Étiquette : scientific practices

A systematic review of barriers to data sharing in public health

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 7 mars 2015

« Background : In the current information age, the use of data has become essential for decision making in public health at the local, national, and global level. Despite a global commitment to the use and sharing of public health data, this can be challenging in reality. No systematic framework or global operational guidelines have been created for data sharing in public health. Barriers at different levels have limited data sharing but have only been anecdotally discussed or in the context of specific case studies. Incomplete systematic evidence on the scope and variety of these barriers has limited opportunities to maximize the value and use of public health data for science and policy.

Methods : We conducted a systematic literature review of potential barriers to public health data sharing. Documents that described barriers to sharing of routinely collected public health data were eligible for inclusion and reviewed independently by a team of experts. We grouped identified barriers in a taxonomy for a focused international dialogue on solutions.

Results : Twenty potential barriers were identified and classified in six categories: technical, motivational, economic, political, legal and ethical. The first three categories are deeply rooted in well-known challenges of health information systems for which structural solutions have yet to be found; the last three have solutions that lie in an international dialogue aimed at generating consensus on policies and instruments for data sharing.

Conclusions : The simultaneous effect of multiple interacting barriers ranging from technical to intangible issues has greatly complicated advances in public health data sharing. A systematic framework of barriers to data sharing in public health will be essential to accelerate the use of valuable information for the global good. »

URL : A systematic review of barriers to data sharing in public health

Alternative URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/14/1144

Étiquettes data sharing, research data, scientific practices

Non classé

A Reputation Economy: Results from an Empirical Survey on Academic Data Sharing

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 4 mars 2015

« Academic data sharing is a way for researchers to collaborate and thereby meet the needs of an increasingly complex research landscape. It enables researchers to verify results and to pursuit new research questions with « old » data. It is therefore not surprising that data sharing is advocated by funding agencies, journals, and researchers alike. We surveyed 2661 individual academic researchers across all disciplines on their dealings with data, their publication practices, and motives for sharing or withholding research data. The results for 1564 valid responses show that researchers across disciplines recognise the benefit of secondary research data for their own work and for scientific progress as a whole-still they only practice it in moderation. An explanation for this evidence could be an academic system that is not driven by monetary incentives, nor the desire for scientific progress, but by individual reputation-expressed in (high ranked journal) publications. We label this system a Reputation Economy. This special economy explains our findings that show that researchers have a nuanced idea how to provide adequate formal recognition for making data available to others-namely data citations. We conclude that data sharing will only be widely adopted among research professionals if sharing pays in form of reputation. Thus, policy measures that intend to foster research collaboration need to understand academia as a reputation economy. Successful measures must value intermediate products, such as research data, more highly than it is the case now. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.00481

Étiquettes data sharing, research data, scientific practices

Non classé

How scholars implement trust in their reading, citing and publishing activities: Geographical differences

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 17 février 2015
Un commentaire sur How scholars implement trust in their reading, citing and publishing activities: Geographical differences

« In an increasingly digital environment, many factors influence how academic researchers decide what to read, what to cite, where to publish their work, and how they assign trust when making these decisions. This study focuses on how this differs according to the geographical location of the researcher, specifically in terms of the country’s level of development. Data were collected by a questionnaire survey of 3650 authors who had published articles in international journals. The human development index (HDI) was used to compare authors’ scholarly behavior. The findings show that researchers from less developed countries such as India and China (medium HDI) compared to those in developed countries, such as the USA and UK (very high HDI) are more reliant on external factors and those criteria that are related to authority, brand and reputation, such as authors’ names, affiliation, country and journal name. Even when deciding where to publish, the publisher of the journal is more important for developing countries than it is for researchers from the US and UK. Scholars from high HDI countries also differ in these aspects: a) they are less discriminatory than authors from developing countries in their citation practices; b) for them the fact that a source is peer reviewed is the most important factor when deciding where to publish; c) they are more negative towards the use of repositories and social media for publishing and more skeptical about their potential for increasing usage or reaching a wider audience. »

URL : http://ciber-research.eu/download/20141207-LISR_Trust.pdf

Étiquettes scientific communication, scientific practices

An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 31 décembre 2014

The choice of an efficient document preparation system is an important decision for any academic researcher. To assist the research community, we report a software usability study in which 40 researchers across different disciplines prepared scholarly texts with either Microsoft Word or LaTeX. The probe texts included simple continuous text, text with tables and subheadings, and complex text with several mathematical equations. We show that LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users. LaTeX users, however, more often report enjoying using their respective software. We conclude that even experienced LaTeX users may suffer a loss in productivity when LaTeX is used, relative to other document preparation systems. Individuals, institutions, and journals should carefully consider the ramifications of this finding when choosing document preparation strategies, or requiring them of authors.

URL : http://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/journal.pone.0115069.pdf

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0115069

Étiquettes latex, Microsoft word, scientific practices, scientific production

Non classé

Patterns of Text Reuse in a Scientific Corpus

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 30 décembre 2014

« We consider the incidence of text « reuse » by researchers, via a systematic pairwise comparison of the text content of all articles deposited to arXiv.org from 1991–2012. We measure the global frequencies of three classes of text reuse, and measure how chronic text reuse is distributed among authors in the dataset. We infer a baseline for accepted practice, perhaps surprisingly permissive compared with other societal contexts, and a clearly delineated set of aberrant authors. We find a negative correlation between the amount of reused text in an article and its influence, as measured by subsequent citations. Finally, we consider the distribution of countries of origin of articles containing large amounts of reused text. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.2716

Étiquettes scientific practices, text reuse

Non classé

A Survey of Physical Sciences, Engineering and Mathematics Faculty Regarding Author Fees in Open Access Journals

Auteur de l’article Par Hans Dillaerts
Date de l’article 20 décembre 2014

« Discussions of the potential of open access publishing frequently must contend with the skepticism of research authors regarding the need to pay author fees (also known as publication fees). With that in mind, the authors undertook a survey of faculty, postdocs, and graduate students in physical science, mathematics, and engineering fields at two research universities (Cornell University and Syracuse University) asking for their experience with and opinion of paying author fees for publication of research in open access journals. The results of this survey indicated that most respondents had not decided against publishing in an open access journal due to the author fee requirement. Those who had paid them only requested or received coverage for those fees in grant line-items or from institutional sources in a few cases. Responses seemed to combine cautious optimism about open access journals with intense skepticism about their quality and intense opposition to the idea of having to pay any additional costs from their own pockets. »

URL : http://www.istl.org/14-fall/refereed1.html

Étiquettes author fees, case study, open access, open access journals, Scholarly Publishing, scientific communication, scientific practices