“Visual aspects are of paramount importance for Cultural Heritage (CH) research, and 3D models are also playing an important role in CH research and management.
The science demonstrator provides researchers with a system to publish on the web, visualize and analyze images and 3D models in a common workspace, enabling sharing, interoperability and reuse….”
“HRB Open Research endorses the FAIR Data principles to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable. Aileen Sheehy, Data Policy Programme Officer at the Health Research Board, Ireland, tells us more about the Health Research Board‘s (HRB) commitment to openly sharing data, and the initiatives being set up to support this and data reuse. Avril Kennan, from the Medical Research Charities Group, Ireland, shares her views on data and its use in health and social care, given her review of an open letter published on HRB Open Research.…”
“Academics who offer their books free online reach many more readers and are cited slightly more often. Surprisingly enough, it has little effect on the sale of paper editions, positive or negative. …
Remarkably enough, offering books free online has hardly any noticeable effect on the sale of paper versions. ‘The assumption that publishing books via open access will generate a lot of free publicity, which will encourage readers to buy the books, doesn’t seem to hold water.’ But there is also little or no negative effect: an online version seems to have little or no impact on sales. That’s probably because online readers are a different public, Snijder suspects….
Offering a book free online does not automatically lead to optimum use of the work, Snijder stresses. ‘Most people rely on filter mechanisms to sort the wheat from the chaff.’ These could be library catalogues, mentions on social media, specialist websites or blogs by influential authors. ‘The use and success of open access books is mainly determined by language, subject, infrastructure and trust.’ “
Abstract: Background: Web-based resources are commonly used by medical students to supplement curricular material. Three commonly used resources are UpToDate (Wolters Kluwer Inc), digital textbooks, and Wikipedia; there are concerns, however, regarding Wikipedia’s reliability and accuracy.
Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of Wikipedia use on medical students’ short-term knowledge acquisition compared with UpToDate and a digital textbook.
Methods: This was a prospective, nonblinded, three-arm randomized trial. The study was conducted from April 2014 to December 2016. Preclerkship medical students were recruited from four Canadian medical schools. Convenience sampling was used to recruit participants through word of mouth, social media, and email. Participants must have been enrolled in their first or second year of medical school at a Canadian medical school. After recruitment, participants were randomized to one of the three Web-based resources: Wikipedia, UpToDate, or a digital textbook. During testing, participants first completed a multiple-choice questionnaire (MCQ) of 25 questions emulating a Canadian medical licensing examination. During the MCQ, participants took notes on topics to research. Then, participants researched topics and took written notes using their assigned resource. They completed the same MCQ again while referencing their notes. Participants also rated the importance and availability of five factors pertinent to Web-based resources. The primary outcome measure was knowledge acquisition as measured by posttest scores. The secondary outcome measures were participants’ perceptions of importance and availability of each resource factor.
Results: A total of 116 medical students were recruited. Analysis of variance of the MCQ scores demonstrated a significant interaction between time and group effects (P<.001, ?g2=0.03), with the Wikipedia group scoring higher on the MCQ posttest compared with the textbook group (P<.001, d=0.86). Access to hyperlinks, search functions, and open-source editing were rated significantly higher by the Wikipedia group compared with the textbook group (P<.001). Additionally, the Wikipedia group rated open access editing significantly higher than the UpToDate group; expert editing and references were rated significantly higher by the UpToDate group compared with the Wikipedia group (P<.001).
Conclusions: Medical students who used Wikipedia had superior short-term knowledge acquisition compared with those who used a digital textbook. Additionally, the Wikipedia group trended toward better posttest performance compared with the UpToDate group, though this difference was not significant. There were no significant differences between the UpToDate group and the digital textbook group. This study challenges the view that Wikipedia should be discouraged among medical students, instead suggesting a potential role in medical education.
“But at least one new study suggests that Wikipedia is superior to other medical sources in at least one key respect: short-term knowledge acquisition. That is, when it comes to finding the right answers quickly, Wikipedia seems to lead the pack. This suggests a new way of thinking about the utility of the crowdsourced encyclopedia. Wikipedia delivers value not only by offering massive amounts of information with its nearly 5.8 million English articles so far, but by providing the means for even professional users to quickly identify and retrieve the most relevant information….
