Citation data are now open, but that’s far from enough

Posted on September 15, 2022 by peter.suber's bookmarks

“The opening up of citation data is welcome. It means greater transparency and accountability for research studies designed to inform academics, funders and governments in their decisions about areas of research they should focus energy and money on.

But more is needed. Not all publishers index papers on Crossref, and not all indexed papers have citation data associated with them. One study published in July found that about one-third of papers indexed in 2021 are lacking such data (N. J. van Eck and L. Waltman. Preprint at https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/smxe5; 2022). Some of these articles — particularly editorials, letters, corrections and book reviews — might not have any references, but this by no means applies to all of them. Uploading citation data should not be seen as optional….”

Proposed DataCite Metadata Schema Changes: Your Feedback Needed! | September 12, 2022

Posted on September 13, 2022 by OATP primary

“The DataCite Metadata Working Group has been working on the next version of the metadata schema—and we need your feedback! Over the past year and a half, the Metadata Working Group has been working on changes to support the evolving use cases for DataCite DOIs. These proposed updates are in response to requests from DataCite community members and also in alignment with pillar 3 of DataCite’s strategic plan—that is, to “identify and connect all resource types held by research organizations globally.” We want to make sure these changes work—that they solve the problems that they are intended to solve—and we want to hear from you! For the first time, we are sharing a draft proposal before releasing the next metadata schema version….”

Accessibility for Crossref DOI Links: Call for comments on proposed new guidelines – Crossref

Posted on September 7, 2022 by OATP primary

“Here is a quick overview:

DOIs and URLs themselves don’t really tell readers much. People with visual impairments rely on screen readers to read out loud the contents of a page. We’re asking for the title of each DOI to be added, in an ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attribute, so these users understand what these links are for.
Accessible text, as this kind of description is known, should be included for all links, but at this time, we’re specifically recommending it for landing pages of newly registered records.
It’s not required, yet. We’re proposing a 2 year recommendation period and we want your feedback on the particulars, including timing and how we can help. Please take a short survey and/or get in touch and share your thoughts.
We’ll finalize these recommendations after assessing the feedback. Please check back for updates….”

Long-term availability of data associated with articles in PLOS ONE | PLOS ONE

Posted on August 25, 2022 by OATP primary

Abstract: The adoption of journal policies requiring authors to include a Data Availability Statement has helped to increase the availability of research data associated with research articles. However, having a Data Availability Statement is not a guarantee that readers will be able to locate the data; even if provided with an identifier like a uniform resource locator (URL) or a digital object identifier (DOI), the data may become unavailable due to link rot and content drift. To explore the long-term availability of resources including data, code, and other digital research objects associated with papers, this study extracted 8,503 URLs and DOIs from a corpus of nearly 50,000 Data Availability Statements from papers published in PLOS ONE between 2014 and 2016. These URLs and DOIs were used to attempt to retrieve the data through both automated and manual means. Overall, 80% of the resources could be retrieved automatically, compared to much lower retrieval rates of 10–40% found in previous papers that relied on contacting authors to locate data. Because a URL or DOI might be valid but still not point to the resource, a subset of 350 URLs and 350 DOIs were manually tested, with 78% and 98% of resources, respectively, successfully retrieved. Having a DOI and being shared in a repository were both positively associated with availability. Although resources associated with older papers were slightly less likely to be available, this difference was not statistically significant, suggesting that URLs and DOIs may be an effective means for accessing data over time. These findings point to the value of including URLs and DOIs in Data Availability Statements to ensure access to data on a long-term basis.

Improving Research Output Tracking: An Open Letter from the Open Research Funders Group

Posted on June 18, 2022 by peter.suber's bookmarks

“Last year, driven by strong interest in these issues within our membership, the ORFG launched a working group dedicated to policy compliance and research output tracking. This group includes representatives from Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation, Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP), Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, American Heart Association, Arcadia Fund, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Health Research Alliance, John Templeton Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Templeton World Charity Foundation, and Wellcome Trust. Through regular conversations, this group has honed in on specific roadblocks in the research output tracking workflow, and identified concrete actions that could be taken by key interested parties in the ecosystem to improve these processes.

We propose some of these actions here, organized into four priority areas: …”

Produce, publish, promote, track and analyze: Altmetric and Figshare for NTROs – Digital Science

Posted on June 7, 2022 by peter.suber's bookmarks

“Join us on June 15 at 2pm AEST for a webinar with Altmetric and Figshare.

