Étiquette : open science

Catégories
EN

Navigating Open Science as Early Career Feminist Researchers

Authors : Madeleine Pownall, Catherine Talbot, Anna Henschel, Alexandra Lautarescu, Kelly Lloyd, Helena Hartmann, Kohinoor Darda, Karen Tang, Parise Carmichael-Murphy, Jaclyn Siegel

Open Science aims to improve the rigour, robustness, and reproducibility of psychological research. Despite resistance from some academics, the Open Science movement has been championed by some Early Career Researchers (ECRs), who have proposed innovative new tools and methods to promote and employ open research principles.

Feminist ECRs have much to contribute to this emerging way of doing research. However, they face unique barriers, which may prohibit their full engagement with the Open Science movement.

We, ten feminist ECRs in psychology, from a diverse range of academic and personal backgrounds, explore Open Science through a feminist lens, to consider how voice and power may be negotiated in unique ways for ECRs. Taking a critical and intersectional approach, we discuss how feminist early career research may be complemented or challenged by shifts towards Open Science.

We also propose how ECRs can act as grassroots changemakers within the context of academic precarity. We identify ways in which Open Science can benefit from feminist epistemology and end with six practical recommendations for feminist ECRs who wish to engage with Open Science practices in their own research.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/f9m47

Catégories
EN

Preliminary analysis of COVID-19 academic information patterns: a call for open science in the times of closed borders

Authors : Jan Homolak, Ivan Kodvanj, D. Virag

The Pandemic of COVID-19, an infectious disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 motivated the scientific community to work together in order to gather, organize, process and distribute data on the novel biomedical hazard. Here, we analyzed how the scientific community responded to this challenge by quantifying distribution and availability patterns of the academic information related to COVID-19.

The aim of this study was to assess the quality of the information flow and scientific collaboration, two factors we believe to be critical for finding new solutions for the ongoing pandemic.

The RISmed R package, and a custom Python script were used to fetch metadata on articles indexed in PubMed and published on Rxiv preprint server. Scopus was manually searched and the metadata was exported in BibTex file. Publication rate and publication status, affiliation and author count per article, and submission-to-publication time were analysed in R. Biblioshiny application was used to create a world collaboration map.

Preliminary data suggest that COVID-19 pandemic resulted in generation of a large amount of scientific data, and demonstrates potential problems regarding the information velocity, availability, and scientific collaboration in the early stages of the pandemic. More specifically, the results indicate precarious overload of the standard publication systems, significant problems with data availability and apparent deficient collaboration.

In conclusion, we believe the scientific community could have used the data more efficiently in order to create proper foundations for finding new solutions for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Moreover, we believe we can learn from this on the go and adopt open science principles and a more mindful approach to COVID-19-related data to accelerate the discovery of more efficient solutions. We take this opportunity to invite our colleagues to contribute to this global scientific collaboration by publishing their findings with maximal transparency.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03587-2

Catégories
FR

Big deals et open access: quelle stratégie numérique pour les bibliothèques universitaires ?

Auteur/Author : Isabelle Bizos

Le marché mondial de l’édition scientifique tend à se concentrer et à se développer sous la forme de monopoles anticoncurrentiels. Les coûts d’acquisitions des ressources électroniques s’envolent et les bibliothèques universitaires ne peuvent plus durablement soutenir ces augmentations exponentielles.

Fondé sur le fonctionnement de la recherche et en particulier sur le système d’évaluation des productions scientifiques, l’écosystème de l’information scientifique et technique est pris dans un cercle vicieux.

La révolution de la science ouverte et l’évolution des cadres législatifs des états bousculent les modèles économiques et deviennent un espoir pour faciliter la diffusion de l’information avec cependant des risques avérés aussi bien financiers qu’en matière de signalement et de conservation.

Les bibliothèques universitaires s’organisent et s’évaluent pour faire face aux défis de la diffusion de la documentation électronique. Elles sont au coeur des stratégies numériques des établissements de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche.

URL : Big deals et open access: quelle stratégie numérique pour les bibliothèques universitaires ?

Original location : https://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/69602-big-deals-et-open-access-quelle-strategie-numerique-pour-les-bibliotheques-universitaires

 

Catégories
EN

Open Science and Its Enemies: Challenges for a Sustainable Science–Society Social Contract

Author : Venni V. Krishna

Science as a social institution has evolved as the most powerful, highly influential, and sought out institution after the conflicts between science and religion following Galileo. Knowledge as a public good, scientific peer review of science, the prominence of open publications, and the emphasis on professional recognition and scientific autonomy have been the hallmark of science in the past three centuries.

