Study on open science: The general state of the play in Open Science principles and practices at European life sciences institutes

Nowadays, open science is a hot topic on all levels and also is one of the priorities of the European Research Area. Components that are commonly associated with open science are open access, open data, open methodology, open source, open peer review, open science policies and citizen science. Open science may a great potential to connect and influence the practices of researchers, funding institutions and the public. In this paper, we evaluate the level of openness based on public surveys at four European life sciences institute

Congress UPV Proceedings of the 21ST International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators

This is the book of proceedings of the 21st Science and Technology Indicators Conference that took place in València (Spain) from 14th to 16th of September 2016. The conference theme for this year, ‘Peripheries, frontiers and beyond’ aimed to study the development and use of Science, Technology and Innovation indicators in spaces that have not been the focus of current indicator development, for example, in the Global South, or the Social Sciences and Humanities. The exploration to the margins and beyond proposed by the theme has brought to the STI Conference an interesting array of new contributors from a variety of fields and geographies. This year’s conference had a record 382 registered participants from 40 different countries, including 23 European, 9 American, 4 Asia-Pacific, 4 Africa and Near East. About 26% of participants came from outside of Europe. There were also many participants (17%) from organisations outside academia including governments (8%), businesses (5%), foundations (2%) and international organisations (2%). This is particularly important in a field that is practice-oriented. The chapters of the proceedings attest to the breadth of issues discussed. Infrastructure, benchmarking and use of innovation indicators, societal impact and mission oriented-research, mobility and careers, social sciences and the humanities, participation and culture, gender, and altmetrics, among others. We hope that the diversity of this Conference has fostered productive dialogues and synergistic ideas and made a contribution, small as it may be, to the development and use of indicators that, being more inclusive, will foster a more inclusive and fair world

Scientists' concepts of scientific objectivity

According to the results of this qualitative data analysis, objectivity is the crucial value for both natural and social scientists. Both mostly believe that it is attainable ; both are least prone to define it as the correspondence of knowledge and reality ; both stress the importance of research procedures, primarily verification and evidence in science, and non-subjectivity and impartiality. A type of epistemological realism in the sense of the importance of evidence and reason seems to prevail in both scientific areas. Peculiarities of the cognitive style of the natural and social sciences follow the sociological typologies of scientific fields. Natural scientists show greater conviction in the attainment and attainability of objectivity, generally greater confidence in the power and efficiency of scientific methods and procedures, and they also accentuate replicability and measurement. Their greater inclination towards positivism is obvious. Relativism is, naturally, more frequent in social scientists. They put greater emphasis on the inevitability of subjectiveness and external influences in their field. They express greater doubt in the omnipotence of research methods and procedures, and more often either question the possibility of achieving objectivity or reject it in principle

Self-reported research productivity: patterns and factors

In terms of self-reported productivity, it has been empirically proven that the natural and social sciences have developed different publication patterns. The social area is characterised by twice the number of professional publications and by the preponderance of mono-authored publications among scientific works, whereas natural scientists produce twice as many papers indexed in WoS databases, and predominantly co-authored papers. A significant differentiation of research productivity is noticed in both areas because individual sciences show recognisable patterns of career and five-year productivity. The disciplinary specificities of research production patterns can be ascribed to differences in the intellectual and social organisation, mode of knowledge production and cognitive styles of scientific areas and fields. The composition of significant predictors and their contribution to explaining the analysed types of research productivity also differ. The best predictors of production in the natural sciences are the researcher’ s international cooperation and networking, whereas the social sciences show the greater impact of the scientist’ s national or local orientation, i.e. focus on the local scientific community. However, a predictor that at the same time accounts for a significant portion of publication productivity in both areas and indicates the scientist’ s social capital has been identified. It is the variable of invited stays abroad that would be impossible without the scientist’ s international collegial networking. Longitudinal data from Croatian and foreign studies (Kyvik, 1988, 2003) identify deep structural changes in the main forms of research productivity in both areas, especially in the social sciences, and chiefly in the number of authors and international availability of scientific results. Our findings, however, lead to the tentative conclusion that the levelling out or reduction of differences between the social and natural sciences takes place in productivity patterns, but to all appearances also in productivity predictors

How do scientists perceive scientific quality?

Perceptions of scientific quality were investigated using a qualitative research method – open-ended questions. Our respondents proved to understand scientific quality in a way similar to the understanding of Swedish scientists (Hemlin, 1993). This confirms the claim that scientists from different countries basically develop similar concepts of scientific quality (Hemlin, 2009). Differentiation between natural and social scientists in giving prominence to individual aspects or parts of the research process and the quality attributes ascribed to them is statistically relevant, but the similarities of their concepts of scientific quality are also indubitable. In both scientific areas, quality is most often mentioned in regard to scientific results and/or cognitions (knowledge), and the research problem is ranked third. However, methods are the second most frequently mentioned aspect in the social sciences, while scientific production has the same position in the natural sciences. Despite the same rating of attributes of scientific excellence, social scientists tend to highlight solidity of research more often than natural scientists. The perceptions of the measurability of scientific quality are structured similarly in both fields and no significant differences have been determined among them. Those convinced in the measurability of quality are relatively the most numerous, but while natural scientists more often tend to see bibliometric and scientometric methods as relatively reliable, social scientists do not consider them as the most suitable for measuring excellence

