Jenny Fry

The intellectual and social organization of academic fields and the shaping of digital resources

This paper looks at disciplinary differences in the production, relevance, and use of three predominant genres of informal scholarly communication on the internet: academic mailing lists; scholarly homepages, and scholar-produced decentralized digital resources. The aim is to contribute to the development of a theoretical framework for understanding and explaining disciplinary differences in the shaping of networked resources. We apply Whitley’s theory of the intellectual and social organization of academic fields to explain variation in forms and types of digital resources across fields. The paper extends Whitley’s theory by applying his key domain analytic concepts ‘task uncertainty’ and ‘mutual dependence’ to explain scholarly communication practices in the digital realm. The empirical data spans seven intellectual fields across the natural sciences, health sciences, humanities, and social sciences. The analysis shows that, while there are similarities in the scholarly production of information genres on the internet, Whitley’s theory helps in identifying and understanding the diversity and heterogeneity of electronic communication fora across fields.

Authors’ Awareness and Attitudes Toward Open Access Repositories

This article investigates the awareness of scholarly authors toward open access repositories and the factors that motivate their use of these repositories. The article reports on the findings obtained from a mixed methods approach which involved a questionnaire returned by over 3000 respondents, supplemented by four focus groups held across Europe in the summer 2009. The research found that although there was a good understanding and appreciation of the ethos of open access in general, there were clear differences between scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds in their understanding of open access repositories and their motivations for depositing articles within them. This research forms the first part of a longitudinal study that will track the changing behaviors and attitudes of authors toward open access repositories.

Open science in e‐science: contingency or policy?

Purpose – This paper seeks to discuss the question of “openness” in e‐Science.Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on 12 in‐depth interviews with principal investigators, project managers and developers involved in UK e‐Science projects, together with supporting documentary evidence from project web sites. The approach was to explore the juxtaposition of research governance at the institutional level and local research practices at the project level. Interview questions focused on research inputs, software development processes, access to resources, project documentation, dissemination of outputs and by‐products, licensing issues, and institutional contracts.Findings – The findings suggest that, although there is a widely shared ethos of openness in everyday research practice, there are many uncertainties and yet‐to‐be resolved issues, despite strong policy imperatives towards openly shared resources.Research limitations/implications – The paper concludes by observing a stratification of openn...

New techniques in online research: challenges for research ethics

The possibilities for carrying out online research are growing rapidly, enabling researchers to collect previously unavailable data about online behaviours and interactions. While such techniques provide exciting opportunities for researchers they can present ethical challenges. In this paper we explore these ethical dilemmas with particular reference to the new methods used to explore online virtual environments, the ability to re-use online data from multiple sources and the global reach of the Internet. We conclude by highlighting the key issues that need to be considered by researchers both in terms of developing their own ethical viewpoints as well as the development of future institutional and professional ethical codes of practice for online research.1

Measuring researchers' use of scholarly information through social bookmarking data: A case study of BibSonomy

This paper explores the possibility of using data from social bookmarking services to measure the use of information by academic researchers. Social bookmarking data can be used to augment participative methods (e.g. interviews and surveys) and other, non-participative methods (e.g. citation analysis and transaction logs) to measure the use of scholarly information. We use BibSonomy, a free resource-sharing system, as a case study. Results show that published journal articles are by far the most popular type of source bookmarked, followed by conference proceedings and books. Commercial journal publisher platforms are the most popular type of information resource bookmarked, followed by websites, records in databases and digital repositories. Usage of open access information resources is low in comparison with toll access journals. In the case of open access repositories, there is a marked preference for the use of subject-based repositories over institutional repositories. The results are consistent with those observed in related studies based on surveys and citation analysis, confirming the possible use of bookmarking data in studies of information behaviour in academic settings. The main advantages of using social bookmarking data are that is an unobtrusive approach, it captures the reading habits of researchers who are not necessarily authors, and data are readily available. The main limitation is that a significant amount of human resources is required in cleaning and standardizing the data.

Open-access mega-journals: A bibliometric profile

In this paper we present the first comprehensive bibliometric analysis of eleven open-access mega-journals (OAMJs). OAMJs are a relatively recent phenomenon, and have been characterised as having four key characteristics: large size; broad disciplinary scope; a Gold-OA business model; and a peer-review policy that seeks to determine only the scientific soundness of the research rather than evaluate the novelty or significance of the work. Our investigation focuses on four key modes of analysis: journal outputs (the number of articles published and changes in output over time); OAMJ author characteristics (nationalities and institutional affiliations); subject areas (the disciplinary scope of OAMJs, and variations in sub-disciplinary output); and citation profiles (the citation distributions of each OAMJ, and the impact of citing journals). We found that while the total output of the eleven mega-journals grew by 14.9% between 2014 and 2015, this growth is largely attributable to the increased output of Scientific Reports and Medicine. We also found substantial variation in the geographical distribution of authors. Several journals have a relatively high proportion of Chinese authors, and we suggest this may be linked to these journals’ high Journal Impact Factors (JIFs). The mega-journals were also found to vary in subject scope, with several journals publishing disproportionately high numbers of articles in certain sub-disciplines. Our citation analsysis offers support for Björk & Catani’s suggestion that OAMJs’s citation distributions can be similar to those of traditional journals, while noting considerable variation in citation rates across the eleven titles. We conclude that while the OAMJ term is useful as a means of grouping journals which share a set of key characteristics, there is no such thing as a “typical” mega-journal, and we suggest several areas for additional research that might help us better understand the current and future role of OAMJs in scholarly communication.

