A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review [version 2; referees: 2 approved]

Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform and reduce the biases of existing models as much as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that could, at least partially, resolve many of the socio-technical issues associated with peer review, and potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments

Guide to Options for ETD Programs

Dr. Martin Halbert of the University of North Texas documents the spectrum of ETD program implementation and offers guidance for academic decision-makers who are either creating or modifying ETD programs. Dr. Halbert identifies and offers in-depth analysis regarding the five key decisions that ETD programs must make. He also provides a literature review of publications, standards and reports that have been produced to date, and relates these to the key decisions

Co-developing and co-validating location-specific fertilizer and agroclimate advisory service for Wheat in Ethiopia: the Digital Green Use Case

This report addresses activities conducted during the Incubation Phase of the Excellence in Agronomy (EiA) “Digital Green Ethiopia Use Case”. The report outlines the major activities implemented from proposal development to the execution of the main activities and associated results. The focus of the Use Case was to capitalize on the datasets and resources of the coalition of the willing (CoW) led by the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT and supported by GIZ) to develop and pilot a minimum viable product (MRV) related to the development of an agroadvisory tool incorporating fertilizer, crop planting date and wheat rust surveillance for wheat value chain in Ethiopia. EiA is generally composed of content development and associated demand partner. In this case, the Alliance and its team envisaged developing location-specific agroadvisory (content) and Digital Green would disseminate the content to extension and farmers using its agile channels. Accordingly, the Alliance team in Ethiopia supported by EiA and CoW team developed an integrated location-specific fertilizer recommendation tool that has been validated on selected farmers. in three regions and four Woredas of Ethiopia. Close to 300 farmers participated in the trails which were composed of: national blanket recommendation, local optimal recommendation (based on local research institutes, Universities, etc.), and the data-driven location-specific recommendation developed by the CoW-EiA collaborative project. Note that the ‘local optimal’ recommendation relates to commonly applied fertilizer type and rate based on suggestion by local experiences (applied in the four sites) but with no adequate documentation. Also note that the data-driven location-specific fertilizer recommendation refers to one developed through the collaborative effort of the CoW (supported by Alliance, GIZ-Ethiopia and EiA), in general referred to as the ‘Digital Green Use Case (DGUC). While evaluating the three trials, the Farmers’ field days and data analysis results clearly showed that the DGUC has produced significantly higher biomass and grain yield compared to the other two. Field validation results show that the location-specific advisory (DGUC) resulted in about 8-17% grain yield increase compared to the standard and local checks. Biomass yield of plots that received the DGUC advisory showed 8% (1 t ha-1 increase compared to the local check). This indicated location-specific fertilizer rate advisory boosted not only grain yield but also biomass yield, which is one of the most valuable products for feeding livestock in Ethiopia. In addition, thousand seed weight and plant vigor were higher with site-specific fertilizer rate compared with local fertilizer rates. This is an important achievement demonstrating the value of integrated data analytics to make date-based and knowledge-informed decision making. During the 2021/2022 season, an attempt will be made to develop and provide bundled advisories composed of onset of rains and planting date (extracted from EDACaP, Ethiopian Digital AgroClimate advisory Platform) and a weather surveillance system developed by different partners (EIAR, Alliance and CIMMYT). This report summarizes the details of activities associated with the DGUC undertaken in the 2020/2021 cropping season in Ethiopia. The report is organized into different sections, including: (1) background of the project, validation trial protocol development; (2) field trip to districts and kebeles for discussion and site selection; (3) training and planning workshop held on validation trial implementation, management, data collection and use of open data kit (ODK) for digital data collection; (4) field book preparation and customization of data forms on ODK; (5) fertilizer treatment set up for the target development group (DG); (6) barcoded identification card preparation for digital data collection; (7) validation trial inputs and research materials purchase and distribution; and (8) trial follow up and visit by Alliance (CIAT) and Digital Green team, and farmers’ field day to evaluate the three fertilizer treatment performances based on their observation; (9) validation trial data collection and submission to ONA using ODK tool; and (10) research results from the fertilizer validation trial data

Tree-Based Classifier Ensembles for PE Malware Analysis: A Performance Revisit

Given their escalating number and variety, combating malware is becoming increasingly strenuous. Machine learning techniques are often used in the literature to automatically discover the models and patterns behind such challenges and create solutions that can maintain the rapid pace at which malware evolves. This article compares various tree-based ensemble learning methods that have been proposed in the analysis of PE malware. A tree-based ensemble is an unconventional learning paradigm that constructs and combines a collection of base learners (e.g., decision trees), as opposed to the conventional learning paradigm, which aims to construct individual learners from training data. Several tree-based ensemble techniques, such as random forest, XGBoost, CatBoost, GBM, and LightGBM, are taken into consideration and are appraised using different performance measures, such as accuracy, MCC, precision, recall, AUC, and F1. In addition, the experiment includes many public datasets, such as BODMAS, Kaggle, and CIC-MalMem-2022, to demonstrate the generalizability of the classifiers in a variety of contexts. Based on the test findings, all tree-based ensembles performed well, and performance differences between algorithms are not statistically significant, particularly when their respective hyperparameters are appropriately configured. The proposed tree-based ensemble techniques also outperformed other, similar PE malware detectors that have been published in recent years

