Archives des mots-clés : scientific practices

Crédibilité du chercheur, relation de confiance et éthique en recherche qualitative : l’implexité à la croisée des chemins

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Auteur/Author : Bakary Doucouré

Cet article, élaboré à partir d’observations et d’expériences accumulées durant une quinzaine d’années dans le cadre de plusieurs recherches empiriques, analyse l’intérêt de la crédibilité du chercheur et de la relation de confiance dans un processus de recherche qualitative.

Il relève d’une démarche autoréflexive et introspective faisant émerger la place de l’implexité et le rôle essentiel de l’éthique dans le processus d’enquête qualitative, tout en permettant de mieux comprendre le lien entre les deux.

Aussi cet article s’inscrit de manière plus large dans les réflexions épistémologiques, méthodologiques et éthiques portant sur la recherche qualitative qui constituent des préoccupations à la fois constantes, évolutives et sans cesse renouvelées. Il est structuré autour de deux principaux axes.

D’une part, il aborde un ensemble de questions portant à la fois sur la crédibilité, la confiance, l’éthique et l’implexité, tout en indiquant des perspectives analytiques qui s’en dégagent.

D’autre part, à partir de l’analyse des données, l’article montre la relation entre l’implexité, la crédibilité et la confiance, mais aussi la dynamique de renforcement mutuel entre l’éthique et l’implexité.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7202/1076346ar

Behavioral Reluctance in Adopting Open Access Publishing: Insights From a Goal-Directed Perspective

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Authors : Massimo Köster, Agnes Moors, Jan De Houwer, Tony Ross-Hellauer, Inge Van Nieuwerburgh, Frederick Verbruggen

Despite growing awareness of the benefits of large-scale open access publishing, individual researchers seem reluctant to adopt this behavior, thereby slowing down the evolution toward a new scientific culture.

We outline and apply a goal-directed framework of behavior causation to shed light on this type of behavioral reluctance and to organize and suggest possible intervention strategies. The framework explains behavior as the result of a cycle of events starting with the detection of a discrepancy between a goal and a status quo and the selection of behavior to reduce this discrepancy.

We list various factors that may hinder this cycle and thus contribute to behavioral reluctance. After that, we highlight potential remedies to address each of the identified barriers. We thereby hope to point out new ways to think about behavioral reluctances in general, and in relation to open access publishing in particular.

URL : Behavioral Reluctance in Adopting Open Access Publishing: Insights From a Goal-Directed Perspective

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.649915

Exploring factors that influence the practice of Open Science by early career health researchers: a mixed methods study

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Authors : Ksenija Zečević, Catherine Houghton, Chris Noone, Hopin Lee, Karen Matvienko-Sikar, Elaine Toomey

Background

There is a growing global movement towards open science and ensuring that health research is more transparent. It is vital that the researchers are adequately prepared for this research environment from early in their careers.

However, limited research has been conducted on the barriers and enablers to practicing open science for early career researchers. This study aimed to explore the views, experiences and factors influencing open science practices amongst ECRs working in health research.

Methods

Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of ECRs working in health research. Participants also completed surveys regarding the factors influencing open science practices. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the qualitative data and descriptive statistical analyses were used to analyse survey data.

Results

14 ECRs participated. Two main themes were identified from interview data; Valuing Open Science and Creating a Culture for Open Science. Within ‘Valuing Open Science’, participants spoke about the conceptualisation of open science to be open across the entire research cycle, and important for producing better and more impactful research for patients and the public.

Within ‘Creating a Culture of Open Science’ participants spoke about a number of factors influencing their practice of open science. These included cultural and academic pressures, the positives and negatives of increased accountability and transparency, and the need for more training and supporting resources to facilitate open science practices.

Conclusion

ECRs see the importance of open science for beneficially impacting patient and public health but many feel that they are not fully supported to practice open science.

Resources and supports including education and training are needed, as are better incentives for open science activities. Crucially, tangible engagement from institutions, funders and researchers is needed to facilitate the development of an open science culture.

URL : Exploring factors that influence the practice of Open Science by early career health researchers: a mixed methods study

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/hrbopenres.13119.2

The evolving role of preprints in the dissemination of COVID-19 research and their impact on the science communication landscape

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Authors : Nicholas Fraser, Liam Brierley, Gautam Dey, Jessica K. Polka, Máté Pálfy, Federico Nann, Jonathon Alexis Coates

The world continues to face a life-threatening viral pandemic. The virus underlying the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has caused over 98 million confirmed cases and 2.2 million deaths since January 2020.

Although the most recent respiratory viral pandemic swept the globe only a decade ago, the way science operates and responds to current events has experienced a cultural shift in the interim.

The scientific community has responded rapidly to the COVID-19 pandemic, releasing over 125,000 COVID-19–related scientific articles within 10 months of the first confirmed case, of which more than 30,000 were hosted by preprint servers.

We focused our analysis on bioRxiv and medRxiv, 2 growing preprint servers for biomedical research, investigating the attributes of COVID-19 preprints, their access and usage rates, as well as characteristics of their propagation on online platforms.

