Category Archives: oa.benefits

Current concerns on journal article with preprint: Korean Journal of Internal Medicine perspectives

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Abstract:  Preprints are preliminary research reports that have not yet been peer-reviewed. They have been widely adopted to promote the timely dissemination of research across many scientific fields. In August 1991, Paul Ginsparg launched an electronic bulletin board intended to serve a few hundred colleagues working in a subfield of theoretical high-energy physics, thus launching arXiv, the first and largest preprint platform. Additional preprint servers have since been implemented in different academic fields, such as BioRxiv (2013, Biology; www.biorxiv.org) and medRxiv (2019, Health Science; www.medrxiv.org). While preprint availability has made valuable research resources accessible to the general public, thus bridging the gap between academic and non-academic audiences, it has also facilitated the spread of unsupported conclusions through various media channels. Issues surrounding the preprint policies of a journal must be addressed, ultimately, by editors and include the acceptance of preprint manuscripts, allowing the citation of preprints, maintaining a double-blind peer review process, changes to the preprint’s content and authors’ list, scoop priorities, commenting on preprints, and preventing the influence of social media. Editors must be able to deal with these issues adequately, to maintain the scientific integrity of their journal. In this review, the history, current status, and strengths and weaknesses of preprints as well as ongoing concerns regarding journal articles with preprints are discussed. An optimal approach to preprints is suggested for editorial board members, authors, and researchers.

 

David Eaves: ‘The open data battle now is to demonstrate value, and that’s hard to do’ – Open Knowledge Foundation blog

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“Starting January 2023, we are meeting 100+ people to discuss the future of open knowledge, shaped by a diverse set of visions from artists, activists, academics, archivists, thinkers, policymakers, data scientists, educators and community leaders from all over the world. 

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s team wants to identify and debate issues sensitive to our movement and use this effort to constantly shape our actions and business strategies to deliver in the best possible way what the community expects from us and from our Network, a pioneering organization that has been defining the standards of the open movement for two decades.

Another objective is to include the perspectives of people from diverse backgrounds, especially those from marginalised communities, from dissident identities, and whose geographic location is outside the world’s major financial powers.

How openness can speed up and strengthen the fights against the complex challenges of our times? This is the key question behind conversations like the one you can read below….”

The chasm between the scholarly record and grey literature | Research Information

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“In January, nine organisations timed the release of new research with the specific aim of impacting the discussions of political and business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Three of the nine, sharing findings about global risks, tax, and trust, attracted significant media attention. None of the reports are available via a publisher. They matter not just because of their impact but because they are but the tip of a growing mountain of valuable research that is being posted, not published. And, because it is posted, not published, it’s a growing mountain of vital research that’s missing from the scholarly record….”

The benefits of journal-independent open peer review | Research Information

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“I launched PeerRef in late 2021 to address some of the problems with peer review. At PeerRef, we organise open peer review of preprints and publish reviewer reports on our platform. We aim to make peer review open, provide researchers with more choice in how their research is shared and evaluated, and eliminate the need for repeated peer review in successive journals….

A benefit of journal-independent peer review is that a reviewer does not consider whether a piece of research is suitable for a specific journal, nor do they act as a journal gatekeeper. This puts the rigour and validity of the research at the centre of the assessment and allows the reviewer to focus on constructive feedback. I believe this will increase the quality of feedback, making peer review more useful to authors….

Momentum is growing around journal-independent peer review of preprints. eLife has created Sciety, which aggregates peer reviewed preprints and allows anyone to curate lists of reviewed preprints. JMIR is also supporting journal-independent peer review with their Plan P initiative. Funders are in support of journal-independent peer review. In 2022 cOAlition S made the statement that they consider peer reviewed preprints to have equivalent merit to peer-reviewed journal publications. HHMI, ASAPbio and EMBO recently organised a meeting between funders, publishers, researchers, and peer review platforms with the aim of creating funder, institutional, and journal policies for the peer review of preprints. Several resources have resulted from that meeting, which ASAPbio have posted on their website. All funders and publishers can help drive this change by establishing policies that recognise and encourage journal-independent peer review….”

