Archives des mots-clés : open science

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

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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

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

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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

(Semi)automated disambiguation of scholarly repositories

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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

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

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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

The Invisible Workload of Open Research

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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

Iranian researchers’ perspective about concept and effect of open science on research publication

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Authors : Maryam Zarghani, Leila Nemati-Anaraki, Shahram Sedghi, Abdolreza Noroozi Chakoli, Anisa Rowhani-Farid

Background

Sharing research outputs with open science methods for different stakeholders causes better access to different studies to solve problems in diverse fields, which leads to equal access conditions to research resources, as well as greater scientific productivity. Therefore, the aim of this study was to perceive the concept of openness in research among Iranian health researchers.

Methods

From the beginning of August to the middle of November 2021, twenty semi-structured interviews were held with Iranian health researchers from different fields using purposeful, snowball, and convenience sampling. The interviews continued until data saturation. Data analysis was performed with thematic analysis using MAXQDA 20. Finally, seven main issues related to open science were identified.

Results

Through analysis of the interviews, 235 primary codes and 173 main codes were extracted in 22 subclasses. After careful evaluation and integration of subclasses and classes, they were finally classified into nine categories and three main themes. Analysis showed that openness in research was related to three main themes: researchers’ understanding of open science, the impact of open science on publication and sharing of research, concerns and reluctance to open research.

Conclusion

The conditions of access to research output should be specified given the diversity of studies conducted in the field of health; issues like privacy as an important topic of access to data and information in the health system should also be specified. Our analysis indicated that the conditions of publication and sharing of research processes should be stated according to different scopes of health fields.

The concept of open science was related to access to findings and other research items regardless of cost, political, social, or racial barriers, which could create collective wisdom in the development of knowledge. The process of publication and sharing of research related to open access applies to all types of outputs, conditions of access, increasing trust in research, creation of diverse publication paths, and broader participation of citizens in research.

Open science practices should be promoted to increase the circulation and exploitation rates of knowledge while adjusting and respecting the limits of privacy, intellectual property and national security rights of countries.

URL : Iranian researchers’ perspective about concept and effect of open science on research publication

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-023-09420-9

Contours of a research ethics and integrity perspective on open science

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Authors : Tom Lindemann, Lisa Häberlein

This article argues that adopting a research ethics and integrity perspective could support researchers in operationalizing the open science guiding principle “as open as possible, as closed as necessary” in a responsible and context-sensitive manner.

To that end, the article points out why the guiding principle as such provides only a limited extent of action-guidance and outlines the practical value of ethical reflection when it comes to translating open science into responsible research practice.

The article illustrates how research ethics and integrity considerations may help researchers understand the ethical rationale underpinning open science as well as recognize that limiting openness is necessary or at least normatively permissible in some situations.

Finally, the article briefly discusses possible consequences of integrating open science into a responsibility-centered framework and implications on research assessment.

URL : Contours of a research ethics and integrity perspective on open science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2023.1052353