A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform and reduce the biases of existing models as much as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that could, at least partially, resolve many of the socio-technical issues associated with peer review, and potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments

A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform and reduce the biases of existing models as much as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that could, at least partially, resolve many of the socio-technical issues associated with peer review, and potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments

Bridging different worlds:Using people analytics effectively for improving well-being and performance

Sparked by an ever-increasing amount of data, organizations have begun to analyze the data of their workforce in hopes of improving their business outcomes (Cascio, Boudreau, & Fink, 2019; Levenson, 2005). This practice is called people analytics and refers to “the analysis of employee and workforce data to reveal insights and provide recommendations to improve business outcomes” (Ferrar & Green, 2021). People analytics can support any employee-related decision (Ellmer & Reichel, 2021; Huselid & Minbaeva, 2019), help the Human Resources Management (HRM) function become more strategic (Angrave, Charlwood, Kirkpatrick, Lawrence, & Stuart, 2016), and allow an organization to prepare for the future (Guenole, Ferrar, & Feinzig, 2017). Practically, people analytics can, for example, identify internal and external talents, create succession pipelines, predict which talents may be tempted to leave the organization and provide recommendations on how they may be retained most efficiently (Minbaeva & Vardi, 2018; Rosenbaum, 2019; Yuan, Kroon, & Kramer, 2021). Due to these proposed benefits, organizations invest heavily in people analytics (Ledet, McNulty, Morales, & Shandell, 2021). Nevertheless, most organizations struggle to use it effectively (Ledet et al., 2020; Orgvue, 2019; Inc. Sierra-Cedar, 2019). Therefore, this dissertation aims to answer the following research question: How people analytics can be used to gain insights into and provide recommendations to enhance business outcomes? To answer this question, this dissertation addressed three challenges from the people analytics literature after a general introduction of the topic and challenges in chapter 1. The challenges, their importance and the results of the different chapters are briefly discussed in the following. How can an effective people analytics function be created? (challenge 1) This dissertation investigates what a people analytics function requires to be effective. This is important, as there is a rather limited understanding of how people analytics can be implemented effectively within the people analytics literature (Fernandez & Gallardo-Gallardo, 2020; Qamar & Samad, 2021). To address this issue, I conducted a narrative literature review (chapter 2) and follow-up qualitative research (chapter 3). For the literature review, the people analytics literature and broader more advanced, business intelligence domain that people analytics is part of (Davenport & Harris, 2017; Holsapple et al., 2014) were investigated. Based upon this, a number of crucial elements for an effective people analytics function were identified. However, a number of gaps within the literature were also found. Specifically, the relationships between the different elements and the processes a people analytics function requires to transform its inputs into outputs remained unclear. To address these gaps in our knowledge, qualitative follow-up research was conducted (chapter 3). To this end, 36 in-depth interviews with members of nine people analytics functions and their stakeholders were conducted. Based on the findings, eight processes were identified to transform the inputs into outputs. Some of these are related to the projects of a people analytics function (i.e. project selection, management, execution and the compliant and ethical behavior of people analytics experts) and others to their stakeholders (i.e. the attitude of stakeholders, collaborations, partnerships and the transparency of people analytics function to their stakeholders). Furthermore, the “People Analytics Effectiveness Model” together with seven propositions to guide future research were developed. These propositions illustrated on one hand the relative importance of the different elements a people analytics function requires. For example, having data was found to be more crucial than a specific organizational culture. On the other hand, the propositions showed the relationships between the different elements: Delivering high-quality people analytics products, for instance, increased the reputation of the people analytics function. Furthermore, as the reputation increased, people analytics functions were typically provided with more inputs and better contextual factors, such as access to new datasets and increased support from senior management. How can people analytics be used to enhance employee well-being and performance? (challenge 2) This dissertation demonstrates how people analytics can be used to enhance employee well-being and performance through two use cases. This is relevant, as organizations increasingly consider how the interest of the manager and employees may be achieved in conjunction (Battilana, Obloj, Pache, & Sengul, 2020; Paauwe, 2004). However, there are few empirical studies on people analytics that demonstrate it can provide insights and recommendations that support employee well-being or performance (Margherita, 2021). In chapter 4, I therefore demonstrate how people analytics can be used to evaluate whether the decision of a company to adopt the agile way of working is beneficial to employee well-being and performance. The agile way of working is an increasingly popular way of working among teams, that is characterized by self-management, face-to-face communication, reflexivity, a quick product turnaround and customer interaction (Beck et al., 2001). To do this, I developed a survey focused on the agile way of working and tested among 97 teams from an organization whether the agile way of working leads to beneficial outcomes. Based upon the results, it appeared that this was indeed the case: The agile way of working was found to be related to increased levels of team engagement and performance regardless of teams’ functional domains. Moreover, it was found that these effects are partially mediated by psychological safety climate. Following this research, the company central to this research now has data-driven insights that support the decision to implement the agile way of working across a variety of functional domains. In chapter 5, I show how people analytics can be used to provide insights about employee well-being and performance and inform job design practices. Specifically, I tested in line with the HRM literature (e.g. Ayala et al., 2017; Benitez et al., 2019; Tordera et al., 2020) whether complex trade-off patterns may occur between employee well-being and performance. Based upon data of 5,729 employees working in a large financial organization, I find support for the notion that five well-being and performance profiles exist: 1. Low well-being/low performance, 2. low well-being/medium performance, 3. high well-being/medium performance, 4. high well-being/high performance, and 5. high well-being/top performance. Furthermore, it appeared that specific job demands and resources are related to these well-being and performance profiles. Specifically, employees with more learning and development opportunities, more social support from colleagues, more autonomy, and less role-conflict were related to the high well-being profiles. Additionally, employees with more role clarity, more performance feedback, more