Author: Cameron Neylon

Integrated advice of the Open Science Policy Platform on 8 prioritised Open Science ambitions

Author: EU Open Science Policy Platform

Notes: The integrated recommendations of the main European expert policy group on Open Science. Includes a focus on rewards and incentives but primarily at the individual level. Amongst the release documents associated with this is a reference to a Norwegian proposal to kitemark universities based on their open science performance.

Summary: The Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP) adopted on the 22nd of April 2018 a set of prioritised actionable recommendations concerning the eight Open Science ambitions of Commissioner Moedas. These recommendations constitute an integrated advice on all Open Science ambitions of Commissioner Moedas.

These actionable recommendations from the OSPP are the next step towards the longer-term vision articulated by Open Science consultations and expert groups set up by the EC and other organisations in Europe and worldwide. The recommendations have been split up into the eight priorities identified from the European Open Science Agenda , namely:

  • Rewards and Incentives
  • Research Indicators and Next-Generation Metrics
  • Future of Scholarly Communication
  • European Open Science Cloud
  • FAIR Data
  • Research Integrity
  • Skills and Education
  • Citizen Science

Source: Integrated advice of the Open Science Policy Platform on 8 prioritised Open Science ambitions

Think civic! Five ideas for universities

Author: Alex Miles is Deputy Director of Communications, Advocacy & Global Affairs at the University of Nottingham.

Notes: Framing of the idea of the civic role of universities in the context of  the UK obsession with Excellence Frameworks. Plays with the idea of a “Civic Excellence Framework” including many aspects of cultural engagement with communities, quality of staff experience, and salary levels.

Snippet: The public value and civic role of universities have, over the last 18 months, become a major topic of debate.

This national conversation has emerged in response to pressure from three sources. The first is societal pressure on the purpose and utility of universities. The second is internal pressure – illustrated by pay and pension disputes – but underpinned by longer-term unease about marketisation and reforms of higher education. The third pressure, exerted by politicians and regulators who detect that universities are losing the consent of the public to continue to operate – with independence – in the manner we have been.

Source: Think civic! Five ideas for universities

How global university rankings are changing higher education – Degrees of success

Author: The Economist

Notes: Up to date critical general interest article from The Economist on rankings with an emphasis on the ARWU/Shanghai ranking including some history and background as well as a discussion of the issues that rankings are causing.

Snippet: They favour research over teaching and the sciences over the arts[…] EARLIER this month Peking University played host to perhaps the grandest global gathering ever of the higher-education business. Senior figures from the world’s most famous universities—Harvard and Yale, Oxford and Cambridge among them—enjoyed or endured a two-hour opening ceremony followed by a packed programme of mandatory cultural events interspersed with speeches lauding “Xi Jinping thought”. The party was thrown to celebrate Peking University’s 120th birthday—and, less explicitly, China’s success in a race that started 20 years ago.

The Economist. 2018. “How Global University Rankings Are Changing Higher Education,” May 19, 2018. https://www.economist.com/international/2018/05/19/how-global-university-rankings-are-changing-higher-education.

Source: How global university rankings are changing higher education – Degrees of success

Filling in missing data: books

Author: Christina Pikas
Notes: Christina is an experienced information services librarian trying to get a set of information for a project. Here she encounters the “book problem” i.e. no central index that is usable and resorts to data from Harvard. This is probably a strong recommendation for using it as a source.

Snippet: Current project I’m obsessing on (it’s actually really cool and interesting and fun) spans political science, history, philosophy, and even some sociology and criminal justice. So I played all my reindeer games on the journal articles, but when it comes to analyzing the abstracts, a lot were missing. I wanted to ignore these, but they were whole collections from extremely relevant journals and also nearly all of the books. The journals I filled in what i could from Microsoft Academic (no endorsement intended).

Books though…

Source: Filling in missing data: books – Christina’s LIS Rant

Open access in ethics research: an analysis of open access availability and author self-archiving behaviour in light of journal copyright restrictions | SpringerLink

Authors: Mikael Laakso and Andrea Polonioli

Summary: Examines OA status in the field of ethics. Starts by determining a set of researchers, then a set of articles then determining OA status by Google Scholar. Makes it challenging to scale. Good analysis of the different forms of OA being used here and the complexities that creates.

