Category Archives: oa.plos

PLOS Announces New Publishing Agreement with German Consortium – The Official PLOS Blog

Posted on by
Reply

“The Public Library of Science (PLOS) is pleased to announce a consortium agreement with Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) that allows member institutions to participate in PLOS’ three innovative publishing models. This two-year agreement provides researchers affiliated with consortium members with unlimited publishing privileges in PLOS journals without them having to cover fees themselves. The TIB-led consortium has more than 40 members…

All PLOS journals are underpinned by institutional business models that move beyond APCs to ensure more equitable and regionally appropriate ways to support Open Access publishing. PLOS’ institutional models are Community Action Publishing (CAP)[2], Flat Fees [3], and the Global Equity model[4]….”

2022 PLOS accomplishments – The Official PLOS Blog

Posted on by
Reply

“Here are some highlights:

Our new journals, launched to address global issues like climate change, published more than 1,000 papers
We just published our first dataset on our Open Science Indicators, a new initiative that will help us surface and understand researcher practices with regards to sharing data and code, among other Open Science practices 
We set up PLOS entities across the globe and formed relationships with stakeholders within local research ecosystems
We doubled the number of our institutional partnerships…”

PLOS partners with EarthArXiv for 2023 – Latitude

Posted on by
Reply

“We are pleased to announce that PLOS has entered into a partnership with EarthArXiv—a preprint server focused on earth and planetary science, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary research. EarthArXiv is a community-based server, governed by a diverse advisory council with representatives from many regions and institutions, and hosted by the California Digital Library (CDL), an organization committed to open scholarship.

This relationship will open new opportunities for authors submitting to PLOS Climate, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, and PLOS Water to post preprints with ease. Beginning early in 2023, submitting authors will have the option to automatically forward their manuscript to the EarthArXiv preprint server, directly from our submission system….”

Explore the first Open Science Indicators dataset—and share your thoughts – The Official PLOS Blog

Posted on by
Reply

“Open Science is on the rise. We can infer as much from the proliferation of Open Access publishing options; the steady upward trend in bioRxiv postings; the periodic rollout of new national, institutional, or funder policies. 

But what do we actually know about the day-to-day realities of Open Science practice? What are the norms? How do they vary across different research subject areas and regions? Are Open Science practices shifting over time? Where might the next opportunity lie and where do barriers to adoption persist? 

To even begin exploring these questions and others like them we need to establish a shared understanding of how we define and measure Open Science practices. We also need to understand the current state of adoption in order to track progress over time. That’s where the Open Science Indicators project comes in. PLOS conceptualized a framework for measuring Open Science practices according to the FAIR principles, and partnered with DataSeer to develop a set of numerical “indicators” linked to specific Open Science characteristics and behaviors observable in published research articles. Our very first dataset, now available for download at Figshare, focuses on three Open Science practices: data sharing, code sharing, and preprint posting….”

Plos launches open science data collection push | Times Higher Education (THE)

Posted on by
Reply

“The Public Library of Science is beginning a project to track open science behaviours across scientific publishing, calling the lack of such data a critical barrier to making meaningful advances in research-sharing.

Plos, the pioneering non-profit open-access publisher founded in 2000, said that its new Open Science Indicator project would measure and report three characteristics of published articles: how many appeared in a preprint format, shared their research data, and made available the computer code underlying that data….”

 

Guest Post – How Do We Measure Success for Open Science? – The Scholarly Kitchen

Posted on by
Reply

“If the success of an innovation relates to the practice of Open Science – which at PLOS is about much more than reputation; it’s central to our mission – then what does success look like? And how do you measure it at the publisher scale? Indeed, to make progress towards any goal, good data are needed, including a view of your current and desired future states. Unfortunately, as recently as last year, there were no tools or services that could tell us everything we wanted to know, at PLOS, about Open Science practices. Benefits of Open Science – economic, societal, research impact and for researcher careers – are often highlighted, and to deliver these long-term benefits, measurably increasing adoption of Open Science practices is a prerequisite goal….”

PLOS Open Science Indicators

Posted on by
Reply

“This dataset contains article metadata and information about Open Science Indicators for approximately 61,000 research articles published in PLOS from 1 January 2019 to 30 June 2022 and a set of approximately 6,500 comparator articles published in non-PLOS journals. This is the first release of this dataset, which will be updated with new versions as newly published content is analysed.

