Category: Open Access

"An Open Social Scholarship Path for the Humanities"


Open digital scholarship is significant for facilitating public access to and engagement with research, and as a foundation for growing digital scholarly infrastructure around the world today and in the future. But the path to adopting open, digital scholarship on a national—never mind international—scale is challenged by several real, pragmatic issues. In this article, we consider these issues as well as proactive strategies for the realization of robust, inclusive, publicly engaged, open scholarship in digital form. We draw on the INKE Partnership’s central goal of fostering open social scholarship (academic practice that enables the creation, dissemination, and engagement of open research by specialists and non-specialists in accessible and significant ways). In doing so, we look to pursue more open, and more social, scholarly activities through knowledge mobilization, community training, public engagement, and policy recommendations in order to understand and address challenges facing digital scholarly communication. We then provide tangible details, outlining how the INKE Partnership puts open social scholarship theory into practice, with an eye to a more open and engaged future.

https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.1973

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"Ten Recommended Practices for Managing Preprints in Generalist and Institutional Repositories"


Currently, there are numerous gaps in geographic and domain coverage and some authors will choose to deposit their research outputs into another type of repository, such as an institutional or generalist repository. . . . To address these gaps, a COAR-ASAPbio Working Group on Preprint in Repositories identified ten recommended practices for managing preprints across three areas: linking, discovery, and editorial processes. While we acknowledge that many of these practices are not currently in use by institutional and generalist repositories, we hope that these recommendations will encourage repositories around the world that collect preprints to begin to apply them locally.

https://cutt.ly/R0gursT

Full report

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"Comparison of Clinical Study Results Reported in medRxiv Preprints vs Peer-reviewed Journal Articles"


Most clinical studies posted as preprints on medRxiv and subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals had concordant study characteristics, results, and final interpretations. With more than three-fourths of preprints published in journals within 24 months, these results may suggest that many preprints report findings that are consistent with the final peer-reviewed publications.

https://cutt.ly/k0gyQOv

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"Adding Equity to Transformative Agreements and Journal Subscriptions — The Read & Let Read Model"


Not only should libraries pay for access to that number of articles in the next year, they should multiply it by two. This will mean that likely about half the prepaid article uses will go unclaimed by a libraries’ community during the coverage year. To justify the "double" payment, these unclaimed uses shall be made available for any online reader during the following year. . . . I call this plan Read & Let Read (R&LR).

bit.ly/3iGSgoz

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"Evaluation of Publication of COVID-19–Related Articles Initially Presented as Preprints"


In this study, we identified 3343 COVID-19–related preprints posted on medRxiv in 2020. Our March 2022 search indicated that 1712 of those preprints (51.2%) were subsequently published in the peer-reviewed literature; this number increased to 1742 (52.1%) when we repeated the search in October 2022. Not considering January 2020, in which only 1 article on COVID-19 was posted, the rate of subsequent publication in a scientific journal ranged from 43.5% (94 of 216 preprints; observed in March 2020) to 60.6% (177 of 292 preprints posted in August 2020). The Table shows the top 25 of 579 peer-reviewed journals in which these preprints were published; 827 preprints (47.5%) were subsequently published in quartile 1 journals (Figure).

bit.ly/3HprhIq

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"Open Access Journals Lack Image Accessibility Considerations in Author Guidelines"


Using image accessibility and alt text as a lens, our objective was to evaluate how open access journals incorporate disability accessibility as part of open access publishing. Using a random sample of 300 English language open access journals, we assessed author guidelines to understand image requirements for submissions and open access statements to understand how journals conceive of openness and accessibility. We found that most open access journals do not include disability accessibility elements in their guidelines to authors when submitting images as part of their scholarship. While over half the journals had required parameters for image submission, none of them required alt text. And while the majority of journals included the word 'access' or 'accessibility' in their open access statements, almost none included disability or inclusion related terms.

https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/zsjqw

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Wolters Kluwer: The Path to Open Medicine: Driving Global Health Equity through Medical Research


