scientific communication – Page 163

Converting STEM Doctoral Dissertations into Patent Applications: A Study of Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, and Chemical Engineering Dissertations from CIC Institutions

Statut

Doctoral candidates may request short-term embargoes on the release of their dissertations in order to apply for patents. This study examines how often inventions described in dissertations in chemical engineering, chemistry, physics, and mathematics are converted into U.S. patent applications, as well as the relationship between dissertation approval dates and patent application filing dates.

Dissertations approved in 2008 by the 13 Committee on Institutional Cooperation universities provided the sample populations. Authors were searched as inventors in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Applications Full-text database to identify relevant patent applications. The number of dissertations yielding applications varied by discipline. Mathematics had none; chemical engineering had the most.

The majority of applications in chemical engineering and chemistry were filed either prior to or in the same month as the dissertation approval dates; all of those in physics were filed after them. These results will be of interest to librarians, administrators, advisors, and anyone else associated with determining and approving embargoes for dissertations, as well as science and engineering librarians working with graduate students interested in patenting the results of their research.

URL : http://www.istl.org/15-summer/refereed3.html

The presence of High-impact factor Open Access Journals in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM) disciplines

Statut

The present study means to establish to what extent high-quality open access journals are available as an outlet for publication, by examining their distribution in different scientific disciplines, including the distribution of those journals without article processing charges.

The study is based on a systematic comparison between the journals included in the DOAJ, and the journals indexed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Science edition 2013, released by Thomson Reuters.

The impact factor of Open Access (OA) journals was lower than those of other journals by a small but statistically significant amount. Open access journals are present in the upper quartile (by impact factor) of 85 out of 176 (48.8%) categories examined. There were no OA journals with an Impact Factor in only 16 categories (9%).

URL : The presence of High-impact factor Open Access Journals in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM) disciplines

Alternative location : http://leo.cineca.it/index.php/jlis/article/view/11257

Barriers to Open Access Publishing: Views from the Library Literature

Statut

The library and information science (LIS) community has an active role in supporting access to information and, therefore, is an important stakeholder in the open access conversation. One major discussion involves the barriers that have hindered the complete transition to open access in scientific publications.

Building upon a longitudinal study by Bo-Christer Björk that looked at barriers to the open access publishing of scholarly articles, this study evaluates the discussion of those barriers in the LIS literature over the ten year period 2004–2014, and compares this to Björk’s conclusions about gold open access publishing. Content analysis and bibliometrics are used to confirm the growth of the discussion of open access in the past ten years and gain insight into the most prevalent issues hindering the development of open access.

URL : Barriers to Open Access Publishing: Views from the Library Literature

DOI : 10.3390/publications3030190

Fee Waivers for Open Access Journals

Statut

Open access journals which charge article processing charges (APCs) sometimes offer fee waivers to authors who cannot afford to pay them. This article measures the extent of this practice among the largest toll access and open access publishers by gathering stated fee waiver policies from publishers’ websites. A majority (68.8%) were found to offer fee waivers and sometimes they are only available to authors from low- and middle-income countries. This has implications for the ability of authors without funding to publish in journals from these publishers.

URL : Fee Waivers for Open Access Journals

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/publications3030155

Replication, Communication, and the Population Dynamics of Scientific Discovery

Statut

Many published research results are false (Ioannidis, 2005), and controversy continues over the roles of replication and publication policy in improving the reliability of research. Addressing these problems is frustrated by the lack of a formal framework that jointly represents hypothesis formation, replication, publication bias, and variation in research quality. We develop a mathematical model of scientific discovery that combines all of these elements.

This model provides both a dynamic model of research as well as a formal framework for reasoning about the normative structure of science. We show that replication may serve as a ratchet that gradually separates true hypotheses from false, but the same factors that make initial findings unreliable also make replications unreliable. The most important factors in improving the reliability of research are the rate of false positives and the base rate of true hypotheses, and we offer suggestions for addressing each. Our results also bring clarity to verbal debates about the communication of research.

Surprisingly, publication bias is not always an obstacle, but instead may have positive impacts—suppression of negative novel findings is often beneficial. We also find that communication of negative replications may aid true discovery even when attempts to replicate have diminished power. The model speaks constructively to ongoing debates about the design and conduct of science, focusing analysis and discussion on precise, internally consistent models, as well as highlighting the importance of population dynamics.

URL : Replication, Communication, and the Population Dynamics of Scientific Discovery

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0136088

Dataverse 4.0: Defining Data Publishing

Statut

The research community needs reliable, standard ways to make the data produced by scientific research available to the community, while getting credit as data authors. As a result, a new form of scholarly publication is emerging: data publishing. Data pubishing – or making data long-term accessible, reusable and citable – is more involved than simply providing a link to a data file or posting the data to the researchers web site.

In this paper, we define what is needed for proper data publishing and describe how the open-source Dataverse software helps define, enable and enhance data publishing for all.

URL : http://scholar.harvard.edu/mercecrosas/publications/dataverse-4-defining-data-publishing

Open Science in Poland 2014 : A Diagnosis

Statut

The process of producing and distributing scientific knowledge has been undergoing significant changes recently, termed collectively as “opening” of science. The changes were begun with the development of new technologies, but their dynamics was also influenced by the features of scholary communication and the social role of scientific research, as well as its institutional and political context. The basic aspect of Open Science is Open Access to scientific literature and data, but openness can also concern other elements of science, such
as conducting, evaluating, disseminating and using research and its findings.

The open models were initially implemented locally, as a “grassroot” movement, but with time a need arose for a more systematic approach, especially in strategies and policies of institutions responsible for research and funding, both state-owned and international bodies. In Poland such strategies and policies are yet to be developed, and the basic condition to be fulfilled is establishing a diagnosis of the current state of openness in the Polish science sector. The present report is an attempt to draw such a diagnosis.

URL : https://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Szprot2015.pdf

Alternative location : http://pon.edu.pl/index.php/nasze-publikacje?pubid=16