Catégories
EN

Scientific collaboration on open science in the field of Information Science

Authors : Lígia Parreira Muniz Gäal, César Antonio Pereira

Introduction

Open Science is a movement largely based on knowledge sharing and its discussion has been carried out by several areas, including Information Science. Scientific collaboration has potential to benefit science in several ways, however, little is known about country collaboration in this area.

Objective

Therefore, the objective of this work is to analyze scientific cooperation between countries on the subject of Open Science in the field of Information Science.

Methodology

The network analysis method (co-authorship between countries) and the frequency of keywords were used to identify the most discussed subjects.

Results

The results showed that England has a central position in the scientific collaboration network. However, it is necessary to improve communication to avoid loss of quality in the information transmission.

Conclusion

The Open Access theme is still the most evident, however, topics such as research data management have gained notoriety in discussions on Open Science in the field of Information Science.

URL : Scientific collaboration on open science in the field of Information Science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.20396/rdbci.v21i00.8673825

Catégories
FR

Enjeux, pratiques et stratégies d’ouverture de l’information scientifique en bioéconomie

Auteur.ice : Marianne Duquenne

La bioéconomie est une opportunité en réponse aux problématiques écologiques actuelles que nous traversons. Ce nouveau paradigme contribue à une transition globale vers des modèles plus durables et respectueux de l’environnement. La mise en œuvre d’une telle stratégie sur un territoire implique nécessairement une forte interaction entre le secteur privé et le secteur public pour répondre aux défis d’innovation posés par la bioéconomie.

La région Hauts-de-France témoigne de cet écosystème composé d’acteurs de l’industrie, de la recherche, du transfert ou encore du monde de l’exploitation agricole. L’enjeu de cet article est double : d’abord, de comprendre comment ces catégories d’acteurs s’organisent pour produire des connaissances scientifiques et techniques en bioéconomie et, aussi, d’analyser le partage des résultats de la recherche entre ces acteurs.

Cette dernière question se pose de plus en plus depuis que l’État français mène une politique en faveur d’une science plus ouverte, transparente et accessible à tous. Depuis 2019, une étude de terrain est menée pour analyser l’application des principes de la science ouverte en bioéconomie.

Des entretiens menés auprès de porteurs de projets révèlent un domaine de recherche émergent, large et complexe. Tandis que les parties prenantes ont recours à des stratégies plus ou moins ouvertes pour partager les résultats de leurs travaux en recherche et développement, les résultats montrent que la mise en œuvre des principes de la science ouverte peut être impactée.

La discussion porte sur la nécessité d’être nuancé dans l’ouverture de l’information scientifique pour garantir les intérêts des partenaires industriels, et par ailleurs pour assurer le bon développement de la bioéconomie sur le territoire des Hauts-de-France.

URL : Enjeux, pratiques et stratégies d’ouverture de l’information scientifique en bioéconomie

Original location : https://revue-cossi.numerev.com/articles/revue-12/3101-enjeux-pratiques-et-strategies-d-ouverture-de-l-information-scientifique-en-bioeconomie

Catégories
EN

Promoting Open Access in Research-Performing Organizations: Spheres of Activity, Challenges, and Future Action Areas

Author : Heinz Pampel

Open access (OA) has become a critical issue in science policy and affects a wide range of activities in universities and research labs. Research-performing organizations (RPOs), defined as publicly funded universities and research institutions, face significant challenges in shaping the OA transformation.

This article examines the spheres of activity available to RPOs for shaping the OA transformation, using a categorization of 22 spheres of activity related to OA. These spheres of activity include strategy and communication, services and infrastructures, business relationships with publishers, and collaborations.

Current challenges and future action areas in promoting OA are also described, providing support for RPOs in handling OA and highlighting key issues. The categorization can serve as a tool for systematically assessing OA activities at RPOs and shows that OA is a cross-cutting issue in these organizations.

Collaboration on OA activities, both within and beyond organizations, presents a challenge. To effectively promote OA, it is crucial to strengthen the interaction between funding agencies and RPOs. Libraries are critical stakeholders, playing a vital role in advancing OA at the local, national, and international levels in partnership with RPO management and other partners in faculty, administration, and information technology.

URL : Promoting Open Access in Research-Performing Organizations: Spheres of Activity, Challenges, and Future Action Areas

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11030044

Catégories
EN

Development and preliminary validation of an open access, open data and open outreach indicator

Authors : Evgenios Vlachos, Regine Ejstrup, Thea Marie Drachen, Bertil Fabricius Dorch

We present the development and preliminary validation of a new person-centered indicator that we propose is named “OADO” after its target concepts: Open Access (OA), Open Data (OD) and Open Outreach (OO).

The indicator is comprised of two factors: the research factor indicating the degree of OA articles and OD in research; and the communication factor indicating the degree of OO in communication activities in which a researcher has participated. We stipulate that the weighted version of this new indicator, the Weighted-OADO, can be used to assess the openness of researchers in relation to their peers from their own discipline, department, or even group/center.

