Presentation on responsible metrics given at the FORCE 2019 conference in Edinburgh on Wednesday ... more Presentation on responsible metrics given at the FORCE 2019 conference in Edinburgh on Wednesday 16 October, 2019.
Inspired by the Open Archives Initiative, the United Kingdom (UK) Joint Information Systems Commi... more Inspired by the Open Archives Initiative, the United Kingdom (UK) Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) established the FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Repositories) programme in 2002. One of the programme's objectives was to "explore the challenges associated with disclosure and sharing [of content], including IPR and the role of institutional repositories". To this end, the JISC funded a one-year project called RoMEO (Rights Metadata for Open archiving). RoMEO, which took place between 2002–2003, specifically looked at the self-archiving of academic research papers, and the subsequent disclosure and harvesting of metadata about those papers using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) by OAI Data and Service Providers [Open Archives Initiative, 2002a]. The RoMEO project aimed to develop simple rights metadata by which academics could protect their research papers in an open-access environment and also to develop a means by...
In 2011, the Library and Research Office undertook a joint study to explore Loughborough Universi... more In 2011, the Library and Research Office undertook a joint study to explore Loughborough University researchers' attitudes towards open access (and institutional repositories). This built upon previous work undertaken by the Library which showed that there were a high percentage of academics who perceived the University's Institutional Repository as being unimportant. The study was undertaken as part of a national project. The national survey instrument was adapted for the Loughborough University context and made available online using Bristol Online System (BOS). The survey was completed by 161 respondents which represent 7.8% of University academics and researchers. Responses were received from most University departments with contributions from researchers across the age ranges. Some of the key findings from the study included: 82% of respondents were mildly or strongly in favour of the principles of open access publishing 79% of respondents were mildly or strongly in favour of institutional repositories Concerns about open access publishing revolve around quality, the peer review process and copyright and there is variance depending upon academic discipline 6 Open Access at Loughborough University | Department of Information Science which resulted in some minor changes to the questionnaire. Two @ £50 Amazon vouchers were offered as an incentive. The survey was completed by 161 respondents which represents 7.8% of University academics and researchers (Loughborough University, 2011). Figure 2 shows that there were contributions from researchers from all the age groups. Responses were received from most University departments (Figure 3) but there were significant differences in response rate by individual departments. The most responses (28) were from the Design School with the least (1 each) from the Departments of Systems Engineering, PHIR, Physics and Electronic and Electrical Engineering. Figure 4 shows the breakdown from respondents depending on where they were in their research career. Over 50% had more than 5 years post doctoral experience with 17% currently studying for their PhDs.
Presentation at: 'Future of Research Evaluation' workshop, Imperial College London, 21 Se... more Presentation at: 'Future of Research Evaluation' workshop, Imperial College London, 21 September 2018.
Elsevier is the latest in a lengthening list of publishers to announce their adoption for 1,200 j... more Elsevier is the latest in a lengthening list of publishers to announce their adoption for 1,200 journals of the CASRAI Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT). Authors of papers in these journals will be required to define their contributions in relation to a predefined taxonomy of 14 roles. In this post, Elizabeth Gadd weighs the pros and cons of defining contributorship in a more prescriptive fashion and asks whether there is a risk of incentivising new kinds of competitive behaviour and forms of evaluation that doesn’t benefit researchers.
No. respondents Created or developing own set of principles Actively considering but no decision ... more No. respondents Created or developing own set of principles Actively considering but no decision made Actively considered and decided against How to implement a responsible metrics policy The need to accept your policy is just the beginning
Presentation given at the 2019 Norway Association of Research Managers & Administrators (NARMA) c... more Presentation given at the 2019 Norway Association of Research Managers & Administrators (NARMA) conference on the possible research evaluation implications of 'Plan S' [Science Europe/European Research Council, September 2018].
The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) has yet to achieve widespread institutional support... more The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) has yet to achieve widespread institutional support in the UK. Elizabeth Gadd digs further into the slow uptake. Although there is growing acceptance that the Journal Impact Factor is subject to significant limitations, DORA feels rather negative in tone: an anti-journal metric tirade. There may be times when a journal metric, sensibly used, is the right tool for the job. By signing up to DORA, institutions may feel unable to use metrics at all.
