Open Research Data and Open Peer Review: Perceptions of a Medical and Health Sciences Community in Greece

Abstract

Recently significant initiatives have been launched for the dissemination of Open Access as part of the Open Science movement. Nevertheless, two other major pillars of Open Science such as Open Research Data (ORD) and Open Peer Review (OPR) are still in an early stage of development among the communities of researchers and stakeholders. The present study sought to unveil the perceptions of a medical and health sciences community about these issues. Through the investigation of researchers` attitudes, valuable conclusions can be drawn, especially in the field of medicine and health sciences, where an explosive growth of scientific publishing exists. A quantitative survey was conducted based on a structured questionnaire, with 179 valid responses. The participants in the survey agreed with the Open Peer Review principles. However, they ignored basic terms like FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and appeared incentivized to permit the exploitation of their data. Regarding Open Peer Review (OPR), participants expressed their agreement, implying their support for a trustworthy evaluation system. Conclusively, researchers need to receive proper training for both Open Research Data principles and Open Peer Review processes which combined with a reformed evaluation system will enable them to take full advantage of the opportunities that arise from the new scholarly publishing and communication landscape.

Individual Perspectives on Data Sharing: Human Factors Impacting the Digital Economy

“…In the context of research open data, there was less concern about technical skill working with data and more concern that terms like FAIR and the general vocabulary and landscape of open research were unfamiliar to researchers (e.g. Delikoura and Kouis, 2021). The lack of understanding or ability to provide appropriate metadata, or a need for appropriate standards was noted throughout the literature (e.g., Martin et al, 2013;Schmidt et al, 2015;Suhr et al, 2020).…”

“…Commercial exploitation of data was also mentioned as a concern, with different attitudes toward other researchers using data versus corporations profiting from data (e.g. Delikoura & Kouis, 2021). The picture that emerged across the articles discussing this concern is not that researchers needed control or feared losing personal control, but rather they did not have confidence that their data would be used for broadly-and personallydefined "good".…”

“…Concern about de-identified research data was also common, including concern about a lack of ability to correctly de-identify data (e.g. Delikoura & Kouis, 2021) and concern that end users would be able to combine different datasets to create identifying information that government did not intend to release (e.g. Barry & Bannister, 2014).…”

“…There was some evidence that in the context of managing research data, the perceived skill gap is often larger than the actual skill gap, and that much of the gap is jargon (Aleixandre-Benavent et al, 2020). This has three big implications: first, the scale of the intervention needed re: training is likely small and might be suitable for a nudging-type approach; second, the intervention should focus on RDM-specific skills and jargon like data anonymization, FAIR principles, data repositories (Delikoura & Kouis, 2021); and third, clearly defining the skills required could itself be a mitigation of a training barrier.…”

“…The articles implied that respondents were comparing their resources to their peers in other nations. Yet the research in the other nations reports similar skill gaps.Skill gaps are often mentioned in the same sentence as a lack of training or support (e.g Delikoura and Kouis, 2021),. and training is suggested as a mitigation for this and many of the other barriers.…”