Category: Open Science

"Defining the Role of Libraries in the Open Science Landscape: A Reflection on Current European Practice"

Paul Ayris and Tiberius Ignat have self-archived "Defining the Role of Libraries in the Open Science Landscape: A Reflection on Current European Practice."

Here's an excerpt:

This collaborative paper looks at how libraries can engage with and offer leadership in the Open Science movement. It is based on case studies and the results of an EU-funded research project on Research Data Management taken from European research-led universities and their libraries. It begins by analysing three recent trends in Science, and then links component parts of the research process to aspects of Open Science. The paper then looks in detail at four areas and identifies roles for libraries: Open Access and Open Access publishing, Research Data Management, E-Infrastructures (especially the European Open Science Cloud), and Citizen Science. The paper ends in suggesting a model for how libraries, by using a 4-step test, can assess their engagement with Open Science. This 4-step test is based on lessons drawn from the case studies.

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ORCID 2017 Annual Report

ORCID has released the ORCID 2017 Annual Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The ORCID Registry officially launched in October 2012. Our member and user base has grown steadily, and as of 31 December 2017, 4,253,582 researchers from every country and discipline had registered for an ORCID iD. We work closely with our community, and are thankful for their continued support and engagement

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"Opening the Heart of Science: A Review of the Changing Roles of Research Libraries"

Jorge Revez has published "Opening the Heart of Science: A Review of the Changing Roles of Research Libraries" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

In a world of information overload and data deluge, is opening science a research library’s duty? Or is the openness of science deeply changing libraries, ultimately converting them into something else? The purpose of the review is to highlight the challenging issues stemming from the relationship between research and libraries. A broad literature analysis was performed focused on the intersection of three different perspectives: (1) the future of research libraries, (2) the emerging new roles, and (3) the ongoing openness of science. Libraries are still at the heart of science but challenged by several stakeholders within the complexity of present science production and communication. Research support services, research data management, or research information management are emerging roles, among others, sustaining an open path where libraries thrive to be more collaborative while looking forward to establishing new partnerships.

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"Data Sustainability and Reuse Pathways of Natural Resources and Environmental Scientists"

Yi Shen has self-archived "Data Sustainability and Reuse Pathways of Natural Resources and Environmental Scientists."

Here's an excerpt:

This paper presents a multifarious examination of natural resources and environmental scientists' adventures navigating the policy change towards open access and cultural shift in data management, sharing, and reuse. Situated in the institutional context of Virginia Tech, a focus group and multiple individual interviews were conducted exploring the domain scientists' all-around experiences, performances, and perspectives on their collection, adoption, integration, preservation, and management of data. . . . Based on these findings, this study provides suggestions on data modeling and knowledge representation strategies to support the long-term viability, stewardship, accessibility, and sustainability of scientific data.

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Behaviours and Technical Recommendations of the COAR Next Generation Repositories Working Group

COAR has released Behaviours and Technical Recommendations of the COAR Next Generation Repositories Working Group.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

COAR's vision is to position repositories as the foundation for a distributed, globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication, on top of which layers of value added services will be deployed, thereby transforming the system, making it more research-centric, open to and supportive of innovation, while also collectively managed by the scholarly community.

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"Building a Culture of Data Sharing: Policy Design and Implementation for Research Data Management in Development Research"

Cameron Neylon has published "Building a Culture of Data Sharing: Policy Design and Implementation for Research Data Management in Development Research" in Research Ideas and Outcomes.

Here's an excerpt:

The project had two core findings. First that the shift from an aim of changing behaviour, to changing culture, has both subtle and profound implications for policy design and implementation. A particular finding is that the single point of contact that many data management and sharing policies create where a Data Management Plan is required at grant submission but then not further utilised is at best neutral and likely counter productive in supporting change in researcher culture.