Open-access mega-journals: The future of scholarly communication or academic dumping ground? A review

Purpose Open-access mega-journals (OAMJs) represent an increasingly important part of the scholarly communication landscape. OAMJs, such as PLOS ONE, are large scale, broad scope journals that operate an open access business model (normally based on article-processing charges), and which employ a novel form of peer review, focussing on scientific “soundness” and eschewing judgement of novelty or importance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the discourses relating to OAMJs, and their place within scholarly publishing, and considers attitudes towards mega-journals within the academic community. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents a review of the literature of OAMJs structured around four defining characteristics: scale, disciplinary scope, peer review policy, and economic model. The existing scholarly literature was augmented by searches of more informal outputs, such as blogs and e-mail discussion lists, to capture the debate in its entirety. Findings While the academic literature relating specifically to OAMJs is relatively sparse, discussion in other fora is detailed and animated, with debates ranging from the sustainability and ethics of the mega-journal model, to the impact of soundness-only peer review on article quality and discoverability, and the potential for OAMJs to represent a paradigm-shifting development in scholarly publishing. Originality/value This paper represents the first comprehensive review of the mega-journal phenomenon, drawing not only on the published academic literature, but also grey, professional and informal sources. The paper advances a number of ways in which the role of OAMJs in the scholarly communication environment can be conceptualised.

Open access megajournals: The publisher perspective (Part 2: Operational realities)

This paper is the second of two Learned Publishing articles in which we report the results of a series of interviews, with senior publishers and editors exploring open access megajournals (OAMJs). Megajournals (of which PLoS One is the best known example) represent a relatively new approach to scholarly communication and can be characterized as large, broad‐scope, open access journals, which take an innovative approach to peer review, basing acceptance decisions solely on the technical or scientific soundness of the article. Based on interviews with 31 publishers and editors, this paper reports the perceived cultural, operational, and technical challenges associated with launching, growing, and maintaining a megajournal. We find that overcoming these challenges while delivering the societal benefits associated with OAMJs is seen to require significant investment in people and systems, as well as an ongoing commitment to the model.

Towards an understanding of the relationship between disciplinary research cultures and open access repository behaviors

This article explores the cultural characteristics of three open access (OA)‐friendly disciplines (physics, economics, and clinical medicine) and the ways in which those characteristics influence perceptions, motivations, and behaviors toward green OA. The empirical data are taken from two online surveys of European authors. Taking a domain analytic approach, the analysis draws on Becher and Trowlers (2001) and Whitleys (2000) theories to gain a deeper understanding of why OA repositories (OAR) play a particularly important role in the chosen disciplines. The surveys provided a unique opportunity to compare perceptions, motivations, and behaviors of researchers at the discipline level with the parent metadiscipline. It should be noted that participants were not drawn from a stratified sample of all the different subdisciplines that constitute each discipline, and therefore the generalizability of the findings to the discipline may be limited. The differential role of informal and formal communication in each of the three disciplines has shaped green OA practices. For physicists and economists, preprints are an essential feature of their respective OAR landscapes, whereas for clinical medics final published articles have a central role. In comparing the disciplines with their parent metadisciplines there were some notable similarities/differences, which have methodological implications for studying research cultures.

Google’s Privacy Responsibilities at Home and Abroad

The Bush administration’s subpoena to the major Internet search engine companies, Google, America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo! came to the attention of the general public in January of this year. The reason it came to light is that while America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo! had complied with the subpoena to provide lists of indexed URLs and search query terms of their users, Google had resisted. In a subsequent District Court hearing in March 2006 Google was compelled to provide a list of 50,000 randomly selected URLs from its indexes, but the Bush administration’s request for user search queries was denied. During the same week that the headlines were full of the Bush versus Google case, Google China was launched amidst a maelstrom of controversy over their acquiescence to heavy censorship regulations. It seemed that Google’s ‘Don’t be evil’ mission statement was being put under considerable strain. The two news stories during that week in January raise important questions about how the Internet is being governed and what the appropriate interventions should be in order to maintain its integrity as an open, safe and democratic public space. This article is about the values, beliefs and expectations that people have about the Internet and how they are currently under threat.