Étiquette : scientific communication

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Identifiers for the 21st century: How to design, provision, and reuse persistent identifiers to maximize utility and impact of life science data

Authors : Julie A. McMurry, Nick Juty, Niklas Blomberg, Tony Burdett, Tom Conlin, Nathalie Conte, Mélanie Courtot, John Deck, Michel Dumontier, Donal K. Fellows, Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran, Philipp Gormanns, Jeffrey Grethe, Janna Hastings, Jean-Karim Hériché, Henning Hermjakob, Jon C. Ison, Rafael C. Jimenez, Simon Jupp, John Kunze, Camille Laibe, Nicolas Le Novère, James Malone, Maria Jesus Martin, Johanna R. McEntyre, Chris Morris, Juha Muilu, Wolfgang Müller, Philippe Rocca-Serra, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Murat Sariyar, Jacky L. Snoep, Stian Soiland-Reyes, Natalie J. Stanford, Neil Swainston, Nicole Washington, Alan R. Williams, Sarala M. Wimalaratne, Lilly M. Winfree, Katherine Wolstencroft, Carole Goble, Christopher J. Mungall, Melissa A. Haendel, Helen Parkinson

In many disciplines, data are highly decentralized across thousands of online databases (repositories, registries, and knowledgebases). Wringing value from such databases depends on the discipline of data science and on the humble bricks and mortar that make integration possible; identifiers are a core component of this integration infrastructure.

Drawing on our experience and on work by other groups, we outline 10 lessons we have learned about the identifier qualities and best practices that facilitate large-scale data integration. Specifically, we propose actions that identifier practitioners (database providers) should take in the design, provision and reuse of identifiers.

We also outline the important considerations for those referencing identifiers in various circumstances, including by authors and data generators. While the importance and relevance of each lesson will vary by context, there is a need for increased awareness about how to avoid and manage common identifier problems, especially those related to persistence and web-accessibility/resolvability.

We focus strongly on web-based identifiers in the life sciences; however, the principles are broadly relevant to other disciplines.

URL : Identifiers for the 21st century: How to design, provision, and reuse persistent identifiers to maximize utility and impact of life science data

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2001414

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The State of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles

Authors : Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem, Vincent Larivière, Juan Pablo Alperin, Lisa Matthias, Bree Norlander, Ashley Farley, Jevin West, Stefanie Haustein

Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles.

We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigate OA in three populations: 1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, 2) recent journal articles indexed in Web of Science, and 3) articles viewed by users of Unpaywall, an open-source browser extension that lets users find OA articles using oaDOI.

We estimate that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA (19M in total) and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. The most recent year analyzed (2015) also has the highest percentage of OA (45%). Because of this growth, and the fact that readers disproportionately access newer articles, we find that Unpaywall users encounter OA quite frequently: 47% of articles they view are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made free-to-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license.

We also examine the citation impact of OA articles, corroborating the so-called open-access citation advantage: accounting for age and discipline, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA. We encourage further research using the free oaDOI service, as a way to inform OA policy and practice.

URL : The State of OA: A large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3119v1

 

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Improving the Measurement of Scientific Success by Reporting a Self-Citation Index

Authors : JustinW. Flatt, Alessandro Blasimme, Effy Vayena

Who among the many researchers is most likely to usher in a new era of scientific breakthroughs? This question is of critical importance to universities, funding agencies, as well as scientists who must compete under great pressure for limited amounts of research money.

Citations are the current primary means of evaluating one’s scientific productivity and impact, and while often helpful, there is growing concern over the use of excessive self-citations to help build sustainable careers in science.

Incorporating superfluous self-citations in one’s writings requires little effort, receives virtually no penalty, and can boost, albeit artificially, scholarly impact and visibility, which are both necessary for moving up the academic ladder.

Such behavior is likely to increase, given the recent explosive rise in popularity of web-based citation analysis tools (Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus, and Altmetric) that rank research performance.

