Étiquette : Marcel LaFlamme

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Emerging Forms of Open Research in Social/Cultural Anthropology

Authors : Timothy Elfenbein, Marcel LaFlamme, Andrew S. Hoffman

This article explores some current efforts to reconfigure research practices in the field of social/cultural anthropology, in ways that intersect with the open research movement but cannot be reduced to its local implementation.

We highlight three initiatives—the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), Experimental Methods for Ethnographic Research, Gathering, and Exchange (EMERGE), and xcol: An Ethnographic Inventory—seeking to make knowledge practices that are presently tacit or invisible in published research outputs more explicit and available for critical reflection.

Drawing on edited excerpts from unstructured interviews and a group discussion with participants from the three projects, we find that the primary driver for these efforts is a desire to increase the generativity of research materials, rather than regarding openness as a means to ensure reliability or reproducibility.

While directed at different steps of the knowledge production process, all three initiatives invite researchers to engage with some version of « light structure » for documentation, which aims to enable comparison and iteration while respecting fidelity to the source material. These findings offer insight into a distinctively anthropological culture of openness that prioritizes the proliferation of interpretations over the corroboration of fact.

URL : Emerging Forms of Open Research in Social/Cultural Anthropology

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.8085

Catégories
EN

An analysis of the effects of sharing research data, code, and preprints on citations

Authors : Giovanni Colavizza, Lauren Cadwallader, Marcel LaFlamme, Grégory Dozot, Stéphane Lecorney, Daniel Rappo, Iain Hrynaszkiewicz

Calls to make scientific research more open have gained traction with a range of societal stakeholders. Open Science practices include but are not limited to the early sharing of results via preprints and openly sharing outputs such as data and code to make research more reproducible and extensible. Existing evidence shows that adopting Open Science practices has effects in several domains.

In this study, we investigate whether adopting one or more Open Science practices leads to significantly higher citations for an associated publication, which is one form of academic impact. We use a novel dataset known as Open Science Indicators, produced by PLOS and DataSeer, which includes all PLOS publications from 2018 to 2023 as well as a comparison group sampled from the PMC Open Access Subset. In total, we analyze circa 122’000 publications. We calculate publication and author-level citation indicators and use a broad set of control variables to isolate the effect of Open Science Indicators on received citations.

We show that Open Science practices are adopted to different degrees across scientific disciplines. We find that the early release of a publication as a preprint correlates with a significant positive citation advantage of about 20.2% on average. We also find that sharing data in an online repository correlates with a smaller yet still positive citation advantage of 4.3% on average.

However, we do not find a significant citation advantage for sharing code. Further research is needed on additional or alternative measures of impact beyond citations. Our results are likely to be of interest to researchers, as well as publishers, research funders, and policymakers.

Arxiv : https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.16171

Catégories
EN

Seeing oneself as a data reuser: How subjectification activates the drivers of data reuse in science

Authors : Marcel LaFlamme, Marion Poetz, Daniel Spichtinger

Considerable resources are being invested in strategies to facilitate the sharing of data across domains, with the aim of addressing inefficiencies and biases in scientific research and unlocking potential for science-based innovation.

Still, we know too little about what determines whether scientific researchers actually make use of the unprecedented volume of data being shared. This study characterizes the factors influencing researcher data reuse in terms of their relationship to a specific research project, and introduces subjectification as the mechanism by which these influencing factors are activated.

Based on our analysis of semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 24 data reusers and intermediaries, we find that while both project-independent and project-dependent factors may have a direct effect on a single instance of data reuse, they have an indirect effect on recurring data reuse as mediated by subjectification.

We integrate our findings into a model of recurring data reuse behavior that presents subjectification as the mechanism by which influencing factors are activated in a propensity to engage in data reuse.

Our findings hold scientific implications for the theorization of researcher data reuse, as well as practical implications around the role of settings for subjectification in bringing about and sustaining changes in researcher behavior.

URL : Seeing oneself as a data reuser: How subjectification activates the drivers of data reuse in science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272153