What is open science?

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What is open science?

This is the fifth and final instalment of the “What is…” series of posts focusing on open science. Previous posts in this series covered open access, open peer review, post-publication peer review and open data.

This is the fifth and final instalment of the “What is…” series of posts, in which we focus on open science. Previous posts in this series covered open access, open peer review, post-publication peer review and open data. Here we look at open science as a collective term, and some of the other concepts that fall under the open science term. - See more at: http://blog.f1000research.com/2014/11/11/what-is-open-science/#sthash.4t7DE1HK.dpuf

This is the fifth and final instalment of the “What is…” series of posts, in which we focus on open science. Previous posts in this series covered open access, open peer review, post-publication peer review and open data. Here we look at open science as a collective term, and some of the other concepts that fall under the open science term. - See more at: http://blog.f1000research.com/2014/11/11/what-is-open-science/#sthash.4t7DE1HK.dpuf

This
is the fifth and final instalment of the “What is…” series of posts, in
which we focus on open science. Previous posts in this series covered
open access, open peer review, post-publication peer review and open
data. Here we look at open science as a collective term, and some of the
other concepts that fall under the open science term. - See more at:
http://blog.f1000research.com/2014/11/11/what-is-open-science/#sthash.5SEfzQrI.dpuf

This
is the fifth and final instalment of the “What is…” series of posts, in
which we focus on open science. Previous posts in this series covered
open access, open peer review, post-publication peer review and open
data. Here we look at open science as a collective term, and some of the
other concepts that fall under the open science term. - See more at:
http://blog.f1000research.com/2014/11/11/what-is-open-science/#sthash.5SEfzQrI.dpuf

Less prestigious journals publishing greater share of high-impact papers

 

From 14 October 2014  "ScienceInsider : Breaking news and analysis from the world of science policy"

 

Uprising: Less prestigious journals publishing greater share of high-impact papers 

The world of academic publishing is an oligarchy. Not only are the vast majority of highly cited papers authored by an elite 1% of scientists, but a small group of elite journals also get the lion's share of citations and media attention. But this rarified world is becoming more egalitarian, according to a study released 9 October by the team that develops Google Scholar, the free literature search engine now used by virtually every scientist in the world. The study is the strongest evidence yet that the dominance of the elite journals is eroding, thanks in part to how much easier it has become for scientists to find and cite obscure but relevant papers.

Researcher profiles - which one to use?

Are you confused by all the researcher profile options available? Not surprising

This post on ScienceOpen, "Researcher #profilefatigue – what it is and why it’s exhausting!" outlines the importance of creating a researcher profile and promotes the use of ORCID

Organization	Status
ORCID	Non-profit: independent, community driven
Google Scholar	Search: Google
Researcher ID	Publisher: Thomson Reuters
Scopus Author ID	Publisher: Elsevier
Mendeley	Publisher: Elsevier
Academia.edu	Researcher Network: Academia.edu
ResearchGate	Researcher Network: ResearchGate

Scientists on Twitter

This post on BrainFacts.org by Jean-François Gariépy, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, raises several interesting issues.........

"Neil Hall from the Centre for Genomic Research, University of Liverpool, has published a very interesting mini-study on scientists and Twitter.  He developed a metric that compares the popularity of scientists on Twitter to the impact of their publications within peer-reviewed journals. The metric is called the Kardashian Index, a reference to the fact that Kim Kardashian became wildly popular for no apparent reason, and a wink at those scientists who get Twitter popularity without having accomplished as much as others in their scientific career. Neil Hall is not necessarily critiquing the individuals who use Twitter to their advantage – he simply creates a metric that finds discrepancies between Twitter popularity and scientific popularity. The idea is brilliant, but in my view the short article is based on an incorrect premise. The premise is that science and social media contributions are two fundamentally separate things that can be compared to each other............The view that emerges from the article is that what scientists do on Twitter is not science or education – it is self-promotion, shouting, or mindless small talk. I hope that sharing part of my experience on social media will convince you that this is wrong..."  Read on ...

..."we may want to recognize that, yes, science is now happening on Twitter too"...

..."some.....have found a way to disseminate their knowledge that does not always results in increasing the number of times their research gets quoted in the research articles of the next generation" ...

..."might want to consider that the number of times a researcher is quoted in future research is not a perfect representation of the value of ... contributions to science." 

..."we currently have intellectuals who teach, research and engage in a thought process in the public sphere, to the benefit of their followers, and academia has not yet found a way to evaluate and reward this part of their contribution to society"...

Scopus releases 2013 Journal Metrics

The metrics provide alternative, transparent and accurate views of the citation impact a journal makes, and are all available for free download.. The impact metrics are based on methodologies developed by external bibliometricians and use Scopus as the data source.
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP)
SNIP measures contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. The impact of a single citation is given higher value in subject areas where citations are less likely, and vice versa. As a field-normalized metric SNIP offers researchers, authors and librarians the ability to benchmark and compare journals from different subject areas. A component of the SNIP calculation is the raw Impact per Publication (IPP) which measures the ratio of citations per article published in the journal.
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR)
SJR is a prestige metric based on the idea that ‘all citations are not created equal’. With SJR, the subject field, quality and reputation of the journal have a direct effect on the value of a citation. It is a size-independent indicator and it ranks journals by their ‘average prestige per article’ and can be used for journal comparisons in the scientific evaluation process.

