Posted: June 18th, 2013 | Author: Sven | Filed under: EDaWaX | Tags: data archvies, Data Policies, Report | No Comments »
Last year our project won the LIBER-Award for Library Innovation 2012. Now our paper was published in LIBER-Quarterly, the peer-reviewed journal of the Association of European Research Libaries.
In this paper we summarize the findings of an empirical study conducted by the EDaWaX-Project. 141 economics journals were examined regarding the quality and extent of data availability policies that should support replications of published empirical results in economics. This paper suggests criteria for such policies that aim to facilitate replications. These criteria were also used for analysing the data availability policies we found in our sample and to identify best practices for data policies of scholarly journals in economics. In addition, we also evaluated the journals’ data archives and checked the percentage of articles associated with research data. To conclude, an appraisal as to how scientific libraries might support the linkage of publications to underlying research data in cooperation with researchers, editors, publishers and data centres is presented.
I’m very happy that this article is online now and want to thank the team of LIBER Quarterly for their support.
Of course this article mainly reflects an early part of our research only, but other publications will follow in late summer and automn this year.
The article “Data Management in Scholarly Journals and Possible Roles for Libraries — Some Insights from EDaWaX” is available in html- and in pdf-format.
Picture: Jorma Bork_pixelio.de
Posted: May 13th, 2013 | Author: Sven | Filed under: Uncategorized | Comments Off
I
n February, the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics initiated a meeting of experts from across Europe as well as representatives of the European Commission and ERCEA (Executive Agency of the ERC) at the Brussels office of the Leibniz Association in order to formulate recommendations for a policy regarding the open access publication of research data. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: April 30th, 2013 | Author: Sven | Filed under: found on the net | Tags: nature, Replication, reproducibility | Comments Off
nature has published a new special issue on challenges in irreproducible research. The journal addresses the challenges and barriers of reproducibel research:
No research paper can ever be considered to be the final word, and the replication and corroboration of research results is key to the scientific process. In studying complex entities, especially animals and human beings, the complexity of the system and of the techniques can all too easily lead to results that seem robust in the lab, and valid to editors and referees of journals, but which do not stand the test of further studies. Nature has published a series of articles about the worrying extent to which research results have been found wanting in this respect. The editors of Nature and the Nature life sciences research journals have also taken substantive steps to put our own houses in order, in improving the transparency and robustness of what we publish. Journals, research laboratories and institutions and funders all have an interest in tackling issues of irreproducibility. We hope that the articles contained in this collection will help.
All articles within this issue are available free of charge. The table of contents is available here.
Graphic: pasukaru76, www.flickr.com
Posted: April 18th, 2013 | Author: Sven | Filed under: found on the net | Tags: Data Sharing, economics, Linking Data and Publications | 1 Comment »
Yesterday several blogs, journals and news agencies spread the news: The US star economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart are in trouble, because a paper of them -which had and has a considerable influence on worldwide economic policy- contains at least one serious error.
Their paper “Growth in a Time of Debt” was published in the flagship of economic research – the American Economic Review (AER) with also has a data availability policy that was evaluated in the course of our research project.
Important political assumptions and decisions were based on the research of Rogoff and Reinhart: Olli Rehm, European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro and vice president of the European Commission and also the US-Republican Paul Ryan argued with the findings of Rogoff and Reinhart to justify austerity economics. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: April 16th, 2013 | Author: Sven | Filed under: Report, Workshop | Tags: Knowledge Exchange, Report, Research Data | 1 Comment »
Last week I’ve been in Berlin and took part in the workshop “Making Data Count: Research data availability and research assessment” hosted by Knowledge Exchange (KE), a 2005 established cooperation between five research funders.
