scientific practices – Page 6 – InfoDoc MicroVeille

Exploring the social activity of open research data on ResearchGate: implications for the data literacy of researchers

Posté le 14 janvier 2022 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Juliana Elisa Raffaghelli, Stefania Manca

Purpose

Although current research has investigated how open research data (ORD) are published, researchers’ behaviour of ORD sharing on academic social networks (ASNs) remains insufficiently explored. The purpose of this study is to investigate the connections between ORDs publication and social activity to uncover data literacy gaps.

Design/methodology/approach

This work investigates whether the ORDs publication leads to social activity around the ORDs and their linked published articles to uncover data literacy needs. The social activity was characterised as reads and citations, over the basis of a non-invasive approach supporting this preliminary study.

The eventual associations between the social activity and the researchers’ profile (scientific domain, gender, region, professional position, reputation) and the quality of the ORD published were investigated to complete this picture.

A random sample of ORD items extracted from ResearchGate (752 ORDs) was analysed using quantitative techniques, including descriptive statistics, logistic regression and K-means cluster analysis.

Findings

The results highlight three main phenomena: (1) Globally, there is still an underdeveloped social activity around self-archived ORDs in ResearchGate, in terms of reads and citations, regardless of the published ORDs quality; (2) disentangling the moderating effects over social activity around ORD spots traditional dynamics within the “innovative” practice of engaging with data practices; (3) a somewhat similar situation of ResearchGate as ASN to other data platforms and repositories, in terms of social activity around ORD, was detected.

Research limitations/implications

Although the data were collected within a narrow period, the random data collection ensures a representative picture of researchers’ practices.

Practical implications

As per the implications, the study sheds light on data literacy requirements to promote social activity around ORD in the context of open science as a desirable frontier of practice.

Originality/value

Researchers data literacy across digital systems is still little understood. Although there are many policies and technological infrastructure providing support, the researchers do not make an in-depth use of them.

URL : Exploring the social activity of open research data on ResearchGate: implications for the data literacy of researchers

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-05-2021-0255

The Data Life Aquatic: Oceanographers’ Experience with Interoperability and Re-usability: Oceanographers’ Experience with Interoperability and Re-usability

Posté le 13 janvier 2022 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Bradley Wade Bishop, Carolyn F Hank, Joel T Webster

This paper assesses data consumers’ perspectives on the interoperable and re-usable aspects of the FAIR Data Principles. Taking a domain-specific informatics approach, ten oceanographers were asked to think of a recent search for data and describe their process of discovery, evaluation, and use.

The interview schedule, derived from the FAIR Data Principles, included questions about the interoperability and re-usability of data. Through this critical incident technique, findings on data interoperability and re-usability give data curators valuable insights into how real-world users access, evaluate, and use data.

Results from this study show that oceanographers utilize tools that make re-use simple, with interoperability seamless within the systems used. The processes employed by oceanographers present a good baseline for other domains adopting the FAIR Data Principles.

URL : The Data Life Aquatic: Oceanographers’ Experience with Interoperability and Re-usability: Oceanographers’ Experience with Interoperability and Re-usability

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v16i1.635

Open access in the humanities, arts and social sciences: Complex perceptions of researchers and implications for research support

Posté le 3 janvier 2022 par Hans Dillaerts

Author : Niamh Quigley

Adoption of open access in the humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) is a work in progress, with lower engagement in HASS than most of the natural sciences. HASS research impacts how we live, how we learn and how we see ourselves, and research institutions should encourage and enable their HASS research communities to increase the prevalence of open access research outputs.

Six experienced HASS researchers at a single academic institution in Perth, Australia, were interviewed to explore their perceptions and experiences of open access, and any barriers that they had encountered. Thematic analysis was used to code the transcribed interviews, and generate themes.

This study found a wide variance in the adoption of open access practices among HASS researchers. Some participants are publishing via APC-based gold open access (in DOAJ listed journals), while other participants encounter multiple barriers to sharing more of their work as open access.

Confusion about aspects of open access is evident. Even among participants who support open access, some have had poor experiences of open access publishing. This research also found that some participants hold extremely complex opinions on open access, which directly influence participants’ behaviour depending on which perspective they are considering.

These perspectives are: research supervisor, editorial role at journal, funding assessor and global citizen. Within HASS a diversity of behaviours exists around open access, and research institutions need to tailor their research support services around open access and scholarly publishing for different communities of researchers.

URL : Open access in the humanities, arts and social sciences: Complex perceptions of researchers and implications for research support

DOI : https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.10937

Attitudes toward open peer review among stakeholders of a scholar-led journal in Brazil

Posté le 15 décembre 2021 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle, Thiago Dias Sarti

Scholarly journals should consider the attitudes of their communities before adopting any of the seven traits of open peer review. Unfortunately, surveys from the Global North might not apply to the Global South, where double-blind peer review is commonplace even among natural sciences and medicine journals.

This paper reports the findings of a survey on attitudes toward open peer review among four stakeholder groups of a scholar-led medical journal in Brazil: society members, journal readers, authors, and reviewers.

Compared to a previous survey, which mostly recruited natural sciences researchers from Europe, this survey found similar support for open peer review in general and for most of its traits.

One important exception was open identities, which were considered detrimental by most participants, even more in this survey than in the previous one. Interestingly, participants were more dismissive of open identities as a whole than of statements about its specific consequences.

