“What we will aim to deliver as a result of the booksprint is a report about the role of open metadata in the SSH scholarly communication. Our idea is to focus on 4 areas – abstracts, citations, keywords and persistent identifiers – and to do so we have invited both the experts in each field and the specialists from the TRIPLE consortium working on the development of the GOTRIPLE platform. …”
Abstract: This paper investigates different uses of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in national journal rankings and discusses the merits of supplementing metrics with expert assessment. Our focus is national journal rankings used as evidence to support decisions about the distribution of institutional funding or career advancement. The seven countries under comparison are China, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Poland, and Turkey—and the region of Flanders in Belgium. With the exception of Italy, top-tier journals used in national rankings include those classified at the highest level, or according to tier, or points implemented. A total of 3,565 (75.8%) out of 4,701 unique top-tier journals were identified as having a JIF, with 55.7% belonging to the first Journal Impact Factor quartile. Journal rankings in China, Flanders, Poland, and Turkey classify journals with a JIF as being top-tier, but only when they are in the first quartile of the Average Journal Impact Factor Percentile. Journal rankings that result from expert assessment in Denmark, Finland, and Norway regularly classify journals as top-tier outside the first quartile, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. We conclude that experts, when tasked with metric-informed journal rankings, take into account quality dimensions that are not covered by JIFs.
Abstract: Background
The European Parliament’s directive on open data indicates the direction to follow for all public institutions in Europe. The portal Polish Platform of Medical Research (PPM) required more information about researcher attitudes and training requirements for strategic planning.
Objectives
The aim was to assess (1) the status of knowledge about research data management among medical researchers in Poland, and (2) their attitudes towards data sharing. This knowledge may help to inform a training program and adapt PPM to the requirements of researchers.
Methods
The authors circulated an online survey and received responses from 603 researchers representing medical sciences and related disciplines. The survey was conducted in 2019 at seven Polish medical universities and at the Nofer Institute of Occupational Medicine. Analysis used descriptive statistics.
Results
Data sharing was not widespread (55.7% only shared with their research team, 9.8% had shared data on an open access basis). Many cited possible benefits of research data sharing but were concerned about drawbacks (e.g. fraud, plagiarism).
Discussion
Polish medical scientists, like many researchers, are not aware of the processes required for safe data preparation for sharing. Academic libraries should develop roles for data librarians to help train researchers.
Conclusion
Fears about the dangers of data sharing need to be overcome before researchers are willing to share their own research data.
The PhD Students’ Council of the University of Warsaw kindly invites to participate in the Doctoral Festival of Open Science (DFON). The aim of the Festival is to disseminate scientific studies of young researchers from the fields of humanities, social sciences, exact and natural sciences and interdisciplinary fields. During the event the speakers (who are currently pursuing their doctorates) will present selected topic in an interesting and accessible way during short presentations. The speeches are addressed to everyone who is interested in broadening their scientific horizon in the field of humanities, social sciences, exact and natural sciences and interdisciplinary fields, as well as to the university communities of the 4EU+ alliance, i.e. the European Union: University of Warsaw (Poland), Charles University (Czech Republic), Heidelberg University (Germany), Sorbonne University (France), University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and University of Milan (Italy). The event will be held in Polish and in English. The festival will be mainly held online (on the ZOOM platform) from 16th to 18th of September, 2021. The day of the conference is planned in a hybrid mode (if the epidemic situation allows it).
Ramune Petuchovaite, EIFL Public Library Innovation Programme Manager, will participate in the 16th annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) – a global forum that brings together stakeholders from government, industry and civil society to discuss public policy issues relating to the internet governance.
“There are several layers that need to be unpacked. The scholarly communication landscape in the SSH is very diverse, which is not in itself a bad thing, but more communication and coordination between different institutions and stakeholders is needed. Moreover, the open science policies vary across Europe and there’s no consensus among researchers on how important and prestigious open access is. Similarly, digital innovations are adopted to a varying extent by different disciplines and individual scholars, with some curious and eager to experiment with different forms and others sticking to safer, more traditional solutions (interestingly, it often has nothing to do with the career stage!).
The evaluation criteria have not caught up with the digital transformation and so many authors end up publishing via more traditional outputs even though they would rather experiment with the former as they know that they need to have the established publications – for example articles in prestigious journals – on their academic resume.
There is another issue linked to evaluation: often publications in English are recognised as more valuable by funders or institutions which is not the best situation, especially in the case of domestic authors addressing important local issues in their native language.
