Perceptions regarding open science appraised by editors of scholarly publications published in Spain

Authors : Remedios Melero, Juan-José Boté-Vericad, Alexandre López-Borrull

Pillars of open science are often included within the editorial policies of scholarly journals, including policies on open access publication, availability of underlying research data, preprints and open peer review.

The aim of this paper is to examine and analyse perceptions and editorial practices related to open access, preprints, open research data and open peer review, from the perspective of editors of scientific journals published in Spain, to gain an insight into editorial policies related to open science.

Results and data were obtained by a combined method of online interviews and an online questionnaire. The online survey was sent to editors from journals indexed in the Dulcinea directory, which at the time of the study included 1875 academic journals. A total of 420 responses (22.4%) were obtained.

The results indicated that 92% of the journals were open access journals, 2% of the journals conducted open peer review, 15% of the journals had instructions to allow archiving preprints, and out of 375 responses, only 59 journals (16%) reported having a policy on underlying research data.

Based on these results, there is a trend in favour of open access, but the perceived barriers to open peer review outweighed the advantages. There is also some reluctance to allow preprints to be made available.

This concern might be because editors want authors and readers to read and cite the contents published in their journals, rather than their preprint versions.

URL : Perceptions regarding open science appraised by editors of scholarly publications published in Spain

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1511

Les systèmes d’information recherche : un nouvel objet du questionnement éthique

Auteur/Authors : Joachim Schöpfel, Otmane Azeroual

La politique en faveur de la science ouverte interroge les critères et les procédures de l’évaluation de la recherche, tout en mettant en avant les principes fondamentaux de l’éthique scientifique, comme la transparence, l’ouverture et l’intégrité.

Dans ce contexte, nous menons depuis 2020 une analyse de la dimension éthique des systèmes d’information consacrés à l’évaluation de la recherche (SI recherche).

Cet article présente les résultats d’une enquête internationale conduite en 2021 avec un petit échantillon de professionnels et de chercheurs sur deux aspects : l’éthique comme objet du modèle de données de ces systèmes (métriques), et l’aspect éthique de la mise en place et de l’utilisation de ces systèmes.

La discussion fait le lien avec la qualité de ces systèmes, insiste sur la distinction entre l’évaluation des institutions et des personnes et propose l’analyse de ces systèmes à partir du concept d’une responsabilité morale répartie des infrastructures éthiques (infraéthique).

DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.13254

La science (dé)confinée

Autrice/Author : Clara Galliano

Plusieurs pays d’Asie, d’Afrique, d’Europe, d’Amérique latine et certains états américains ont mis en place des mesures de confinement pour lutter contre la propagation du virus et l’arrivée de nouveaux variants.

En France comme ailleurs, ces mesures ont provoqué de lourdes conséquences sur l’économie du pays, ainsi que sur le moral des populations. Cet article propose d’évaluer, à partir de plusieurs méthodes, les impacts du confinement sur la recherche en étudiant plusieurs éléments comme : les collaborations internationales, les efforts des éditeurs sur l’accessibilité aux ressources numériques et les différentes enquêtes menées au sein des communautés scientifiques.

La Science Ouverte, entre mouvement et norme, a été un point clé stratégique et libérateur pendant la crise sanitaire afin d’accéder aux résultats pour faire avancer les recherches sur le vaccin, mais aussi pour continuer à maintenir l’activité scientifique quand tout la contraignait.

URL : https://revue-cossi.numerev.com/articles/revue-11/2750-la-science-deconfinee

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

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

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

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

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