May 24 2013

Easy steps towards open scholarship

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Posted in: Academic communication, Academic Publishing, Open Access
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MOUNCEKnowing how and where to share your research may still seem a daunting task given the variety of channels. Ross Mounce, Community Coordinator for Open Science at the Open Knowledge Foundation, presents the best ways to ensure discoverable access to research outputs. He highlights the metadata power of institutional repositories and other services like Zenodo. With a combination of preprint & postprint postings, it is easy to make your research freely available.

Recently I tried to explain on twitter in a few tweets how everyone can take easy steps towards open scholarship with their own work. It’s really not that hard and potentially very beneficial for your own career progress – open practices enable people to read & re-use your work, rather than let it gather dust unread and undiscovered in a limited access venue as is traditional. For clarity I’ve rewritten the ethos of those tweets below:

Step 1: before submitting to a journal or peer-review service upload your manuscript to a public preprint server

Step 2: after your research is accepted for publication, deposit all the outputs – full-text, data & code in subject or institutional repositories

The above is the concise form of it, but as with everything in life there is devil in the detail, and much to explain, so I will elaborate upon these steps in this post.

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Posted by: Posted on May 24, 2013 by Blog Admin   Tagged with: ,

May 23 2013

Clear articulation of scholarly contribution is essential in academic writing

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Posted in: Academic communication, Impact
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Rachael CayleyComprehensible writing relies on the strength of authorial voice, but voice remains a bewilderingly nebulous concept. Rachael Cayley recommends shifting from discussing voice to discussing contribution. The clear articulation of the contribution of one’s work to a body of research will ultimately strengthen voice. Cayley outlines modesty, inexperience, and familiarity as hurdles many academics must overcome to achieve greater clarity.

In my line of work, I hear a lot of sentences that start, ‘My supervisor says …’. And the supervisory comment that seems to elicit the most confusion involves the concept of voice: ‘I can’t hear your voice in this’ or ‘your voice is missing from the text’. In my experience, these concerns are met with a great deal of bafflement from graduate student writers. The reason for this largely baffled response is, I suspect, the way that we tend to think of voice as a feature of literary or expressive writing. Voice is usually associated with the distinctive style of a particular author: the sum total of the way that person writes. Thus, when we hear about a lack of voice, we take that to mean a certain generic quality to the prose or a lack of overall consistency in the diction, the phrasing, the pacing, etc. Given those associations, it’s no wonder that novice academic writers may be puzzled by the suggestion that they lack a voice. Since we cannot fix a problem that we don’t understand, that puzzlement unfortunately often leads to inaction or ineffectual editing.

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Posted by: Posted on May 23, 2013 by Blog Admin   Tagged with:

May 22 2013

Formal academic conferences and informal blogging play complementary roles in the academic feedback cycle

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Posted in: Academic communication
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adam-370sqAdam Crymble compares his experience presenting his research at an academic conference to his experiences of academic blogging. The formal, specialised nature of academic conferences offers the chance for invaluable targeted expert critique; however, blogging allows for a much more diverse, interdisciplinary audience, which is not to be sniffed at. Both outlets strengthen the structure of academic feedback and discourse.

Last year I delivered a couple of research papers on the history of crime. The first was in October at the Institute of Historical Research or the IHR as it’s known, here in London. The second was in January, on a beach in Belize. I thought I’d talk a little bit today about how those two experiences were different, how they were the same, and what place I think each holds in the future of scholarship.

Now before you start looking for tropical conferences on 18th century crime, I should qualify that the first paper was delivered to a room full of people. The second was posted on my blog while I was on vacation – and yes, sadly, I DID write about 18th century crime while gazing out over the Caribbean Sea. For some people speaking to a room and blogging are probably significantly different activities. But for me they aren’t all that dissimilar. Let me explain why by talking about what I got out of both experiences as well as what went into them.

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Posted by: Posted on May 22, 2013 by Blog Admin   Tagged with:

May 21 2013

Impact factors declared unfit for duty

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Posted in: Academic communication, Academic Publishing, REF 2014
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curry

Last week the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment was published. This document aims to address the research community’s problems with evaluating individual outputs, a welcome announcement for those concerned with the mis-use of journal impact factors. Stephen Curry commends the Declaration’s recommendations, but also highlights some remaining difficulties in refusing to participate in an institutional culture still beholden to the impact factor.