There are several layers to a successful research infrastructure in the SSH. Firstly -and this really is key -it needs to be inclusive, so open to different stakeholders representing diverse perspectives.
Secondly, the infrastructure has to be dedicated to the specific traits of SSH: for example, research outputs often tend to be more traditional than in the case of hard sciences (‘the monograph is the king,’ claimed one of our interviewees in the OPERAS-P project) and there is often less funding for opening up research. Multilingualism is also an important aspect of the SSH as it is crucial that a topic that is important to smaller, local communities can be presented to them in a way that they can understand.
Thirdly, it needs to be researcher-driven, thus reflecting the actual needs of the scholars and be developed with the collaborators from various academic circles….”
“When historians seek to research what Dutch citizens did during Nazi Germany’s occupation of the Netherlands, they have access to a stack of files that’s taller than the National Mall in Washington, DC.
Twenty years ago, those files of the “Central Archive of Special Jurisdiction” were deposited at the Dutch National Archives in The Hague. Suddenly, 300,000 case files on Dutch citizens suspected of having collaborated with Nazis were made available to everyone….
The climate in the Netherlands differs sharply from an allegedly “research-muzzling” atmosphere in Poland. On February 9, a district court ordered prominent Holocaust historians Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking to apologize to a woman who claimed the scholars slandered her deceased uncle….
In Poland, research into the Holocaust has become a lightning rod since the Law and Justice party was elected in 2015. Simultaneously, the digitization of the Netherlands’ “special jurisdiction” archive has helped researchers piece together a diverse mosaic of Dutch citizens’ wartime behavior….
Poland has its own version of the “Central Archive of Special Jurisdiction.” In 1989, files from the communist-era security services became available to the public, including those related to Nazi collaborators….
According to Grabowski, Poland’s “History Laws” are intended to “defend the good name of the Polish nation.” Any claims that Poland bore responsibility for the Holocaust are now criminalized, despite the historian’s documentation that 200,000 Jews were murdered by their Polish neighbors….”
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What are the main challenges for Open Science implementation in your country?
The biggest challenges in Poland are, first of all, the lack of awareness and lack of knowledge about Open Science among researchers. Despite the fact that there are many initiatives, events and courses, either available for free on the internet or as services and resources provided by university libraries, scientists in Poland do not always know what Open Science and related concepts are about. Another problem concerns the lack of systemic support in this regard at the university level or national level policies e.g. during research assessment. If these policies will not include incentives for researchers to practice OS, it will be very difficult to develop this habit and permanently introduce it into the researchers’ daily work. In addition, practicing OS requires specific skills, as well as some kind of administrative work, which, given the current heavy workload of researchers, may become another unwanted duty if universities do not provide support in this area. The discussion on this topic in Poland is still difficult – Open Science has many opponents and, sadly, it often applies to scientists themselves who do not distinguish OS practices from practices of predatory publishing houses….”
Abstract: Purpose
This paper aims to answer the question of how the Polish representatives of social communication and media sciences communicate the most recent scientific findings in the media space, i.e. what types of publications are shared, what activities do they exemplify (sharing information about their own publications, leading discussions, formulating opinions), what is the form of the scientific communication created by them (publication of reference lists’ descriptions, full papers, preprints and post prints) and what is the audience reception (number of downloads, displays, comments).
Design/methodology/approach
The authors present the results of analysis conducted on the presence of the most recent (2017–2019) publications by the Polish representatives of the widely understood social communication and media sciences in three selected social networking services for scientists: ResearchGate, Google Scholar and Academia.edu. The analyses covered 100 selected representatives of the scientific environment (selected in interval sampling), assigned, according to the OECD classification “Field of Science”, in the “Ludzie nauki” (Men of Science) database to the “media and communication” discipline.
Findings
The conducted analyses prove a low usage level of the potential of three analysed services for scientists by the Polish representatives of social communication and media sciences. Although 60% of them feature profiles in at least one of the services, the rest are not present there at all. From the total of 113 identified scientists’ profiles, as little as 65 feature publications from 2017 to 2019. Small number of alternative metrics established in them, implies, in turn, that if these metrics were to play an important role in evaluation of the value and influence of scientific publications, then this evaluation for the researched Polish representatives of social communication and media sciences would be unfavourable.