The aim of the workshop was to bring experts and stakeholders from research institutions, universities, scholarly societies and funding agencies together in order to review, discuss and build on possibilities to implement the culture of sharing and to integrate publication of data into research assessment procedures. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: April 2nd, 2013 | Author: Sven | Filed under: Data Policy, Projects | Comments Off
The JoRD-project (Journal Research Data Policies ) recently has published some final results. As mentioned in one of my previous blog posts, the JoRD-project -which was funded by JISC as part of its Digital Infrastructure Programme- aims to conduct a feasibility study into the scope and shape of a sustainable service that will collate and summarise journal data policies. The purpose of the service would be to provide a ready reference source of easily accessible, standardised, accurate and clear guidance and information, on the journal policy landscape relating to research data. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: March 28th, 2013 | Author: Sven | Filed under: found on the net | Tags: academic publishing, open access | Comments Off
Today I read an incredible story- published by Declan Butler in the very informative nature special issue on “the future of publishing.”
Most of us know about the massive profit margins scholarly publishers earn every year. According to Björn Brembs the corporate scholarly publishing industry with roughly four billion US$ in profit every year, is a lucrative business. For example Reed Elsevier just published his “Annual Reports and Financial Statements” for 2012 – despite the Elsevier-Boycott in 2012 the company achieved revenues of £ 6.116 billion in 2012.
But as Butler reports in nature (“Sham journals scam authors“) also cybercriminals have understood that they can earn a lot of money with faking existing journals. But what has happened? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: March 4th, 2013 | Author: Sven | Filed under: Data Sharing, EDaWaX | Tags: incentives, research paper | 4 Comments »
In the context of our research project EDaWaX a new research paper has been published by Patrick Andreoli-Versbach (International Max Planck Research School for Competition and Innovation (IMPRS-CI), LMU Munich, Munich Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research (MCIER)) and Frank Mueller-Langer (Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law, IMPRS-CI, MCIER).
The paper analyzes the data sharing behavior of 488 randomly chosen empirical economists. More specifically, the researchers under study were chosen uniformly across the top 100 economics departments and the top 50 business schools and randomly within the respective institution. Economics departments were chosen using the Shanghai Ranking 2011 in Economics and Business and business schools were chosen using the Financial Times Global MBA Ranking 2011.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: February 25th, 2013 | Author: Sven | Filed under: Data Sharing, Research Data | Tags: academic publishing, access to data, Guidelines, open access, Open Data | 1 Comment »
John Paul Holdren, a chief advisor of US-President Obama on science and technology issues, has issued a memorandum that directs those agencies with more than $100 million in research and development expeditures…
“…to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication.”
According to Holdren the directive is well-balanced:
“We wanted to strike the balance between the extraordinary public benefit of increasing public access to the results of federally-funded scientific research and the need to ensure that the valuable contributions that the scientific publishing industry provides are not lost.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: February 11th, 2013 | Author: Sven | Filed under: journals, Report | Tags: academic publishing, Citation, recommendations, supplements | Comments Off
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the National Federation for Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) have published a new Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials (NISO RP-15-2013).
Supplemental materials are increasingly being added to journal articles, but until now there has been no recognized set of practices to guide in the selection, delivery, discovery, and preservation of these materials.
To address this gap, NISO and NFAIS jointly sponsored an initiative to establish best practices that would provide guidance to publishers and authors for management of supplemental materials and would address related problems for librarians, abstracting and indexing services, and repository administrators.
The Supplemental Materials project involved two teams working in tandem: one to address business practices and one to focus on technical issues. This new publication is the combined outcome of the two groups’ work.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: January 31st, 2013 | Author: Sven | Filed under: found on the net, Research Data | Tags: metadata, standards, tools | Comments Off
All people dealing with research data management quickly learn that good metadata is key for research data access and re-use.
Now Elizabeth Bedford from DCC, the Digital Curation Centre in UK, collected a lot of information about disciplinary metadata standards, including profiles, tools to implement the standards and use cases of data repositories currently implementing them.
The ressource can be searches by discipline (biology, earth science, physical science, social sciences and humanities and general research data) or by resource type (metadata standards, profiles and extensions, use cases, tools).
Everyone dealing with RDM should have a look at that page – I think it is a very good ressource and provides a valueable overview of disciplinary metadata standards.
