Open Grants: Assisting Early Career Scientists

Posted on July 28, 2018 by Stephanie Krueger

An increasing number of researchers are sharing their grant proposals openly. They do this to open up science so that all stages of the process can benefit from better interaction and communication and to provide examples for early career scientists writing grants.

https://www.ogrants.org/

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Another One-Click to PDF Player

Posted on July 25, 2018 by Stephanie Krueger

Digital Science is now actively promoting Anywhere Access in quest to provide researchers with easier access to content:

I will have someone on staff attend one of the upcoming webinars about the service and report more here in the coming weeks.

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Open Science on Both Sides of the Atlantic

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Stephanie Krueger
  1. A helpful Open Science MOOC (core partners: Leiden University’s Centre for Innovation and the German National Library of Science and Technology): https://opensciencemooc.github.io/site/Resources/

2. …& a brand new resource from the US National Academies: https://www.nap.edu/catalog/25116/open-science-by-design-realizing-a-vision-for-21st-century

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Who Owns Digital Science (Makers of Overleaf)?

Posted on June 29, 2018 by Stephanie Krueger

…and the answer is: Holtzbrinck.

Holtzbrinck also holds a majority share in SpringerNature, as Roger Schonfeld detailed for The Scholarly Kitchen in October 2017 together with an analysis of a possible scholarly publishing “duoply”:

Any kind of acquisition of Digital Science would leave Springer Nature and Elsevier with many of the pieces of a research workflow business in combination with publishing operations and platforms. There are a number of differences between the two workflow businesses and publishing operations, but the fundamentals would be that the two largest scientific publishers, and the two largest open access publishers, would also be the two largest scientific workflow providers. This would reinforce the emerging marketplace dynamics as one leading towards duopoly.

Watch this space.

Additional Reading

Schonfeld, Roger (2017). Who Owns Digital Science? The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/10/23/ownership-digital-science/

 

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California Joins Germany, Finland, & Others in Championing Journal Subscription System Change

Posted on June 29, 2018 by Stephanie Krueger

The University of California system has issued a strong statement championing further development of open access publishing infrastructures, in the spirit of Germany’s Projekt DEAL and Finland’s “No Deal No Review“:

It has become increasingly clear that the problem of rising journal costs in the context of a widespread movement toward open access can only be addressed by tackling the subscription system itself.

Read more:

Championing Change in Journal Negotiations

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Evaluating RG Score in relation to the Leiden Manifesto

Posted on June 21, 2018 by Stephanie Krueger

Orduna-Malea, E., Martín-Martín, A., Thelwall, M., &  López-Cózar, E.D. (2017) analyze ResearchGate (RG) Scores using a set of seventy-three Nobel Prize winners, also analyzing the RG Score in relation to the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics principles (Table 7). The authors caution against using RG Scores as indicators of academic reputation:

Within RG it is possible to distinguish between (passive) academics that interact little in the site and active platform users, who can get high RG Scores through engaging with others inside the site (questions, answers, social networks with influential researchers). Thus, RG Scores should not be mistaken for academic reputation indicators.

Additional Reading

Hicks, D., Wouters, P., Waltman, L., de Rijcke, S., & Rafols, I. (2015). The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics. Nature, 520(7548), 429–431. https://doi.org/10.1038/520429a

Orduna-Malea, E., Martín-Martín, A., Thelwall, M., &  López-Cózar, E.D. (2017). Do ResearchGate Scores create ghost academic reputations? Scientometrics, 112: 443. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2396-9

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Academic Social Media: ResearchGate Financials

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Stephanie Krueger

In one of my writing workshops this semester, my students asked me to provide an overview of the academic social media landscape. One of the surprising things for students to consider in such discussions is the fact that social media outlets (including very “solid” looking enterprises such as LinkedIn and ResearchGate) are actually subject to the whims of the marketplace, and their future is by no means as secure as the tools may appear.

Thus this morning, scanning my work Twitter (which I find functions quite well for staying aware of global scholarly publishing trends), I was not surprised to find a discussion by the American scholarly publishing community regarding ResearchGate and its current financial status. A brief analysis of this is provided by german startups at:

https://www.deutsche-startups.de/2018/06/12/researchgate-verlust-steigt-um-733-auf-107-millionen/

To make a long story short, ResearchGate is losing money and its path towards “profitability” is unclear.

What does this mean for students? I feel it’s important to continue stressing that such tools – while very useful – may disappear or have certain functionalities “gated” in the future. That it’s still important to keep one’s own personal archive.

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The Movie You’ve Been Waiting For…

Posted on May 17, 2018 by Stephanie Krueger

Coming September 2018 to NYC – October 9 to Rotterdam (Erasmus University, Netherlands) – is Paywall: The Business of Scholarship. Featuring interviews by academics and publishers alike.

 

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Springer Nature IPO Withdrawn

Posted on May 15, 2018 by Stephanie Krueger

Why Was Springer Nature’s IPO Withdrawn?

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Towards an Access and Discovery “Supercontinent”?

Posted on May 4, 2018 by Stephanie Krueger

Roger Schonfeld paints the current picture of access and discovery in a must-read article for everyone interested the so-called researcher experience:

Will a supercontinent emerge for discovery and access? Time will tell. Meanwhile, users have long become impatient of the wait.

Additional Reading

Green, Toby (2018). Let’s Hear It for Readers. Fiesole Retreat: Serving Learning & Scholarship.

Schonfeld, Roger C. (2018). The Supercontinent of Scholarly Publishing? The Scholarly Kitchen.

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