Regulars at this blog will be familiar with the dim view that I have of impact factors, in particular their mis-appropriation for the evaluation of individual researchers and their work. I have argued for their elimination, in part because they act as a brake on the roll-out of open access publishing but mostly because of the corrosive effect they have on science and scientists.

I came across a particularly dispiriting example of this recently when I was asked by a well-known university in North America to help assess the promotion application of one of their junior faculty. This was someone whose work I knew — and thought well of — so I was happy to agree. However, when the paperwork arrived I was disappointed to read the following statement the description of their evaluation procedures:

“Some faculty prefer to publish less frequently and publish in higher impact journals. For this reason, the Adjudicating Committee will consider the quality of the journals in which the Candidate has published and give greater weight to papers published in first rate journals.”

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Posted by: Posted on May 21, 2013 by Blog Admin   Tagged with:

May 20 2013

Investing in higher education, including the social sciences, would promote growth in Britain

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Posted in: Government, Impact, Research funding
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paulwhitelyPaul Whiteley points out that there is no evidence that supports the argument that STEM subjects provide an additional boost to growth on top of investments in universities in general. Despite higher than average enrolment in sciences, for instance, Britain has lower average rates of growth. More strikingly, Britain under-invests in higher education relative to other countries. Since it plays a key role in stimulating growth, this is a very unwise policy in the long run.

This article was originally published on LSE’s British Politics and Policy blog.

The chart below shows student enrolments in higher education in three subject areas in the OECD or advanced industrial countries in 2010, with Britain and the United States identified separately. The data refer to the percentage of students enrolled in higher education who study science, engineering and also social science, business and law. The latter category is rather broad but the UNESCO data does not allow a finer distinction to be made between these subjects. The data are very relevant to the debate about the importance of science and technology as opposed to the arts, humanities and social science in stimulating investment and growth in Britain.

Whiteley fig 1

Source: UNESCO.

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Posted by: Posted on May 20, 2013 by Blog Admin   Tagged with: ,

May 19 2013

5 minutes with Kathryn King from The Policy Press: “Digital publishing gives us the opportunity to offer content in ways impossible in print”

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Posted in: Academic Publishing, Book Reviews
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Policy Press BW - 08To mark their first birthday, the LSE Review of Books held an awards ceremony on 16 May 2013 to recognise the hard work of contributors and to thank all parties involved in helping to support the initiative. Kathryn King, Marketing Manager at The Policy Press, continues the series of blog posts from academic publishers, covering more details about the award Policy Press is sponsoring and how integral the study of Sociology is to their publishing history.

This was first posted on LSE Review of Books.

Which books first inspired your own interest in books and the world of publishing?

I had wanted to work with books in publishing since I was young. A voracious reader as a teenager, I adored books like The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth. Nowadays I feel lucky in my current role at The Policy Press to combine my love of books and publishing with its not-for-profit status and ‘making a difference’ social mission. It is immensely satisfying to know that, in a small way, we contribute to improving people’s lives through our publications.

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Posted by: Posted on May 19, 2013 by Blog Admin  

May 17 2013

Academia.edu releases embedded data-sets and code

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Posted in: Academic communication, Social Media
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richard.priceImproved research sharing practices will undoubtedly help to boost the visibility of research. Richard Price, CEO of Academia.edu, explains how their social media platform is looking to incentivise data sharing by providing an outlet for researchers to share their data and code in a way that also enhances their reputations. 

Last week, Academia.edu announced that users can embed data-sets and code onto their Academia.edu profile pages. Data-sets and code can be attached to papers, or can be uploaded in a stand-alone way. Historically researchers have only shared their ideas in the form of academic papers. The DNA of academic journals came from the era of print, and it never made sense to share data and code in print form. Currently 75% of the world’s scientific data is not shared. It hasn’t been there because the distribution platforms haven’t been there, and there haven’t been the right reputation metrics to incentivize researchers to share their data.