The paper is divided into three parts. Part 1 traces the historical events that led to the modern system of scientific research, funding, knowledge dissemination, and recognition, which largely confines health and medical knowledge production to those in HICs [high income countries]. By understanding our shared past and the rise of structural barriers to global health equity, we can better inform our shared path to dismantle them. Part 2 takes a clear-eyed look at where the scientific community is now. Are the ideals of Open Medicine playing out as envisioned? Are the benefits of Open Medicine shared amongst all of humanity, or with only a select few? Lastly, Part 3 offers ideas and recommendations for all stakeholders to chart a path to bring Open Medicine into alignment with its goals and aspirations.

https://cutt.ly/E15vETj

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John Willinsky: Copyright’s Broken Promise: How to Restore the Law’s Ability to Promote the Progress of Science


In Copyright’s Broken Promise, John Willinsky presents the case for reforming copyright law so that it supports, rather than impedes, public access to research and scholarship. He draws on the legal strategy of statutory licensing to set out the terms and structures by which the Copyright Act could ensure that publishers are fairly compensated for providing immediate open access.

https://cutt.ly/E15zPXH

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"Why We Need Open-Source Science Innovation — Not Patents and Paywalls"


The results of a survey study of university professors in Canada found 81.1 percent of Canadian faculty would trade all IP for an open-source endowed chair and 34.4 percent of these faculty would require no additional compensation. Surprisingly, even more American faculty (86.7 percent) are willing to accept an open-source endowed professorship.

https://cutt.ly/x190Hso

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"Institute of Physics Publishing Strikes Unlimited Publishing Deal with Big Ten Academic Alliance"


Strengthening the commitment to opening research, IOP Publishing (IOPP) has agreed to a three-year unlimited open publishing agreement with the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) consortium in the United States (US). Beginning January 2023, the agreement enables affiliated researchers to publish unlimited Open Access (OA) papers at no cost to them. . . . During the agreement, authors affiliated with Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions will be able to make their research openly accessible to the global community immediately after publication while retaining their copyright.

https://cutt.ly/u19NN2u

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"Are We Undervaluing Open Access by Not Correctly Factoring in the Potentially Huge Impacts of Machine Learning? — An Academic Librarian’s View (I)"


Synopsis: I have recently adjusted my view to the position that the benefits of Machine learning techniques are more likely to be real and large. This is based on the recent incredible results of LLM (Large Language models) and about a year’s experimenting with some of the newly emerging tools based on such technologies.

If I am right about this, are we academic librarians systematically undervaluing Open Access by not taking this into account sufficiently when negotiating with publishers? Given that we control the purse strings, we are one of the most impactful parties (next to publishers and researchers) that will help decide how fast if at all the transition to an Open Access World occurs.

https://cutt.ly/U19MZzK

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"Access to Research Data and EU Copyright"


The article seeks to contribute to this aim by exploring the legal framework in which research data can be accessed and used in EU copyright law. First, it delineates the authors’ understanding of research data. It then examines the protection research data currently receives under EU and Member State law via copyright and related rights, as well as the ownership of these rights by different stakeholders in the scientific community. After clarifying relevant conflict-of-laws issues that surround research data, it maps ways to legally access and use them, including statutory exceptions, the open science movement and current developments in law and practice.

bit.ly/3VVx7pg

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"A Landscape of Open Science Policies Research"


This literature review aims to examine the approach given to open science policy in the different studies. The main findings are that the approach given to open science has different aspects: policy framing and its geopolitical aspects are described as an asymmetries replication and epistemic governance tool. The main geopolitical aspects of open science policies described in the literature are the relations between international, regional, and national policies. There are also different components of open science covered in the literature: open data seems much discussed in the works in the English language, while open access is the main component discussed in the Portuguese and Spanish speaking papers. Finally, the relationship between open science policies and the science policy is framed by highlighting the innovation and transparency that open science can bring into it.

https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440221140358

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"Free and Open-Source Automated Open Access Preprint Harvesting"