Benefits of open access (OA) to researchers from lower-income countries: Tracing evidence through an analysis of reference patterns

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Abstract:  Making scientific literature freely available to everyone is a main objective of the open access (OA) movement. This may be of particular importance to researchers in lower-income countries, where access to literature is often hindered by high subscription costs. This study addresses this issue by analyzing reference lists of the world’s output of scientific publications over time. The core issues addressed include whether researchers from lower-income countries refer to fewer previous publications when they publish and how this pattern develops over time. Moreover, whether researchers from lower-income countries rely more on literature that is openly available through different OA routes than other researchers is explored. The study shows that the proportion of OA references increases over time for all publications and country groups. However, the main finding is that publications from lower-income countries have a higher growth rate of OA references. This suggests that an increase in OA publishing has been particularly beneficial to researchers in lower-income countries.

Adoption of a rights retention policy by academic and research institutions in India: a door to open science

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“The Government of India is considering a one nation, one subscription (ONOS) policy to enable green open access to readers in India to journal articles published by the identified publishers. However, even if this succeeds, it will not provide green open access to pay-walled articles published by Indian researchers to readers outside the country or to readers in India to journals not covered under the ONOS. On the other hand, adoption of RRP by country’s educational and research institutions will enable free access to the country’s research output everywhere in the world. The ‘Open Science Policy’ (2014) of Departments of Biotechnology, and Science & Technology of the Government of India (https://dst.Gov.in/sites/default/files/ APPROVED%20OPEN%20ACC-ESS%20POLICY-DBT& DST(12.12.2014)_1.pdf) requires final accepted manuscript resulting from research projects, fully or partially funded by DBT/DST to be deposited at the institutional repositories or the interoperable institutional open access repository or the central harvester (www.sciencecentral.in). A rigorous implementation of this policy and the adoption of RRP by different academic and research institutions in the country will indeed open a wide door to the muchdesired open science…”

Experimenting with open science practices at the STI 2023 conference – Leiden Madtrics

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“As organizers of the STI 2023 conference, we introduce two open science experiments: We adopt a new publication and peer review process and we invite authors of conference contributions to reflect on their open science practices.

The adoption of open science practices has become a prominent topic of study for the science studies community. However, the research practices of the community itself are still quite traditional. While open access publishing, preprinting, open peer review, open data sharing, and other open science practices are gradually becoming more common in the science studies community, the adoption of these practices is still at a relatively low level.

Given the community’s deep understanding of the research system, we think we should be able to do a better job. As organizers of this year’s Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators conference (STI 2023), we therefore introduce two open science experiments: We adopt a new publication and peer review process, fully aligned with state-of-the-art open science practices, and we invite authors of contributions submitted to the conference to reflect on their own open science practices….”

Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences : Seminars : Is Open Science Good for Research? :

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“This public debate brings together world-leading scholars working at the intersection of Open Science, Science and Technology Studies and the philosophy of science, to discuss the value, opportunities and challenges involved in making research more open. The Open Science movement has been tremendously successful, spurring a global shift in research policies, evaluation procedures and publication channels. At first sight, this seems to be a very good thing: a necessary development in the face of research and publication practices that have grown more and more restrictive, inaccessible and (arguably) unreliable over the last few decades. At the same time, the specific ways in which science is being made open – ranging from Open Access publishing agreements to Open Data mandates by funders and research institutions – are proving controversial and, in some cases, downright damaging to at least some forms of research.

The panel will debate the pros and cons of Open Science policies and practices, with ample time devoted to interventions from the audience. We aim for this session to foster a frank exchange of views over the ongoing transformation of the research landscape, and the ways it affect scientific work at the University of Exeter and beyond. This debate is organised by the PHIL_OS project (www.opensciencestudies.eu ) and generously sponsored by the European Research Council, the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences, the Open Science team at the Library of the University of Exeter, and the Institute for Data Science and AI.