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"Dissertation to Book? A Snapshot of Dissertations Published As Books in 2014 and 2105, Available in Open Access Institutional Repositories"

Anna Marie Johnson et al. have published "Dissertation to Book? A Snapshot of Dissertations Published As Books in 2014 and 2105, Available in Open Access Institutional Repositories" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

Only a small percentage of books published as dissertations were found in ProQuest and then subsequently in IRs. The number of libraries holding book titles with corresponding dissertations in IRs dropped between 2014 and 2015.

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The State of Open Data Report 2017

Figshare has released The State of Open Data Report 2017.

Here's an excerpt:

Its key finding is that open data has become more embedded in the research community—82% of survey respondents are aware of open data sets and more researchers are curating their data for sharing.

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"Who Owns Digital Science?"

Roger C. Schonfeld has published "Who Owns Digital Science?" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Other publishers—and libraries and universities—that are working in collaboration with, or customers of, various Digital Science businesses might wish to give greater attention to the implications. First, Digital Science itself may soon become an operating unit of Springer Nature. Second, this could well yield changes to the Digital Science strategy, if its current model as an investor were to give way to the operating integrations that have been a hallmark of Elsevier’s strategy.

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"Q&A with PLOS Co-founder Michael Eisen"

Richard Poynder has published "Q&A with PLOS Co-founder Michael Eisen" in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

ME [Michael Eisen]: The most important thing to do now is to get publishers—commercial and non-profit—out of the process. The whole industry is unnecessary and needlessly cumbersome and expensive. We should all just publish in places like bioRxiv (assuming its software gets better and produces finished documents people are happy to read) and do all peer review post publication. There should be little or no money transacted in the process—the infrastructure should be subsidized so it’s free to both publish and access all the content.

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Lots of Institutional Repositories Keep E-prints Safe

The seductive allure of a commercial mega repository is two-fold: (1) everything is conveniently in one place, and (2) a company is taking care of the dreary and expensive business of running it.

Everything seems fine: problem solved! That is until something goes wrong, such as the repository being bought and controlled by a publisher or being threatened by lawsuits by a coterie of publishers.

Then it's important to remember: it's a company, and companies exist to make a profit.

Heh, companies are great. I wouldn't have just had that tasty cup of coffee without them. But, we should be very clear about what motivates companies and controls their behavior. And we shouldn't be shocked if they do things that aren't motivated by lofty goals.

I know: institutional repositories are hard work. The bloom is off the rose. But they exist to serve higher education, not make money, and they part of the academic communities they serve. And they can't be bought. And their universities don't often go out of business. And there are a lot of them. And they are not likely to be attractive targets for lawsuits unless something has gone very, very wrong at the local level.

Copyright is complicated. No one is advocating that we ignore it and just shove e-prints into IR's willy-nilly. Getting faculty to understand the ins and outs of e-print copyright is no picnic, nor is monitoring for compliance. But the battle is easier to fight at the local level where one-on-one faculty to librarian communication is possible.

For self-archiving to flourish in the long run, institutional repositories must flourish. By and large, librarians establish, run, and support them, and they are the quiet heroes of green open access who will continue to provide a sustainable and reliable infrastructure for self-archiving.

Coalition for Responsible Sharing’s Statement: "Publishers and Societies Take Action against ResearchGate’s Copyright Infringements"

The Coalition for Responsible Sharing has released "Publishers and Societies Take Action against ResearchGate’s Copyright Infringements."

Here's an excerpt:

Numerous attempts to agree with ResearchGate on amicable solutions, including signing up to the Voluntary Principles of Article Sharing on Scholarly Collaboration Networks and implementing a user-friendly technical solution, remained unsuccessful. Members of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing are therefore now resorting to formal means to alter ResearchGate's damaging practices. The coalition members include the American Chemical Society, Brill, Elsevier, Wiley and Wolters Kluwer. These organizations will begin to issue takedown notices to ResearchGate requesting that infringing content be removed from the site. Concurrently, The American Chemical Society and Elsevier are asking the courts to clarify ResearchGate's copyright responsibility.

See also: "ResearchGate: Publishers Take Formal Steps to Force Copyright Compliance."