We’ll be discussing how you can effectively promote your Non-Traditional Research Outputs (NTROs) using a Figshare repository and how to generate Altmetric attention around those research outputs, ensuring you get the credit you deserve. …”

The experiment begins: Arcadia publishing 1.0 · Reimagining scientific publishing

Posted on June 1, 2022 by OATP primary

“In thinking about how to share Arcadia’s research, we wanted to keep features of traditional publishing that have been honed over centuries, but improve upon what hasn’t quite adapted to the nature of modern science and technology. We have a unique opportunity to use our own research to develop mechanisms of sharing and quality control that can be more agile and adaptable. Our initial attempt is outlined here and we will continue to iterate upon it, always keeping the advancement of knowledge as our guiding principle when making decisions on what to try next….

We are reimagining scientific publishing — sharing our work early and often, maximizing utility and reusability, and improving our science on the basis of public feedback.

This is our first draft. We have ambitious goals and we’re committed to replicable long-term solutions, but we also know that “perfection is the enemy of good.” We’re using this platform to release findings now rather than hiding them until we’ve gotten everything exactly how we want it. Readers can think of the pubs on this platform as drafts that will evolve over time, shaped by public feedback. The same goes for the platform itself! We’re treating our publishing project like an experiment — we’re not sure where we will land, but we can only learn if we try. In this pub, we’re sharing our strategy and the reasoning behind some of our key decisions, highlighting features we’re excited about and areas for improvement. …

Work: The OpenAccess object | OpenAlex documentation

Posted on April 29, 2022 by OATP primary

“…The OpenAccess object

The OpenAccess object describes access options for a given work. It’s only found as part of the Work object.

is_oa

Boolean: True if this work is Open Access (OA).

There are many ways to define OA. OpenAlex uses a broad definition: having a URL where you can read the fulltext of this work without needing to pay money or log in. You can use the alternate_host_venues and oa_status fields to narrow your results further, accommodating any definition of OA you like.

is_oa: true

oa_status

String: The Open Access (OA) status of this work. Possible values are:

gold: Published in an OA journal that is indexed by the DOAJ

green: Toll-access on the publisher landing page, but there is a free copy in an OA repository.

hybrid: Free under an open license in a toll-access journal.

bronze: Free to read on the publisher landing page, but without any identifiable license.

closed: All other articles.

oa_status: “gold”

oa_url

String: The best Open Access (OA) URL for this work.

Although there are many ways to define OA, in this context an OA URL is one where you can read the fulltext of this work without needing to pay money or log in. The “best” such URL is the one closest to the version of record.

This URL might be a direct link to a PDF, or it might be to a landing page that links to the free PDF

oa_url: “https://peerj.com/articles/4375.pdf””

5 things you may not know about DOIs or why there is more to DOIs than meets the eye

Posted on April 24, 2022 by OATP primary

“DOIs or Digital Object Identifers have become ubiquitous in our Scholarly ecosystem to the point that I find most researchers today are at least vaguely familar with the idea. You can possibly blame Sci-hub for this, but today many other tools and systems are comfortable with asking for DOIs without feeling the need to explictly explain what they are.

Similarly librarians even those not in the Scholarly Communication know of DOIs. Most of us know DOIs are meant as a unique persistant identifer for articles but having a DOI has no bearing on the quality of the article.

Still knowing of DOIs is not the same of actually having good or detailed understanding….

COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations

Posted on March 29, 2022 by peter.suber's bookmarks

“COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations, is an RDF dataset containing details of all the citations that are specified by the open references to DOI-identified works present in Crossref, as of the latest COCI update. COCI does not index Crossref references that are not open, nor Crossref open references to entities that lack DOIs. The citations available in COCI are treated as first-class data entities, with accompanying properties including the citations timespan, modelled according to the OpenCitations Data Model. For an in-depth description of COCI, see:

Ivan Heibi, Silvio Peroni, David Shotton (2019). Software review: COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations. Scientometrics, 121 (2): 1213-1228. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03217-6 …”

Data and Software for Authors | AGU

Posted on March 29, 2022 by peter.suber's bookmarks

“AGU requires that the underlying data needed to understand, evaluate, and build upon the reported research be available at the time of peer review and publication. Additionally, authors should make available software that has a significant impact on the research. This entails:

Depositing the data and software in a community accepted, trusted repository, as appropriate, and preferably with a DOI
Including an Availability Statement as a separate paragraph in the Open Research section explaining to the reader where and how to access the data and software
And including citation(s) to the deposited data and software, in the Reference Section….”

