Previous Research Initiatives

Understanding the Societal Impact of Research Through Social Media

Juan Pablo Alperin, Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, Katherine Reilly, Florence Millerand
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
2016 – 2019
As the communication of research increasingly takes place on social media platforms, there is enormous potential to capture and analyze digital traces left by scholars. This offers, for the first time, the opportunity to study at large scale—using both quantitative and qualitative methods—the processes of knowledge dissemination and co-creation between academia and the public. Taking advantage of this opportunity, the authors of this SSHRC-funded project asked: What is the nature and extent of societal impact of research that can be observed through the public’s engagement with research on social media?
Social media symbols like twitter and Facebook likes, verifications, hashtags, and then open access symbols at the bottom, representing the question of the relationship between social media and open access.

The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Pre-History from Saint Jerome to John Locke

John Willinsky
Stanford Humanities Center
2009-2016
* John Willinsky, (2017). The intellectual properties of learning: A pre-history from Saint Jerome to John Locke (open access edition). University of Chicago Press.
This book-length project seeks to establish how a prototypical form of intellectual property emerged from within medieval monasteries and cathedral schools, and all the more so through the universities, from the medieval to Early Modern era. These learned properties were, and often continue to be, distinguished by economic and legal, as well as textual and cultural, qualities. This prehistory culminates with Locke’s theory of property and early copyright law at the turn of the seventeenth century. Both can be shown to support distinctions that still set learned intellectual properties apart from other sorts, and that tend to be lost sight of amid the current intellectual-property gold rush. View the project in progress and related publications.
Book cover of The Intellectual Properties of Learning book by PKP's John WIllinsky

Open Innovation in Latin American Scholarly Communication: Planning for Greater Integration and Impact

Juan Pablo Alperin, Gustavo Fischman, and John Willinsky
International Development Research Centre
2010-2014
Latin American scholars are putting higher proportions of their scholarship online, free of charge, and free of most copyright restrictions, than scholars from any other part of the world. It is within this context that PKP seeks to build on the experience gained through previous collaborations and knowledge with relevant institutions in the region. The authors of this study analyzed Open Science, Open Access and Open Source Software (OS/OA/OSS) approaches toward two goals: a) directed toward exploring emerging challenges in the production, circulation, and utilization of scientific knowledge within and outside the scholarly community and; b) promoting greater efficiencies in communication in scholarly practice that have been shown to advance scientific production, circulation, and utilization of knowledge.  
Results from one of the outcomes detailing the nature of online presence and sources of financial support.

Public Access to Health Research

Cheryl Holzmeyer, Laura Moorhead, Lauren Maggio, John Willinsky
2011-2014
In 2008, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) instituted a Public Access Policy that requires recipients of NIH funding to make all resulting peer-reviewed journal articles publicly accessible within a year of publication. The study tested the hypothesis that, if health personnel are provided with relatively complete online access to the primary research literature, their use of research evidence will increase, as this use contributes to their professional practice and personal learning. It involved two professional communities, family physicians and non-profit health organization (NGO) staff, who advocate for public health and policy change. A sample of 100 family physicians and 50 NGO health organizations were provided with access to a point of care (POC) research summary service (UpToDate) and, as a proxy of future public access policy results, the journal collection of Stanford University Library. Participants were debriefed on the why and how of their research use, and a secondary analysis was conducted to determine demographic, technical, and training factors that affect information access and utilization, with the intent of informing policy-making in the sciences, education, and other areas.
Open locks at the top indicate open access and the charts, graphs, brain, heartbeat, relationship, mushroom, and herbs indicate health research. Open access to health research.

Major Science Initiative

PKP and Érudit
2017-2022
In partnership with Érudit, PKP has been recognized as a Major Science Initiative in Canada, the only Humanities and Social Science project in this category. Funding will help to ensure the maintenance of PKP as a sustainable research and development facility serving the needs of researchers in Canada and internationally. To further our work, we have created the Coalition Publi.ca, which formalizes the partnership between our two organizations.
Coalition Publica logo

Review, Promotion, and Tenure

Juan Pablo Alperin, Erin McKiernan, Meredith Niles, Lesley Schimanski, Carol Muñoz Nieves, Lisa Matthias, Michelle La, Esteban Morales, Diane (DeDe) Dawson

2016-2020

The review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process is central to academic life and workplace advancement. It influences where faculty direct their attention, research, and publications. By unveiling the RPT process, we can inform actions that lead towards a greater opening of research. To do so, we collected and analyzed more than 850 RPT guidelines from 129 research institutions across Canada and the US. We assessed the degree to which they included guidelines specific to open access, open data, and open education, and how non-traditional outputs are evaluated in the RPT process. We also explored the use of common metrics and research terms (e.g., Journal Impact Factor, “quality,” “prestige”) in these documents, analyzing how often they defined and mentioned these controversial terms. Finally, we investigated faculty members’ perceptions about the RPT process, including what publishing strategies they believe will be rewarded and how this influences their dissemination choices, as well as how “collegiality” is defined and used in the tenure process.


Top right: Infographic artfully crafted by Minh Ngo / The Visual Scribe (originally one piece landscape orientation, split in two and stacked for this website). 
Full infographic showing the need to shift the focus from status to value when considering review, tenure, and promotion.

Preprint Uptake and Use

ASAPbio and ScholCommLab; Juan Pablo Alperin, Lauren Maggio, Joseph Costello, Mario Malički, Janina Sarol, Naomi Penfold
ASAPbio
2019-2020
In this research project, the ScholCommLab and scientist-driven non-profit ASAPbio teamed up to better understand the status of preprint adoption and impact in specific research communities. The project aimed to consolidate, analyze, and map data documenting the adoption of preprinting in specific communities. As a result, the team hopes to situate conservations about preprinting and best practice among researchers in their networks.
This was John Willinsky's desk when he was doing research for one of his books. The image is meant to represent how PKPers have made open access and the associated research and infrastructure a major part of their lives.

CyberInfrastructure Grant

PKP and Érudit
2017-2020
Also in partnership with Érudit, this grant funds the development of the OJS beacon to help us better understand and serve the globally distributed OJS community. our work aims to better automate and edit the production of JATS-XML galley files and their integration into the OJS workflow, and the creation of alternative forms of metrics, including our work on Paperbuzz.