Archives des mots-clés : open science

Champions of Transparency in Education: What Journal Reviewers Can Do to Encourage Open Science Practices

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Authors : Rachel Renbarger, Jill L. Adelson, Joshua Rosenberg, Sondra M Stegenga, Olivia Lowrey, Pamela Rose Buckley, Qiyang Zhang

As the field of education and especially gifted education gradually moves towards open science, our research community increasingly values transparency and openness brought by open science practices.

Yet, individual researchers may be reluctant to adopt open science practices due to low incentives, barriers of extra workload, or lack of support to apply these in certain areas, such as qualitative research.

We encourage and give guidelines to reviewers to champion open science practices by warmly influencing authors to consider applying open science practices to quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research and providing ample support to produce higher-quality publications.

Instead of imposing open science practices on authors, we advocate reviewers suggest small, non-threatening, specific steps to support authors without making them feel overwhelmed, judged, or punished.

We believe that these small steps taken by reviewers will make a difference to create a more supportive environment for researchers to adopt better practices.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.35542/osf.io/xqfwb

Challenges of Promoting Open Science within the NI4OS-Europe Project in Hungary

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Authors : Ákos Lencsés, Péter Sütő

National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe (NI4OS-Europe) is a Horizon 2020 project related to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). One of the project objectives is promoting EOSC and open science in 15 Central and East European EU states and EU-associated countries.

This paper describes the variety of promoting activities carried out in Hungary as part of the NI4OS-Europe project by the Governmental Agency for IT Development (KIFÜ). Identifying good practices will give us the chance to find the best communication channels and methods to promote open science and to manage expectations of funders, researchers and librarians. The audience diversity of organized NI4OS events was analyzed in this study.

The anonymized dataset based on registration forms was filtered by profession. Results suggest that events are generally visited by more librarians than researchers. The only exception is the third forum where the main Hungarian research fund as co-organizer might have attracted researchers’ attention.

This suggests that librarians are considered to be in charge of open science issues in general. Usage data of the open science news feed were also studied. The 130 posts between May 2021 and April 2022 and 2500 visitors until the end of June 2022 give us the chance to learn about the characteristics of the most visited posts.

We can conclude that the focus of communication is on open and FAIR data management, while other areas receive less attention. The results show that despite more international posts being published, the target group is more interested in local information.

URL : Challenges of Promoting Open Science within the NI4OS-Europe Project in Hungary

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10040051

 

A Landscape of Open Science Policies Research

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Author : Alejandra Manco

This literature review aims to examine the approach given to open science policy in the different studies. The main findings are that the approach given to open science has different aspects: policy framing and its geopolitical aspects are described as an asymmetries replication and epistemic governance tool.

The main geopolitical aspects of open science policies described in the literature are the relations between international, regional, and national policies. There are also different components of open science covered in the literature: open data seems much discussed in the works in the English language, while open access is the main component discussed in the Portuguese and Spanish speaking papers.

Finally, the relationship between open science policies and the science policy is framed by highlighting the innovation and transparency that open science can bring into it.

URL : A Landscape of Open Science Policies Research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440221140358

The impact of open and reproducible scholarship on students’ scientific literacy, engagement, and attitudes towards science: A review and synthesis of the evidence

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Authors : Madeleine Pownall, Flávio Azevedo, Laura M. König, et al. 

In recent years, the scientific community has called for improvements in the credibility, robustness, and reproducibility of research, characterized by higher standards of scientific evidence, increased interest in open practices, and promotion of transparency. While progress has been positive, there is a lack of consideration about how this approach can be embedded into undergraduate and postgraduate research training.

Currently, the impact of integrating an open and reproducible approach into the curriculum on student outcomes is not well articulated in the literature.

Therefore, in this paper, we provide the first comprehensive review of how integrating open and reproducible scholarship into teaching and learning may impact students, using a large-scale, collaborative, team-science approach. Our review highlighted how embedding open and reproducible scholarship may impact: (1) students’ scientific literacies (i.e., students’ understanding of open research, consumption of science, and the development of transferable skills); (2) student engagement (i.e., motivation and engagement with learning, collaboration, and engagement in open research), and (3) students’ attitudes towards science (i.e., trust in science and confidence in research findings).