New arXiv articles are now automatically assigned DOIs | arXiv.org blog

Posted on February 19, 2022 by OATP primary

“New articles submitted to arXiv are now automatically assigned DOIs that align with their arXiv ID. This makes research articles more discoverable across search engines because associated metadata is made available to the community in a reusable format.

DOIs (digital object identifiers) are unique and unchanging, just like the original arXiv ID number already assigned to every arXiv article. However, because DOIs are used across many different platforms, they enable greater interoperability with other services….”

DOI (Digital Object Identifier) for Systematic Reviewers and other Researchers: Benefits, Confusions, and Need-to-Knows | by Farhad | Jan, 2022 | Medium

Posted on February 3, 2022 by OATP primary

“DOI enhances the accessibility, discoverability, trustability, and interoperability of digital objects and serves the openness and visibility of professionally published content. While I am not a DOI expert, I know about it because I use it a lot in my profession. I believe DOI will play a significant role in the automation of literature reviews. More than it does now.

It is the responsibility of librarians, information specialists and other information professionals to raise awareness about the benefits of DOI. …”

Citation needed? Wikipedia bibliometrics during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic | GigaScience | Oxford Academic

Posted on January 19, 2022 by peter.suber's bookmarks

Abstract: Background

With the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak, millions flocked to Wikipedia for updated information. Amid growing concerns regarding an “infodemic,” ensuring the quality of information is a crucial vector of public health. Investigating whether and how Wikipedia remained up to date and in line with science is key to formulating strategies to counter misinformation. Using citation analyses, we asked which sources informed Wikipedia’s COVID-19–related articles before and during the pandemic’s first wave (January–May 2020).

Results

We found that coronavirus-related articles referenced trusted media outlets and high-quality academic sources. Regarding academic sources, Wikipedia was found to be highly selective in terms of what science was cited. Moreover, despite a surge in COVID-19 preprints, Wikipedia had a clear preference for open-access studies published in respected journals and made little use of preprints. Building a timeline of English-language COVID-19 articles from 2001–2020 revealed a nuanced trade-off between quality and timeliness. It further showed how pre-existing articles on key topics related to the virus created a framework for integrating new knowledge. Supported by a rigid sourcing policy, this “scientific infrastructure” facilitated contextualization and regulated the influx of new information. Last, we constructed a network of DOI-Wikipedia articles, which showed the landscape of pandemic-related knowledge on Wikipedia and how academic citations create a web of shared knowledge supporting topics like COVID-19 drug development.

Conclusions

Understanding how scientific research interacts with the digital knowledge-sphere during the pandemic provides insight into how Wikipedia can facilitate access to science. It also reveals how, aided by what we term its “citizen encyclopedists,” it successfully fended off COVID-19 disinformation and how this unique model may be deployed in other contexts.

Incentivising research data sharing: a scoping review

Posted on December 22, 2021 by OATP primary

Abstract: Background: Numerous mechanisms exist to incentivise researchers to share their data. This scoping review aims to identify and summarise evidence of the efficacy of different interventions to promote open data practices and provide an overview of current research.

Methods: This scoping review is based on data identified from Web of Science and LISTA, limited from 2016 to 2021. A total of 1128 papers were screened, with 38 items being included. Items were selected if they focused on designing or evaluating an intervention or presenting an initiative to incentivise sharing. Items comprised a mixture of research papers, opinion pieces and descriptive articles.

Results: Seven major themes in the literature were identified: publisher/journal data sharing policies, metrics, software solutions, research data sharing agreements in general, open science ‘badges’, funder mandates, and initiatives.

Conclusions: A number of key messages for data sharing include: the need to build on existing cultures and practices, meeting people where they are and tailoring interventions to support them; the importance of publicising and explaining the policy/service widely; the need to have disciplinary data champions to model good practice and drive cultural change; the requirement to resource interventions properly; and the imperative to provide robust technical infrastructure and protocols, such as labelling of data sets, use of DOIs, data standards and use of data repositories.

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