According to this scientific spirit, the scientific social system and society formed a unique social contract. This social contract drew considerable institutional and state legitimacy for the openness and public good of science in the service of state and society, all through the post-war period.

Openness and public good of science are recognized and legitimized by the scientific community and science agencies at the global level. This paradigm of open science, in varying forms and manifestations, contributed to the progress of systematic knowledge at the service of humankind over the last three centuries.

Entering the third decade of the 21st century, the social contract between science and society is undergoing major changes. In fact, the whole paradigm of open science and its social contract is being challenged by various “enemies” or adversaries such as (a) market-based privatized commercial science, (b) industry 4.0 advanced technologies, and (c) a “new iron curtain” on the free flow of science data and information.

What is at stake? Are there major changes? Is the very social institution of science transforming? What impact will this have on our contemporary and future sustainable society? These are some important issues that will be addressed in this article.

URL : Open Science and Its Enemies: Challenges for a Sustainable Science–Society Social Contract

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/joitmc6030061

Catégories
EN

Low availability of code in ecology: A call for urgent action

Authors : Antica Culina, Ilona van den Berg, Simon Evans, Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar

Access to analytical code is essential for transparent and reproducible research. We review the state of code availability in ecology using a random sample of 346 nonmolecular articles published between 2015 and 2019 under mandatory or encouraged code-sharing policies.

Our results call for urgent action to increase code availability: only 27% of eligible articles were accompanied by code. In contrast, data were available for 79% of eligible articles, highlighting that code availability is an important limiting factor for computational reproducibility in ecology.

Although the percentage of ecological journals with mandatory or encouraged code-sharing policies has increased considerably, from 15% in 2015 to 75% in 2020, our results show that code-sharing policies are not adhered to by most authors.

We hope these results will encourage journals, institutions, funding agencies, and researchers to address this alarming situation.

URL : Low availability of code in ecology: A call for urgent action

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000763

Catégories
EN

Transparency and open science principles in reporting guidelines in sleep research and chronobiology journals

Authors : Manuel Spitschan, Marlene H. Schmidt, Christine Blume

Background

« Open science » is an umbrella term describing various aspects of transparent and open science practices. The adoption of practices at different levels of the scientific process (e.g., individual researchers, laboratories, institutions) has been rapidly changing the scientific research landscape in the past years, but their uptake differs from discipline to discipline.

Here, we asked to what extent journals in the field of sleep research and chronobiology encourage or even require following transparent and open science principles in their author guidelines.

Methods

We scored the author guidelines of a comprehensive set of 28 sleep and chronobiology journals, including the major outlets in the field, using the standardised Transparency and Openness (TOP) Factor.

This instrument rates the extent to which journals encourage or require following various aspects of open science, including data citation, data transparency, analysis code transparency, materials transparency, design and analysis guidelines, study pre-registration, analysis plan pre-registration, replication, registered reports, and the use of open science badges.

Results

Across the 28 journals, we find low values on the TOP Factor (median [25th, 75th percentile] 2.5 [1, 3], min. 0, max. 9, out of a total possible score of 28) in sleep research and chronobiology journals.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest an opportunity for sleep research and chronobiology journals to further support the recent developments in transparent and open science by implementing transparency and openness principles in their guidelines and making adherence to them mandatory.

URL : Transparency and open science principles in reporting guidelines in sleep research and chronobiology journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.16111.1

Catégories
EN

Open Access uptake by universities worldwide

Authors : Nicolas Robinson-Garcia​, Rodrigo Costas, Thed N. van Leeuwen

The implementation of policies promoting the adoption of an open science (OS) culture must be accompanied by indicators that allow monitoring the uptake of such policies and their potential effects on research publishing and sharing practices.

This study presents indicators of open access (OA) at the institutional level for universities worldwide. By combining data from Web of Science, Unpaywall and the Leiden Ranking disambiguation of institutions, we track OA coverage of universities’ output for 963 institutions.

This paper presents the methodological challenges, conceptual discrepancies and limitations and discusses further steps needed to move forward the discussion on fostering OA and OS practices and policies.

URL : Open Access uptake by universities worldwide

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.9410