Universities are attempting to ensure that all of their research is publicly accessible because of funding mandates. Many universities have established campus open access (OA) repositories but are struggling with how to upload millions of manuscripts under numerous license agreements while also linking metadata to make them discoverable. To do this manually requires around 15 minutes per manuscript from an experienced librarian. The time and cost to do this campus-wide is prohibitive. To radically reduce the time and costs of this process and to harvest all past work, this article reports on the development and testing of a free and open source (FOSS) JavaScript-based application, aperta-accessum, which does the following: 1) harvests names and emails from a department’s faculty webpage; 2) identifies scholars’ Open Researcher and Contributor Identifiers (ORCID iDs); 3) obtains digital object identifiers (DOIs) of publications for each scholar; 4) checks for existing copies in an institution’s OA repository; 5) identifies the legal opportunities to provide OA versions of all of the articles not already in the OA repository; 6) sends authors emails requesting a simple upload of author manuscripts; and 7) adds link-harvested metadata from DOIs with uploaded preprints into a bepress repository; the code can be modified for additional repositories. The results of this study show that, in the administrative time needed to make a single document OA manually, aperta-accessum can process approximately five entire departments worth of peer-reviewed articles. Following best practices discussed, it is clear that this open-source OA harvester enables institutional library’s stewardship of OA knowledge on a mass scale for radically reduced costs.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.14421

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Federating Research Infrastructures in Europe for Fair Access to Data: Science Europe Briefing on EOSC

The European research and innovation ecosystem is going through a period of profound change. Researchers, organisations that fund or perform research, and policymakers are reshaping the research process and its outputs based on the opportunities offered by the digital transition. The findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIRness) of research publications, data, and software in the digital space will define research and innovation going forward. Closely related, the transition to an open research process and Open Access of its outputs is becoming the ‘new normal’. One of the most prominent initiatives in the digital and open transition of research is the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). This federation of existing research data infrastructures in Europe aims to create a web of FAIR data and related services for research.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7346887

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"The Impact of Open and Reproducible Scholarship on Students’ Scientific Literacy, Engagement, and Attitudes Towards Science: A Review and Synthesis of the Evidence"


Currently, the impact of integrating an open and reproducible approach into the curriculum on student outcomes is not well articulated in the literature. Therefore, in this paper, we provide the first comprehensive review of how integrating open and reproducible scholarship into teaching and learning may impact students, using a large-scale, collaborative, team-science approach. Our review highlighted how embedding open and reproducible scholarship may impact: (1) students’ scientific literacies (i.e., students’ understanding of open research, consumption of science, and the development of transferable skills); (2) student engagement (i.e., motivation and engagement with learning, collaboration, and engagement in open research), and (3) students’ attitudes towards science (i.e., trust in science and confidence in research findings). Our review also identified a need for more robust and rigorous methods within evaluations of teaching practice. We discuss implications for teaching and learning scholarship in this area.

https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/9e526

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"Texas Universities Reach Historic Deal with Elsevier: TLCUA Saves Texas Universities Millions Collectively"


All TLCUA members will receive a discount on journal subscriptions—some as high as 30%—while still maintaining significant amounts of access to journals and combined, will realize a savings of over $4.75M annually. Beyond initial cost savings, Elsevier agreed to a maximum annual increase of 2% over the course of the license agreement, with some years as low as 0%, which is significantly lower than industry standard. . . . TLCUA and Elsevier have agreed to partner on a pilot project to revert ownership of journal articles back to original authors—and not just those at TLCUA-member institutions. Currently, authors transfer copyright of their work in exchange for that work being published. This pilot will provide for rights to go back to authors after a period of time that will be collaboratively determined with Elsevier. . . . Further, all TLCUA-member authors who choose to publish their work under an open access license will have access to discounted author publication charges (APCs). TLCUA also negotiated a license template that removed non-disclosure terms, restrictions on sharing usage data, and 44-year-old limitations on interlibrary loans (i.e., CONTU Guidelines) to expand library collaboration and improve how libraries can share information on journal usage.

https://cutt.ly/G1Yu8IU

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"Accountability in the Knowledge Commons: Lessons from Next Generation Library Publishing and the 2022 Values and Principles Summit"


Values and principles provide a scaffold for community governance of the knowledge commons, engaging stakeholders in the construction of a system that encourages participants to adhere to a shared set of ethical and functional practices. This article introduces the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication, a toolkit and approach developed by the Next Generation Library Publishing project to assess a community or organization’s alignment with scholarly values and principles. The article situates the FOREST Framework within the context of other initiatives advancing values-based scholarly communication and explains the importance of assessment mechanisms as a core element in governing an equitable and sustainable knowledge commons. It also synthesizes the findings of a half-day summit hosted in February 2022 that convened representatives of values-and-principles-based frameworks and initiatives in scholarly communication to strategize a collective future for these efforts.