Because preprints are increasingly popular but incompatible with double-blind review, future research should examine the effects of transitioning from double-blind to open identities, especially on gender bias.

Meanwhile, scholarly journals with double-blind review might prefer to begin by adopting other traits of open review or to make open identities optional at first.

URL : Attitudes toward open peer review among stakeholders of a scholar-led journal in Brazil

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1590/2318-0889202133e200072

L’usage de la plateforme HAL par les unités de recherche de l’Université de Lille. La situation en 2021

Posté le 14 octobre 2021 par Hans Dillaerts

Auteurs/Authors : Eric Kergosien, Joachim Schöpfel

Cette note présente les résultats d’une étude de suivi sur l’usage de la plateforme HAL par les laboratoires de recherche de l’Université de Lille, réalisée en avril 2021. L’analyse a porté sur les dépôts dans HAL, sur la création d’une collection et sur la part des documents en libre accès.

L’étude propose une photographie de la situation en 2021, par rapport aux résultats des analyses de 2019 et 2020, en montrant l’évolution de l’usage de HAL par les unités de recherche et l’impact de la mise en place d’une archive institutionnelle locale nommée LillOA.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03372596

L’ouverture des matériaux de recherche ethnographiques en question

Posté le 25 septembre 2021 par Hans Dillaerts

Auteur-e-s/Authors : Florence Revelin, Alix Levain, Morgane Mignon, Marianne Noel, Betty Queffelec, Pascal Raux, Hervé Squividant

Le mouvement d’ouverture des données scientifiques constitue, pour les sciences humaines et sociales (SHS), un défi à la fois épistémologique, juridique, éthique et technique. Il se manifeste par des normes et injonctions multiples vis-à-vis des communautés de recherche, qui peinent à s’y conformer et à se saisir des instruments mis à leur disposition.

Le projet PARDOQ vise à rendre intelligibles les implications complexes de ce mouvement pour les communautés travaillant à partir de données qualitatives (ethnographiques), à travers l’analyse de l’expérience de chercheuses et chercheurs confronté.e.s à la tension entre partage et protection des données ethnographiques, en prenant appui d’une part sur une étude de cas (le programme de recherche interdisciplinaire Parchemins) et d’autre part sur une enquête auprès de chercheurs.euses pratiquant l’ethnographie et de membres de réseaux scientifiques, techniques et juridiques d’appui et à la recherche.

URL : L’ouverture des matériaux de recherche ethnographiques en question

Original location : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03238067

Do authors of research funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research comply with its open access mandate?: A meta-epidemiologic study

Posté le 9 septembre 2021 par Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Michael A. Scaffidi, Karam Elsolh, Juana Li, Yash Verma, Rishi Bansal, Nikko Gimpaya, Vincent Larivière, Rishad Khan, Samir C. Grover

Background

Since 2008, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) has mandated that studies it funds either in whole or in part are required to publish their results as open access (OA) within 12 months of publication using either online repositories and/or OA journals.

Yet, there is evidence that authors are poorly compliant with this mandate. Specifically, there has been an apparent decrease in OA publication after 2015, which coincides with a change in the OA policy during the same year.

One particular policy change that may have contributed to this decline was lifting the requirement that authors deposit their article in an OA repository immediately upon publication.

We investigated the proportion of OA compliance of CIHR-funded studies in the period before and after the policy change of 2015 with manual confirmation of both CIHR funding and OA status.

Methods and findings

We identified CIHR-funded studies published between the years 2014 to 2017 using a comprehensive search in the Web of Science (WoS). We took a stratified random sample from all four years (i.e. 2014 to 2017), with 250 studies from each year.

Two authors independently reviewed the final full-text publications retrieved from the journal web page to determine to confirm CIHR funding, as indicated in the acknowledgements or elsewhere in the paper.

For each study, we also collected bibliometric data that included citation count and Altmetric attention score Statistical analyses were conducted using two-tailed Fisher’s exact test with relative risk (RR). Among the 851 receiving CIHR funding published from 2014 to 2017, the percentage of CIHR-funded studies published as OA significantly decreased from 79.6% in 2014 to 70.3% in 2017 (RR = 0.88, 95% CI: 0.79–0.99, P = 0.028).

When considering all four years, there was no significant difference in the percentage of CIHR-funded studies published as OA in both 2014 and 2015 compared to both 2016 and 2017 (RR = 0.97, 95% CI: 0.90–1.05, P = 0.493). Additionally, OA publications had significantly higher citation count (both in year of publication and in total) and higher attention scores (P<0.05).

Conclusions

Overall, we found that there was a significant decrease in the proportion of CIHR funded studies published as OA from 2014 compared to 2017, though this difference did not persist when comparing both 2014–2015 to 2016–2017.

The primary limitation was the reliance of self-reported data from authors on CIHR funding status. We posit that this decrease may be attributable to CIHR’s OA policy change in 2015.

Further exploration is warranted to both validate these studies using a larger dataset and, if valid, investigate the effects of potential interventions to improve the OA compliance, such as use of a CIHR publication database, and reinstatement of a policy for authors to immediately submit their findings to OA repositories upon publication.

URL : Do authors of research funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research comply with its open access mandate?: A meta-epidemiologic study

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256577