The authors of the paper, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in October, devised a “three-arm randomized trial” to test the comparative effects of three resources. 116 first- or second-year medical students in Canada took a multiple-choice medical test similar to the Canadian medical licensing examination. During the test, participants took notes on topics to research. After the test, the students were provided one of three pre-selected resources: Wikipedia, a digital textbook, or UpToDate, a subscription service mostly used by doctors. After the test, participants researched topics and took written notes using their assigned resource. Then the students retook the test using their notes.
If you’re like me, then at this point you’re probably feeling bad for the poor medical students. But at least the trial yielded a meaningful result: Students in the Wikipedia group had significantly better post-test performances on the exam compared to the digital textbook group. The Wikipedia group also outperformed the UpToDate group by a small margin, an impressive result given that UpToDate costs more than $500 annually for a subscription….
It’s not only the general public that turns to Wikipedia for health content. More than 90 percent of medical students, and 50–70 percent of physicians, use the online encyclopedia as a source for health information….”
“Since 2018, all the members of the German consortium of The Electrochemical Society (ECS) led by the Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) – German National Library of Science and Technology have benefited from a special publishing option: ECS grants all institutions participating in its program an unlimited number of article processing charge (APC) credits. This allows all scientists affiliated with participating institutions to publish open access articles in ECS journals free of charge. By the end of 2018, 52 open access articles from corresponding authors affiliated with a TIB institution were published and are freely accessible. The additional costs for this supplementary benefit come in the form of a small surcharge on the license fee. The TIB is currently bearing these costs in its role as the National Library of Science and Technology. Due to the program’s flat-rate pricing and the lack of a cap on the amount of articles that may be published, the added cost of participation is very low—only a fraction of the price of the standard ECS APC ($800 for 2018; $1000 for 2019)….
The TIB will not only continue the consortium in 2019, but will also support it financially again….”
Abstract : This paper addresses the integration of a Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) service within a group of open access (OA) publishing digital platforms and considers its potential impact on both research and scholarly publishing. The software powering this service, called entity-fishing, was initially developed by Inria in the context of the EU FP7 project CENDARI and provides automatic entity recognition and disambiguation using the Wikipedia and Wikidata data sets. The application is distributed with an open-source licence, and it has been deployed as a web service in DARIAH’s infrastructure hosted by the French HumaNum. In the paper, we focus on the specific issues related to its integration on five OA platforms specialized in the publication of scholarly monographs in the social sciences and humanities (SSH), as part of the work carried out within the EU H2020 project HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure). In the first section, we give a brief overview of the current status and evolution of OA publications, considering specifically the challenges that OA monographs are encountering. In the second part, we show how the HIRMEOS project aims to face these challenges by optimizing five OA digital platforms for the publication of monographs from the SSH and ensuring their interoperability. In sections three and four we give a comprehensive description of the entity-fishing service, focusing on its concrete applications in real use cases together with some further possible ideas on how to exploit the annotations generated. We show that entity-fishing annotations can improve both research and publishing process. In the last chapter, we briefly present further possible application scenarios that could be made available through infrastructural projects.
“In order to do research and to train/educate others, scientists/teachers and need access to hardware. Scientific hardware is normally expensive and it doesn’t have to be. So we want to find out what people need in terms of equipment and build Open Source versions of them following this demand. …”
“Your participation will enable us to develop a series of online tutorials related to building affordable equipment. It will also help us identify opportunities for the creation of equipment distributed under open/permissive licenses. Under these types of licenses, the created equipment can be used, modified, copied, and improved for new use cases.
It should take less then 10 minutes to complete this questionnaire. By participating in this survey, you can opt-in to a lottery for one of two books related to science and open source hardware….”
Abstract: This document aims to agree on a broad, international strategy for the implementation of open scholarship that meets the needs of different national and regional communities but works globally.
Scholarly research can be idealised as an inspirational process for advancing our collective knowledge to the benefit of all humankind. However, current research practices often struggle with a range of tensions, in part due to the fact that this collective (or “commons”) ideal conflicts with the competitive system in which most scholars work, and in part because much of the infrastructure of the scholarly world is becoming largely digital. What is broadly termed as Open Scholarship is an attempt to realign modern research practices with this ideal. We do not propose a definition of Open Scholarship, but recognise that it is a holistic term that encompasses many disciplines, practices, and principles, sometimes also referred to as Open Science or Open Research. We choose the term Open Scholarship to be more inclusive of these other terms. When we refer to science in this document, we do so historically and use it as shorthand for more general scholarship.