http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.588

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India: "Ministry [of Education] Sets ‘One Nation, One Subscription ’ Deal Deadline"


"One Nation, One Subscription" (ONOS) is a scheme of the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India. The letter from the ministry’s Department of Higher Education said the government will negotiate with journal publishers for "all people in India" to have access to journal articles under a single centrally negotiated payment to be made by the government.

https://cutt.ly/A1bnyQK

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"Open Science Infrastructure as a Key Component of Open Science"


The Open Science movement is a response to the accumulated problems in scholarly communication, like the "reproducibility crisis", "serials crisis", and "peer review crisis". The European Commission defines priorities of Open Science as Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reproducible (FAIR) data, infrastructure and services in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), Next generation metrics, altmetrics and rewards, the future of scientific communication, research integrity and reproducibility, education and skills and citizen science. Open Science Infrastructure is also one of four key components of Open Science defined by UNESCO.

Mainly represented among Open Science Infrastructures are institutional and thematic repositories for publications, research data, software and code. Furthermore, the Open Science Infrastructure services range may include discovery, mining, publishing, the peer review process, archiving and preservation, social networking tools, training, high-performance computing, and tools for processing and analysis. Successful Open Science Infrastructure should be based on community values and responsive to needed changes. Preferably the Open Science Infrastructure should be distributed, enabling machine-actionable tools and services, supporting reusability and reproducibility, quality FAIR data, interoperability, sustainability, long-term preservation and funding.

https://doi.org/10.7557/5.6777

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"Why Don’t We Share Data and Code? Perceived Barriers and Benefits to Public Archiving Practices"


Here, we define, categorize and discuss barriers to data and code sharing that are relevant to many research fields. We explore how real and perceived barriers might be overcome or reframed in the light of the benefits relative to costs. By elucidating these barriers and the contexts in which they arise, we can take steps to mitigate them and align our actions with the goals of open science, both as individual scientists and as a scientific community.

https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.1113

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"Reducing Barriers to Open Science by Standardizing Practices and Realigning Incentives"


In this policy position paper, we outline current open science practices and key bottlenecks in their broader adoption. We propose that national science agencies create a digital infrastructure framework that would standardize open science principles and make them actionable. We also suggest ways of redefining research success to align better with open science, and to incentivize a system where sharing various research outputs is beneficial to researchers.

https://doi.org/10.38126/JSPG210201

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"Recommendations for Transformative Journal Agreements with Providers of Publishing Services Published"


These formulated criteria will serve as a common, action-guiding framework for actors from all science organizations—that is, higher education institutions as well as non-university research institutions—for negotiations with providers of publishing services. . . .The criteria are organized into the following aspects: journal transformation, pricing; transparency, workflow, preprints, metadata and interfaces, statistics, tracking, and waivers.

https://cutt.ly/z1zjc9H

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"Data Quality Assurance at Research Data Repositories"


This paper presents findings from a survey on the status quo of data quality assurance practices at research data repositories.

The personalised online survey was conducted among repositories indexed in re3data in 2021. It covered the scope of the repository, types of data quality assessment, quality criteria, responsibilities, details of the review process, and data quality information and yielded 332 complete responses.

The results demonstrate that most repositories perform data quality assurance measures, and overall, research data repositories significantly contribute to data quality. Quality assurance at research data repositories is multifaceted and nonlinear, and although there are some common patterns, individual approaches to ensuring data quality are diverse. The survey showed that data quality assurance sets high expectations for repositories and requires a lot of resources. Several challenges were discovered: for example, the adequate recognition of the contribution of data reviewers and repositories, the path dependence of data review on review processes for text publications, and the lack of data quality information. The study could not confirm that the certification status of a repository is a clear indicator of whether a repository conducts in-depth quality assurance.

http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-018

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Paywall: "A Comprehensive Review of Open Data Platforms, Prevalent Technologies, and Functionalities"


We will discuss seven major open data platforms, such as (1) CKAN (2) DKAN (3) Socrata (4) OpenDataSoft (5) GitHub (6) Google datasets (7) Kaggle. We will evaluate the technological commons, techniques, features, methods, and visualization offered by each tool. In addition, why are these platforms important to users such as providers, curators, and end-users? And what are the key options available on these platforms to publish open data?

https://doi.org/10.1145/3560107.3560142

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