (OA) in the university landscape of Germany and distinguishes between three factors: The disciplinary profile, infrastructures and services of universities that aim to support OA, and large transformative agreements.

The uptake of OA, the influence of the disciplinary profile of universities and the influence of transformative agreements is measured by combining several data sources (incl. Web of Science, Unpaywall, an authority file of standardised German affiliation information, the ISSN-Gold-OA 4.0 list, and lists of publications covered by transformative agreements).

For infrastructures and services that support OA, a structured data collection was created by harvesting different sources of information and by manual online search. To determine the explanatory power of the different factors, a series of regression analyses was performed for different periods and for both Full as well as Hybrid OA.

As a result of the regression analyses, the most determining factor for the explanation of differences in the uptake of both OA-types turned out to be the disciplinary profile. For the year 2020, Hybrid OA transformative agreements have become a second relevant factor.

However, all variables that reflect local infrastructural support and services for OA turned out to be non-significant. To deepen the understanding of the adoption of OA on the level of institutions, the outcomes of the regression analyses are contextualised by an interview study conducted with 20 OA officers of German universities.

URL : Understanding differences of the OA uptake within the German university landscape (2010–2020): part 1—journal-based OA

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04716-3

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EN

Balancing interests between freedom and censorship: Organizational strategies for quality assurance in science communication

Authors : Benedikt Fecher, Freia Kuper, Birte Fähnrich, Hannah Schmid-Petri, Thomas Schildhauer, Peter Weingart, Holger Wormer

While science communication is increasingly being discussed as a third mission alongside research and teaching, there is little research on how universities and research organizations deal with issues regarding the quality of science communication.

This article examines, from an organizational perspective, which new forms of quality assurance processes scientific organizations in Germany apply when addressing quality risks for science communication such as exaggeration in press releases or in the online communication of individual faculty members.

Six focus group discussions were conducted with 22 participants (rectors or presidents of universities, heads of communication, ombudsmen, and high-impact researchers). Based on the results, proposals were developed to extend central as well as decentral organizational structures to assure good scientific communication practice.

Their possible implementation was discussed in a workshop with representatives of all abovementioned groups. In conclusion, recommendations for future institutional policy are presented.

URL : Balancing interests between freedom and censorship: Organizational strategies for quality assurance in science communication

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/scipol/scac043

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EN

RDM in a Decentralised University Ecosystem—A Case Study of the University of Cologne

Authors : Constanze Curdt, Jens Dierkes, Sonja Kloppenburg

The University of Cologne (UoC) has historically grown in highly decentralised structures. This is reflected by a two-layered library structure as well as by a number of decentralised research data management (RDM) activities established on the faculty and research consortium level.

With the aim to foster networking, cooperation, and synergies between existing activities, a university-wide RDM will be established. A one-year feasibility study was commissioned by the Rectorate in 2016 and carried out by the department research management, library and computing centre.

One study outcome was the adoption of a university-wide research data guideline. Based on a comprehensive RDM service portfolio, measures were developed to put a central RDM into practice.

The challenges have been to find the right level of integration and adaptation of existing and established decentralised structures and to develop additional new structures and services.

We will report on first steps to map out central RDM practices at the UoC and to develop a structure of cooperation between loosely coupled information infrastructure actors. Central elements of this structure are a competence center, an RDM expert network, a forum for exchange about RDM and associated topics as well as the faculties with their decentralized, domain-specific RDM services.

The Cologne Competence Center for Research Data Management (C3RDM) was founded at the end of 2018 and is still in its development phase. It provides a one-stop entry point for all questions regarding RDM. T

he center itself provides basic and generic RDM services, such as training, consulting, and data publication support, and acts as a hub to the decentral experts, information infrastructure actors, and resources.

