Archives des mots-clés : scientific practices

Ready for the future? A survey on open access with scientists from the French National Research Center (CNRS)

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Authors : Joachim Schöpfel, Coline Ferrant, Francis André, Renaud Fabre

Purpose

The paper presents empirical evidence on the opinion and behaviour of French scientists (senior management level) regarding open access to scientific and technical information.

Approach

The results are part of a nationwide survey on scientific information and documentation with 432 directors of French public research laboratories conducted by the French Research Center CNRS in 2014.

Findings

1. The CNRS senior research managers (laboratory directors) globally share the positive opinion towards open access revealed by other studies with researchers from the UK, Germany, the United States and other countries. However, they are more supportive of open repositories (green road) than of OA journal publishing (gold).

2. The response patterns reveal a gap between generally positive opinions about open access and less supportive behaviours, principally publishing articles with APCs.

3. A small group of senior research managers does not seem to be interested in green or gold open access and reluctant to self-archiving and OA publishing.

4. Similar to other studies, the French survey confirms disciplinary differences, i.e. a stronger support for self-archiving of records and documents in HAL by scientists from
Mathematics, Physics and Informatics than from Biology, Earth Sciences and Chemistry; and more experience and positive feelings with open access publishing and payment of APCs in Biology than in Mathematics or in Social Sciences and Humanities. Disciplinary differences and specific French factors are discussed, in particular in the context of the new European policy in favour of Open Science.

Originality

For the first time, a nationwide survey was conducted with the senior research management level from all scientific disciplines.

The response rate was high (>30%), and the results provide good insight into the real awareness, support and uptake of open access by senior research managers who provide both models (examples for good practice) and opinion leadership.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01399422

A systematic identification and analysis of scientists on Twitter

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Authors : Qing Ke, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Cassidy R. Sugimoto

Metrics derived from Twitter and other social media—often referred to as altmetrics—are increasingly used to estimate the broader social impacts of scholarship. Such efforts, however, may produce highly misleading results, as the entities that participate in conversations about science on these platforms are largely unknown.

For instance, if altmetric activities are generated mainly by scientists, does it really capture broader social impacts of science? Here we present a systematic approach to identifying and analyzing scientists on Twitter.

Our method can identify scientists across many disciplines, without relying on external bibliographic data, and be easily adapted to identify other stakeholder groups in science.

We investigate the demographics, sharing behaviors, and interconnectivity of the identified scientists.

We find that Twitter has been employed by scholars across the disciplinary spectrum, with an over-representation of social and computer and information scientists; under-representation of mathematical, physical, and life scientists; and a better representation of women compared to scholarly publishing.

Analysis of the sharing of URLs reveals a distinct imprint of scholarly sites, yet only a small fraction of shared URLs are science-related. We find an assortative mixing with respect to disciplines in the networks between scientists, suggesting the maintenance of disciplinary walls in social media.

Our work contributes to the literature both methodologically and conceptually—we provide new methods for disambiguating and identifying particular actors on social media and describing the behaviors of scientists, thus providing foundational information for the construction and use of indicators on the basis of social media metrics.

 URL : A systematic identification and analysis of scientists on Twitter

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0175368

Early career researchers: Scholarly behaviour and the prospect of change

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Authors : David Nicholas, Anthony Watkinson, Cherifa Boukacem-Zeghmouri, Blanca Rodríguez-Bravo, Jie Xu, Abdullah Abrizah, Marzena Świgon, Eti Herman

Early career researchers (ECRs) are of great interest because they are the new (and biggest) wave of researchers. They merit long and detailed investigation, and towards this end, this overarching paper provides a summary of the firstyear findings of a 3-year, longitudinal study of 116 science and social science ECRs who have published nearly 1,200 papers and come from 7 countries and 81 universities.

ECRs were interviewed in their own languages face-to-face, by Skype, or telephone. The study focused on the attitudes and behaviours of ECRs with respect to scholarly communications and the extent to which they are adopting new and disruptive technologies, such as social media, online communities, and Open Science.

The main findings include: publishing in highimpact factor journals is the only reputational game in town; online scholarly communities, and ResearchGate in particular, are gaining ground; social media are beginning to have an impact, especially in the dissemination arena; outreach activities have become more important; libraries are becoming increasingly invisible to ECRs; Open Science is not gaining traction; and more transformational ideas are being expressed, especially in the US and UK.

URL : http://ciber-research.eu/download/20170218-Nicholas_et_al-2017a-Learned_Publishing.pdf

What are the personal and professional characteristics that distinguish the researchers who publish in high- and low-impact journals? A multi-national web-based survey

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Authors : Carlos Eduardo Paiva, Raphael L C Araujo, Bianca Sakamoto Ribeiro Paiva, Cristiano de Pádua Souza, Flavio Mavignier Cárcano, Marina Moreira Costa, Sérgio Vicente Serrano, João Paulo Nogueira Lima

Purpose

This study identifies the personal and professional profiles of researchers with a greater potential to publish high-impact academic articles.

