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The case for Open Research: reproducibility, retractions & retrospective hypotheses
This is the third instalment of ‘The case for Open Research’ series of blogs exploring the problems with Scholarly Communication caused by having a single value point in research – publication in a high impact journal. The first post explored the mis-measurement of researchers and the second looked at issues with authorship. This blog will explore the accuracy of the research record, including the ability (or otherwise) to reproduce research that has been published, what happens if research is retracted, and a concerning trend towards altering hypotheses in light of the data that is produced. Science is thought to progress through the building of knowledge through questioning, testing and checking work. The…
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The case for Open Research: the authorship problem
This is the second in a blog series about why we need to move towards Open Research. The first post about the mis-measurement problem considered issues with assessment. We now turn our attention to problems with authorship. Note that as before this is a topic of research in itself – and there is a rich vein of literature to be mined here for the interested observer. Hyperauthorship In May last year a high energy physics paper was published with over 5,000 authors. Of the 33 pages in this article, the paper occupied nine with the remainder listing the authors. This paper caused something of a storm of protest about ‘hyperauthorship’ (a term coined in 2001 by Blaise Cronin).…
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The case for Open Research: the mis-measurement problem
Let’s face it. The biggest blockage we have to widespread Open Access is not researcher apathy, a lack of interoperable systems, or an unwillingness of publishers to engage (although these do each play some part) – it is the problem that the only thing that counts in academia is publication in a high impact journal. This situation is causing multiple problems, from huge numbers of authors on papers, researchers cherry picking results and retrospectively applying hypotheses, to the reproducibility crisis and a surge in retractions. This blog was intended to be an exploration of some solutions prefaced by a short overview of the issues. Rather depressingly, there was so much material…
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Press embargoes – a threat from the shadows
Something has been rumbling under the surface in the repository world recently, at least in the UK. Over the past six months or so, the Office of Scholarly Communication has had some fraught conversations with researchers who are terrified that their papers will be ‘pulled’ from publication by the journal. The reason is because some information about the upcoming paper is publicly available. The HEFCE policy asks us to deposit the Author’s Accepted Manuscript into a repository “as soon after the point of acceptance as possible” and to present the manuscript “in a way that allows it to be discovered by readers and by automated tools such as search engine”.…
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Show me the money – the path to a sustainable Research Data Facility
Like many institutions in the UK, Cambridge University has responded to research funders’ requirements for data management and sharing with a concerted effort to support our research community in good data management and sharing practice through our Research Data Facility. We have written a few times on this blog and presented to describe our services. This blog is a description of the process we have undertaken to support these services in the long term. Funders expect that researchers make the data underpinning their research available and provide a link to this data in the paper itself. The EPSRC started checking compliance with their data sharing requirement on 1 May 2015. When we first created the Research…
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Watch this space – the first OSI workshop
It was always an ambitious project – trying to gather 250 high level delegates from all aspects of the scholarly communication process with the goal of better communication and idea sharing between sectors of the ecosystem. The first meeting of the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) happened in Fairfax, Virginia last week. Kudos to the National Science Communication Institute for managing the astonishing logistics of an exercise like this – and basically pulling it off. This was billed as a ‘meeting between global, high-level stakeholders in research’ with a goal to ‘lay the groundwork for creating a global collaborative framework to manage the future of scholarly publishing and everything these practices impact’. The OSI is…
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Consider yourself disrupted – notes from RLUK2016
The 2016 Research Libraries UK conference was held at the British Library from 9-11 March on the theme of disruptive innovation. This blog pulls out some of the highlights personally gained from the conference: If librarians are to be considered important – we as a community need to be strong in our grasp of understanding scholarly communication issues We need to know the facts about our subscriptions to, usage of and contributions to scholarly publishing We need high level support in institutions to back libraries in advocacy and negotiation with publishers Scientists are rarely rewarded for being right, so the scientific record is being distorted by the scientific ecosystem Society needs…
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The value of embracing unknown unknowns
This blog accompanies a talk Danny Kingsley gave to the RLUK Conference held at the British Library on 9-11 March 2016. The slides are available and the Twitter hashtag from the event was #rluk16 The talk centred around a debate piece written with my long standing collaborator, Dr Mary Anne Kennan, published in August 2015: Open Access: The Whipping Boy for Problems in Scholarly Publishing. This original 10,000 word article was the starting point for a debate where five people provided rebuttals to our position and we were then given the opportunity to write a rejoinder to these. All the articles were published together. I have included a précis of…
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Forget compliance. Consider the bigger RDM picture
The Office of Scholarly Communication sent Dr Marta Teperek, our Research Data Facility Manager to the International Digital Curation Conference held in in Amsterdam on 22-25 February 2016. This is her report from the event. Fantastic! This was my first IDCC meeting and already I can’t wait for next year. There was not only amazing content in high quality workshops and conference papers, but also a great opportunity to network with data professionals from across the globe. And it was so refreshing to set aside our UK problem of compliance with data sharing policies, to instead really focus on the bigger picture: why it is so important to manage and share research data and…
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Cambridge perspective on Jisc RDM Shared Services
The Jisc Shared Research Data Management Service pilot will allow institutions to work collaboratively with the aim of producing a system that is greater than the sum of their parts. Sarah Middle started work as Institutional Repository Manager at the University of Cambridge’s Office of Scholarly Communication in November last year, and discusses her involvement in the pilot here. As well as having the potential to provide a better quality system, the shared RDM service is likely to increase efficiency and reduce costs – rather than replicating the same smaller models everywhere, there will be one central hub. It should also provide solutions to particular issues faced by individual institutions, which…