The purpose of this document is to provide a concise analysis of where the global Open Scholarship movement currently stands: what the common threads and strengths are, where the greatest opportunities and challenges lie, and how we can more effectively work together as a global community to recognise and address the top strategic priorities. This document was inspired by the Foundations for OER Strategy Development and work in the FORCE11 Scholarly Commons Working Group, and developed by an open contribution working group.
Our hope is that this document will serve as a foundational resource for continuing discussions and initiatives about implementing effective strategies to help streamline the integration of Open Scholarship practices into a modern, digital research culture. Through this, we hope to extend the reach and impact of Open Scholarship into a global context, making sure that it is truly open for all. We also hope that this document will evolve as the conversations around Open Scholarship progress, and help to provide useful insight for both global co-ordination and local action. We believe this is a step forward in making Open Scholarship the norm.
Ultimately, we expect the impact of widespread adoption of Open Scholarship to be diverse. We expect novel research practices to accelerate the pace of innovation, and therefore stimulate critical industries around the world. We could also expect to see an increase in public trust of science and scholarship, as transparency becomes more normative. As such, we expect interest in Open Scholarship to increase at multiple levels, due to its inherent influence on society and global economics.
“The National Library of Luxembourg has a consortial section1 which is planning to transition its agreements to the new realities of Open Access. The past years have been spent setting up an integrated administrative structure that allows for flexible shifting of costs and devising entirely new models. We envision the transition to play on two levels: 1. Our subscriptions contain more and more Open Access content, hence the subscription costs should fall proportionally, the “Transition credit”; 2. Our consortial partners pay increasing amounts for Open Access publications, these costs should be covered by the savings of the subscription part. Goals for transition agreements: 1. Transparent and sustainable for both publishers and libraries 2. Long term commitment (3-5 years) 3. Data-driven…”
“UCL is pleased to post Robert Kiley’s response to the UCL Town Hall meeting and UCL’s Plan S consultation response as a contribution to the ongoing consultation over Plan S.
“As the cOAlition S representative at the UCL Town Hall meeting I’d like to thank UCL for their response to the Plan S guidance document and for giving me the opportunity to respond to some of the points raised.” …
I was disappointed by the UCL response to Plan S which calls for a “wholescale rethink of the strategy and timelines for moving to 100% Open Access”. …”
“At the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Summit in June 2017, I made a commitment to champion the alignment of research data management (RDM) among research funding organisations in Europe. This commitment was the origin of an initiative for that purpose, launched by Science Europe and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in January 2018. The aim of the initiative was to develop a set of core requirements for data management plans (DMPs), as well as a list of criteria for the selection of trustworthy repositories where researchers can store their data for sharing. In light of the development of the EOSC and an increasing tendency towards data sharing, these requirements and criteria should help to harmonise rules on data management throughout Europe. This will aid researchers in complying with RDM requirements even when working with different research funders and research organisations. Less than a year after its launch, I am pleased to introduce the results of this endeavour. These core requirements for DMPs and criteria for the selection of trustworthy repositories have been developed by experts from Science Europe’s Member Organisations, who have sought additional input from external stakeholders to ensure a broad consensus….”
“Article 13 relating to online content sharing services, has had wide coverage in the main stream media. An online petition targeting Article 13 has 4.5 million signatures already and, according to MEP Julia Reda, will become the largest ever online petition if it surpasses 4.9 million signatures.
The legislation is aimed at changing existing legal regimes and introducing new obligations on organisations who allow end users to upload content to their platforms. The drafting was firmly aimed at the likes of You Tube and Facebook but, as is common with copyright draft legislation, it failed to take into consideration many others who would be affected. These include platorms such as Wikipedia and GitHub through to educational organisations which host open platforms that allow upload by end users.
Working with other library and university groups such as SPARC Europe, IFLA, the European University Association and EBLIDA, we have repeatedly voiced our concerns that the provisions and core definitions also apply to platforms coming from the education and research sector such as Open Access Repositories and some Open Education Resources (OER)….”
From Google’s English: “Openly available research promotes knowledge exchange and is an important building block in democratic society. But an overly quick transition to open access in accordance with Plan S risks undermining both the quality of research and the opportunities for Swedish researchers for collaboration and impact internationally. It writes 133 social scientists and humanists at the Swedish universities in an open letter about Plan S.”