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"Publishers Taking Legal Action against ResearchGate to Limit Unlicensed Paper Sharing on Networking Site"

Jyllian Kemsley and Andrea Widener have published "Publishers Taking Legal Action against ResearchGate to Limit Unlicensed Paper Sharing on Networking Site" in Chemical & Engineering News.

Publishers could issue "millions" of take-down notices to ResearchGate.

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COAR Annual Report 2016/17

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories has released the COAR Annual Report 2016/17 .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The report contains information about strategy and outreach, annual meetings, activities of the Executive Board, Executive Director and Office as well as working and interest group accomplishments. Moreover, the report covers themes like marketing and communications, membership, publications and representation of COAR at major international and regional conferences.

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"Scientific Data From and for the Citizen"

Sven Schade et al. have published "Scientific Data From and for the Citizen" in First Monday.

Here's an excerpt:

Powered by advances of technology, today's Citizen Science projects cover a wide range of thematic areas and are carried out from local to global levels. This wealth of activities creates an abundance of data, for example, in the forms of observations submitted by mobile phones; readings of low-cost sensors; or more general information about peoples’ activities. The management and possible sharing of this data has become a research topic in its own right. We conducted a survey in the summer of 2015 in order to collectively analyze the state of play in Citizen Science. This paper summarizes our main findings related to data access, standardization and data preservation. We provide examples of good practices in each of these areas and outline actions to address identified challenges.

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"The State of OA: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Prevalence and Impact of Open Access Articles"

Heather Piwowar et al. have self-archived "The State of OA: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Prevalence and Impact of Open Access Articles."

Here's an excerpt:

We estimate that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA (19M in total) and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. The most recent year analyzed (2015) also has the highest percentage of OA (45%). Because of this growth, and the fact that readers disproportionately access newer articles, we find that Unpaywall users encounter OA quite frequently: 47% of articles they view are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made free-to-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license.

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"Information Scientist Herbert Van de Sompel to Receive Paul Evan Peters Award"

CNI released "Information Scientist Herbert Van de Sompel to Receive Paul Evan Peters Award."

Here's an excerpt:

An accomplished researcher and information scientist, Van de Sompel is perhaps best known for his role in the development of protocols designed to expose data and make them accessible to other systems, forging links that connect related information, thereby enhancing, facilitating, and deepening the research process. These initiatives include the OpenURL framework (stemming from his earlier work on the SFX link resolver), as well as the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), which included the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and the Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) scheme. Other notable contributions include the Memento protocol, which enables browsers to access earlier versions of the Web easily, and ResourceSync, which allows applications to remain synchronized with evolving content collections.

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"Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS): Design And First-Year Review"

Arfon M. Smith et al. have self-archived "Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS): Design And First-Year Review."

Here's an excerpt:

This article describes the motivation, design, and progress of the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). JOSS is a free and open-access journal that publishes articles describing research software. . . . JOSS publishes articles that encapsulate scholarship contained in the software itself, and its rigorous peer review targets the software components: functionality, documentation, tests, continuous integration, and the license. A JOSS article contains an abstract describing the purpose and functionality of the software, references, and a link to the software archive. The article is the entry point of a JOSS submission, which encompasses the full set of software artifacts. Submission and review proceed in the open, on GitHub. Editors, reviewers, and authors work collaboratively and openly. Unlike other journals, JOSS does not reject articles requiring major revision; while not yet accepted, articles remain visible and under review until the authors make adequate changes (or withdraw, if unable to meet requirements). Once an article is accepted, JOSS gives it a DOI, deposits its metadata in Crossref, and the article can begin collecting citations on indexers like Google Scholar and other services. Authors retain copyright of their JOSS article, releasing it under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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"The Changing Role of Research Publishing: A Case Study from Springer Nature"

Steven Inchcoombe has published "The Changing Role of Research Publishing: A Case Study from Springer Nature" in Insights: the UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Using Springer Nature as a case study this article explores the future of research publishing, with the guiding objective of identifying how such organizations can better serve the needs of researchers and those that support researchers (particularly academic institutions, institutional libraries, research funding bodies and academic societies) as we work together to help advance discovery for the benefit of all. Progress in four key areas is described: improving the publishing process, innovating across science communication, driving the growth and development of open research and adding value beyond publishing. The aim of this article is thus to set out a clear vision of what research publishers can achieve if they especially focus on addressing researchers’ needs and apply their considerable resources and expertise accordingly.