autonomy, and less work pressure were related to the high- and top-performance profiles. Finally, communication and social support from the manager were found to be relatively weak antecedents of the different profiles. How can people analytics departments benefit from a collaboration with academia? (challenge 3) The final challenge this dissertation addresses is how people analytics departments may benefit from a collaboration with academia. This is an important topic, as a competency gap among people analytics practitioners has been identified as being one of the main obstacles for organizations to use people analytics effectively (Fernandez & Gallardo-Gallardo, 2020; McCartney et al., 2020). Specifically, Human Resource (HR) professionals usually fall short of statistical skills and statistically strong individuals usually lack business acumen and HR knowledge (Andersen, 2016; McCartney et al., 2020; Rasmussen & Ulrich, 2015). As a potential solution, a collaboration with academia has been suggested (Simón & Ferreiro, 2018; Van der Togt & Rasmussen, 2017). Specifically, the so-called “boundary spawners”, in which for example PhD candidates bridge the gap between academia and a people analytics department is frequently mentioned within the people analytics literature (Minbaeva, 2018; Van der Togt & Rasmussen, 2017). To illustrate how this may work in practice, chapter 6 of this dissertation discusses the benefits, challenges and potential ways to navigate through these challenges based upon my own experience of working in a joined PhD trajectory for 4.5 years. In total, six benefits and five challenges were identified in this chapter. Among the benefits, the opportunity to conduct relevant research for both parties and the time and opportunity to identify and address real and pressing business needs are for instance discussed. With regards to the challenges, topics such as the different potential interest for both parties and limitations regarding the data are described. Discussion After addressing the challenges, the discussion follows in chapter 7. This chapter holds a summary of the main findings of this dissertation, their theoretical and practical contributions, strengths and limitations and points of reflection. The primary contribution of this dissertation is to explore how people analytics can be used to gain insights into and provide recommendations to enhance business outcomes. To this end, the discussion chapter described what a people analytics function requires to be effective, investigated two potential use cases and showed how a collaboration with academics may be beneficial and challenging. Furthermore, four points of reflection are discussed within this chapter. First, I describe how people analytics can contribute to and benefit from the employee experience. The employee experience is one of the actual trends within the field of HRM and emphasizes that organizations need to consider the wants, needs and expectations of their employees from the moment of their recruitment all the way to the moment they leave the organization. Furthermore, as each employee is different, employee experience experts emphasize the need to offer a differentiating employee experience depending on the wants, needs and expectations of specific employees (Dye et al., 2020; Whitter, 2019). In this section, five concrete ways in which people analytics can support employee experience experts through data-driven insight are discussed. Furthermore, the reverse value of the employee experience for people analytics is also discussed. Specifically, whereas a substantial amount of HR professionals are confused or skeptical about the use of people analytics (Guenole & Feinzig, 2018), the far majority is enthousiastic about improving the employee experience (Dye et al., 2020). By offering insights and recommendations on a topic HR professionals are enthousiastic about, it is suggested people analytics can improve the number of data-driven decisions taken within the HRM function, and through this, enhance employee well-being and performance. Second, I explore how data science and HRM research can become more intertwined. On one hand, it is discussed how HRM scholars can utilize the data sources and analysis techniques used by data scientists to make new contributions to the HRM literature. Specifically, the analysis of non-survey data, such as unstructured text and (HRM) system data, is highlighted as a method to unveil relevant insights into the sentiment, behavior, and perceptions of employees (e.g., Gloor et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2021). On the other hand, it is suggested that data scientists may benefit more from using survey data, theories, and analysis and interpretation techniques common among HRM scholars. This could help them to avoid oversimplifying reality (e.g., human beings are more complex and unpredictable than the numbers captured in the HR information system or their model output may suggest) and avoid misinterpretations, miscalculations and errors as a result (Giermindl et al., 2021). Third, I discuss the topic of ethics within people analytics. Despite of the benefits of people analytics that this dissertation highlighted, people analytics has also been used by organizations for unethical matters, such as intrusively tracking employees (Ajunwa et al., 2017; Tursunbayeva et al., 2021), (unintentionally) discrimination (Dastin, 2018) or even firing employees (e.g., Business Internet Tech, 2021). Therefore, the ethical aspect of people analytics are highlighted in this section. On one side of the spectrum, I discuss that it is always necessary to operate within the boundaries of the law but not always sufficient, and explore the negative consequences of behaving unethically for the people analytics function itself. On the other end of the spectrum, I also discuss three examples in which I believe it is ethically just to push for the use of people analytics. Specifically, I advocate that data-driven insights can bring more equality and fairness to the workplace, increase the employability of employees and enhance employee well-being. Therefore, it is concluded in this section people analytics is not necessarly good or evil and that it should be reviewed on a case-by-case basis whether it is ethical to use people analytics. Fourth, I discuss the governance of people analytics. Although in this dissertation various governance aspects are discussed (e.g., data governance, governance of the people analytics function), I suggest people analytics scholars and practitioners should also pay attention to the question of who owns people analytics. This is important, as software providers are increasingly facilitating HR experts and line managers to run their own (semi) automated advanced analytics models. However, as these professionals typically lack the skills, there is a high risk of misinterpretation of the results, finding incorrect findings due to pure chance (e.g., as a result of the error margin for all statistical models) and statistical artifacts such as reverse causal relationships and spurious effects. I therefore recommend caution in enabling professionals who lack the capabilities to run advanced analytical models in fear of wasting valuable organizational resources on the wrong actions, and to focus on building their analytical capability first. Finally, I conclude this dissertation by emphasizing that the age of people analytics is just beginning. Continued attention from academics and practitioners will therefore be needed to ensure that the right bridges are built between different worlds to be effective at people analytics: These are the worlds of HRM and technology; the worlds of academia and practice; the worlds of data science practitioners and HR practitioners; the worlds of subjectivity and objectivity; and the worlds of employee well-being and performance