Our data provide evidence for increased scientific and public engagement with preprints related to COVID-19 (COVID-19 preprints are accessed more, cited more, and shared more on various online platforms than non-COVID-19 preprints), as well as changes in the use of preprints by journalists and policymakers.

We also find evidence for changes in preprinting and publishing behaviour: COVID-19 preprints are shorter and reviewed faster.

Our results highlight the unprecedented role of preprints and preprint servers in the dissemination of COVID-19 science and the impact of the pandemic on the scientific communication landscape.

URL : The evolving role of preprints in the dissemination of COVID-19 research and their impact on the science communication landscape

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000959

Open Research Data and Open Peer Review: Perceptions of a Medical and Health Sciences Community in Greece

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Authors : Eirini Delikoura, Dimitrios Kouis

Recently significant initiatives have been launched for the dissemination of Open Access as part of the Open Science movement. Nevertheless, two other major pillars of Open Science such as Open Research Data (ORD) and Open Peer Review (OPR) are still in an early stage of development among the communities of researchers and stakeholders.

The present study sought to unveil the perceptions of a medical and health sciences community about these issues. Through the investigation of researchers‘ attitudes, valuable conclusions can be drawn, especially in the field of medicine and health sciences, where an explosive growth of scientific publishing exists.

A quantitative survey was conducted based on a structured questionnaire, with 179 valid responses. The participants in the survey agreed with the Open Peer Review principles. However, they ignored basic terms like FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and appeared incentivized to permit the exploitation of their data.

Regarding Open Peer Review (OPR), participants expressed their agreement, implying their support for a trustworthy evaluation system.

Conclusively, researchers need to receive proper training for both Open Research Data principles and Open Peer Review processes which combined with a reformed evaluation system will enable them to take full advantage of the opportunities that arise from the new scholarly publishing and communication landscape.

URL : Open Research Data and Open Peer Review: Perceptions of a Medical and Health Sciences Community in Greece

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications9020014

What Constitutes Authorship in the Social Sciences?

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Author : Gernot Pruschak

Authorship represents a highly discussed topic in nowadays academia. The share of co-authored papers has increased substantially in recent years allowing scientists to specialize and focus on specific tasks.

Arising from this, social scientific literature has especially discussed author orders and the distribution of publication and citation credits among co-authors in depth. Yet only a small fraction of the authorship literature has also addressed the actual underlying question of what actually constitutes authorship.

To identify social scientists’ motives for assigning authorship, we conduct an empirical study surveying researchers around the globe. We find that social scientists tend to distribute research tasks among (individual) research team members. Nevertheless, they generally adhere to the universally applicable Vancouver criteria when distributing authorship.

More specifically, participation in every research task with the exceptions of data work as well as reviewing and remarking increases scholars’ chances to receive authorship. Based on our results, we advise journal editors to introduce authorship guidelines that incorporate the Vancouver criteria as they seem applicable to the social sciences.

We further call upon research institutions to emphasize data skills in hiring and promotion processes as publication counts might not always depict these characteristics.

URL : What Constitutes Authorship in the Social Sciences?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2021.655350

A survey of researchers’ needs and priorities for data sharing

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Authors : Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, James Harney, Lauren Cadwallader

PLOS has long supported Open Science. One of the ways in which we do so is via our stringent data availability policy established in 2014. Despite this policy, and more data sharing policies being introduced by other organizations, best practices for data sharing are adopted by a minority of researchers in their publications. Problems with effective research data sharing persist and these problems have been quantified by previous research as a lack of time, resources, incentives, and/or skills to share data.

In this study we built on this research by investigating the importance of tasks associated with data sharing, and researchers’ satisfaction with their ability to complete these tasks. By investigating these factors we aimed to better understand opportunities for new or improved solutions for sharing data.

In May-June 2020 we surveyed researchers from Europe and North America to rate tasks associated with data sharing on (i) their importance and (ii) their satisfaction with their ability to complete them. We received 728 completed and 667 partial responses. We calculated mean importance and satisfaction scores to highlight potential opportunities for new solutions to and compare different cohorts.

Tasks relating to research impact, funder compliance, and credit had the highest importance scores. 52% of respondents reuse research data but the average satisfaction score for obtaining data for reuse was relatively low. Tasks associated with sharing data were rated somewhat important and respondents were reasonably well satisfied in their ability to accomplish them. Notably, this included tasks associated with best data sharing practice, such as use of data repositories. However, the most common method for sharing data was in fact via supplemental files with articles, which is not considered to be best practice.

We presume that researchers are unlikely to seek new solutions to a problem or task that they are satisfied in their ability to accomplish, even if many do not attempt this task. This implies there are few opportunities for new solutions or tools to meet these researcher needs. Publishers can likely meet these needs for data sharing by working to seamlessly integrate existing solutions that reduce the effort or behaviour change involved in some tasks, and focusing on advocacy and education around the benefits of sharing data.

There may however be opportunities – unmet researcher needs – in relation to better supporting data reuse, which could be met in part by strengthening data sharing policies of journals and publishers, and improving the discoverability of data associated with published articles.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/njr5u