Beyond the myths about the natural and social sciences: a sociological view

The hypothetical starting point of the book was the concept of the complex socio-cognitive structure of science, with a common (relatively loose) nucleus of the basic characteristics of its social and intellectual system, the interdependence of these two systems, and a high level of cognitive and social peculiarity of individual scientific fields. Our goal was to gain as complete an insight into the socio-cognitive specificities of the natural and social sciences as possible, on the basis of comprehensive empirical research - an insight into the differences and similarities between natural scientists and social scientists in their career paths and patterns, professional performances and achievements, and scientific productivity, as well as in their perceptions of scientific objectivity and quality. To achieve this goal, a more complex quantitative and qualitative methodological approach with several research methods had to be applied. The first ever web survey among Croatian scientists was conducted in 2004, covering 480 or 24.7% of natural scientists and social scientists, from whom both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered. In 2007, the first comprehensive bibliometric study of the productivity of all 1, 938 doctors of natural and social sciences was carried out. The data on publications and citations over the period of the last ten years was collected from the WoS (Web of Science) and Scopus bibliographic and citation database for every PhD holder. Basic quantitative (including bibliometric) and qualitative analyses were conducted, in line with the goal and the concept of the book. Sociological papers, which form the backbone of the book, are enriched by an information-science approach to the analysis of the scientific output, the socio-psychological view of scientific quality, and an epistemological overview of objectivity in the social sciences. Besides a complex theoretical and methodological approach, interdisciplinarity was also necessary if any relevant contribution was to be made to understand the presumed gap between the natural and social sciences

The social and professional profile of natural and social scientists

The social and professional profile of natural and social scientists showed no significant differences in the two groups regarding their socio-demographic and socialisational background. Thus, we can conclude that they were mostly recruited from the same social groups. An elite social background, not necessarily accompanied by early elite educational achievements, characterises both groups of scientists. On the other hand, significant differences are seen in the professional aspects of these groups which also indicate a differentiation of the social and cognitive organisation of the two areas. While an academic institutional structure prevails in the social sciences, the natural sciences are marked by a high proportion of public institutes. Basic research prevails in the latter scientific area, while the social sciences include a greater proportion of applied research, development and mixed-type research. The career patterns in the compared areas also manifest great differences. Thus, an average natural scientist obtains a doctorate at a younger age than the social scientist. His career is more focused on regular research cooperation with international colleagues, and his high integration in the international scientific community is confirmed by the high rate of his reviewing of papers by international colleagues. In contrast to the natural scientist's profile, the Croatian social scientist works on more local projects and reviews more papers by local authors. He is also more often a member of the editorial boards of local journals. In brief, the natural scientists’ international orientation and the local national focus of social scientists are empirically corroborated here

Bridging the gap between the two scientific areas

Judging from the recruitment of research personnel, scientists’ organisational and cognitive context and career patterns, their output and cognitive convictions, the natural and social sciences show both similarities and significant differences. Although the differences between the two areas seem great, as in the orientation towards international and national research, or team and individual work, and even appear enormous as in the scientific production indexed in WoS, there are also similarities, even tendencies for cognitive practices to converge. Thus, the growing orientation towards team work, cooperation, and the international scientific scene can also be identified in social scientists, just as the lessening of those differences can be noticed over a relatively short period of time. Significant differences found in the cognitive convictions of researchers in the two scientific areas do not seem that great considering the theoretical expectations or the described cognitive styles of the natural and social sciences. For this reason, the claim of the unbridgeable gap between the natural and social sciences seems more of a myth when viewed through our empirical results than as a well-founded presupposition. The theories of scientific fields or organisations are superior to the unitary concept of science in their explanation of the differences in the social and intellectual organisation of scientific fields. Yet, they fail to explain the common features of scientific fields without demarcating science and other knowledge and belief producers. When such a modification is made, these theories (as shown by our findings) can successfully interpret both the common and the specific in the social organisation, professional and career patterns, research production and in the scientists’ cognitive convictions

The unbridgeable gap between the natural and social sciences?

A comprehensive empirical insight into the socio-cognitive specificities of the natural and social sciences was conceived in order to establish whether the sociological theories of science also built the myths on the great divide between these scientific areas. Instead of unitary and atomised models of science, we have developed a concept of complex socio-cognitive structure of science with some common social and intellectual features but also with the cognitive and social specificities of individual scientific fields. If modified in this direction, the theories of scientific organisations offer a fruitful, and the widest possible hypothetical framework for sociological empirical investigations of science. Such a theoretical approach, a complex methodology (combining both the quantitative and qualitative methods) as well as interdisciplinary perspective were necessary to provide an answer to the initial question whether the differences between these sciences are as deep as the dominant theories and typologies deem them to be