Daniel S. Katz and Hollydawn Murray, supported by more than 15 publishers, write a guest post in the Scholarly Kitchen, “Citing Software in Scholarly Publishing to Improve Reproducibility, Reuse and Credit.” They make a case for authors and publishers to publish and cite software code itself, rather than merely an article about the code or research that was generated using code. Properly cited, open software enables others to reproduce research and modify and reuse that code for further developments. Those who write the code deserve credit for this critical work and they can’t receive it if their software isn’t properly cited. The FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group has proposed a set of customizable guidelines to clearly identify the software and credit its developers and maintainers.
Month: March 2021
The case of a fabricated author
“Who is Camille Noûs, the fictitious French researcher with nearly 200 papers?” tells the story of the birth of this non-person, the intentions of those researchers who assign Camille Noûs as an author of their works, at times without notifying the journal editors, and the ethics of doing so. The name represents a collective, gender-neutral “we” and is the brainchild of RogueESR, a French research advocacy organization with no formal leadership. Those who express concern about including Camille Noûs as author note how the practice undermines responsible research and the difficulty of tracking and correcting errors, among others. Thanks to Laura Quilter for bringing this article and fascinating case to my attention.
Study of open access journals published without author fees
The “OA Diamond Journals Study” commissioned by cOAlition S is a robust work in multiple parts: findings, recommendations, references, journals inventory and dataset. It looks at the global landscape of an estimated 29,000 journals that are free for readers and authors. Only about a third of these are indexed in DOAJ and they represent diverse regions (45% in Europe, 25% in Latin America, 16% in Asia, 5% in the US/Canada) and disciplines (60% HSS, 22% science, 17% medicine). We don’t hear enough about them, perhaps because they are less common in the U.S. and Canada, less English-centric, and more often published by small, niche organizations. The majority of the journals exhibit academic rigor and conform to standards that make them compliant with Plan S. However, most depend on volunteers, governments and universities for funding. The recommendations focus on potential efficiency gains, collaborations, and principles-based action plans to secure non-commercial funding. As one who recognizes the barriers that author processing charges (APCs) create, I’m a fan of the Diamond OA and the financial models that support them. This study provides a useful and detailed landscape for understanding and planning for sustainable OA Diamond journals.
Research Uses Across Disciplines for WikiData
Data is an obvious and critical open science research output. WikiData and Open Science: a Model for Open Data Work is an interview with Dr. Timo Borst from ZBW – Leibniz Information Center for Economics about research uses across disciplines for WikiData’s 90 million data objects. WikiData is a neutral, comprehensive, open source database in the Wikimedia family that has been practicing the FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability, reusability) principles from its beginning. Dr. Borst touts the benefits of WikiData as an open and enriched repository of linked data that is a great source of data to use and to share one’s own data. He provides several use scenarios in the life sciences and humanities. Dr. Borst is obviously a WikiData fan and an advocate for open scholarship as a process.
Special issue of Data Intelligence on Open Science
The Winter 2021 (3:1) issue of Data Intelligence, an open access journal published by MIT Press is a special issue on Open Science. It includes Editors’ Note; a commentary, “Politics and Open Science: how the European Union Science Cloud became a reality” with 8 responses; 10 vision papers; and 5 practice papers. The editors quote Michael Nielson’s definition:
“OS is the idea that scientific knowledge of all kinds should be openly shared as early as is practical in the discovery process”
They set out to cover both current policy and practices with selected conference papers and invited papers and note the distinction between “open by publication” and “open by design”, the former relying on librarians and others to retrospectively curate works after publication and the latter requiring redesigning researcher processes to make outputs available along the way. This is an interesting issue, and it includes more content than I could read, let alone detail, even in a long month. I will be dipping into these articles going forward, because they dig into the evolution from the original conception of open access as journal article publication to the broader practice of open scholarship/science across disciplines, research processes and output types (data, metadata, protocols, software, etc.).