Biology subjects

Neylon, C.

Publications and source records attributed to Neylon, C..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2020

Evaluating institutional open access performance: Methodology, challenges and assessment

Open Access to research outputs is becoming rapidly more important to the global research community and society. Changes are driven by funder mandates, institutional policy, grass-roots advocacy and culture change. It has been challenging to provide a robust, transparent and updateable analysis of progress towards open access that can inform these interventions, particularly at the institutional level. Here we propose a minimum reporting standard and present a large-scale analysis of open access progress across 1,207 institutions world-wide that shows substantial progress being made. The analysis detects responses that coincide with policy and funding interventions. Among the striking results are the high performance of Latin American and African universities, particularly for gold open access, whereas overall open access levels in Europe and North America are driven by repository-mediated access. We present a top-100 of global universities with the worlds leading institutions achieving around 80% open access for 2017 publications.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2020

Evaluating institutional open access performance: Sensitivity analysis

In the article “Evaluating institutional open access performance: Methodology, challenges and assessment” we develop the first comprehensive and reproducible workflow that integrates multiple bibliographic data sources for evaluating institutional open access (OA) performance. The major data sources include Web of Science, Scopus, Microsoft Academic, and Unpaywall. However, each of these databases continues to update, both actively and retrospectively. This implies the results produced by the proposed process are potentially sensitive to both the choice of data source and the versions of them used. In addition, there remain the issue relating to selection bias in sample size and margin of error. The current work shows that the levels of sensitivity relating to the above issues can be significant at the institutional level. Hence, the transparency and clear documentation of the choices made on data sources (and their versions) and cut-off boundaries are vital for reproducibility and verifiability.View Full Text

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2019

Comparison of bibliographic data sources: Implications for the robustness of university rankings

Universities are increasingly evaluated, both internally and externally on the basis of their outputs. Often these are converted to simple, and frequently contested, rankings based on quantitative analysis of those outputs. These rankings can have substantial implications for student and staff recruitment, research income and perceived prestige of a university. Both internal and external analyses usually rely on a single data source to define the set of outputs assigned to a specific university. Although some differences between such databases are documented, few studies have explored them at the institutional scale and examined the implications of these differences for the metrics and rankings that are derived from them. We address this gap by performing detailed bibliographic comparisons between three key databases: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and, the recently relaunched Microsoft Academic (MSA). We analyse the differences between outputs with DOIs identified from each source for a sample of 155 universities and supplement this with a detailed manual analysis of the differences for fifteen universities. We find significant differences between the sources at the university level. Sources differ in the publication year of specific objects, the completeness of metadata, as well as in their coverage of disciplines, outlets, and publication type. We construct two simple rankings based on citation counts and open access status of the outputs for these universities and show dramatic changes in position based on the choice of bibliographic data sources. Those universities that experience the largest changes are frequently those from non-English speaking countries and those that are outside the top positions in international university rankings. Overall MSA has greater coverage than Scopus or WoS, but has less complete affiliation metadata. We suggest that robust evaluation measures need to consider the effect of choice of data sources and recommend an approach where data from multiple sources is integrated to provide a more robust dataset.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2017

Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action: The lessons that Olson can teach us

Infrastructures for data, such as repositories, curation systems, aggregators, indexes and standards are public goods. This means that finding sustainable economic models to support them is a challenge. This is due to free-loading, where someone who does not contribute to the support of the infrastructure nonetheless gains the benefit of it. The work of Mancur Olson (1974) suggests there are only three ways to address this for large groups: compulsion (often as some form of taxation) to support the infrastructure; the provision of non-collective (club) goods limited to those who contribute as a side-effect of providing the collective good; or mechanisms that lower the effective number of participants in the negotiation (oligopoly).\n\nIn this paper I use Olsons framework to analyze existing scholarly infrastructures and proposals for the sustainability of new infrastructures. I argue that the focus on sustainability models prior to seeking a set of agreed governance principles is the wrong approach. Rather we need to understand how to navigate from club-like to public-like goods. We need to define the communities that contribute and identify club-like benefits for those contributors. We need interoperable principles of governance and resourcing to provide public-like goods and we should draw on the political economics of taxation to develop this.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2016

On the origin of nonequivalent states: how we can talk about preprints

Increasingly, preprints are at the center of conversations across the research ecosystem. But disagreements remain about the role they play. Do they \"count\" for research assessment? Is it ok to post preprints in more than one place? In this paper, we argue that these discussions often conflate two separate issues, the history of the manuscript and the status granted it by different communities. In this paper, we propose a new model that distinguishes the characteristics of the object, its \"state\", from the subjective \"standing\" granted to it by different communities. This provides a way to discuss the difference in practices between communities, which will deliver more productive conversations and facilitate negotiation on how to collectively improve the process of scholarly communications not only for preprints but other forms of scholarly contributions.

scientific communication and education↗