Abstract: The current state of open access to journal publications within research areas belonging to the humanities has received relatively little research attention. This study provides a detailed mapping of the bibliometric state of open access to journal publications among ethicists, taking into account not only open access publishing in journals directly, but also where and in what form ethicists make their journal articles available elsewhere on the web. As part of the study 297 ethicists affiliated with top-ranking philosophy departments were identified and their journal publication information for the years 2010–2015 were recorded (1682 unique articles). The journal articles were then queried for through Google Scholar in order to establish open access status (web locations, document versions) of each publication record. Publication records belonging to the 20 most frequently used journal outlets (subset of 597 unique articles) were put under closer inspection with regards to alignment with publisher copyright restrictions as well as measuring unused potential to share articles. The results show that slightly over half of recent journal publications are available to read for free. PhilPapers and academic social networks (Academia.edu and ResearchGate) were found to be key platforms for research dissemination in ethics research. The representation of institutional repositories as providers of access was found to be weak, receiving the second lowest frequency rating among the eight discrete web location categories. Further, the study reveals that ethicists are at the same time prone to copyright infringement and undersharing their scholarly work.

Laakso, Mikael, and Andrea Polonioli. 2018. “Open Access in Ethics Research: An Analysis of Open Access Availability and Author Self-Archiving Behaviour in Light of Journal Copyright Restrictions.” Scientometrics, April, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2751-5.

Source: Open access in ethics research: an analysis of open access availability and author self-archiving behaviour in light of journal copyright restrictions | SpringerLink

Ethnographic approaches to the practices of scholarly communication: tackling the mess of academia

 

Author: Donna Lanclos

Summary: A discussion of ethnographic perspectives in mapping information and learning environments. Particularly explores the ways in which people’s experience spreads beyond their institution and offers some ways to think about mapping and analysing these perspectives.

Extract: In my anthropological research in academic libraries, and in higher education generally, I have encountered a contrast between the ways that institutions approach the information systems they build and buy, and how people use those systems. Confronting the ‘mess’ of people’s everyday practice is a necessary first step towards more effectively connecting people to the resources they want and need. Here I discuss some of the ways to visualize and embrace the actual practices of people, in physical and digital contexts.

[…]

Institutionally unbounded practices are messy and unpredictable, and they are much more interesting practices to engage in. In fact, I would argue that it is our responsibility to recognize the effectiveness of those practices. Institutions would be served better by engaging in far less locked-down control of scholarly content, because any sense of control that they have is an illusion in the first place. We do not have to control people’s practices to be able to equip them to be effective practitioners. We do not have to control people’s practices to be able to equip them to be well-educated citizens who are capable of making good decisions.

Lanclos, D. (2016). Ethnographic approaches to the practices of scholarly communication: tackling the mess of academia. Insights 29. http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.316

Source: Ethnographic approaches to the practices of scholarly communication: tackling the mess of academia

University courses in Australia: Half of degrees will soon be ‘obsolete’

Authors: news.com.au

Summary: Quite a good example of the kind of surface level engagement with issues of the future of universities. The article demonstrates a utility-based rhetoric and simplistic assumptions about value creation and return on investment. Not surprisingly it’s based on a policy report from a professional services firm and is mainly a retread of the press release.

Snippet: NEARLY half of existing university degrees could be obsolete within a decade leaving graduates with “more debt and poor job prospects” if Australia’s university system is not drastically overhauled, a new report has warned.

[…]FOUR FUTURE SCENARIOS

1. Champion University: A hands-on government actively champions universities as strategic national assets. Most students enrol in traditional undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Universities streamline operations by transforming service delivery and administration.

2. Commercial University: A hands-off government requires universities to be financially independent to ease national budget pressures. Students favour degree programs that offer work-integrated learning. Universities reposition by drawing closer to industry to collaborate on teaching and research.

3. Disruptor University: A hands-off government deregulates the sector to drive competition and efficiency. Continuous learners and their preferences for on-demand micro-certificates dominate as technology disrupts the workplace. Universities expand into new markets and services and compete against a range of new local and global educational services providers.

4. Virtual University: An activist government restructures the tertiary sector to integrate universities and vocational institutes, prioritising training and employability outcomes as humans begin to be replaced by machines. Continuous learners are the majority, preferring unbundled courses delivered flexibly and online. Universities restructure into networks that share digital platforms.