The meaning of ‘impact’: prestige or relevance for developing world research?

This guest post by Eve Gray (a researcher on open access scholarly communications at the Centre for Innovation in Teaching and Learning and the IP Law Unit at the University of Cape Town) on the BioMed Central blog "Open Access in the Developing World" discusses impact (and impact factors), scholarly communication, research prestige and relevance and the inclusion/exclusion of developing world research in established indices.

Altmetrics14: expanding impacts and metrics

Altmetrics14: expanding impacts and metrics: an ACM Web Science Conference 2014 Workshop
Altmetrics researchers agree: we know how many, now we need to know why

Researchers gathered in Bloomington, Indiana on June 23 to share cutting-edge bibliometrics and altmetrics research at the ACM WebScience Altmetrics14 workshop.

Some of the highlights include a new study that finds that only 6% of articles that appear in Brazilian journals have 1 or more altmetrics (compared with ~20% of articles published in the “global North”); findings that use of Twitter to share scholarly articles grew by more than 90% from 2012 to 2013; a study that found that most sharing of research articles on Twitter occurs in original tweets, not retweets; and a discovery that more biomedical and “layman” terms appear in the titles of research shared on social media than in titles of highly-cited research articles.

Throughout the day, presenters repeatedly emphasized one point: high-quality qualitative research is now needed to understand what motivates individuals to share, bookmark, recommend, and cite research outputs. In other words, we increasingly know how many altmetrics research outputs tend to accumulate and what those metrics’ correlations are–now we need to know why research is shared on the social Web in the first place, and how those motivations influence various flavors of impact.

Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) report

The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP), 

together with African Minds 

and SARUA, (Southern African Regional Universities Association) has just produced

 an important report

 (authors: Henry Trotter, Catherine Kell, Michelle Willmers, Eve Gray & Thomas King)

entitled  

"SEEKING IMPACT AND VISIBILITY : Scholarly Communication in Southern Africa"

From the executive summary:

African scholarly research is relatively invisible for three primary reasons:
1. While research production on the continent is growing in absolute terms, it is
falling in comparative terms (especially as other Southern countries such as China
ramp up research production), reducing its relative visibility.
2. Traditional metrics of visibility (especially the ISI/WoS Impact Factor) which
measure only formal scholar-to-scholar outputs (journal articles and books) fail to
make legible a vast amount of African scholarly production, thus underestimating
the amount of research activity on the continent.
3. Many African universities do not take a strategic approach to scholarly
communication, nor utilise appropriate information and communications
technologies (ICTs) and Web 2.0 technologies to broaden the reach of their
scholars’ work or curate it for future generations, thus inadvertently minimising
the impact and visibility of African research.

Recommendations: 

To university administrations
•Offer a reduction in teaching time to scholars who demonstrate ambitious research activity.
•Establish digital platforms for sharing publication success by university scholars.
•Develop policies mandating that all publicly funded research be made open access
•Put all university-affiliated journals online and make them open access
•Induce academic staff to create personal profiles on their departmental web pages
•Establish or identify support service providers who can translate scholars’ research for government- and community-based audiences.
•Develop a network of communication officers/content managers so that disparate dissemination activity can be pursued in a more cohesive and strategic manner.
•Encourage scholars to share their research insights on Wikipedia.
•Invest in training for library staff so that they can operate effectively in the new scholarly communication landscape.
•Train and incentivise scholars to use Web 2.0 platforms

 To university scholars
• Share responsibility with the administration for research visibility. Communicate research findings to the audiences that could best leverage them for developmental purposes.

Avoiding author ambiguity: 10 things you need to know about ORCID (and ResearcherID) right now

(IMPORTANT:  ResearcherID and ORCID are complementary attribution identifiers. They go hand-in-hand and it is essential that scholarly authors and researchers have both. ORCID is a platform-agnostic identifier, whereas the ResearcherID identifier is specific to Thomson Reuters - more about integration of ResearcherID and ORCID)

ORCID IDs are permanent identifiers for researchers. Community uptake has increased tenfold over the past year, and continues to be adopted by new institutions, funders, and journals on a daily basis.  

ORCID may prove to be one of the most important advances in scholarly communication in the past ten years.

Here are ten things you need to know about ORCID and its importance to you.

ORCIDs protects your unique scholarly identity
Creating an ORCID identifier takes 30 seconds
ORCID is getting big fast
ORCID lasts longer than your email address
ORCID supports 37 types of “works,” from articles to dance performances
You control who views your ORCID information
ORCID is glue for all your research services
Journals, funders & institutions are moving to ORCID
When everyone has an ORCID identifier, scholarship gets better
ORCID is open source, open data, and community-driven

Why upload to academic preprint sites like arXiv?

"The recent question about the legality of uploading to arXiv made me realize that I don't have any understanding of why one would upload to a preprint site. (I don't work in a field where they seem to be common.) Why would one be concerned about getting a manuscript on arXiv, if it's already under review with a journal? Is it because of the long publishing timeline of journals? (That could explain why computer science — which publishes much more in conferences — doesn't seem to do much with them.) ..." Read more at:

 Why upload to academic preprint sites like arXiv? - Academia Stack Exchange

(arXiv is an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics. Submissions to arXiv must conform to Cornell University academic standards. arXiv is owned and operated by Cornell University, a private not-for-profit educational institution. arXiv is funded by Cornell University Library, the Simons Foundation and by the member institutions.)