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Posted by: Posted on May 17, 2013 by Blog Admin   Tagged with:

May 16 2013

Elite journals are losing their position of privilege

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Posted in: Academic Publishing
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George

Having first documented the large-scale demise of the impact factor as a predictor of quality research, George Lozano and team examined whether this pattern also applies to the handful of elite journals. His recent study finds the proportion of top papers published by elite journals has in fact been in steady decline since the late-eighties. Journal hierarchies are breaking down and researchers will benefit from the many publishing venues now available to reach wider audiences.

The digital age has brought forth many changes to scholarly publishing. For instance, we now read papers, not journals. We used to read papers physically bound with other papers in an issue within a journal, but now we just read papers, downloaded individually, and independently of the journal. In addition, journals have become easier to produce. A physical medium is no longer necessary, so the production, transportation, dissemination and availability of papers have drastically increased. The former weakened the connection between papers and their respective journals; papers now are more likely to stand on their own. The latter allowed the creation of a vast number of new journals that, in principle, could easily compete at par with long-established journals.

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Posted by: Posted on May 16, 2013 by Blog Admin   Tagged with:

May 15 2013

True innovation in Higher Ed will emerge from faculty-driven, open-source projects, not start-up commercialisation

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Posted in: Academic communication, Higher Education
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leslieLeslie Madsen-Brooks is skeptical about the kind of disruption start-ups and tech folks promise. She highlights ways university faculty and staff are already driving thoughtful technological innovation through engaging in open source, open learning projects. Projects which focus on the individual and collective empowerment of students and communities, rather than commercialization will ensure lasting, productive disruption.

I’ve heard that higher ed needs to be “disrupted” because it’s not cost efficient, it treats students as learners rather than customers, it’s risk-averse and unproductive, it values research over teaching, it doesn’t offer enough flexibility to adult learners, it’s too focused on prestige and credit hours instead of broad-based student competencies, it’s done a lousy job of using technology to expand affordable access to degrees, faculty spend too much classroom time lecturing and faculty act as if we should be exempt from the sweeping technological change that has upended the newspaper and music industries.

I’m not opposed to disruption; rather, I’m skeptical about the kind of disruption start-ups and tech folks promise: “paradigm-shifting” technology that improves university teaching and learning. The truth is, many of these start-ups clearly have no idea what actually works in higher ed and know little about the direction university teaching and learning have moved in the last 10 years, because they’re trying to take us backward, not forward. Start-up and commercial tech are certainly proving disruptive—just in all the wrong ways.

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Posted by: Posted on May 15, 2013 by Blog Admin   Tagged with:

May 14 2013

The apparatus of research assessment is driven by the academic publishing industry and has become entirely self-serving

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Posted in: REF 2014
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petercoles

Peer review may be favoured as the best measure of scientific assessment ahead of the REF, but can it be properly implemented? Peter Coles does the maths on what the Physics panel face and finds there simply won’t be enough time to do what the REF administrators claim. Rather, closed-access bibliometrics will have to be substituted at the expense of legitimate assessment of outputs. 

What I want to do first of all is to draw attention to a very nice blog post by a certain Professor Moriarty who, in case you did not realise it, dragged himself away from his hiding place beneath the Reichenbach Falls and started a new life as Professor of Physics at Nottingham University.  Phil Moriarty’s piece basically argues that the only way to really judge the quality of a scientific publication is not by looking at where it is published, but by peer review (i.e. by getting knowledgeable people to read it). This isn’t a controversial point of view, but it does run counter to the current mania for dubious bibliometric indicators, such as journal impact factors and citation counts.

The forthcoming Research Excellence Framework involves an assessment of the research that has been carried out in UK universities over the past five years or so, and a major part of the REF will be the assessment of up to four “outputs” submitted by research-active members of staff over the relevant period (from 2008 to 2013). Reading Phil’s piece might persuade you to be happy that the assessment of the research outputs involved in the REF will be primarily based on peer review. If you are then I suggest you read on because, as I have blogged about before, although peer review is fine in principle, the way that it will be implemented as part of the REF has me deeply worried.

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Posted by: Posted on May 14, 2013 by Blog Admin