“Smart alone, brilliant together” – Leiden Madtrics

“Academic publishing is on the move. Dissatisfaction with the dominant publishing paradigm has given rise to a manifold of new ideas, projects and services. The time is ripe for consolidation of the most promising developments.

Imagine academic publishing that is fast, transparent, and free. Is that a pipe dream or something within reach? We already have preprint publishing (fast), open peer review (transparent), and diamond/overlay journals (free). If we could connect these disparate initiatives, would that make our dream come true? And how could this best be done? These are questions that are currently being discussed by us and others at Leiden University….”

Boost for academic recognition and reward revolution

“Dutch academics are putting their foot on the gas in the rebellion against the uncritical use of journal impact factors to recognise and reward researchers, which was set in motion by the 2012 San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, or DORA.

From early next year, Utrecht University in the Netherlands will officially stop using the so-called ‘impact factor’ in all its hiring and promotions and judge its researchers by their commitment to open science, teamwork, public engagement and data sharing.

And despite opposition from some Dutch professors, the sweeping changes are gathering pace, with Leiden University among the Dutch institutions also pledging their support with their Academia in Motion paper….”

VOSviewer goes online! (Part 1)

Our VOSviewer software enables visualizations of bibliometric networks to be explored interactively. Nevertheless, VOSviewer visualizations often end up as static images in blog posts, research articles, policy reports, and PowerPoint presentations. In this way the visualizations lose a lot of their value, and in the end they may indeed be “just nice to look at but not useful or helpful”.

To address this problem, we have developed VOSviewer Online, a web-based version of VOSviewer released today. Using VOSviewer Online, visualizations of bibliometric networks can be explored interactively in a web browser. This makes it much easier to share interactive visualizations, and it reduces the need to show static images.

Open science means better science – Leiden University

“Leiden University has an active open science community. Open science means transparency in all phases of research by precisely documenting every step of the way and making this publicly available. ‘It’s time to be open,’ say psychologists Anna van ’t Veer and Zsuzsika Sjoerds. There is increasing awareness of the need for open science, or open scholarship as it is sometimes called, also at Leiden University….”

 

Research on Research Institute (RoRI)

“RoRI is an international consortium of research funders, academics and technologists working to champion transformative and translational research on research.

By analysing research systems and experimenting with new tools, indicators and evaluation frameworks, we aim to advance more strategic, open, diverse and inclusive research….”

Research on Research Institute Launches to Enable More Strategic, Open, Diverse, And Inclusive Research

“We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) – an international consortium of research funders, academic institutions, and technologists working to champion the latest approaches to research on research.

Co-founded by the Wellcome Trust, the universities of Sheffield and Leiden, and Digital Science, the RoRI consortium will undertake transformative and translational research on research (also known as meta-research, science of science or meta-science). By analysing research systems and experimenting with decision and evaluation data, tools and frameworks, we aim to advance more strategic, open, diverse and inclusive research….”

Open Data: The Researcher Perspective

“A year ago, in April 2016, Leiden University’s Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) and Elsevier embarked on a project to investigate open data practices at the workbench in academic research. Knowledge knows no borders, so to understand open data practices comprehensively the project has been framed from the outset as a global study. That said, both the European Union and the Dutch government have formulated the transformation of the scientific system into an open innovation system as a formal policy goal. At the time we started the project, the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science had just been published under the Dutch presidency of the Council of the European Union. However, how are policy initiatives for open science related to the day-to-day practices of researchers and scholars? With this report, we aim to contribute to bridging the gap between policy on the one hand, and daily research practices from a global perspective on the other hand. As we show, open data practices are less developed than anticipated, with the exception of fields where data practices are integrated in the research design from the very beginning. While policy has high expectations about open science and open data, the motive force comes not from the policy aims, but in changing practice at the grass roots level. This requires we confront the harsh reality that the rewards for researchers and scholars to make data available are few, and the complexity in doing so is high….”