This thesis considers the various perspectives of universities, academic staff and publishers to ... more This thesis considers the various perspectives of universities, academic staff and publishers to the copyright ownership of teaching and research outputs produced by UK universities, with a particular focus on how this affects the provision of online and/or open access to those outputs by university libraries. It presents ten papers written over a twenty year time frame that consider these issues within the context of a number of practitioner research projects and demonstrate how practices are changing over time. The papers employ a range of methodologies including questionnaire surveys, comparative design studies, interviews and content analyses. The key findings relating to research outputs (the scholarly royalty-free literature) are that rights are still mainly relinquished to academic staff by UK HEIs, although some HEIs are beginning to assert the right to re-use those works in various ways. Whilst academics are relied upon to either retain copyright or communicate their HEI s ...
L'article recherche l'effet de copyright sur la bibliotheque numerique d'apres l'... more L'article recherche l'effet de copyright sur la bibliotheque numerique d'apres l'experience du projet ACORN (Access to Course Readings via Networks) pour etablir des collections pour pret court de l'Universite de Longhborough : buts du Projet ACORN, aspects juridiques au Royaume-Uni (comment le copyright est applique dans un environnement electronique), bibliotheque numerique : difficulte d'identifier et contacter les titulaires juridiques, cout du copyright electronique, methodes de protection
Considering the future of research assessment, Elizabeth Gadd outlines how she believes research ... more Considering the future of research assessment, Elizabeth Gadd outlines how she believes research evaluation could be made better, fairer, and more meaningful. The resulting seven guiding principles, neatly framed as hashtags, range from understanding our responsibilities to researchers as people, through to ensuring our evaluations are a more formative process, offering valuable, constructive feedback.
To many authors, the point of publication can feel like the culmination of a process; the moment ... more To many authors, the point of publication can feel like the culmination of a process; the moment one’s troubles are over. But for many others, it can mark the start of a new set of wholly unanticipated problems. Elizabeth Gadd discusses some of the challenges she has faced after having her own papers published; from a lack of certainty about rights retained, through unwelcome surprises emerging after the copy editing process, to the interminable wait for a paper to be recognised by important abstract and indexing databases.
Slides from a keynote given to the NIH Bibliometrics & Research Assessment Symposium on Wednesday... more Slides from a keynote given to the NIH Bibliometrics & Research Assessment Symposium on Wednesday 7 October 2020.
Describes a method to provide an independent, community-sourced set of best practice criteria wit... more Describes a method to provide an independent, community-sourced set of best practice criteria with which to assess global university rankings and to identify the extent to which a sample of six rankings, Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), CWTS Leiden, QS World University Rankings (QS WUR), Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE WUR), U-Multirank, and US News & World Report Best Global Universities, met those criteria. The criteria fell into four categories: good governance, transparency, measure what matters, and rigour. The relative strengths and weaknesses of each ranking were compared. Overall, the rankings assessed fell short of all criteria, with greatest strengths in the area of transparency and greatest weaknesses in the area of measuring what matters to the communities they were ranking. The ranking that most closely met the criteria was CWTS Leiden. Scoring poorly across all the criteria were the THE WUR and US News rankings. Suggestions for developing the ranker rating method are described.
Draws parallels between the problematic use of GDP to evaluate economic success with the use of g... more Draws parallels between the problematic use of GDP to evaluate economic success with the use of global university rankings to evaluate university success. Inspired by Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, this perspective argues that the pursuit of growth as measured by such indicators creates universities that ‘grow’ up the rankings rather than those which ‘thrive’ or ‘mature’. Such growth creates academic wealth divides within and between countries, despite the direction of growth as inspired by the rankings not truly reflecting universities’ critical purpose or contribution. Highlights the incompatibility between universities’ alignment with socially responsible practices and continued engagement with socially irresponsible ranking practices. Proposes four possible ways of engendering change in the university rankings space. Concludes by calling on leaders of ‘world-leading’ universities to join together to ‘lead the world’ in challenging global university rankings, and to set their...
How can bibliometric and altmetric vendors improve? Messages from the end-user community This ite... more How can bibliometric and altmetric vendors improve? Messages from the end-user community This item was submitted to Loughborough University's Institutional Repository by the/an author.
