Wikiversity:Fellow-Programm Freies Wissen/Einreichungen/Open Editorial Boards
Open Editorial Boards[Bearbeiten]Projektbeschreibung[Bearbeiten]Editors of scientific journals are among the most authoritative scholars. An editorial board membership not only demonstrates engagement for the academic community at large, but it also confers power to legitimize selected research and thus to further (or delay) the career of chosen researchers. As a consequence, a nascent scientometric literature has come to analyse the composition of academic journals’ editorial boards. Such research has focused on issues such as the international diversity in science, biased gender patterns or publication ethics.[1][2][3] However, due to a lack of efficient data availability, these studies rely on laborious processes of manual data-collection. The proposed project seeks to address this shortcoming by providing structured data on editorial board memberships of 792 social science journals in both a human- and machine-readable manner. After an initial webscraping phase, the project would link these data to persistent identifiers such as ROR (for institutional affiliations) and ORCID (for author-level data). It would then create an API to enable structured access to the data. Finally, the project would donate the thus collected information (to be licensed under CC0) to Wikidata, and all codes would be made openly available for further use and adaptation. The project thus contributes to a greater transparency in the conduct of scientific endeavours. It offers a basis for analysing and uncovering patterns regarding knowledge equity within the academic publication system. In addition, research libraries could draw from the dataset and codes so to assess to what extent their university’s researchers serve in editorial boards.
Review 1[Bearbeiten]- The goal of the project is exciting and innovative. It fills a gap that hasn't been adressed so far in a systematic manner. Its contribution to knowledge equity and science itself could be substantial. - There is a wide range of beneficiaries of the produced data/ knowledge: libraries, meta-science, researchers choosing journals, ... - The project appears coherent and well conceived - The project appears possible within the given project time - The applicant appears to highly value principles of open science and motivated to engage in advocacy Jürgen Schneider Review 2[Bearbeiten]This project goes to the heart of open science both because it offers new open methods and data, and because it investigates a topic of great concern for the crisis of science: journals and their editorial boards. We know that these boards often favor 'their own' in publications, and this is problematic. We also know that getting named to these boards may be more of a prestige event, than a scientific endeavor. I like this proposed project very much for these reasons. My only 'concern' is that the funding for the project does not seem necessary. All of it can be conducted within the normal realm of research as part of the researcher's current position - it has no costs. Links[Bearbeiten]Autor/in[Bearbeiten]
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