Method

The study involved conducting an international survey of journal authors using a  web-based questionnaire. The survey examined personal characteristics, funding, and the perceived barriers of research quality, work-life balance, and satisfaction and motivation in relation to career.

The processes of manuscript writing and journal publication were measured using an online questionnaire that was developed for this study. The responses were compared between the two groups of researchers using logistic regression models.

Results

A total of 269 questionnaires were analysed. The researchers shared some common perceptions; both groups reported that they were seeking recognition (or to be leaders in their areas) rather than financial remuneration.

Furthermore, both groups identified time and funding constraints as the main obstacles to their scientific activities.

The amount of time that was spent on research activities, having >5 graduate students under supervision, never using text editing services prior to the publication of articles, and living in a developed and English-speaking country were the independent variables that were associated with their article getting a greater chance of publishing in a high-impact journal.

In contrast, using one’s own resources to perform studies decreased the chance of publishing in high-impact journals.

Conclusions

The researchers who publish in high-impact journals have distinct profiles compared with the researchers who publish in low-impact journals.

English language abilities and the actual amount of time that is dedicated to research and scientific writing, as well as aspects that relate to the availability of financial resources are the factors that are associated with a successful researcher’s profile.

URL : What are the personal and professional characteristics that distinguish the researchers who publish in high- and low-impact journals? A multi-national web-based survey

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3332/ecancer.2017.718

Les pratiques informationnelles des chercheurs à l’ère du numérique

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Auteur/Author : Amal Jaouzi

Dans la présente étude, nous avons tenté d’analyser les modalités d’accès aux informations scientifiques et techniques, en particulier et aux publications scientifiques éditées par les grands éditeurs, en général.

Nous précisons que ladite analyse porte principalement sur les pratiques informationnelles des chercheurs issus des pays en voie de développement, notamment les enseignants-chercheurs et les doctorants marocains.

En effet, notre étude s’inscrit dans le domaine des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication dans la mesure où elle traite principalement les problématiques d’accès aux communications scientifiques.

Á ce titre, en vue d’apporter des éléments de réponse et d’explication aux questions de recherche que nous avons défini au début de cette étude, nous nous sommes entretenus avec vingt-et-un (21) chercheurs marocains issus de trois instituts d’enseignement supérieur : IAV, INPT et ESI, dont le domaine est respectivement, l’agronomie et la médecine vétérinaire ; les télécommunications et les sciences de l’information.

Il s’agit d’un entretien semi-directif guidé par une grille d’entretien. Par ailleurs, selon les résultats de l’enquête menée, l’accès aux informations scientifiques est problématique au Maroc.

Les chercheurs font appel à des pratiques contournées pour acquérir les articles scientifiques, notamment, l’utilisation de certains réseaux de partage tel que ResearchGate ou l’utilisation des sites de recensement des productions scientifiques de grands éditeurs, comme la plate-forme Sci-Hub ou Libgen.

Outre ces constats, nous avons tenté, par le biais de ce travail, de situer l’usage du hashtag #IcanhazPDF dans la démarche d’accès aux communications scientifiques. Par conséquent, nous avons constaté que ladite pratique demeure récente et méconnue dans le contexte marocain mais, à laquelle les chercheurs marocains ont porté un intérêt particulier et ont exprimé leurs volontés de l’utiliser et de la pratiquer.

La valeur ajoutée de ce travail est transversale dans le sens où il présente une analyse axée sur l’usage des productions scientifiques dans deux contextes différents : marocain et étranger -en particulier français- et dans le sens où il présente également l’étude d’une pratique nouvelle qui n’a pas été traitée par un grand nombre de chercheurs.

Nous évoquons, à ce niveau, la pratique de demande des articles scientifiques payants moyennant le hashtag #IcanhazPDF sur le réseau social Twitter.

URL : https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-01379402

Networks of digital humanities scholars: The informational and social uses and gratifications of Twitter

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Authors : Anabel Quan-Haase, Kim Martin, Lori McCay-Peet

Big Data research is currently split on whether and to what extent Twitter can be characterized as an informational or social network. We contribute to this line of inquiry through an investigation of digital humanities (DH) scholars’ uses and gratifications of Twitter.

We conducted a thematic analysis of 25 semi-structured interview transcripts to learn about these scholars’ professional use of Twitter.

Our findings show that Twitter is considered a critical tool for informal communication within DH invisible colleges, functioning at varying levels as both an information network (learning to ‘Twitter’ and maintaining awareness) and a social network (imagining audiences and engaging other digital humanists).

We find that Twitter follow relationships reflect common academic interests and are closely tied to scholars’ pre-existing social ties and conference or event co-attendance. The concept of the invisible college continues to be relevant but requires revisiting.

The invisible college formed on Twitter is messy, consisting of overlapping social contexts (professional, personal and public), scholars with different habits of engagement, and both formal and informal ties.

Our research illustrates the value of using multiple methods to explore the complex questions arising from Big Data studies and points toward future research that could implement Big Data techniques on a small scale, focusing on subtopics or emerging fields, to expose the nature of scholars’ invisible colleges made visible on Twitter.

URL : http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fimspub/71/