Open Access Research Research Articles

Studying technical sciences without borders: We use the navigator for open educational resources. Part 1. The Russian experience

Introduction. The introduction of information and communication technologies into learning processes expands the possibilities of using information resources and becomes one of the priorities of the transforming higher education system. These changes are reflected in the trends in the development and application of open educational resources. However, the scale and fragmentation of data on the Internet, as well as the lack of open educational resources standards, makes the information retrieval process a difficult task and requires professional skills.Purpose setting. To determine the relevance and prospects for the development of sectoral open educational resources, it is necessary to analyze their role in the modern educational system. It is important to identify the possibilities of using open access research in technical sciences as one of the tools to eliminate social inequality in higher education. To identify and present arguments for the purpose of justifying the need to develop an industry-specific «Navigator on OER of Technical Sciences» (hereinafter referred to as the «Navigator»).Methodology and methods of the study. The research methodology covers the study and analysis of scientific papers devoted to the development of tools and initiatives in the field of open educational resources in technical sciences both in Russia and abroad. This study is also based on the method of oral questioning of students, postgraduates and teachers of technical disciplines at universities in Novosibirsk. Results. An array of scientific literature and web resources has been studied, providing free access to scientific and educational information in the field of research under consideration. Taking into account empirical data, the necessity of developing a «Navigator» on open educational resources in the system of higher technical education is justified (http://lib-os.ru/issledovatelyam/resursy/obrazovatelnye- resursy/navigator-oor-techn-nauk/).Conclusion. The study of technical sciences using open educational resources contributes to the effective improvement of professional level and allows you to be aware of current solutions to innovative activities in the field of knowledge under consideration.

The h-Index Explained: Tools, Limitations and Strategies for Academic Success

The h-index, introduced by J.E Hursh in 2005, is a prevalent metric for assessing academic research productivity and impact. It evaluates a researcher’s cumulative impact by comparing the number of their publications to the number of citations they have received. Despite its straightforward computation, the h-index can be confusing for novice researchers. Various databases like Scopus, Google Scholar, ResearchGate and Web of Science offer h-index computations, each with unique features and access requirements. For example, Google Scholar provides h-index information based on citations indexed by its service, while Web of Sciences offers a comprehensive profile including total citations and indexed articles. The h-index is widely used in academia for evaluating candidates for hiring and promotion. Studies reveal varying benchmarks for different career stages and disciplines, with higher h-indices typically associated with senior researchers. However, the h-index has limitations, such as favouring established researchers and not accounting for citation practices across different fields. Further, some fields tend to have more literature available than others and there it appears imperative that those fields with less literature will mostly likely attract less readership resulting in less citations and hence lower h-Index for researcher and academicians in such fields. It also does not reflect publication quality or contributions beyond citations. Researchers can improve their h-index by publishing in high-impact journals, making research open access, collaborating, staying active in their field, and promoting their work. Despite its utility, the h-index should be used alongside other metrics to provide a more holistic view of a researcher’s impact.

Student athlete career management: A systematic review

The research aims to locate and examine articles discussing student-athlete career management worldwide, spanning from middle school to college. The targeted articles are those published from 2020 to 2024, in the form of English-language open-access research articles. The search involves the use of keywords such as “student-athlete, career, and management.” Data retrieval was conducted from two journal databases, namely ScienceDirect and Emerald, employing an article screening process guided by PRISMA guidelines. This process resulted in the identification of 5 relevant articles out of a total of 110. Screening was conducted systematically, encompassing the review of titles, abstracts, and full article contents to ensure comprehensive results. Mendeley software was utilized for article screening, and VOSviewer for data analysis. The findings indicate the necessity for future research to explore suitable support models for student-athletes, involving the engagement of government, schools/universities, and parents as mentors. This collaborative approach aims to establish a supportive environment for student-athletes, lessening the burden they face due to the demands of their dual careers.

EVA-02: A visual representation for neon genesis

We launch EVA-02, a next-generation Transformer-based visual representation pre-trained to reconstruct strong and robust language-aligned vision features via masked image modeling. With an updated plain Transformer architecture as well as extensive pre-training from an open & accessible giant CLIP vision encoder, EVA-02 demonstrates superior performance compared to prior state-of-the-art approaches across various representative vision tasks, while utilizing significantly fewer parameters and compute budgets. Notably, using exclusively publicly accessible training data, EVA-02 with only 304 M parameters achieves a phenomenal 90.0 fine-tuning top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1 K val set. Additionally, our EVA-02-CLIP can reach up to 80.4 zero-shot top-1 on ImageNet-1 K, outperforming the previous largest & best open-sourced CLIP with only ∼1/6 parameters and ∼ 1/6 image-text training data. We offer four EVA-02 variants in various model sizes, ranging from 6 M to 304 M parameters, all with impressive performance. To facilitate open access and open research, we release the complete suite of EVA-02 to the community at https://github.com/baaivision/EVA/tree/master/EVA-02.