Exploring the feasibility of bioenergy crop production with a multi-analytical approach: a case study from Kentucky

Bioenergy crops can provide a reliable and adequate supply of biomass feedstocks to support the bioenergy industry. However, commercial scale production of bioenergy crops has not been established to meet the increasing energy demand for the bioenergy industry. Thus, there is a need to explore the full potential of bioenergy crop production to support energy generation. This dissertation examined the feasibility of bioenergy crop production in the southern United States with a case study from Kentucky. For the feasibility of bioenergy crop production, I (1) analyzed trade-offs among the major components of bioenergy crop production, (2) assessed landowners’ willingness to promote bioenergy crops and, (3) evaluated potential bioenergy policies and prioritized them based on their effectiveness to support the promotion of sustainable bioenergy production. I used multiple approaches including a multi-objective optimization model, a questionnaire survey, and an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model, to examine the feasibility of bioenergy production. The trade-off analysis highlighted potential opportunities and risks in bioenergy production. Even though there were suitable lands for growing bioenergy crops, the production was not economically beneficial. Further, higher bioenergy production generated concerns for negative impact on the environment. Thus, results from the trade-off analysis showed a need to find the best balance among the trade-offs for better production decisions. The landowner survey indicated that they were relatively more willing to grow bioenergy crops themselves than rent their land to others. Current land management practices and socio-economic and environmental factors affected their land use decisions about bioenergy crop production. Finally, my policy analysis highlighted that policies that incorporate environmental conservation are key to establishing bioenergy crops. In addition, consideration should also be given to efficient technological support while designing specific policy to promote bioenergy production. Overall, results from the whole study can be useful to design effective policies, develop outreach activities, and support technological investments that would promote bioenergy crop production in ways that are economically efficient as well as compatible with social, and environmental factors