In the previous post, I noted that a chemistry publisher is about to repeat an earlier experiment in serving pre-prints of journal articles. It would be fair to suggest that following the first great period of journal innovation, the boom in rapid publication “camera-ready” articles in the 1960s, the next period of rapid innovation started around 1994 driven by the uptake of the World-Wide-Web.
This week the ACS announced its intention to establish a “ ChemRxiv preprint server to promote early research sharing ”. This was first tried quite a few years ago, following the example of especially the physicists. As I recollect the experiment lasted about a year, attracted few submissions and even fewer of high quality.
I occasionally post about "RDM" (research data management), an activity that has recently become a formalised essential part of the research processes. I say recently formalised, since researchers have of course kept research notebooks recording their activities and their data since the dawn of science, but not always in an open and transparent manner.
I want to describe a recent attempt by a group of collaborators to share the research data associated with their just published article.[cite]10.1021/jacs.5b13070[/cite] I am here introducing things in a hierarchical form (i.e. not necessarily the serial order in which actions were taken). The data repository selected for the data sharing is described by (m3data) doi: 10.17616/R3K64N[cite]10.17616/R3K64N[/cite] A collaborative
Scientists are familiar with the term data, at least in a scientific or chemical context, but appreciating metadata (meaning "after", or "beyond") is slightly more subtle, in the sense of using it to mean data about data. The challenge lies in clarifying where the boundary between data and its metadata lies and in specifying and controlling the vocabulary used for these metadata descriptions.
Publishing embargoes seem a relatively new phenomenon, probably starting in areas of science when the data produced for a scientific article was considered more valuable than the narrative of that article. However, the concept of the embargo seems to be spreading to cover other aspects of publishing, and I came across one recently which appears to take such embargoes into new and uncharted territory.
The upcoming ACS national meeting in San Diego has a CINF (chemical information division) session entitled "Global initiatives in research data management and discovery". I have highlighted here just one slide from my contribution to this session, which addresses the discovery aspect of the session. Data, if you think about it, is rarely discoverable other than by intimate association with a narrative or journal article.
I attended the first (of a proposed five) workshops organised by LEARN (an EU-funded project that aims to .. .Raise awareness in research data management (RDM) issues & research policy ) on Friday. Here I give some quick bullet points relating to things that caught my attention and or interest. The program (and Twitter feed) can be found at https://learnrdm.wordpress.com where other's comments can also be seen.
The university sector in the UK has quality inspections of its research outputs conducted every seven years, going by the name of REF or Research Excellence Framework. The next one is due around 2020, and already preparations are under way! Here I describe how I have interpreted one of its strictures;
A lunchtime conversation with a colleague had us both bemoaning the distorting influence on chemistry of bibliometrics, h-indices and journal impact factors, all very much a modern phenomenon of scientific publishing. Young academics on a promotion fast-track for example are apparently advised not to publish in a well-known journal devoted to organic chemistry because of its apparently “low” impact factor.
