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Sierra Williams

August 9th, 2014

Impact Round-Up 9th August: Research recommendations, open data outcomes, and keeping open access simple.

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Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Sierra Williams

August 9th, 2014

Impact Round-Up 9th August: Research recommendations, open data outcomes, and keeping open access simple.

0 comments

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Managing Editor Sierra Williams presents a round-up of popular stories from around the web on higher education, academic impact, and trends in scholarly communication.

Jennifer Lin at PLOS announced an exciting new recommendations feature to be implemented across the PLOS journals in Diving into the haystack to make more hay? at the PLOS Tech Blog. Linking up with figshare, the Related Content tab on PLOS research articles will now pull in associated content (ie articles, datasets, figures, presentations, etc.) retrieved from the entire figshare corpus:

Today, we continue to build on the figshare offering with the launch of research recommendations, a service which delivers relevant outputs associated with PLOS articles and beyond. This begins to fill a critical need for tools that address the full breadth of research content. Rather than being limited by the article as a container, we can now present a far broader universe of scholarly objects: figures, datasets, media, code, software, filesets, scripts, etc. [read more]

Source: Franzen JL, Gingerich PD, Habersetzer J, Hurum JH, von Koenigswald W, et al. (2009) Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology. PLoS ONE 4(5): e5723. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005723

As governments, businesses and civil society look to invest in the benefits of open data, it may not be surprising that the economic outcomes for supporting such initiatives tend to dominate the discourse. But a recent event hosted by the Center for Data Innovation in Washington, DC looked to challenge this by emphasising the social impact of open data and the emerging issues therein.  Alex Howard at TechRepublic covered the discussion which provided great insight into the opportunities of open data to play a role in a wide variety of social processes but will require a more proactive approach taken by government bodies such as the United States’ Federal Trade Commission:

The return on investment for open government goes beyond making government institutions and services more transparent, and the people that run them more accountable for the use of taxpayer dollars: In systems of governance that are of the people, for the people, and by the people, open government provides access to information about how those people are being governed and new opportunities to participate in that governance. That means that focusing on publishing open data with economic value shouldn’t preclude or take too much focus away from digitizing and releasing data with other societal value. [read more]

 

Professors Michelle N. Meyer and Christopher Chabris provide an overview of the ongoing controversy over replication currently taking psychology disciplines by storm. They argue that the controversy will have far greater implications across and beyond academia for how scientific truth is understood in Why Psychologists’ Food Fight Matters at Slate:

To publish a scientific result is to make a claim about reality. Reality doesn’t belong to researchers, much less to any single researcher, and claims about it need to be verified. Critiques or attempts to replicate scientific claims should always be—and usually are—about reality, not about the researchers who made the claim. In science, as in The Godfather: It’s not personal, it’s business. [read more]

Finally, in light of  the the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers’ (STM) decision to release their own version of open access licences, Robert Kiley and Chris Bird at the Wellcome Trust argue against the approach in their post Keeping open access simple:

The great thing about CC-BY is freedom to re-use, and interoperability with other platforms and technologies. Anyone can re-use CC-BY content without getting permission: all they need to do is give credit to the author. Under CC-BY, anyone can take an article and translate it to a different language, use text and graphics such as figures and tables in their own presentations or blogs, and use the power of computers to create links and generate new knowledge. Anyone can post CC-BY content to any web site, including commercial ones, allowing much wider reach. For example, if new research was published which described new approaches to reduce cot death, this could be re-published without permission on Mumsnet and BabyCentre (both highly commercial sites) in order to reach more parents who may not generally search journal web sites or repositories like Europe PMC. [read more]

Featured image credit: One element of the dual matrix of OEIS A223538 written in binary by mate2code (Wikimedia, Public Domain)
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Sierra Williams

Posted In: Academic communication | Academic publishing | Government | Open Access

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