Source: EY University of the Future

frank.chung@news.com.au

Source: University courses in Australia: Half of degrees will soon be ‘obsolete’

Publishing while Female. Are women held to higher standards? Evidence from peer review.

Author: Erin Hengel

Comment: Very strong article looking at the burden of publishing and peer review for women vs men in economics. Shows that not only do women do more work and improve their manuscripts more from the perspective of readability but that they also internalise this and produce more readable manuscripts in the first place.

Abstract: I use readability scores to test if referees and/or editors apply higher standards to women’s writing in academic peer review. I find: (i) female-authored papers are 1-6 percent better written than equivalent papers by men; (ii) the gap is two times higher in published articles than in earlier, draft versions of the same papers; (iii) women’s writing gradually improves but men’s does not-meaning the readability gap grows over authors’ careers. In a dynamic model of an author’s decision-making process, I show that tougher editorial standards and/or biased referee assignment are uniquely consistent with this pattern of choices. A conservative causal estimate derived from the model suggests senior female economists write at least 9 percent more clearly than they otherwise would. These findings indicate that higher standards burden women with an added time tax and probably contribute to academia’s “Publishing Paradox” Consistent with this hypothesis, I find female-authored papers spend six months longer in peer review. More generally, tougher standards impose a quantity/quality tradeoff that characterises many instances of female output. They could resolve persistently lower-otherwise unexplained-female productivity in many high-skill occupations.

Hengel, E. (2017). Publishing while Female. Are women held to higher standards? Evidence from peer review. (University of Cambridge). https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/270621

Source: Publishing while Female. Are women held to higher standards? Evidence from peer review.

Coherence of “open” initiatives in higher education and research: Framing a policy agenda – D-Scholarship@Pitt

Authors: Sheila Corrall and Stephen Pinfield

Comments: Discusses the range of definitions of “open” in policy contexts drawing on OER, OA and other aspects as well as controversies and the nature of disagreements.

Abstract: “Open” approaches have the potential to advance significantly the mission of higher education and research institutions worldwide, but the multiplicity of initiatives raises questions about their coherence and points to the need for a more coordinated approach to policy development. Drawing on the European e-InfraNet project, we adopt a broad definition of Open, including activity alongside content, and identify the different Open domains, their salient characteristics and relationships. We propose a high-level typology and model of Open to inform policy design and delivery, and employ Willinsky’s framework for open source and open access to discuss the theoretical underpinnings of openness, finding important commonalities among the domains, which suggests that the framework can extend to all the Open areas. We then examine potential shared benefits of Open approaches, which reinforce the argument for a unified policy agenda. We conclude with some observations on limits of openness, and implications for policy.

Corrall, S., and Pinfield, S. (2014). Coherence of “Open” Initiatives in Higher Education and Research: Framing a Policy Agenda. http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/21973/

Source: Coherence of “open” initiatives in higher education and research: Framing a policy agenda – D-Scholarship@Pitt

A genealogy of open access: negotiations between openness and access to research

Author: Samuel Moore

Comment: A discussion of the history of different conceptions of Open Access, their origins and how they play out in the policy and political arena today.

Abstract: Open access (OA) is a contested term with a complicated history and a variety of understandings. This rich history is routinely ignored by institutional, funder and governmental policies that instead enclose the concept and promote narrow approaches to OA. This article presents a genealogy of the term open access, focusing on the separate histories that emphasise openness and reusability on the one hand, as borrowed from the open-source software and free culture movements, and accessibility on the other hand, as represented by proponents of institutional and subject repositories. This genealogy is further complicated by the publishing cultures that have evolved within individual communities of practice: publishing means different things to different communities and individual approaches to OA are representative of this fact. From analysing its historical underpinnings and subsequent development, I argue that OA is best conceived as a boundary object, a term coined by Star and Griesemer (1989) to describe concepts with a shared, flexible definition between communities of practice but a more community-specific definition within them. Boundary objects permit working relationships between communities while allowing local use and development of the concept. This means that OA is less suitable as a policy object, because boundary objects lose their use-value when ‘enclosed’ at a general level, but should instead be treated as a community-led, grassroots endeavour.

Moore, S. (2017). A genealogy of open access: negotiations between openness and access to research / Une généalogie de l’open access : négociations entre l’ouverture et l’accès à la recherche. Revue Française Des Sciences de l’information et de La Communication 11.

Source: A genealogy of open access: negotiations between openness and access to research