Monthly Archives: August 2021

Seminar.net special issue: Digital Capitalism, Datafication, and Media Education – Critical Perspectives | Seminar.net

Posted on by
Reply

As digitization and datafication continue to extend into all areas of society, digital capitalism becomes equally ubiquitous and universal. Digital capitalism, and related phenomena such as data, surveillance or platform capitalism, operate on the basis of a comprehensive expropriation and exploitation of personal data profiles. It functionalizes life worlds and places of education to an unprecedented extent.

This special issue is responding to the following questions: What position/s can media education in research and application take to respond to these developments? Which theories, concepts and methods help to formulate adequate analytical, critical and transformative answers?

Graves in 19,000 English churchyards to be mapped online | Anglicanism | The Guardian

Posted on by
Reply

“Graves in 19,000 churchyards in England are to be digitally mapped in a seven-year project that will be a boon to people researching family history.

The Church of England is to launch a free website next year that will eventually list every grave memorial in every churchyard in the country.

 

The ancient church of St Bega on the shores of Bassenthwaite Lake in Cumbria is the first churchyard to be scanned by surveyors using sophisticated laser equipment….”

Chief Scientist gets the nod on open access | Campus Morning Mail

Posted on by
Reply

“Industry Minister Christian Porter ticked the plan last week – which is good, except that it is for 2021.

Most of the tasks are of the standard advise and participate kind, but two give Dr Foley space, if not time, to get things done

* create a government scientists group, “to leverage the government’s investment in science and identify opportunities for collaboration.” She is also tasked with increasing awareness of the scitech advice available to government “including improvement of mechanisms for its delivery.”  Perhaps this could encourage her to suggest an independent parliamentary science office, as knocked-back by the government the other week (CMM August 12).

* “Champion Open Access … including development of a roadmap, with links to research integrity.”  This is an issue the Chief Scientist is already engaged with. In March Dr Foley was “closely considering” OA as one of her priorities. “Access to information is the great enabler for innovation and for research commercialisation.  Lack of access to information is a real roadblock, and hinders our ability to compete internationally,” she said (CMM March 18).”

Standards, Inputs, and Outputs: Strategies for improving data-sharing and consortia-based epidemiologic research | American Journal of Epidemiology | Oxford Academic

Posted on by
Reply

Abstract:  Data sharing improves epidemiology research, but sharing data frustrates epidemiologic researchers. The inefficiencies of current methods and options for data-sharing are increasingly documented and easily understood by any study that has shared its data and any researcher who has received shared data. Temprosa and Moore et al. (Am J Epidemiol. XXXX;XXX(XX):XXXX–XXXX)) describe how the COnsortium of METabolomics Studies (COMETS) developed and deployed a flexible analytic platform to eliminate key pain points in large-scale metabolomics research. COMETS Analytics includes an online tool, but its cloud computing and technology are supporting, rather than the lead, actors in this script. The COMETS team identified the need to standardize diverse and inconsistent metabolomics and covariate data and models across its many participating cohort studies, and then they developed a flexible tool that gave its member studies choices about how they wanted to meet the consortium’s analytic requirements. Different specialties will have different specific research needs and will likely continue to use and develop an array of diverse analytic and technical solutions for their projects. COMETS Analytics shows how important and enabling the upstream attention to data standards and data consistency are to producing high-quality metabolomics, consortium-based, and large-scale epidemiology research.

 

The early bird gets the return: The benefits of publishing your data sooner – Lortie – 2021 – Ecology and Evolution – Wiley Online Library

Posted on by
Reply

“Now, could someone else find your data and use it? Sure. However, they are unlikely to write the same paper(s), one may or may not write about the work. Furthermore, reuse is preferable and a positive outcome. There are many solutions in place both at journals and within our scientific culture to protect and attenuate the risks and potential costs of sharing (Whitlock et al., 2016). Balance and fairness including collaboration with those that collect key components of data in addition to reasonable embargo periods still enable open science. The nuances of Ecology and Evolution and perhaps many disciplines that use a wide palette of experimental and synthesis tools likely limit the capacity for direct experimental replication from a dataset without additional details of the methods (Alston & Rick, 2021). Nonetheless, others can and will find a new use for the data. So, there is not zero risk to us of being scooped, but one does risk a lost chance for attribution and provenance for ideas (and people) embodied in the collection of those data. A critical implication is that we are often obligated by funders to publish data, and as described above, lags in peer review can be a real challenge and publication may not always be synchronous with the grant reporting cycle. Writing metadata does consume time that is unavailable for other activities such as writing the paper, but we are likely to commit the time at some point to satisfy requirements of agencies. Returns are also potentially higher in net efficiency and in recognition and reuse that benefit the researcher and team in having more to report. The main implication is that publishing sooner likely simplifies and makes your scientific life easier. It can support more efficient, rapid, and open work. So, if can consider it for some of your data some of the time, make a change and accelerate the research, recognition, and reuse process. A little bit more speed and openness will ensure that the early bird gets the return.”

 

Reshaping the Academic Self: Connecting Education & Open Science | Zenodo

Posted on by
Reply

Sicco de Knecht, Martijn van der Meer, Loek Brinkman, Manon Kluijtmans, & Frank Miedema. (2021). Reshaping the Academic Self: Connecting Education & Open Science (Version 2). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5345573

The transition towards Open Science will drastically alter our approach to academic life. It will change the ways in which we reward and recognise university employees and reshape the relationship between education and research. This should be reflected in how a new generation of academics and citizens are educated. Not only through the qualifications our students receive to become productive members of society, but also by dint of the values and attitudes we teach our pupils. The aim of university education should be preparing future graduates to share their (inter)disciplinary knowledge, engage with societal stakeholders, and shape tomorrow’s society. Now is the time to explore how.