Impact of the midwife-led care model on mode of birth: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background/Aims Increased rates of caesarean sections globally have potential short- and long-term impacts for mothers and babies. Research on models of care and mode of birth has reported varied results. The aim of this study was to analyse the relationship between the midwife-led model of care and mode of birth. Methods This systematic review and meta-analysis searched PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science. Quantitative full-text open access research articles published between 2010 and 2023 in Indonesian or English were included. Research that assessed the relationship between the model and birth planning were excluded. Results A total of 16 articles were included. Two were experimental, and the remaining 14 were observational, with a total sample of 125 201 people. The midwife-led model supported spontaneous vaginal birth (odds ratio: 1.64, P=0.01) when compared to other models. Conclusions Implementing the midwife-led model of care may increase the likelihood of physiological birth and reduce the incidence of caesarean section, especially in low-risk pregnancies.

Editorial: The Value of Open Access Research in the Age of Opinion-based Decision-Making

Editorial: The Value of Open Access Research in the Age of Opinion-based Decision-Making

In vitro fertilization as an option for couples with genetic disorders

Errors in human DNA may cause genetic disorders. Technological developments have raised hopes for reducing the risks of genetic inheritance among married couples who have a history of such disorders. Among the developments in reproductive health technology that reduce those risks is the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process. This review aimed to describe the current strategies using IVF and preimplantation genetic testing (PGT), which would be effective for couples with genetic disorders to have healthy offspring. The literature review included full-text, open-access research articles from ScienceDirect, PubMed, and Google Scholar that were published between 2013 and 2023, with 65 articles obtained from various journals. The keywords were “in vitro fertilization,” “reproductive genetic disorders,” “PGT-A,” “PGT-M,” “PGT-SR,” and “oocyte donor.” A total of 46 articles were selected as the most relevant to the review topic, and the results show that the IVF process can be an option for couples with a history of genetic disorders. Several additional procedures can be performed following IVF, such as oocyte donation and PGT, to help couples who want to have offspring without transmitting their genetic disorders. IVF can be an option for couples who have or carry genetic disorders. With IVF, couples can undertake several procedures such as oocyte donation and PGT for aneuploidy, monogenic disorders, or structural rearrangement.

Advancing Postoperative Pain Management in Oral Cancer Patients: A Systematic Review.

The goal of this review is to shed light on the management of orofacial discomfort after a cancer diagnosis in the head and neck region. A search was conducted on PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science to identify studies on postoperative pain control in oral cancer. The review included open-access research, investigations into pain management, randomized clinical trials, retrospective studies, case-control studies, prospective studies, English-written studies, and full-text publications. Exclusion criteria included animal studies; in vitro studies; off-topic studies; reviews, case reports, letters, or comments; and non-English language. Three reviewers independently accessed databases and assigned a quality rating to the chosen articles. The review explores postoperative pain management in oral cancer patients; highlighting persistent opioid use; the efficacy of adjuvant drugs, such as gabapentin; and a multimodal approach. It emphasizes the need for personalized pain management, recognizing individual pain perception and tailoring interventions. Integrating pharmacological and non-pharmacological strategies is crucial for comprehensive pain management. The review also serves as a guide for future research, emphasizing the need for standardized methodologies and diverse participant populations.

Não acho que devamos “combater” editores predatórios: uma entrevista com Jeffrey Beall

Beall’s List was discontinued in January 2017. It catalogued potential predatory publishers, known for publishing non-peer-reviewed open access articles with profit reasons. This leads to a pollution of the academic record with poorly reviewed pseudo-scientific data, which is harmful for science in general. In this interview, Beall discusses some aspects and impacts of predatory publishing, as well as the dilemma of open-access research and what different entities can do to diminish the influence of predatory journals.

Open Access and Reproducibility in Plant Pathology Research: Guidelines and Best Practices.

The landscape of scientific publishing is experiencing a transformative shift toward open access, a paradigm that mandates the availability of research outputs such as data, code, materials, and publications. Open access provides increased reproducibility and allows for reuse of these resources. This article provides guidance for best publishing practices of scientific research, data, and associated resources, including code, in The American Phytopathological Society journals. Key areas such as diagnostic assays, experimental design, data sharing, and code deposition are explored in detail. This guidance aligns with that observed by other leading journals. We hope the information assembled in this paper will raise awareness of best practices and enable greater appraisal of the true effects of biological phenomena in plant pathology.

