Open Science, Humanitarian Engagement, and Critical Social Media Appraisal

Come to The Unjournal’s Asia-Pacific online event on March 25, 6:30 PT, March 26, 10:30am Japan. Registration is open.

Peer review is not the only way of acquiring critical appraisal. Increasingly, researchers use open social networks to consider scholarly work. Jay Patel, a PhD student studying Information Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, explains:

Often, these social media users find signs of plagiarism, academic fraud, methodological flaws, analytic errors, weak conceptual foundations, deviations from preregistrations, and questionable interpretations of results. We consider these “organic critical appraisals (OrCAs)” to be interesting sociotechnical solutions for pre and post-publication peer review and worthy of cross-disciplinary analysis. Metascience and scientometrics have investigated these organic critical appraisals using quantitative methods like statistics and natural language processing (NLP). 

Jay will present his research at the Unjournal’s Asia-Pacific event titled Innovations in Research Evaluation, Replicability, and Impact on March 25. The presentation will later be made publicly available.

Another highlight of the event: a discussion facilitated by Dr. Safieh Shah on the role of open science and open evaluation within humanitarian engagement. Dr. Shah argues that open science cultivates deliberate, purposeful, and analytical participation among the scholarly circles of the humanitarian sector. She will discuss how can open science make humanitarian interventions stronger, more transparent, and more accountable.

Dr. Shah is a decolonial scientist from Pakistan, specializing in global health policy and operational research in global health. She has contributed by helping pioneer the first multidisciplinary and the first multi-country open-access data repository for Ebola hosted by the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO).

Patel and Shah will be joined by other speakers and discussion hosts, including David Reinstein (“Introducing The Unjournal”, “(How) should we rate research?”), Gary Charness (“Improving Peer Review in Economics“), Amanda Metskas and Clare Harris (“Transparent Replications”), and Takahiro Kubo (“Banning wildlife trade can boost demand for unregulated threatened species”, Impactful Research Prize winner ) during The Unjournal’s Asia-Pacific online event.

This event is co-hosted with Center for Open Science and Effective Thesis.