Speakers: Helen Longino (Stanford University), Rachel Ankeny (University of Adelaide), Cameron Neylon (Curtin University) and Sally Wyatt (University of Maastricht)….”

Why PID Strategies Are Having A Moment – And Why You Should Care – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“Last year’s White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Nelson Memo is just one recent example of a national funding organization that is paying attention to PIDs. It directs US agencies to instruct their funded researchers “to obtain a digital persistent identifier … include it in published research outputs when available, and provide federal agencies with the metadata associated with all published research outputs they produce”. Other examples include UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) recently updated open access policy, which states that “Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) for articles must be implemented according to international recognised standards”; and Plan S’s requirement for the “Use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for scholarly publications (with versioning, for example, in case of revisions), such as DOI”, which has been adopted by multiple countries.

It’s not just the national funders who are getting in on the act; there’s also been a surge in interest at the national government level. A number of countries in the Americas, Asia Pacific, and Europe are at various stages of developing and implementing national PID strategies. They include Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, Peru, South Korea, and the UK, all of which are participating in a Research Data Alliance (RDA) National PID Strategies Working Group, set up following a Birds of a Feather session at the RDA Virtual Plenary 17 last year. There are a number of similarities between these countries’ approaches, as the RDA WG has found. Its aim is “to map common activities across national agencies/efforts and produce a guide on the specific PIDs adopted in the context of national or regional PID strategies [in order to] help others, irrespective of geographical region, follow a blueprint to define their national PID approach. The intention is that it can be adopted or adapted by other countries looking to develop their own PID strategies. By following the recommendations it will encourage standardisation internationally.” One element of this work is to identify the most commonly used PIDs across all countries, which I’m sure is music to the ears of my former NISO colleague Todd Carpenter, who pointed out in his recent post that, “It is past time that we all agree on a core set of identifiers and basic metadata elements and begin to encourage researchers to use them at scale when communicating their results.” Common PIDs (not all of which are open) that have already been identified in the RDA WG’s work include: ORCID or ISNI for researchers; ROR or ISNI for research organizations; Crossref DOIs for research articles; DataCite DOIs or Handles for research data; Crossref DOIs for grants; RAiD for projects; and DOIs, IGSN and RRID for samples and specimens….”

Amending the literature through version control | Biology Letters

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Abstract:  The ideal of self-correction in science is not well served by the current culture and system surrounding amendments to published literature. Here we describe our view of how amendments could and should work by drawing on the idea of an author-led version control system. We report a survey (n = 132) that highlights academics’ dissatisfaction with the status quo and their support for such an alternative approach. Authors would include a link in their published manuscripts to an updatable website (e.g. a GitHub repository) that could be disseminated in the event of any amendment. Such a system is already in place for computer code and requires nothing but buy-in from the scientific community—a community that is already evolving towards open science frameworks. This would remove a number of frictions that discourage amendments leading to an improved scientific literature and a healthier academic climate.

 

The Benefits of Accessibility and Open Educational Resources – The Future is Open

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“When creating and distributing open educational resources (OERs), it is important to consider accessibility to make sure that everyone can benefit from these resources, including those with disabilities. By designing and developing OERs with accessibility in mind, we can help make sure that everyone has the opportunity to benefit from these resources.

The use of alternative formats is an important aspect of accessibility in OERs. This includes providing text in a format that can be read by assistive technology, such as a screen reader, as well as providing captions for videos and audio content. Additionally, images and other non-textual elements should include alternative text (alt text) descriptions so that users who are visually impaired can understand the content….”