Our review also identified a need for more robust and rigorous methods within evaluations of teaching practice. We discuss implications for teaching and learning scholarship in this area.

URL : The impact of open and reproducible scholarship on students’ scientific literacy, engagement, and attitudes towards science: A review and synthesis of the evidence

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/9e526

Adoption of Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines across Journals

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Authors : Inga Patarčić, Jadranka Stojanovski

Journal policies continuously evolve to enable knowledge sharing and support reproducible science. However, that change happens within a certain framework. Eight modular standards with three levels of increasing stringency make Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines which can be used to evaluate to what extent and with which stringency journals promote open science.

Guidelines define standards for data citation, transparency of data, material, code and design and analysis, replication, plan and study pre-registration, and two effective interventions: “Registered reports” and “Open science badges”, and levels of adoption summed up across standards define journal’s TOP Factor. In this paper, we analysed the status of adoption of TOP guidelines across two thousand journals reported in the TOP Factor metrics.

We show that the majority of the journals’ policies align with at least one of the TOP’s standards, most likely “Data citation” (70%) followed by “Data transparency” (19%). Two-thirds of adoptions of TOP standard are of the stringency Level 1 (less stringent), whereas only 9% is of the stringency Level 3.

Adoption of TOP standards differs across science disciplines and multidisciplinary journals (N = 1505) and journals from social sciences (N = 1077) show the greatest number of adoptions. Improvement of the measures that journals take to implement open science practices could be done: (1) discipline-specific, (2) journals that have not yet adopted TOP guidelines could do so, (3) the stringency of adoptions could be increased.

URL : Adoption of Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines across Journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10040046

Open science and conflict of interest policies of medical and health sciences journals before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: A repeat cross-sectional study

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Authors : Antoni D. Gardener, Ellen J. Hick, Chloe Jacklin, Gifford Tan, Aidan G. Cashin, Hopin Lee, David Nunan, Elaine C. Toomey, Georgia C. Richards

Objectives

To audit the transparent and open science standards of health and medical sciences journal policies and explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Design

Repeat cross-sectional study.

Setting

19 journals listed in Google Scholar’s Top Publications for health and medical sciences.

Participants

Blood, Cell, Circulation, European Heart Journal, Gastroenterology, Journal of Clinical Oncology, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, PLoS ONE, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science Translational Medicine, The British Medical Journal, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, The Lancet Oncology, and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Main outcome measures

We used the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guideline and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) requirements for disclosing conflicts
of interest (COIs) to evaluate journals standards.

Results

TOP scores slightly improved during the COVID-19 pandemic, from a median of 5 (IQR: 2–12.5) out of a possible 24 points in February 2020 to 7 (IQR: 4–12) in May 2021, but overall, scores were very low at both time points. Journal policies scored highest for their adherence to data transparency and scored lowest for preregistration of study protocols and analysis plans and the submission of replication studies. Most journals fulfilled all ICMJE provisions for reporting COIs before (84%; n = 16) and during (95%; n = 18) the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conclusions

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of practising open science. However, requirements for open science practices in audited policies were overall low, which may impede progress in health and medical research. As key stakeholders in disseminating research, journals should promote a research culture of greater transparency and more robust open science practices.

URL : Open science and conflict of interest policies of medical and health sciences journals before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: A repeat cross-sectional study

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1177/20542704221132139

Open Science in Africa: What policymakers should consider

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Authors : Elisha R. T. Chiware, Lara Skelly

As Open Science (OS) is being promoted as the best avenue to share and drive scientific discoveries at much lower costs and in transparent and credible ways, it is imperative that African governments and institutions take advantage of the momentum and build research infrastructures that are responsive to this movement.

This paper aims to provide useful insight into the importance and implementation of OS policy frameworks. The paper uses a systematic review approach to review existing literature and analyse global OS policy development documents. The approach includes a review of existing OS policy frameworks that can guide similar work by African governments and institutions.

This critical review also makes recommendations on key issues that Africa should consider in the process of OS policy development. These approaches can be widely used as further foundations for future developments in OS practices on the continent.

URL : Open Science in Africa: What policymakers should consider

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2022.950139