An Empirical Study of the Policy Processes behind Norway’s BEV-Olution

Norway’s large battery electric vehicle (BEV) market and fleet are not the result of a comprehensive policy plan. Using the multiple streams (MS) framework and document analysis, it was identified that the most important Norwegian BEV policy decisions were made using inadequate policy processes that fall outside of traditional politics. This is contrary to the MS framework postulate that three independent streams of problems, policy solutions, and politics must align to pave the way for new policies. Politicians had limited information about the effects of policies they introduced in this “learning by doing process”. Impact assessments were rarely made. The decision rationale was often not documented. The future market expectation and thus the national budget consequences were low when important policy decisions were made, whereas the political gain was high. The processes were more aligned with traditional politics after 2014. The ambitious ZE vehicle targets for 2025 and the climate policy targets for 2030 locked in incentives, despite rising tax losses. In sum, these developments created the world’s largest per-capita BEV market. To avoid negative issues and keep the BEV policies’ potential to support the BEV transition, politicians should ensure that sufficient knowledge is available when making decisions about future policies. Such decisions should be taken transparently within traditional politics, be properly assessed as with EU policy processes, and regularly reviewed as with the California ZEV mandate process. The required knowledge should be developed in open-access research.

Open access research outputs receive more diverse citations

The goal of open access is to allow more people to read and use research outputs. An observed association between highly cited research outputs and open access has been claimed as evidence of increased usage of the research, but this remains controversial. A higher citation count also does not necessarily imply wider usage such as citations by authors from more places. A knowledge gap exists in our understanding of who gets to use open access research outputs and where users are located. Here we address this gap by examining the association between an output’s open access status and the diversity of research outputs that cite it. By analysing large-scale bibliographic data from 2010 to 2019, we found a robust association between open access and increased diversity of citation sources by institutions, countries, subregions, regions, and fields of research, across outputs with both high and medium–low citation counts. Open access through disciplinary or institutional repositories showed a stronger effect than open access via publisher platforms. This study adds a new perspective to our understanding of how citations can be used to explore the effects of open access. It also provides new evidence at global scale of the benefits of open access as a mechanism for widening the use of research and increasing the diversity of the communities that benefit from it.

Making science public: a review of journalists’ use of Open Access research

Science journalists are uniquely positioned to increase the societal impact of open research outputs by contextualizing and communicating findings in ways that highlight their relevance and implications for non-specialist audiences. Yet, it is unclear to what degree journalists use open research outputs, such as open access publications or preprints, in their reporting; what factors motivate or constrain this use; and how the recent surge in openly available research seen during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected this. This article examines these questions through a review of relevant literature published from 2018 onwards—particularly literature relating to the COVID-19 pandemic—as well as seminal articles outside the search dates. We find that research that explicitly examines journalists’ engagement with open access publications or preprints is scarce, with existing literature mostly addressing the topic tangentially or as a secondary concern, rather than a primary focus. Still, the limited body of evidence points to several factors that may hamper journalists’ use of these outputs and thus warrant further exploration. These include an overreliance on traditional criteria for evaluating scientific quality; concerns about the trustworthiness of open research outputs; and challenges using and verifying the findings. We also find that, while the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged journalists to explore open research outputs such as preprints, the extent to which these explorations will become established journalistic practices remains unclear. Furthermore, we note that current research is overwhelmingly authored and focused on the Global North, and the United States specifically. We conclude with recommendations for future research that attend to issues of equity and diversity, and more explicitly examine the intersections of open access and science journalism.

Are Pay-Walled Doors of Access Open During the Pandemic? Analysing the Open-Access Landscape of COVID-19 Research

Open access (OA) to research results is indispensable for knowing more about COVID-19 and ways to contain it. The study investigates the OA status of the research output on COVID-19 using the Web of Science. The results show that about 85 per cent of the publications are available as OA, which shows a decline over time. Almost an equal proportion of articles are funded and non-funded, with the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health, both in the United States, as the leading sponsors. Although the United States and China were the top contributors, Sweden and the Netherlands share the highest percentage of OA articles. Among publishers, Elsevier, Springer Nature, the Multidisciplinary Publishing Institute, and Wiley were the leading OA publishers, and universities mainly dominated OA research on COVID-19. This study will be helpful for researchers and policymakers to identify the leading contributors to OA research during public health emergencies of international concern.

Limitations in Medical Research: Recognition, Influence, and Warning.

As the number of limitations increases in a medical research article, their consequences multiply and the validity of findings decreases. How often do limitations occur in a medical article? What are the implications of limitation interaction? How often are the conclusions hedged in their explanation? To identify the number, type, and frequency of limitations and words used to describe conclusion(s) in medical research articles. Search, analysis, and evaluation of open access research articles from 2021 and 2022 from the Journal of the Society of Laparoscopic and Robotic Surgery and 2022 Surgical Endoscopy for type(s) of limitation(s) admitted to by author(s) and the number of times they occurred. Limitations not admitted to were found, obvious, and not claimed. An automated text analysis was performed for hedging words in conclusion statements. A limitation index score is proposed to gauge the validity of statements and conclusions as the number of limitations increases. A total of 298 articles were reviewed and analyzed, finding 1,764 limitations. Four articles had no limitations. The average was between 3.7% and 6.9% per article. Hedging, weasel words and words of estimative probability description was found in 95.6% of the conclusions. Limitations and their number matter. The greater the number of limitations and ramifications of their effects, the more outcomes and conclusions are affected. Wording ambiguity using hedging or weasel words shows that limitations affect the uncertainty of claims. The limitation index scoring method shows the diminished validity of finding(s) and conclusion(s).