Close to open—Factors that hinder and promote open science in ecology research and education | PLOS ONE

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Abstract:  The Open Science (OS) movement is rapidly gaining traction among policy-makers, research funders, scientific journals and individual scientists. Despite these tendencies, the pace of implementing OS throughout the scientific process and across the scientific community remains slow. Thus, a better understanding of the conditions that affect OS engagement, and in particular, of how practitioners learn, use, conduct and share research openly can guide those seeking to implement OS more broadly. We surveyed participants at an OS workshop hosted by the Living Norway Ecological Data Network in 2020 to learn how they perceived OS and its importance in their research, supervision and teaching. Further, we wanted to know what OS practices they had encountered in their education and what they saw as hindering or helping their engagement with OS. The survey contained scaled-response and open-ended questions, allowing for a mixed-methods approach. We obtained survey responses from 60 out of 128 workshop participants (47%). Responses indicated that usage and sharing of open data and code, as well as open access publication, were the most frequent OS practices. Only a minority of respondents reported having encountered OS in their formal education. A majority also viewed OS as less important in their teaching than in their research and supervisory roles. The respondents’ suggestions for what would facilitate greater OS engagement in the future included knowledge, guidelines, and resources, but also social and structural support. These are aspects that could be strengthened by promoting explicit implementation of OS practices in higher education and by nurturing a more inclusive and equitable OS culture. We argue that incorporating OS in teaching and learning of science can yield substantial benefits to the research community, student learning, and ultimately, to the wider societal objectives of science and higher education.

 

The gaping problem at the heart of scientific research – The Week

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“The benefits of open access have been proved beyond doubt….

National science agencies from nations including the UK, Australia, Italy, the United States and Brazil called for publishers to make coronavirus research immediately and freely accessible, which in the most part they did.

But the very need for these groups to call for research to be made available in the middle of a global emergency demonstrates the failure of the current publishing system. Making research immediately free to read, which, when combined with the use of an open publishing licence, is known as open access’ is a hot topic in science.

Global health bodies know how important open research is, especially in times of emergency, which is why they have repeatedly called for research to be made open….

The consequences of lack of access to research can be dire.

In 2015 a group of African researchers claimed that an earlier Ebola outbreak could have been prevented if research on it had been published openly….

As 2023 unfolds, it seems that the benefits of open access have been proved beyond doubt.

The next emergency in front of us, climate change, is much more complex, and there too are calls for open access.

Serious investment in a variety of approaches is essential to ensure a diverse, equitable, open access future.”

Does it pay to pay? A comparison of the benefits of open-access publishing across various sub-fields in Biology | bioRxiv

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Abstract:  Authors are often faced with the decision of whether to maximize impact or minimize costs when publishing the results of their research. For example, to potentially improve impact via increased accessibility, many subscription-based journals now offer the option of paying a fee to publish open access (i.e., hybrid journals), but this solution excludes authors who lack the capacity to pay to make their research accessible. Here, we tested if paying to publish open access in a subscriptionbased journal benefited authors by conferring more citations relative to closed access articles. We identified 146,415 articles published in 152 hybrid journals in the field of biology from 2013-2018 to compare the number of citations between various types of open access and closed access articles. In a simple generalized linear model analysis of our full dataset, we found that publishing open access in hybrid journals that offer the option confers an average citation advantage to authors of 17.8 citations compared to closed access articles in similar journals. After taking into account the number of authors, journal impact, year of publication, and subject area, we still found that open access generated significantly more citations than closed access (p < 0.0001). However, results were complex, with exact differences in citation rates among access types impacted by these other variables. This citation advantage based on access type was even similar when comparing open and closed access articles published in the same issue of a journal (p < 0.0001). However, by examining articles where the authors paid an article processing charge, we found that cost itself was not predictive of citation rates (p = 0.14). Based on our findings of access type and other model parameters, we suggest that, in most cases, paying for access does confer a citation advantage. For authors with limited budgets, we recommend pursuing open access alternatives that do not require paying a fee as they still yielded more citations than closed access. For authors who are considering where to submit their next article, we offer additional suggestions on how to balance exposure via citations with publishing costs.