URL : RDM in a Decentralised University Ecosystem—A Case Study of the University of Cologne

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-020

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EN

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

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

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How far does an emphasis on stakeholder engagement and co-production in research present a threat to academic identity and autonomy? A prospective study across five European countries

Authors : Annette Boaz, Robert Borst, Maarten Kok, Alison O’Shea

There is a growing recognition that needs more to be done to ensure that research contributes to better health services and patient outcomes. Stakeholder engagement in research, including co-production, has been identified as a promising mechanism for improving the value, relevance and utilization of research.

This article presents findings from a prospective study which explored the impact of stakeholder engagement in a 3-year European tobacco control research project. That research project aimed to engage stakeholders in the development, testing and dissemination of a return-on-investment tool across five EU countries (the Netherlands, Spain, Hungary, Germany and the UK).

The prospective study comprised interviews, observations and document review. The analysis focused on the extent to which the project team recognized, conceptualized and operationalized stakeholder engagement over the course of the research project. Stakeholder engagement in the European research project was conceptualized as a key feature of pre-designated spaces within their work programme.

Over the course of the project, however, the tool development work and stakeholder engagement activities decoupled. While the modelling and tool development became more secluded, stakeholder engagement activities subtly transformed from co-production, to consultation, to something more recognizable as research participation.

The contribution of this article is not to argue against the potential contribution of stakeholder engagement and co-production, but to show how even well-planned engagement activities can be diverted within the existing research funding and research production systems where non-research stakeholders remain at the margins and can even be seen as a threat to academic identify and autonomy.

URL : How far does an emphasis on stakeholder engagement and co-production in research present a threat to academic identity and autonomy? A prospective study across five European countries

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvab013

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Investigating the Blind Spot of a Monitoring System for Article Processing Charges

Authors : Andre Bruns, Niels Taubert

The Open Access (OA) publishing model that is based on article processing charges (APC) is often associated with the potential for more transparency regarding the expenditures for publications.

However, the extent to which transparency can be achieved depends not least on the completeness of data in APC monitoring systems. This article investigates two blind spots of the largest collection of APC payment information, OpenAPC. It aims to identify likely APC-liable publications for German universities that contribute to this system and for those that do not provide data to it.

The calculation combines data from Web of Science, the ISSN-Gold-OA-list and OpenAPC. The results show that for the group of universities contributing to the monitoring system, more than half of the APC payments are not covered by it and the average payments for non-covered APCs is higher than for APCs covered by the system.

In addition, the group of universities that do not contribute to OpenAPC accounts for two thirds of the number of APC-liable publications recorded for contributing universities. Regarding the size of these blind spots, the value of the monitoring system is limited at present.

URL : Investigating the Blind Spot of a Monitoring System for Article Processing Charges

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9030041

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EN

Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?

Authors : Pantea Kamrani, Isabelle Dorsch, Wolfgang G. Stock

The h-index is a widely used scientometric indicator on the researcher level working with a simple combination of publication and citation counts. In this article, we pursue two goals, namely the collection of empirical data about researchers’ personal estimations of the importance of the h-index for themselves as well as for their academic disciplines, and on the researchers’ concrete knowledge on the h-index and the way of its calculation.

We worked with an online survey (including a knowledge test on the calculation of the h-index), which was finished by 1081 German university professors. We distinguished between the results for all participants, and, additionally, the results by gender, generation, and field of knowledge.

We found a clear binary division between the academic knowledge fields: For the sciences and medicine the h-index is important for the researchers themselves and for their disciplines, while for the humanities and social sciences, economics, and law the h-index is considerably less important.

Two fifths of the professors do not know details on the h-index or wrongly deem to know what the h-index is and failed our test. The researchers’ knowledge on the h-index is much smaller in the academic branches of the humanities and the social sciences.

As the h-index is important for many researchers and as not all researchers are very knowledgeable about this author-specific indicator, it seems to be necessary to make researchers more aware of scholarly metrics literacy.

URL : Do researchers know what the h-index is? And how do they estimate its importance?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03968-1