Originality/value
The small presence of the Polish representatives of the communication and media sciences in three analysed services shows that these services may be – for the time being – only support the processes of managing own scientific output. Maybe this quite a pessimistic image of scientists’ activities in the analysed services is conditioned by a simple lack of the need to be present in electronic channels of scientific communication or the lack of trust to the analysed services, which, in turn, should be linked to their shortcomings and flaws. However, unequivocal confirmation of these hypotheses might be brought by explorations covering a larger group of scientists, and complemented with survey studies. Thus, this research may constitute merely a starting point for further explorations, including elaboration of good practices with respect to usage of social media by scientists.
“As part of the projects conducted for the COPIM Work Package 2 (Revenue Infrastructures and Management Platform) and OPERAS-P Work Package 6 (Innovation), we are continuing a series of European-based workshops, aiming at gaining a better understanding of the national-specific issues surrounding collective funding for OA books from a library perspective. The second online workshop took place on August 13th. This time we took a peek beyond the usual Western-centric horizon and travelled (even if only virtually) east, beyond the German border….”
“The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) is pleased to announce that it has signed a transformative “read and publish” agreement with the Polish Academic Consortium. The agreement, which lasts through 2022, will benefit 51 institutions across Poland and will enable hundreds of articles to be made open access each year.
Under the terms of this agreement, researchers at universities across Poland will be able to publish under the most liberal of open access licenses, CC-BY. They will also benefit from a highly streamlined process aligning their journal article to the article publication charges covered by this agreement. Researchers at participating institutions will also have access to the over 65 premier journals published by ACS….”
“The Publications Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) is pleased to announce that it has signed a transformative “read and publish” agreement with the Polish Academic Consortium. The agreement, which lasts through 2022, will benefit 51 institutions across Poland and will enable hundreds of articles to be made open access each year.
Under the terms of this agreement, researchers at universities across Poland will be able to publish under the most liberal of open access licenses, CC-BY. They will also benefit from a highly streamlined process aligning their journal article to the article publication charges covered by this agreement. Researchers at participating institutions will also have access to the over 65 premier journals published by ACS….”
“Abstract
Objectives To establish the rates of publication and reporting of results for interventional clinical trials across Polish academic medical centres (AMCs) completed between 2009 and 2013. We aim also to compare the publication and reporting success between adult and paediatric trials.
Design Cross-sectional study.
Setting AMCs in Poland.
Participants AMCs with interventional trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov.
Main outcome measure Results reporting on ClinicalTrials.gov and publishing via journal publication.
Results We identified 305 interventional clinical trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, completed between 2009 and 2013 and affiliated with at least one AMC. Overall, 243 of the 305 trials (79.7%) had been published as articles or posted their summary results on ClinicalTrials.gov. Results were posted within a year of study completion and/or published within 2 years of study completion for 131 trials (43.0%). Dissemination by both posting and publishing results in a timely manner was achieved by four trials (1.3%).
Conclusions Our cross-sectional analysis revealed that Polish AMCs fail to meet the expectation for timely disseminating the findings of all interventional clinical trials. Delayed dissemination and non-dissemination of trial results negatively affects decisions in healthcare….”
“Last summer, dozens of academic institutions in Sweden let their Elsevier subscriptions lapse, forgoing permission to read new content in the scholarly publisher’s journals. Like other groups in Europe and the US, they were pushing for increased open access and contained costs—and had reached a deadlock in negotiations with the publisher. On Friday (November 22), the two sides announced that they had finally come to an agreement, establishing a so-called transformative deal that includes access to paywalled articles and open-accessing publishing into one fee….”
[Quoting] Wilhelm Widmark, the library director at Stockholm University and a member of the steering committee for the Bibsam consortium, which negotiates on behalf of more than 80 Swedish institutions. “I think Elsevier has become more flexible during the last couple of months.”
Just a day before the Swedish deal was made public, Elsevier and Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania announced a similar deal. These are the latest of several agreements Elsevier has forged to pilot open-access elements since the beginning of 2019. Earlier this year, for example, Hungary and Norway—both countries that had cancelled their subscriptions with the publisher after stagnant negotiations—also announced new contracts with the publisher….
As Elsevier is successfully forging deals on both sides of the Atlantic, there are still two major academic groups missing from these announcements: the University of California (UC) system, which includes 10 campuses, and Project DEAL, which represents around 700 academic institutions in Germany….”
“How do early career researchers (ECRs) use Sci-Hub and why? In this post David Nicholas assesses early career researcher attitudes towards the journal pirating site, finding a strong preference for Sci-Hub amongst French ECRs. He raises the question, will Sci-Hub prove the ultimate disruptor and bring down the existing status quo in scholarly communications?…”