What happened? Months ago, the Barcelona Declaration was signed by several institutions around the globe—indeed, I’ve already discussed it in a previous post. To create an appropriate forum to discuss its commitments and to devise collegially a joint roadmap for open research information, the promoters of the declaration, with the help of the Sorbonne University, organised the Paris Conference on Open Research Information, which will take place on September 23-24, 2024, in Paris. The current programme touches on several aspects and stakeholders directly involved in the declaration to explore policies, data and practical implementations, international collaborations, funders, governments, and infrastructures.
What I did. In the following months, I have been involved with several people in creating a framework to exchange scholarly metadata, coordinated in the context of the RDA Working Group on Scientific Knowledge Graphs – Interoperability Framework (SKG-IF). In particular, after having worked on a JSON-LD context for serving the metadata described according to SKG-IF in Linked Open Data form, I’ve just provided a few examples of data based on sources downloadable by using the OpenCitations Meta API. All this material – which includes the JSON-LD context, toy examples of the entities described by the framework, graphs depicting the data model, data samples, and scripts for converting data across formats – is available on one of my GitHub repositories.
What to read. Peer reviewing is a crucial activity in academia since it is one of the primary means we use to assess the soundness of scholarly contributions. Being an activity done by humans, peer reviewing may be biased by subjective points of view, and, as such, it is not a perfect (and measurable, quantitatively) way to assess others’ work. However, it is probably our best (and time-consuming) tool for evaluating science. Being a subjective activity, may peer review be gamed – and, if so, why? Here is an article to start such a discussion:
Brainard, J. (2024). Suspicious phrases in peer reviews point to referees gaming the system. Science, 385(6714), 1150–1150. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.zz2zu81