Clemens Blümel

Digital tools, software and related infrastructures are central to modern science and research. With regards to open science, open software tools are becoming increasingly important as they promote and support collaboration, reproducibility and access to resources. Researchers are actively contributing to the development of these “Open Research Tools (ORT)” and are thus helping to shape the digital transformation of the science system. This change is also noticeable in Germany, where the area of research software is gaining increasing importance. The aim of the study is...

The Trend Survey Research Data Infrastructures 2024 is part of the accompanying research of the Basic Services for the National Research Data Infrastructure (Base4NFDI). The trend survey captures the perception, use and evaluation of established and new data infrastructures and services in the German research landscape. The focus in on the perspective of (potential) users.

This study investigates whether researchers whose published research record is more thematically broad —covering more, and more semantically distant, topics— are also characterized by specific patterns in their mobility between research organizations and countries and their co-authorship patterns. We study a large sample of productive authors in STEM fields who have been active in Germany. Our results show that specific types of international mobility go together with slightly elevated epistemic breadth. But scientists with larger co-author networks have relatively greater epistemic breadth. [...]

This article deals with expectation dynamics in the field of synthetic biology. The article draws on scholarly review articles as the main material, complemented by expert interviews conducted with scholars from the field. The aim is to explore how expectations change over time and how they are used to justify and move the field. Drawing from conceptual advances of the sociology of expectations, I show how expectations are increasingly linked at different levels (the landscape, sector, and niche level) and how they support and justify the field among different audiences.

The contribution deals with what happens when science opens up and communicates’ and the emerging challenges for future scientific communication.

Research that investigates respective researchers’ engagement in Open Science varies widely in the topics addressed, methods employed, and disciplines investigated, which makes it difficult to integrate and compare its results. To investigate current outcomes of Open Science research, and to get a better understanding on well-researched topics and research gaps, we aimed at providing an openly accessible overview of empirical studies that focus on different aspects of Open Science in different scientific disciplines, academic groups and geographical regions. In this paper, we describe a data set of studies about Open Science practices retrieved following a PRISMA approach to compile a literature review.

Many journals now rely on editorial management systems, which are supposed to support the administration and decision making of editors, while aiming at making the process of communication faster and more transparent to both reviewers and authors. Yet, little is known about how these infrastructures support, stabilize, transform or change existing editorial practices. By exploring process generated data from a publisher’s editorial management system, we investigate the ways by which the digital infrastructure is used and how it represents the different realms of the process of peer review. How does the infrastructure support, strengthen or restrain editorial agency for administrating the process?