Part of the winning submission in the category 'best tool'.
A bit later than intended, but I am pleased to announce the winner of the Winter solstice challenge: Bianca Kramer! Of course, she was the only contender, but her solution is awesome! In fact, I am surprised no one took her took, ran it on their own data and just submit that (which was perfectly well within the scope of the challenge).Best Tool: Bianca KramerThe best tool (see the code snippet on the right) uses R and a few R packages (rorcid, rjson, httpcache) and services like ORCID and CrossRef (and the I4OC project), and the (also awesome) oadoi.org project. The code is available on GitHub.Highest Open Knowledge Score: Bianca KramerI did not check the self-reported score of 54%, but since no one challenged here, Bianca wins this category too.So, what next? First, start calculating your own Open Knowledge Scores. Just to be prepared for the next challenge in 11 months. Of course, there is still a lot to explore. For example, how far should we recurse with calculating this score? The following tweet by Daniel Gonzales visualizes the importance so clearly (go RT it!):
We have all been there, and I really think we should not teach our students it is normal that you have to trust your current read and no be able to look up details. I do not know how much time Gonzales spent on traversing this trail, but it must not take more than a minute, IMHO. Clearly, any paper in this trail that is not Open, will require a look up, and if your library does not have access, an ILL will make the traverse much, much longer. Unacceptable. And many seem to agree, because Sci-Hub seems to be getting more popular every day. About the latter, almost two years ago I wrote Sci-Hub: a sign on the wall, but not a new sign.
Of course, in the end, it is the scholars that should just make their knowledge open, so that every citizen can benefit from it (keep in mind, a European goal is to educate half the population with higher education, so half of the population is basically able to read primary literature!).
That completes the circle back to the winner. After all, Bianca Kramer has done really important work on how scientists can exactly do that: make their research open. I was shocked to see this morning that Bianca did not have a Scholia page yet, but that is fixed now (though far from complete):
Finally, follow her on Twitter and read her latest work posted as preprint at PeerJ: Open access levels: a quantitative exploration using Web of Science and oaDOI data! BTW, if you want to use Scholia to show more work together with Jeroen Bosman, try this.
Other papers that you should be read more include:
Comparing the coverage, recall, and precision of searches for 120 systematic reviews in Embase, MEDLINE, and Google Scholar: a prospective study
Innovations in scholarly communication - global survey on research tool usage
Congratulations, Bianca!