Here, we argue for new metrics centered on transparency to help curb this form of self-promotion that, if left unchecked, can have a negative impact on the scientific workforce, the way that we publish new knowledge, and ultimately the course of scientific advance.

URL : Improving the Measurement of Scientific Success by Reporting a Self-Citation Index

DOI : http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/5/3/20

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The Surge in New University Presses and Academic- Led Publishing: An Overview of a Changing Publishing Ecology in the UK

Authors : Janneke Adema, Graham Stone

This article outlines the rise and development of New University Presses and Academic-Led Presses in the UK or publishing for the UK market. Based on the Jisc research project, Changing publishing ecologies: a landscape study of new university presses and academic-led publishing, commonalities between these two types of presses are identified to better assess their future needs and requirements.

Based on this analysis, the article argues for the development of a publishing toolkit, for further research into the creation of a typology of presses and publishing initiatives, and for support with community building to help these initiatives grow and develop further, whilst promoting a more diverse publishing ecology.

URL : The Surge in New University Presses and Academic- Led Publishing: An Overview of a Changing Publishing Ecology in the UK

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10210

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Practicing What You Preach: Evaluating Access of Open Access Research

Author : Teresa Schultz

The open access movement seeks to encourage all researchers to make their works openly available and free of paywalls so more people can access their knowledge. Yet some researchers who study open access (OA) continue to publish their work in paywalled journals and fail to make it open.

This project set out to study just how many published research articles about OA fall into this category, how many are being made open (whether by being published in a gold OA or hybrid journal or through open deposit), and how library and information science authors compare to other disciplines researching this field.

Because of the growth of tools available to help researchers find open versions of articles, this study also sought to compare how these new tools compare to Google Scholar in their ability to disseminating OA research.

From a sample collected from Web of Science of articles published since 2010, the study found that although a majority of research articles about OA are open in some form, a little more than a quarter are not.

A smaller rate of library science researchers made their work open compared to non-library science researchers. In looking at the copyright of these articles published in hybrid and open journals, authors were more likely to retain copyright ownership if they printed in an open journal compared to authors in hybrid journals.

Articles were more likely to be published with a Creative Commons license if published in an open journal compared to those published in hybrid journals.

URL : Practicing What You Preach: Evaluating Access of Open Access Research

DOI : https://dx.doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/YBDR8

 

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Extracting Core Claims from Scientific Articles

Authors : Tom Jansen, Tobias Kuhn

The number of scientific articles has grown rapidly over the years and there are no signs that this growth will slow down in the near future. Because of this, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with the latest developments in a scientific field.

To address this problem, we present here an approach to help researchers learn about the latest developments and findings by extracting in a normalized form core claims from scientific articles.

This normalized representation is a controlled natural language of English sentences called AIDA, which has been proposed in previous work as a method to formally structure and organize scientific findings and discourse.

We show how such AIDA sentences can be automatically extracted by detecting the core claim of an article, checking for AIDA compliance, and – if necessary – transforming it into a compliant sentence.

While our algorithm is still far from perfect, our results indicate that the different steps are feasible and they support the claim that AIDA sentences might be a promising approach to improve scientific communication in the future.

URL : https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07678

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Against capital

Author : Stuart Lawson

The ways in which scholars exchange and share their work have evolved through pragmatic responses to the political and economic contexts in which they are embedded.

So rather than being designed to fulfil their function in an optimal way, our methods of scholarly communication have been distorted by the interests of capital and by neoliberal logic.

If these two interlinked political forces – that suffuse all aspects of our lives – are the reason for the mess we are currently in, then surely any alternative scholarly communication system we create should be working against them, not with them. The influence of capital in scholarly publishing, and the overwhelming force of neoliberalism in our working practices, is the problem.

So when the new ‘innovative disrupters’ are fully aligned with the political forces that need to be dismantled, it is questionable that the new way of doing things is a significant improvement.

URL : http://stuartlawson.org/2017/07/against-capital/