This manifesto is a thought exercise that explores the (possible) relationships between Open Science and education. It attempts to point out the overlap, parallels, synergy, and possible conflicts between Open Science attitudes and practices, and contemporary views and practices in education. We aim to provoke a perspective on the different aspects of how Open Science relates to education and propose several concrete directions forward and possible corresponding interventions. After explaining why education from an Open Science perspective needs to be explored and strengthened, we differentiate four faces of open education: the Open Science mindset, Open Science skillset, open educational resources, and how these activities should be recognised and rewarded. We subsequently illuminate three possible paths on how to strengthen open education, ranging from content to form and system. We hope that this will spark a broader national and international conversation on the relationship between Open Science and education.

Statement on UMass Amherst’s Commitment to Open Scholarship | UMass Amherst Libraries

Posted on by
Reply

“The University of Massachusetts Amherst has demonstrated a longstanding commitment to supporting and advancing open scholarship with policy, guidelines, and investments in staffing, infrastructure, and scholarly content. In 2011 UMass Amherst signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Subsequently, the Faculty Senate endorsed an institutional Open Access Policywhich went into effect on July 1, 2016.  On behalf of the University, the Libraries implemented and manages an institutional repository, ScholarWorks, a platform for open access articles, books, conference proceedings, data, journals, podcasts, and more. Materials from the Special Collections and University Archives have been digitized and made openly available through Credo.The University and its Libraries provide financial support for open access publishing fees and open educational resource development. The Framework Principles for Provider Agreements guides a shift of the Libraries’ investments to those that are consistent with University’s and the Libraries’ mission and values to advance education and knowledge through open access and the widest possible use, reuse, analysis, discovery, curation, and preservation of scholarship. Libraries’ staff include specialists in archives, copyright, data management, open education, and scholarly communication, among many others. They are deeply engaged with campus faculty, researchers, editors, and reviewers to provide open access to research outputs and to develop open scholarship principles and practices. The University’s commitment extends further to its involvement with policy advocacy and education organizations such as Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI), Library Publishing Coalition, Open Education Network, and Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).”

Adema (2021) Versioning and Iterative Publishing | Commonplace

Posted on by
Reply

Adema, J. (2021). Versioning and Iterative Publishing. Commonplace. https://doi.org/10.21428/6ffd8432.42408f5b

Change-logs or revision histories are increasingly integrated — both in the back and frontend — into platforms that accommodate collaborative and experimental forms of online academic writing in the humanities. A well-known feature from platforms such as Wikipedia and Github or Gitlab, additionally PubPub (the platform that hosts the Commonplace and is regularly used for humanities journal and book publishing) launched its Activity Dashboard recently, which provides a filterable log of changes made to a ‘pub’ or ‘collection.’ A version history remains available for readers to explore earlier releases, while a ‘pub history feature’ allows authors or communities the ability to return to or reinstall previous pub drafts.

Several publishers and platform providers have started to experiment with and accommodate more processual forms of publishing within the humanities. Next to PubPub, The University of Minnesota Press in collaboration with CUNY’s Digital Scholarship Lab, have been doing so for example as part of the Manifold Scholarship publishing program for the production of what they call ‘iterative’ texts or publications, where material such as datasets, sound, video, and other digital content can be added to a publication-in-progress, in an ongoing-way as it develops. Foreseeing as they state ‘an emerging hybrid environment for scholarship, Manifold develops, alongside the print edition of a book, an alternate form of publication that is networked and iterative, served on an interactive, open-source platform.’

In an open access environment, there is both more opportunity for and (perhaps) interest in versioning humanities research and in showcasing revision. Yet this increased focus on accommodating versioning as part of the publishing process is not new, and in many ways, it emulates print publishing workflows. Revised, corrected, and updated editions as well as reprints have always been commonplace in a print context too. Disciplines such as textual criticism have dedicated themselves to the different versions and editions of works as part of the creation of critical editions, to engage with the textual variation of literary and academic works in a print environment.

Hacking a Top Journals List: A Collective Approach to Developing Metrics?

Posted on by
Reply

A hackathon for the Financial Times Top 50 journals list is underway for those who want to shape how metrics are developed. An interview with Andrew Jack.

The post Hacking a Top Journals List: A Collective Approach to Developing Metrics? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

A ‘no update’ update: setting the record straight – Altmetric

Posted on by
Reply

“You may have seen a blog post by Kent Anderson last week which indicated that Altmetric has changed the way we score Twitter as part of the Altmetric Attention Score. This is incorrect. We have not changed the Altmetric scoring algorithm. What we have done recently is update our documentation. Like everyone, we do this from time to time whenever we feel we can provide users with better clarity about what we do.  …”

A short history of ebooks in 20 drawings : Lebert, Marie : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Posted on by
Reply

“This virtual exhibition — with drawings by Denis Renard and texts by Marie Lebert — covers ebooks in all their aspects: free ebooks, commercial ebooks, digital libraries, online bookstores, online publishers, digital formats, reading software, smartphones, e-readers, tablets, dictionaries, encyclopedias, novel projects, and more. Here is the corresponding ebook for further information….”

Saving Alexandria with Project Gutenberg’s Dr. Greg Newby – The Poor Prole’s Almanac | Podcast on Spotify

Posted on by
Reply

“In this episode, we chat with Executive Director of Project Gutenberg, Dr. Greg Newby. We talk about the role of open access to knowledge and how copyright has played into a complicated mess that inhibits artistic development.”