Open access research publications in Indian Central Universities: A comparative study through bibliometric approach

Open access research publications in Indian Central Universities: A comparative study through bibliometric approach

Reframing the returns on metadata investments through discoverability, usage, and analytics

The interactions among metadata, content discoverability, and content usage have been undervalued by publishers for years. Despite the regular exhortations by librarians to encourage publishers to develop a good metadata program, it remains very difficult for them to make a robust business case for a positive return on investment from metadata creation and maintenance. However, with the ever-growing body of open access research and the production of datasets, blogs, websites, and other unique research outputs, it is an ideal time to revisit how metadata directly affects discovery and usage in the scholarly communications ecosystem. Certain pieces of metadata make demonstrable differences for helping or hindering end-user engagement, can increase or suppress usage, and, therefore, can be one of the keys to driving the business case for supporting open access and non-traditional scholarly outputs. Better metadata is key to gathering robust analytics on user-engagement.

Thesis Certification: The Role of BrCris in the Integration and Management of Academic Production in Brazil

The Brazilian scientific production has shown expressive but heterogeneous growth. BrCris is a system that integrates information from several databases to provide a complete view of the research process. It aims to certify and standardize scientific data, strengthening the reliability and quality of information. In this work, a case study is carried out to certify theses and dissertations registered in the Lattes Platform, using the Brazilian Portal of Open Access Publications and Research Data (Oasisbr). As a result of the adopted strategies, it was possible to certify approximately 700,000 theses and dissertations in the Lattes Platform curricula, providing greater reliability and access to certified documents.

Europe PMC annotated full-text corpus for gene/proteins, diseases and organisms

Named entity recognition (NER) is a widely used text-mining and natural language processing (NLP) subtask. In recent years, deep learning methods have superseded traditional dictionary- and rule-based NER approaches. A high-quality dataset is essential to fully leverage recent deep learning advancements. While several gold-standard corpora for biomedical entities in abstracts exist, only a few are based on full-text research articles. The Europe PMC literature database routinely annotates Gene/Proteins, Diseases, and Organisms entities. To transition this pipeline from a dictionary-based to a machine learning-based approach, we have developed a human-annotated full-text corpus for these entities, comprising 300 full-text open-access research articles. Over 72,000 mentions of biomedical concepts have been identified within approximately 114,000 sentences. This article describes the corpus and details how to access and reuse this open community resource.

Impact of the STK11/KRAS co-mutation on the response to immunotherapy in a real-world pan-cancer cohort.

Immune checkpoint inhibitors are highly effective in treating various cancers. We analyzed the significance of the KRAS/STK11 co-mutation in relation to the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors in pan-cancer patient cohort. We analyzed data from open-access research: MSK-IMPACT (molecular profiling data from patients receiving systemic antitumor therapy) and MSK-TMB (molecular profiling data from patients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors). In both studies, high throughput sequencing was used for molecular profiling. A total of 10,336 patients receiving antitumor therapy (MSK-IMPACT study) and 1661 patients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors (MSK-TMB study) were included in the analysis. Co-mutation STK11/KRAS was found in 156 (1.5%) and 46 (2.8%) patients in the two studies, respectively. Most patients with the STK11/KRAS co-mutation had non-small cell lung cancer (83% and 85% in the two studies, respectively). Among non-small cell lung cancer patients, the STK11 mutation was associated with a worse outcome for patients receiving systemic antitumor therapy, but not immune checkpoint inhibition therapy (HR for OS 1.90 [95% CI 1.36-2.65] and 1.44 [95% CI 0.88-2.37]). Co-mutation STK11/KRAS was also not associated with patient outcome in any of the studies (HR for OS 0.93 [95% CI 0.56-1.52] and 1.09 [95% CI 0.54-2.19]). High tumor mutational burden was associated with better outcome in the cohort of patients receiving immune checkpoint inhibitors. An analogous analysis among patients in the pan-cancer cohort (excluding patients with non-small cell lung cancer) showed STK11 mutations and high tumor mutational burden have a predictive role for the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors, but not STK11/KRAS co-mutation. Co-mutation STK11/KRAS is common among patients with non-small cell lung cancer and is not an independent predictive marker for the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors. Further studies are required to clarify the role of STK11 mutations in immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment response.