Presentation on responsible metrics given at the FORCE 2019 conference in Edinburgh on Wednesday ... more Presentation on responsible metrics given at the FORCE 2019 conference in Edinburgh on Wednesday 16 October, 2019.
Inspired by the Open Archives Initiative, the United Kingdom (UK) Joint Information Systems Commi... more Inspired by the Open Archives Initiative, the United Kingdom (UK) Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) established the FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Repositories) programme in 2002. One of the programme's objectives was to "explore the challenges associated with disclosure and sharing [of content], including IPR and the role of institutional repositories". To this end, the JISC funded a one-year project called RoMEO (Rights Metadata for Open archiving). RoMEO, which took place between 2002–2003, specifically looked at the self-archiving of academic research papers, and the subsequent disclosure and harvesting of metadata about those papers using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) by OAI Data and Service Providers [Open Archives Initiative, 2002a]. The RoMEO project aimed to develop simple rights metadata by which academics could protect their research papers in an open-access environment and also to develop a means by...
In 2011, the Library and Research Office undertook a joint study to explore Loughborough Universi... more In 2011, the Library and Research Office undertook a joint study to explore Loughborough University researchers' attitudes towards open access (and institutional repositories). This built upon previous work undertaken by the Library which showed that there were a high percentage of academics who perceived the University's Institutional Repository as being unimportant. The study was undertaken as part of a national project. The national survey instrument was adapted for the Loughborough University context and made available online using Bristol Online System (BOS). The survey was completed by 161 respondents which represent 7.8% of University academics and researchers. Responses were received from most University departments with contributions from researchers across the age ranges. Some of the key findings from the study included: 82% of respondents were mildly or strongly in favour of the principles of open access publishing 79% of respondents were mildly or strongly in favour of institutional repositories Concerns about open access publishing revolve around quality, the peer review process and copyright and there is variance depending upon academic discipline 6 Open Access at Loughborough University | Department of Information Science which resulted in some minor changes to the questionnaire. Two @ £50 Amazon vouchers were offered as an incentive. The survey was completed by 161 respondents which represents 7.8% of University academics and researchers (Loughborough University, 2011). Figure 2 shows that there were contributions from researchers from all the age groups. Responses were received from most University departments (Figure 3) but there were significant differences in response rate by individual departments. The most responses (28) were from the Design School with the least (1 each) from the Departments of Systems Engineering, PHIR, Physics and Electronic and Electrical Engineering. Figure 4 shows the breakdown from respondents depending on where they were in their research career. Over 50% had more than 5 years post doctoral experience with 17% currently studying for their PhDs.
Presentation at: 'Future of Research Evaluation' workshop, Imperial College London, 21 Se... more Presentation at: 'Future of Research Evaluation' workshop, Imperial College London, 21 September 2018.
Elsevier is the latest in a lengthening list of publishers to announce their adoption for 1,200 j... more Elsevier is the latest in a lengthening list of publishers to announce their adoption for 1,200 journals of the CASRAI Contributor Role Taxonomy (CRediT). Authors of papers in these journals will be required to define their contributions in relation to a predefined taxonomy of 14 roles. In this post, Elizabeth Gadd weighs the pros and cons of defining contributorship in a more prescriptive fashion and asks whether there is a risk of incentivising new kinds of competitive behaviour and forms of evaluation that doesn’t benefit researchers.
No. respondents Created or developing own set of principles Actively considering but no decision ... more No. respondents Created or developing own set of principles Actively considering but no decision made Actively considered and decided against How to implement a responsible metrics policy The need to accept your policy is just the beginning
Presentation given at the 2019 Norway Association of Research Managers & Administrators (NARMA) c... more Presentation given at the 2019 Norway Association of Research Managers & Administrators (NARMA) conference on the possible research evaluation implications of 'Plan S' [Science Europe/European Research Council, September 2018].
The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) has yet to achieve widespread institutional support... more The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) has yet to achieve widespread institutional support in the UK. Elizabeth Gadd digs further into the slow uptake. Although there is growing acceptance that the Journal Impact Factor is subject to significant limitations, DORA feels rather negative in tone: an anti-journal metric tirade. There may be times when a journal metric, sensibly used, is the right tool for the job. By signing up to DORA, institutions may feel unable to use metrics at all.
