Although only a small fraction of all scientific publications is retracted for misconduct, it has a profound impact on the research community, policy makers and the public at large. Indeed, over... Show moreAlthough only a small fraction of all scientific publications is retracted for misconduct, it has a profound impact on the research community, policy makers and the public at large. Indeed, over the last decades scientific integrity became a hot issue in science policy. Moreover, papers retracted for fraud or other reasons should not be cited or used anymore. Although in most cases they are earmarked as retracted in bibliographic databases and in the electronic version of journals, they often remain cited a long time after the retraction notice is published. The misconduct case of Jan Hendrik Schön is a well know example. It attracted a lot of attention due to the renown of the researcher’s institute, the claims and the sheer number of publications involved. This researcher co-authored more than 100 papers and rose through prominence at the turn of the century with a number of apparent ground breaking discoveries in materials science. In September 2002, an investigation commissioned by Bell Labs, his employer, concluded that 17 papers contained manipulation and misrepresentation of data. They were retracted along with an additional 14 papers based on them Other papers raised suspicion among the co-authors and the scientific community. Notwithstanding all the rumors provoked by this scandal in the physics community, the retracted papers remained cited even several years after they were removed from the body of literature. To get insight in the role of citations to Schön’s oeuvre in citing publications, natural language processing techniques on publications’ full text are used. The main questions are: to what extent, in what sections in the citing publications and in what context are papers co-authored by Schön cited. We make a distinction between retracted and non-retracted papers and between the citations that papers receive before and after the results of the fraud investigation became publicly available. Show less
Open access mandates are setting standards on how to publish open access, as well as indicate the timeframe in which these goals are supposed to be reached. Parallel to the OA development, taken up... Show moreOpen access mandates are setting standards on how to publish open access, as well as indicate the timeframe in which these goals are supposed to be reached. Parallel to the OA development, taken up both nationally as well supra-nationally, European and thus also Dutch academics are confronted with an increasing pressure to cooperate scientifically with European partners, via the consortia obligations expressed via for example EU funding instruments such as those under the more recent Framework programmes. So we notice for many years an increasing tendency to internationally collaborate for European science. The results presented in this study are part of a larger analysis in which CWTS supports the University and Royal Library system (UKB) in the Netherlands in their negotiations with the publishing industry, oriented towards the so called Big Deals. In this study, the question arose to what extent Dutch output was directly under the Big deals, that mean, a situation in which any publication with a Netherlands based author as corresponding author was involved, would get OA format published. The main research question here is: to what extent is the Dutch OA mandate hindered by EU policies to increasingly work together internationally for EU scientists (for example via EU Framework programmes, such as Horizon2020) ? Show less
