Join Mandy Wigdorowitz (speaker), Barbara McGillivray (speaker), and Marton Ribary as they consider the place of Open Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. They focus on the role of the "data paper", and more specifically, on the work done by the open access
Journal of Open Humanities (JOHD) in promoting the practice of publishing data papers with
their accompanying open access datasets.
Full Abstract
The open research movement and initiatives like the FAIR principles have been critical in
establishing the importance of data in research, particularly within the sciences. Alongside the
sciences, attention to openly available data in Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) research
has gradually grown. This growth is largely attributed to the increased availability of digital
collections, the development of new data-intensive methods, an increasingly solid
infrastructure, increased pressure from funders, the requirement of data management plans for
preservation purposes, and the involvement of research libraries in data curation. In this
context, attention to how data is produced, how it is openly and transparently shared, and how
it can be reused has generated great interest, accompanied by an inevitable need for reputable
data sharing outlets. One such outlet is the data paper – a peer-reviewed publication that focuses
on describing a curated dataset. Data papers can be shared in traditional research journals as
one subtype of article publication, or, more recently, in data journals which are dedicated to
the publication of data papers. This presentation will focus on the work done by the open access
Journal of Open Humanities (JOHD) in promoting the practice of publishing data papers with
their accompanying open access datasets. JOHD was established with Ubiquity Press in 2015
to promote awareness, use, and reuse of humanities data. JOHD data papers promote the
comprehensive description of how a dataset was assembled, where it may be accessed, and any
crucial context including the research questions that framed the data gathering, including
limitations to the original methods or scope of sources included. JOHD data papers suggest
potential future reuses of data, which recent analytics seem to suggest has helped increase the
visibility of datasets, and therefore their research impact (Marongiu et al., forthcoming;
McGillivray et al., 2022). In addition, an overview of the three key elements (the “golden
triangle”) that assess the impact of open research efforts as represented by different research
outputs (datasets, data papers and research papers) will be presented, along with proposed
initiatives for linking these. In doing so, we aim to (a) find a programmatic way to identify
these links by extracting information from available metadata of datasets and verifying their
accuracy, and (b) create a “ground truth” in a manual and/or machine-assisted way which
would enable the training of more sophisticated NLP-based methods as a next step. We hope
to illustrate the importance of including data papers into the research conversation given that
they present a unique contribution to addressing global challenges within the open research
arena.
- Tags
-