[GOAL] Linked Research

Thu Nov 28 22:34:25 GMT 2019

Thanks Scott.

This article by Capadisli et al. is very interesting. I don't see how to interact with it as others have, so will post my comments here on GOAL.

There are some apparent similarities and some important differences between these authors' perspectives on the potential of the online digital environment for scholarly communication and my own.

Similarities

The publisher as intermediary is no longer necessary, as it was for most of us from the time of the printing press to the early online environment. I do not need a publisher to disseminate my work and provide means for feedback. Setting up web services to accomplish these tasks is inexpensive and easy.

Sharing and re-using data is one means to advance our knowledge faster than we could in the past. My recent post analyzing 2010 and 2019 APC data is an illustration:

https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/11/26/2010-2019-apc-update/

If all I had access to were the peer-reviewed article, in comparing with 2019 results I would only have seen that the global average APC has changed little, and would have missed the average price increase for this particular sub-set of journals. This was made possible by Solomon & Björk's willingness to share their data.

Differences

Use the term "open knowledge" not "open science", please. Science is only one type of knowledge, and is useless without the other types. Does science need philosophy? Logic and ethics are branches of philosophy. Would we want to rely on science practiced without logic and ethics? In my opinion, no. Cutting philosophy departments and redirecting funding to science is short-sighted. Another example: to understand why science needs other forms of knowledge to be effective, consider the contrast between scientific knowledge about climate science and our seeming inability to act on this knowledge. More here: https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/38890

To evaluate research, read and think, do not rely on metrics. It is a logical fallacy to equate "impact" with "good quality", and metrics-based assessment is a perverse incentive. Consider the study falsely correlating vaccination and autism: highly cited both before and after retraction, plenty of evidence for knowledge transfer to the public - and what other researchers can claim the real-world impact of bringing back illnesses such as measles? More here:
https://ruor.uottawa.ca/handle/10393/39088

No one size fits all - I argue that it is best to start with the research and researchers, the data, rather than trying to provide a universal framework. Even in the small research circle of APC data, my team's data (pricing gathered from publisher websites, DOAJ, other researchers' data) is not the same as the OpenAPC group's data. OpenAPC involves a group that pays APCs who have decided to share their data. A group like this can easily see the logic of standardizing data for re-use and have incentive to do so. It is their data and they can license it as they please. I have no means of compelling every OA publisher to standardize their pricing data. Publishers do not necessarily have an incentive to make this kind of research easy. Standardizing pricing data is not necessarily desirable as it may eliminate creative innovations and discount possibilities.

There are some types of data, such as GIS, where standards and interoperability are highly desirable. However, there are a great many types of research data. The variables that are important (or possible) to record in one research study may not be optimal (or possible) for another one.

I see dangers as well as opportunities in re-using data. Data collection is hard work; I can see researchers being tempted to simply take data others have collected and analyzing it without fully understand the data itself. This could result in reproducible but invalid analysis (make the same mistakes, get the same invalid answers).

To return to similarities: openly sharing such ideas and openness to critique is helpful to advance our understanding of how to move towards open knowledge.

Dr. Heather Morrison

Associate Professor, School of Information Studies, University of Ottawa

Professeur Agrégé, École des Sciences de l'Information, Université d'Ottawa

Principal Investigator, Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, a SSHRC Insight Project

sustainingknowledgecommons.org

Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca

https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/706

[On research sabbatical July 1, 2019 - June 30, 2020]

________________________________
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org <goal-bounces at eprints.org> on behalf of Scott Abbott <Scott.Abbott at uts.edu.au>
Sent: Thursday, November 28, 2019 1:27:15 PM
To: goal at eprints.org <goal at eprints.org>
Subject: [GOAL] Linked Research

Attention : courriel externe | external email
Hi all

I’d like to share this work to this list in the hope of generating awareness and discussion.

I’m not an author or connected to the project in any way beyond my keen interest in open scholarship and advocacy for open/FAIR research.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190729131202/https://csarven.ca/linked-research-scholarly-communication

Kind regards

Scott

Sent from my iPhone

Scott Abbott
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Manager, Office of Scholarly Communication

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