Research Works Act: Partial victory for Open Access

telepolis yesterday reported that the Research Works Act was pulled back. The bill has caused a lot of trouble within the Open-Access and Open-Data Community:  HR 3699 would have prevented agencies of the federal government from requiring public access to federally subsidized research.

A major supporter of the bill, Elsevier, has withdrawed its support for the Research Works Act – only hours before the the co-sponsors of the bill,  Darrell Issa (Republican) and Carolyn Maloney (Democrats) declared the end of the legislation process. It’s interesting (but not surprising) that after Elsevier withdrawed its support, the whole bill was stopped. Someone might think, that this course of action shows the real backers of the bill.

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Psychology: The Rise of false-positive Findings

In the November 2011 Issue of Psychological Science, Joseph P. Simmons, Leif D. Nelson and Uri Simonsohn published an interesting article about the undisclosed flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting that leads to an increase of actual false-positive rates in psychology. The researchers stated that it is unacceptably easy to publish “statistically significant” evidence consistent with any hypothesis.

The major problem they found is what they call the “researcher degrees of freedom” – or to be more correct: the decisions researchers making within a research process: e.g. what observations should be included or rejected? How much data should be collected? Which control variables should be used?

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Science Magazine: Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing

As many of you know, the impact factor is a major vehicle for measuring the quality of a scholarly journal. Despite there is a lot of criticism on impact factors, for researchers as well as for journals a high impact factor is as attractive as honey is for the bears.

One side effect of impact factors is that they’re creating incentives for editors to coerce authors to add citations to their journal – indicating that more citations are inflating the journal’s impact factor.

At the beginning of February, the science magazine published a remarkable article that deals with forced citations in scholarly journals.

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Announcement: Workshop “Metadata and Persistent Identifiers for Social and Economic Data”

The German Data Forum (RatSWD), the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, nestor – the German Competence network for digital preservation, the International Data Service Center of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IDSC) and the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (ZBW) will be hosting a joint workshop on the subject of

„Metadata and Persistent Identifiers for Social and Economic Data“

which will take place on 7th and 8th May 2012 in Berlin and to which you are cordially invited.

Attendance is free, registration is requested.
For registration and more information, please visit:  http://www.ratswd.de/pid_2012

The full program ist attached below. Additional information may be found on our download page and here.

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Berlin publishes strategy for Open Data of the public administration

On Friday, Stefan Krempl wrote an article for heise.de about the new strategy of the Senate of Berlin to extend its Open Data Portal. Open Data Berlin is the first open data project in Germany for the public administration. In the UK this is much more common and already a regular service.

In Berlin, the Senate published a strategy document in cooperation with the Fraunhofer-Institute FOCUS, where the future of the project is designed – including demands for better organizational structures, coherent metadata schema and useful applications.

In the medium term, all enactments and protocols -if not classified as confidential- should be made available to the public on the platform. 
In their paper, Fraunhofer proposes to publish these documents in open formats only – a useful attempt especially when we’re thinking about the long-term preservation of these data. 
Beside  textual documents, datasets of the public administration and applications are also published.

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Incentives for Data Sharing: £8.000 a year for promoting open data!

When I first heard, that the Panton Fellowships offer the possibility to get £8.000 bucks in a year for making scientific data open, I thought this was a joke. Some kind of an idea that might only cause windfall gains by scientists needing a funding budget. But it is worth taking a deeper look:

The Panton Fellowships are funded by the Open Society Foundations. The coordination is done by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The Fellowshops will be awarded to scientists who actively promote open data in science.

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Data Availability Policy: American Economic Review

As announced in my previous blogpost, I ‘m starting the presentation of some data availability policies and replication policies with the American Economic Review (AER). The AER is a flagship of the economic profession and one of the top ranked journals in this scientific discipline.
The AER was published in 1911 for the first time. Only 7 – 10 percent of the submissions are accepted and later on published.

The AER adopted a so called replication policy in 1986 – despite the fact that studies (for example by Dewald, Thursby and Anderson) already claimed, that a replication policy is not enough to promote replicable results.
In their policy, the Review pledged authors to provide datasets and code for processing the data to other scientists that are interested in replicating the results on request.

Replication policies have often failed, even if the corresponding author is willing to support other researchers…and I imagine that this szenario is not very common …After publishing an article, authors mostly don’t have incentives to prepare the data and code for other researchers. It costs time and the rewards the scientific system pays for sharing data often are marginal.

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Announcement: New section – Data Availability Policies in Economic Journals

Today, I want to introduce a new regular section here on edawax.de. Within the next weeks and months I’ m going to discuss some of the data availability policies we found during our investigations for our work package 2.

Even though you’ll find a lot of the information posted here in a condensed report by the end of spring, I thought it would be beneficial to our readers to get some preliminary information about the things we are currently doing. Of course I would be very happy to discuss the policies presented and some of my thoughts with you. So please feel free to comment or to send me an email.

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