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"Open Access and Promotion and Tenure Evaluation Plans at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire"

Stephanie H. Wical and Gregory J. Kocken have published "Open Access and Promotion and Tenure Evaluation Plans at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire" in Serials Review.

Here's an excerpt:

Department and program evaluation plans at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire were examined to see if these documents provide evidence that could be used to justify supporting the publication of peer-reviewed open access articles toward tenure and promotion. . . .

The existing body of scholarship suggests that tenure-line faculty fear publishing in open access journals because it could adversely impact their chances of promotion and tenure. The authors of this current study sought to determine if department and program evaluation plans could influence negative perceptions faculty have of open access journals.

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"A Reputation Economy: How Individual Reward Considerations Trump Systemic Arguments for Open Access to Data"

Benedikt Fecher et al. have published "A Reputation Economy: How Individual Reward Considerations Trump Systemic Arguments for Open Access to Data" in Palgrave Communications.

Here's an excerpt:

In this article, we explore the question of what drives open access to research data using a survey among 1564 mainly German researchers across all disciplines. We show that, regardless of their disciplinary background, researchers recognize the benefits of open access to research data for both their own research and scientific progress as a whole. Nonetheless, most researchers share their data only selectively. We show that individual reward considerations conflict with widespread data sharing. Based on our results, we present policy implications that are in line with both individual reward considerations and scientific progress.

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"Connecting the Persistent Identifier Ecosystem: Building the Technical and Human Infrastructure for Open Research"

Angela Dappert et al. have published "Connecting the Persistent Identifier Ecosystem: Building the Technical and Human Infrastructure for Open Research" in the Data Science Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

This article draws on the work of the EU-funded THOR project to take stock of the current state of interoperability across the PID landscape and to discuss the next steps towards an integrated research record. Examples illustrate how this interconnectivity is facilitated technically, as well as social and human challenges in fostering adoption. User stories highlight how this network of persistent identifier services is facilitating good practice in open research and where its limitations lie.

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"An Analysis of Federal Policy on Public Access to Scientific Research Data"

Adam Kriesberg et al. have published "An Analysis of Federal Policy on Public Access to Scientific Research Data" in Data Science Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

The 2013 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Memo on federally-funded research directed agencies with research and development budgets above $100 million to develop and release plans to increase and broaden access to research results, both published literature and data. The agency responses have generated discussion and interest but are yet to be analyzed and compared. In this paper, we examine how 19 federal agencies responded to the memo, written by John Holdren, on issues of scientific data and the extent of their compliance to the directives outlined in the memo. We present a varied picture of the readiness of federal science agencies to comply with the memo through a comparative analysis and close reading of the contents of these responses.

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"Wide-Open: Accelerating Public Data Release by Automating Detection of Overdue Datasets"

Maxim Grechkin, Hoifung Poon, and Bill Howe have published "Wide-Open: Accelerating Public Data Release by Automating Detection of Overdue Datasets" in PLOS Biology.

Here's an excerpt:

Open data is a vital pillar of open science and a key enabler for reproducibility, data reuse, and novel discoveries. Enforcement of open-data policies, however, largely relies on manual efforts, which invariably lag behind the increasingly automated generation of biological data. To address this problem, we developed a general approach to automatically identify datasets overdue for public release by applying text mining to identify dataset references in published articles and parse query results from repositories to determine if the datasets remain private. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on 2 popular National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) repositories: Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and Sequence Read Archive (SRA). Our Wide-Open system identified a large number of overdue datasets, which spurred administrators to respond directly by releasing 400 datasets in one week.

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