Emerging metrics based on article-level does not exclude traditional metrics based on citations to the journal, but complements them. Both can be employed in conjunction to offer a richer picture of an article use from immediate to long terms. Article-level metrics (ALM) is the result of the aggregation of different data sources and the collection of content from multiple social network services. Sources used for the aggregation can be broken down into five categories: usage, captures, mentions, social media and citations. Data sources depend on the tool, but they include classic metrics indicators based on citations, academic social networks (Mendeley, CiteULike, Delicious) and social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, or Youtube, among others). Altmetrics is not synonymous with alternative metrics. Altmetrics are normally early available and allow to assess the social impact of scholarly outputs, almost at the real time. This paper overviews briefly the meaning of altmetrics and describes some of the existing tools used to apply this new metrics: Public Library of Science--Article-Level Metrics, Altmetric, Impactstory and Plum.
This work analyses the perception and practice of sharing, reusing, and facilitating access to research data in the field of food science and technology. The study involved the coordination of a focus group discussion and an online survey, to understand and evince the behaviour of researchers regarding data management in that field. Both the discussion group and the survey were performed with researchers from several institutes of the Spanish National Research Council. The lack of a data sharing culture, the fear of being scooped, and confusion between the concepts of the working plan and the data management plan were some of the issues that emerged in the focus group. Respondents' previous experience with sharing their research data has been mainly in the form of appendices to peer‐reviewed publications. From the survey (101 responses), the most important motivations for publishing research data were found to be facilitating the reproducibility of the research, increasing the likelihood of citations of the article, and compliance with funding body mandates. Legal constraints, intellectual property, data ownership, data rights, potential commercial exploitation, and misuse of data were the main barriers to publishing data as open data. Citation in publications, certification, compliance with standards, and the reputation of the data providers were the most relevant factors affecting the use of other researchers' data. Being recent or recently updated, well documented, with quality metadata and ease of access were the most valued attributes of open research data.
30 June 2023 in Encontros Bibli: Revista Eletrônica de Biblioteconomia e Ciência da Informação
Objetivo: revisar as terminologias e aplicações da taxonomia de Ciência Aberta para a construção de uma versão mais abrangente, que represente o conhecimento em volta do tema, em conformidade com o cenário atual da comunicação científica e com as recomendações da Organização das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura (Unesco). Método: trata-se de uma pesquisa do tipo exploratória com abordagem dedutiva. A primeira etapa foi a revisão das taxonomias, com 12 pesquisadores que se reuniram, semanalmente, para discussões conceituais e epistemológicas relacionadas à Ciência Aberta, e definições metodológicas e procedimentais para a realização do estudo. Resultados: como resultado das análises, foi desenvolvida uma taxonomia para ser avaliada pelos especialistas. Para isso, foi enviado um questionário com perguntas abertas, sobre cada eixo principal da taxonomia, para 68 especialistas. Foram obtidas 21 respostas que cooperaram com a modelagem e exposição dos termos para a nova taxonomia. A taxonomia oriunda desse processo de revisão tem 10 facetas de nível principal e o total de 96 rótulos. Conclusões: a percepção dos especialistas trouxe à tona um panorama congruente com as recomendações da Unesco e do atual cenário da Ciência Aberta.
30 June 2013 in Revista española de Documentación Científica
El objetivo del artículo es analizar el estado de la cuestión de las políticas en favor del acceso abierto (OA) a la ciencia en las universidades españolas. Para ello se han establecido cinco grandes mecanismos de intervención (la creación de infraestructuras y prestación de servicios, la comunicación y difusión, la incentivación económica, la coordinación institucional así como la reglamentación u obligación) que permiten llevar a cabo políticas a favor del acceso abierto y que hemos utilizado para el análisis y la valoración de la situación. La recogida de datos se ha basado en un cuestionario enviado a los vice-rectores de investigación y se ha complementado con la consulta de directorios de repositorios, revistas científicas españolas y políticas institucionales de acceso abierto. Los resultados muestran un panorama diversificado en relación a las actuaciones llevadas a cabo, pero han permitido clasificar las universidades en cinco grupos en función del número y de la calidad de acciones que han realizado. El primero, formado por siete universidades (9% del total) que disponen de una política completa en acceso abierto. El segundo incluye a doce universidades (16%) con una política destacada. El tercero, diecisiete centros (23%) con una política encaminada y el cuarto incluye otras diecisiete universidades (23%) que han implementado una o dos acciones. Finalmente, quedan las 21 universidades (28%) que no disponen de ninguna acción para favorecer el acceso abierto a la ciencia.
The article describes the results of the online survey on open science (OS) carried out on researchers affiliated with universities and Spanish research centres and focused on open access to scientific publications, the publication process, the management of research data and the review of open articles. The main objective was to identify the perception and habits of researchers with regard to practices closely linked to open science and the scientific value added is that offers an in-depth picture of researchers as one of the main actors to whom this transformation and implementation of open science will fall. It focuses on the different aspects of OS: open access, open data, publication process and open review in order to identify habits and perceptions. This is to make possible an implementation of the OS movement. The survey was carried out among researchers who had published in the years 2020–2021, according to data obtained from WoS. It was emailed to a total of 8,188 researchers and obtained a total of 666 responses, of which 554 were complete, the rest being forms with some questions unanswered. The main results showed that open access still requires the diffusion of practices and services provided by the institution, as well as training (library or equivalent service) and institutional support from the competent authorities (vice rectors or equivalent) in specific aspects such as data management. In the case of data, around 50% of respondents stated they had stored data in a repository, and of all the options, the most frequently given was that of an institutional repository, followed by a discipline repository. Among the main reasons for doing this, we found transparency, visibility of data and the ability to validate results. For those who stated they had never stored data, the most frequent reasons for not having done so were privacy and confidentiality, the lack of a mandated data policy or a lack of knowledge of how to do it. In terms of open peer review, participants mentioned a certain reticence to the opening of evaluations due to potential conflicts of interest that may arise or because lower-quality content might be accepted in order to avoid conflicts. In addition, the hierarchical structure of senior researcher versus junior researcher might affect reviews. The main conclusions indicate a need for persuasion of OA to take place; APCs are an economic barrier rather than the main criterion for journal selection; OPR practices may seem innovative and emerging; scientific and evaluation policies seem to have a clear effect on the behaviour of researchers; researchers state that they share research data more for reasons of persuasion than out of obligation. Researchers do question the pathways or difficulties that may arise on a day-to-day basis and seem aware that we are undergoing change, where academic evaluation or policies related to open science, its implementation and habits among researchers may change. In this sense, more and better support is needed on the part of institutions and faculty support services.
Pillars of open science are often included within the editorial policies of scholarly journals, including policies on open access publication, availability of underlying research data, preprints and open peer review. The aim of this paper is to examine and analyse perceptions and editorial practices related to open access, preprints, open research data and open peer review, from the perspective of editors of scientific journals published in Spain, to gain an insight into editorial policies related to open science. Results and data were obtained by a combined method of online interviews and an online questionnaire. The online survey was sent to editors from journals indexed in the Dulcinea directory, which at the time of the study included 1875 academic journals. A total of 420 responses (22.4%) were obtained. The results indicated that 92% of the journals were open access journals, 2% of the journals conducted open peer review, 15% of the journals had instructions to allow archiving preprints, and out of 375 responses, only 59 journals (16%) reported having a policy on underlying research data. Based on these results, there is a trend in favour of open access, but the perceived barriers to open peer review outweighed the advantages. There is also some reluctance to allow preprints to be made available. This concern might be because editors want authors and readers to read and cite the contents published in their journals, rather than their preprint versions.