A fight for recognition

How do you embed open science in hbo? Sarah Coombs does so with a mix of expertise, networking, games and tenacity. "I would like to see the DCC-PO fully recognised as a centre of expertise for research support. That we don't have to keep begging for money, but are collectively seen as experts."

Diversiferen van beoordeling om verschillende promotietrajecten te erkennen en waarderen - Promovendi Netwerk Nederland

Het opleiden van zelfstandige onderzoekers is een belangrijk aspect in het bevorderen van de ambitie van Nederland om een kenniseconomie te behouden (1). …

Digging deeper into data citations: Recognizing and rewarding data work

Citations and metrics are central features in evaluating academic careers. As researchers increasingly engage in open science, data citations have emerged as potential mechanisms for evaluating and rewarding data sharing and reuse in academic assessments. Despite this, we still lack critical information about the data citation practices and motivations of researchers themselves, information which is needed to contextualize the use of such metrics. Here, we present the results of a semi-structured interview study with researchers across disciplines exploring their data referencing practices and motivations, as well as how they would like their ‘data work’ (including data sharing) to be rewarded and evaluated. As a whole, our findings confirm a lack of standard practices for referencing data and provide new insights into the social and scientific reasons motivating data referencing. While our results show an overall skepticism toward the use of citation-based metrics in evaluations, they also suggest that researchers are caught between traditional and emergent modes of assessment for recognizing data work. Furthermore, we find that rather than valuing data citations as rewards, our participants value creating data objects which are useful for their (often small) research communities. Ultimately, we conclude that data work is a cornerstone of research practice which needs to be evaluated and considered, but one which also requires context-aware approaches.

Achieving Global Open Access

PhD Position on Understanding the Global Movement for Open Research Information

PhD Position on Understanding the Global Movement for Open Research InformationIncreasingly, proprietary ownership and restrictions on research information used to inform the governance of research is being challenged. At CWTS we are seeking a PhD candidate to add to our growing interest and involvement…

An analysis of the suitability of OpenAlex for bibliometric analyses

Scopus and the Web of Science have been the foundation for research in the science of science even though these traditional databases systematically underrepresent certain disciplines and world regions. In response, new inclusive databases, notably OpenAlex, have emerged. While many studies have begun using OpenAlex as a data source, few critically assess its limitations. This study, conducted in collaboration with the OpenAlex team, addresses this gap by comparing OpenAlex to Scopus across a number of dimensions. The analysis concludes that OpenAlex is a superset of Scopus and can be a reliable alternative for some analyses, particularly at the country level. Despite this, issues of metadata accuracy and completeness show that additional research is needed to fully comprehend and address OpenAlex's limitations. Doing so will be necessary to confidently use OpenAlex across a wider set of analyses, including those that are not at all possible with more constrained databases.