Picture: cea. / flickr.com
Posted: January 25th, 2013 | Author: Sven | Filed under: EDaWaX, Research Data | Tags: data centres, hosting | Comments Off
In October and November 2012 our project started an online-survey among national and international research data centres, archives, library networks and libraries. The aim of our survey was to evaluate the opportunities to store and host a publication-related research data archive in the above mentioned organisations.
In our opinion in particular research data centres, but also archives and libraries are very well qualified to take care of these data.
In our survey we checked the general possiblity to host and store different types of research data.
Now we completed our analyses. The results we obtained are listed below.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: December 10th, 2012 | Author: Sven | Filed under: Data Policy, EDaWaX | Tags: academic publishing, Data Policies, Data Sharing, Linking Data and Publications | Comments Off
This article is cross-posted from the blog of the Open Economics Working Group
Background
In Economics, as in many other research disciplines, there is a continuous increase in the number of papers where authors have collected their own research data or used external datasets. However, so far there have been few effective means of replicating the results of economic research within the framework of the corresponding article, of verifying them and making them available for repurposing or using in the support of the scholarly debate.
In the light of these findings B.D. McCullough pointed out: “Results published in economic journals are accepted at face value and rarely subjected to the independent verification that is the cornerstone of the scientific method. Most results published in economics journals cannot be subjected to verification, even in principle, because authors typically are not required to make their data and code available for verification.” (McCullough/McGeary/Harrison: “Lessons from the JMCB Archive”, 2006)
Harvard Professor Gary King also asked: “[I]f the empirical basis for an article or book cannot be reproduced, of what use to the discipline are its conclusions? What purpose does an article like this serve?” (King: “Replication, Replication” 1995). Therefore, the management of research data should be considered an important aspect of the economic profession.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: November 29th, 2012 | Author: Sven | Filed under: Conference, EDaWaX, Workshop | Tags: presentation | Comments Off
The end of the year is coming nearer – for our project it will be an interesting year-end closing, because we’ll be on site at two very interesting meetings:
First at December 11 – 12, we’ll be in Washington D.C., USA, where we’re presenting some results of our research project in a session of the German Research Foundation (DFG) at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Fall 2012 Membership Meeting.
A few days later we’ll present our project at the First Open Economics International Workshop in Cambridge, UK, hosted by the Open Economics Working Group.
# Update: 2012-12-10: Bad news: Because of heavy snowfalls in Germany may flights were canceled. Unfortunately this also applied to our flight to Washington DC – so we’ll not be able to attend the CNI Membership Meeting.
Photo: Gianfranco Chicco | flickr.com
Posted: November 14th, 2012 | Author: Sven | Filed under: found on the net | Tags: academic publishing, data publication, demonstrator, economics, enhanced publications, Open Data | Comments Off
Today I want to point the attention of our readers to some actual developments, articles and blog posts. Actually, there are too many interesting topics to be addressed in single posts. Therefore I collected some facts in a buildup.
Open AIRE releases demonstrators for enhanced publications
The OpenAIRE initiative (www.openaire.eu) has recently released demonstrators for enhanced publications. These focus on linking literature to associated research data and project information in two different disciplines: life sciences and social sciences.
The pilots are ‘work in progress’, but Open AIRE warmly welcomes feedback at this stage from researchers, open science enthusiasts, librarians and all on how the initiative can improve and develop these pilots further, especially from the researcher’s point of view.
The demonstrators are available here: https://www.openaire.eu/en/component/content/article/9-news-events/424-subject-specific-pilots-for-enhanced-publications
To get in touch with Open AIRE directly with any questions, feel free to write an Email to najla.rettberg [at] sub.uni-goettingen.de.
Ross Mounce: Review of Open Access in Economics
Ross Mounce, a PhD student at the University of Bath, wrote an interesting blog post about the development of open access publishing in economics. Ross states that 17% of the overall literature space (1.66 million articles) in 2011 were published open access. This is a comparatively good result. Nevertheless the remaining 83% of all articles are still published closed access. Read the rest of this entry »