This thesis considers the various perspectives of universities, academic staff and publishers to ... more This thesis considers the various perspectives of universities, academic staff and publishers to the copyright ownership of teaching and research outputs produced by UK universities, with a particular focus on how this affects the provision of online and/or open access to those outputs by university libraries. It presents ten papers written over a twenty year time frame that consider these issues within the context of a number of practitioner research projects and demonstrate how practices are changing over time. The papers employ a range of methodologies including questionnaire surveys, comparative design studies, interviews and content analyses. The key findings relating to research outputs (the scholarly royalty-free literature) are that rights are still mainly relinquished to academic staff by UK HEIs, although some HEIs are beginning to assert the right to re-use those works in various ways. Whilst academics are relied upon to either retain copyright or communicate their HEI s ...
L'article recherche l'effet de copyright sur la bibliotheque numerique d'apres l'... more L'article recherche l'effet de copyright sur la bibliotheque numerique d'apres l'experience du projet ACORN (Access to Course Readings via Networks) pour etablir des collections pour pret court de l'Universite de Longhborough : buts du Projet ACORN, aspects juridiques au Royaume-Uni (comment le copyright est applique dans un environnement electronique), bibliotheque numerique : difficulte d'identifier et contacter les titulaires juridiques, cout du copyright electronique, methodes de protection
Considering the future of research assessment, Elizabeth Gadd outlines how she believes research ... more Considering the future of research assessment, Elizabeth Gadd outlines how she believes research evaluation could be made better, fairer, and more meaningful. The resulting seven guiding principles, neatly framed as hashtags, range from understanding our responsibilities to researchers as people, through to ensuring our evaluations are a more formative process, offering valuable, constructive feedback.
To many authors, the point of publication can feel like the culmination of a process; the moment ... more To many authors, the point of publication can feel like the culmination of a process; the moment one’s troubles are over. But for many others, it can mark the start of a new set of wholly unanticipated problems. Elizabeth Gadd discusses some of the challenges she has faced after having her own papers published; from a lack of certainty about rights retained, through unwelcome surprises emerging after the copy editing process, to the interminable wait for a paper to be recognised by important abstract and indexing databases.
Slides from a keynote given to the NIH Bibliometrics & Research Assessment Symposium on Wednesday... more Slides from a keynote given to the NIH Bibliometrics & Research Assessment Symposium on Wednesday 7 October 2020.
Describes a method to provide an independent, community-sourced set of best practice criteria wit... more Describes a method to provide an independent, community-sourced set of best practice criteria with which to assess global university rankings and to identify the extent to which a sample of six rankings, Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), CWTS Leiden, QS World University Rankings (QS WUR), Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE WUR), U-Multirank, and US News & World Report Best Global Universities, met those criteria. The criteria fell into four categories: good governance, transparency, measure what matters, and rigour. The relative strengths and weaknesses of each ranking were compared. Overall, the rankings assessed fell short of all criteria, with greatest strengths in the area of transparency and greatest weaknesses in the area of measuring what matters to the communities they were ranking. The ranking that most closely met the criteria was CWTS Leiden. Scoring poorly across all the criteria were the THE WUR and US News rankings. Suggestions for developing the ranker rating method are described.
Draws parallels between the problematic use of GDP to evaluate economic success with the use of g... more Draws parallels between the problematic use of GDP to evaluate economic success with the use of global university rankings to evaluate university success. Inspired by Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, this perspective argues that the pursuit of growth as measured by such indicators creates universities that ‘grow’ up the rankings rather than those which ‘thrive’ or ‘mature’. Such growth creates academic wealth divides within and between countries, despite the direction of growth as inspired by the rankings not truly reflecting universities’ critical purpose or contribution. Highlights the incompatibility between universities’ alignment with socially responsible practices and continued engagement with socially irresponsible ranking practices. Proposes four possible ways of engendering change in the university rankings space. Concludes by calling on leaders of ‘world-leading’ universities to join together to ‘lead the world’ in challenging global university rankings, and to set their...
How can bibliometric and altmetric vendors improve? Messages from the end-user community This ite... more How can bibliometric and altmetric vendors improve? Messages from the end-user community This item was submitted to Loughborough University's Institutional Repository by the/an author.
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