Archives des mots-clés : knowledge creation

Toward openness and transparency to better facilitate knowledge creation

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Author : Simon Mahony

Changes in modes of publication over recent decades and moves to publish material freely and openly have resulted in increased amounts of research and scholarly outputs being available online. These include teaching and other material but consist mostly of research publications.

There have been significant UK and European initiatives as part of the Open Agenda that facilitate and indeed mandate the move to open whether that is for educational materials, research output and data, or the mechanisms for ensuring the quality of these materials.

A significant issue is that although making research outputs freely available is praiseworthy, without the data on which that research is based, reproducibility and so verification, which are fundamental principles of scholarly methodology, are not possible.

When discrete datasets are linked openly and freely, are able to interact by using common standards, they become more powerful with extended possibilities for research questions that cross disciplinary divides and knowledge domains.

There are always objections and resistance to new innovations, and open publication is no exception; published research, nevertheless, indicates that publishing material openly is becoming considered to be “good research practice” and that the positives of “new collaborations and higher citation” outweigh any perceived negative effects.

URL : Toward openness and transparency to better facilitate knowledge creation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24652

Universities and knowledge sharing: Evaluating progress to openness at the institutional level

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Authors : Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon, Richard Hosking, Karl Huang, Alkim Ozaygen, Katie Wilson

Universities are key sites of knowledge creation. Governments and research funders are increasingly interested in ensuring that their investments in the production of new knowledge deliver a quantifiable return on investment, including in the form of ‘impact’.

Ensuring that research outputs are not locked behind paywalls, and that research data can be interrogated and built upon are increasingly central to efforts to improve the effectiveness of global research landscapes.

We argue that mandating and promoting open access (OA) for published research outputs, as well as the sharing of research data are important elements of building a vibrant open knowledge system, but they are not enough.

Supporting diversity within knowledge-making institutions; enabling collaboration across boundaries between universities and wider communities; and addressing inequalities in access to knowledge resources and in opportunities to contribute to knowledge making processes are also important.

New tools are needed to help universities, funders, and communities to understand the extent to which a university is operating as an effective open knowledge institution; as well as the steps that might be taken to improve open knowledge performance.

This paper discusses our team’s efforts to develop a model of Open Knowledge that is not confined to measures of OA and open data. The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative is a project of the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University.

With funding from the university, we are exploring the extent to which universities are functioning as effective open knowledge institutions; as well as the types of information that universities, funders, and communities might need to understand an institution’s open knowledge performance and how it might be improved.

The challenges of data collection on open knowledge practices at scale, and across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries are also discussed.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02141887

The scientific impact of nations on scientific and technological development

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Authors : Aurelio Patelli, Giulio Cimini, Emanuele Pugliese, Andrea Gabrielli

Determining how scientific achievements influence the subsequent process of knowledge creation is a fundamental step in order to build a unified ecosystem for studying the dynamics of innovation and competitiveness.

Yet, relying separately on data about scientific production on one side, through bibliometric indicators, and about technological advancements on the other side, through patents statistics, gives only a limited insight on the key interplay between science and technology which, as a matter of fact, move forward together within the innovation space.

In this paper, using citation data of both scientific papers and patents, we quantify the direct impact of the scientific outputs of nations on further advancements in science and on the introduction of new technologies.

Our analysis highlights the presence of geo-cultural clusters of nations with similar innovation system features, and unveils the heterogeneous coupled dynamics of scientific and technological success.

This study represents a first step in the buildup of a comprehensive framework for knowledge creation and innovation.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03768