1. Guest Post — The Future of FAIR, as Told by the Past
Where will FAIR end up? What will be its value to research data management stakeholders? To see into the future, Brian Lavoie of OCLC, in his post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, suggests we start by looking into the past: in particular, the development of the OAIS reference model.
The blog post says (quote): Implementing FAIR is a significant undertaking and requires changes in terms of research culture and infrastructure provision. These changes are important in the context of the European Open Science Cloud and the direction for European Commission and Member State policy, but go beyond that: FAIR requires global agreements to ensure the broadest interoperability and reusability of data – beyond disciplinary and geographic boundaries...............(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. Introducing Registered Reports, a New Way to Make Science Robust
Replication, or arriving at similar results when collecting new data, is an ongoing problem primarily plaguing the life and social sciences. Sometimes known as the replication challenge, this obstacle should not be confused with the reproducibility challenge. Although these two horrors affect many disciplines, brain-imaging research is particularly sensitive to them, given the large amount of data that each project yields. Yet only very few neuroscience journals explicitly encourage authors to submit replication studies. Replicability and reproducibility challenges, along with low statistical power and publication and researcher biases, make a young scientist’s journey truly treacherous, notes Teodora Stoica, David Mehler in their post in the Scientific American.
The blog post says (quote): Low statistical power—that is, a very small chance, oftentimes much lower than landing heads in a fair coin toss, to yield a statistically significant result—makes it difficult to detect an effect. In many fields, including neuroscience, statistical power tends to be so low that our young scientist would have to repeat the same experiment many times to actually find it. Our young scientist is busy, though. And poor. She doesn’t have time for that. Heck, ain’t nobody got time for that! Even worse, low statistical power, in combination with the next obstacle, publication bias, inflates reported effects, which further imperils replicability................(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. Open Source for Scholarly Publishing: An Inventory and Analysis
Open source brings many benefits and is used in many corporations, and CoKo has seemed like one especially promising initiative. But open source is not a silver bullet — at least in some arenas, waves of innovation and then consolidation overshadow the necessary ongoing work of steady maintenance and ongoing reinvestment, yielding all too limited impact and no shortage of personal and professional disruption. Roger C. Schonfeld in his post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, discusses a very recent MIT Press report,’ Mind the Gap: A Landscape Analysis of Open Source Publishing Tools and Platforms.’ The report provides an inventory of some 52 ongoing open source publishing initiatives. The study is bounded around open source.
The blog post says (quote): The report reflects on the many ways that publishing itself is being remade, in terms of the transformation of formats such as the journal and the book. I was especially struck by the authors’ reflections on workflow processes for manuscript submission and management systems, including OJS’s comparatively traditional approach and a variety of other efforts to bring review into other stages of the workflow. It is hard not to imagine that there are substantial opportunities to reconceptualize the interplay between preprint repositories, manuscript submissions, and editorial/peer review — and to wonder whether the open source community will get there before Elsevier does with SSRN and Aries..............(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. AmeliCA before Plan S – The Latin American Initiative to develop a cooperative, non-commercial, academic led, system of scholarly communication
Open access is often discussed as a process of flipping the existing closed subscription based model of scholarly communication to an open one. However, in Latin America an open access ecosystem for scholarly publishing has been in place for over a decade. In this post in the LSE Impact Blog, Eduardo Aguado-López and Arianna Becerril-Garcia discuss open access developments in Latin America and the AmeliCA initiative to develop a cooperative infrastructure for scientific communication. They also reflect on how the recent proposals put forward by cOAlition S to foster open access publication in the Global North, could potentially negatively impact open access efforts in Latin America.
The blog post says (quote): For a system that publically subsidizes scholarly communication through academic institutions, as in Latin America, implementing charges to authors heightens the risk of breaking a structure that has been designed to support researchers and keep public money within a publically managed ecosystem. As Chan notes, when opening access is decontextualized from its historical and political roots, it has the potential to become as exploitive and oppressive as the system it is seeking to replace. For these reasons, various organizations have opposed the introduction of APCs: CLACSO, Redalyc, AmeliCA, Conacyt-Conricyt (Mexico), IBICT (Brazil), CONICYT and CINCEL (Chile)................(Unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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