The OADO is developed and customized to the needs of Elsevier’s Research Information Management System (RIMS) environment, Pure. This offers the advantage of more accurate interpretations and recommendations for action, as well as the possibility to be implemented (and further validated) by multiple institutions, allowing disciplinary comparisons of the open practices across multiple institutes.

Therefore, the OADO provides recommendations for action, and enables institutes to make informed decisions based on the indicator’s outcome. To test the validity of the OADO, we retrieved the Pure publication records from two departments for each of the five faculties of the University of Southern Denmark and calculated the OADO of 995 researchers in total.

We checked for definition validity, actionability, transferability, possibility of unexpected discontinuities of the indicator, factor independence, normality of the indicator’s distributions across the departments, and indicator reliability.

Our findings reveal that the OADO is a reliable indicator for departments with normally distributed values with regards to their Weighted-OADO. Unfortunately, only two departments displayed normal distributions, one from the health sciences and one from engineering.

For departments where the normality assumption is not satisfied, the OADO can still be useful as it can indicate the need for making a greater effort toward openness, and/or act as an incentive for detailed registration of research outputs and datasets.

URL : Development and preliminary validation of an open access, open data and open outreach indicator

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2023.1218213

Catégories
EN

(Semi)automated disambiguation of scholarly repositories

Authors  : Miriam Baglioni, Andrea Mannocci, Gina Pavone, Michele De Bonis, Paolo Manghi

The full exploitation of scholarly repositories is pivotal in modern Open Science, and scholarly repository registries are kingpins in enabling researchers and research infrastructures to list and search for suitable repositories. However, since multiple registries exist, repository managers are keen on registering multiple times the repositories they manage to maximise their traction and visibility across different research communities, disciplines, and applications.

These multiple registrations ultimately lead to information fragmentation and redundancy on the one hand and, on the other, force registries’ users to juggle multiple registries, profiles and identifiers describing the same repository. Such problems are known to registries, which claim equivalence between repository profiles whenever possible by cross-referencing their identifiers across different registries.

However, as we will see, this « claim set » is far from complete and, therefore, many replicas slip under the radar, possibly creating problems downstream.

In this work, we combine such claims to create duplicate sets and extend them with the results of an automated clustering algorithm run over repository metadata descriptions. Then we manually validate our results to produce an « as accurate as possible » de-duplicated dataset of scholarly repositories.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02647

Catégories
EN

Making science public: a review of journalists’ use of Open Science research

Authors : Alice Fleerackers, Natascha Chten, Stephen Pinfield, Juan Pablo Alperin, Germana Barata, Monique Oliveira, Isabella Peters

Science journalists are uniquely positioned to increase the societal impact of open science by contextualizing and communicating research findings in ways that highlight their relevance and implications for non-specialist audiences.

Through engagement with and coverage of open research outputs, journalists can help align the ideals of openness, transparency, and accountability with the wider public sphere and its democratic potential.

Yet, it is unclear to what degree journalists use open research outputs in their reporting, what factors motivate or constrain this use, and how the recent surge in openly available research seen during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the relationship between open science and science journalism.

This literature review thus examines journalists’ use of open research outputs, specifically open access publications and preprints. We focus on literature published from 2018 onwards—particularly literature relating to the COVID-19 pandemic—but also include seminal articles outside the search dates.

We find that, despite journalists’ potential to act as critical brokers of open access knowledge, their use of open research outputs is hampered by an overreliance on traditional criteria for evaluating scientific quality; concerns about the trustworthiness of open research outputs; and challenges using and verifying the findings.

We also find that, while the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged journalists to explore open research outputs such as preprints, the extent to which these explorations will become established journalistic practices remains unclear.

Furthermore, we note that current research is overwhelmingly authored and focused on the Global North, and the United States specifically.

Finally, given the dearth of research in this area, we conclude with recommendations for future research that attend to issues of equity and diversity, and more explicitly examine the intersections of open science and science journalism.

URL : Making science public: a review of journalists’ use of Open Science research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.133710.1

Catégories
EN

The Invisible Workload of Open Research

Author : Thomas J. Hostler

It is acknowledged that conducting open research requires additional time and effort compared to conducting ‘closed’ research. However, this additional work is often discussed only in abstract terms, a discourse which ignores the practicalities of how researchers are expected to find the time to engage with these practices in the context of their broader role as multifaceted academics.

In the context of a sector that is blighted by stress, burnout, untenable workloads, and hyper-competitive pressures to produce, there is a clear danger that additional expectations to engage in open practices add to the workload burden and increase pressure on academics even further. In this article, the theories of academic capitalism and workload creep are used to explore how workload models currently exploit researchers by mismeasuring academic labour.

The specific increase in workload resulting from open practices and associated administration is then outlined, including via the cumulative effects of administrative burden.

It is argued that there is a high chance that without intervention, increased expectations to engage in open research practices may lead to unacceptable increases in demands on academics. Finally, the individual and systematic responsibilities to mitigate this are discussed.

URL : The Invisible Workload of Open Research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.36850/mr5