This version of the Open Science Indicators dataset focuses on detection of three Open Science practices by analysing the XML of published research articles:

Sharing of research data, in particular data shared in data repositories
Sharing of code
Posting of preprints

The dataset provides data and code generation and sharing rates, the location of shared data and code (whether in Supporting Information or in an online repository). It also provides preprint sharing rates as well as details of the shared preprint, such as publication date, URL and preprint server used. Additional data fields are also provided for each article analysed, such as geographic information (‘Country’) and research topics (‘Discipline’)….”

Explore the first Open Science Indicators dataset—and share your thoughts – The Official PLOS Blog

Posted on by
Reply

“But what do we actually know about the day-to-day realities of Open Science practice? What are the norms? How do they vary across different research subject areas and regions? Are Open Science practices shifting over time? Where might the next opportunity lie and where do barriers to adoption persist? 

To even begin exploring these questions and others like them we need to establish a shared understanding of how we define and measure Open Science practices. We also need to understand the current state of adoption in order to track progress over time. That’s where the Open Science Indicators project comes in. PLOS conceptualized a framework for measuring Open Science practices according to the FAIR principles, and partnered with DataSeer to develop a set of numerical “indicators” linked to specific Open Science characteristics and behaviors observable in published research articles. Our very first dataset, now available for download at Figshare, focuses on three Open Science practices: data sharing, code sharing, and preprint posting….”

PLOS announces partnership with EarthArXiv

Posted on by
Reply

The Public Library of Science (PLOS) today announced that it has partnered with EarthArXiv, which enables authors submitting to PLOS Climate, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, and PLOS Water to post preprints with ease. Beginning next year, submitting authors will have the option to automatically forward their manuscript to the EarthArXiv preprint server, directly from our submission system.

How do researchers really feel about methods-sharing? – The Official PLOS Blog

Posted on by
Reply

“In scientific communications, methods are finally getting their due. Tools for better-communicating methods are everywhere these days—from new reporting standards and methods-specific article types, to dedicated methods journals and purpose-built repository platforms. But so far, no single solution has enjoyed wide adoption or been generally acknowledged as best practice.

Now, new data gathered by PLOS, with the support of protocols.io and TCC Africa, sheds light on how researchers view methods, and lends insight into their motivations and behaviors when it comes to methods-sharing. Over 1,000 researchers completed the survey. Respondents were concentrated primarily in the Life and Health Sciences, and tended to be more senior in their careers. Read on for highlights, or skip straight to the preprint for in-depth details.

Takeaway #1 – Established methods-sharing norms are insufficient…

Takeaway #2 – Researchers see methods sharing as important…

Takeaway #3 – When it comes to their specific goals, researchers aren’t satisfied…

Takeaway #4 – The main blockers to methods-sharing are practical…”

PLOSAnnounces Publishing Agreement With the Largest Research Institution in Mexico

Posted on by
Reply

(UNAM) and the Public Library of Science (PLOS) today announced a one-year agreement, brokered by Accucoms (PLOS’ regional representative),that will allow UNAM researchers to publish in PLOS ONE and other select PLOS journals[1] without incurring article processing charges (APC). Flat fee agreements and PLOS’ other models shift publishing costs from authors to research institutions based on prior publishing history and anticipated future growth with PLOS. The agreement with UNAM starts on January 1, 2023.

 

Does Scholarly Publishing Have an Innovation Problem? – The Scholarly Kitchen

Posted on by
Reply

“At PLOS, we’ve been in deep conversation over the past few months with a number of people from four core groups: researchers, senior university administrators, funders, and librarians. Our conversations have been with a selected group who are engaged with the transition to open science (and weighted towards the biomedical sciences) so there’s clearly some inbuilt bias. But I think that my key takeaways have wider relevance….

 

While our stakeholders were all staunch supporters of open research, we heard significant divergence from librarians about business models. European library budgeting and negotiating is still heavily linked to the legacy of APCs and assessed by cost per article. In the US, every librarian we spoke to was strongly anti-APC. But all librarians were deeply frustrated with the pain and cost and managing OA deals – whatever their nature – and copyright terms across publishers. And all stakeholder groups expressed concern that moves towards open research would lead to further “land grabs” by large publishers to control yet more of the research enterprise….”

Commitment to Openness in Research and Research Communication – PLOS

Posted on by
Reply

“Open Science encompasses the entire research process and the entire research community. It empowers researchers everywhere to share valuable artifacts from each stage of their investigation and increase visibility and collaboration around their work. Every research community and individual has an opportunity to shape the activities and norms that inspire trust in their work. A commitment to Open Science, therefore, is not a pledge to adopt a few specific behaviors, but to advance openness, transparency and reproducibility in daily life as a researcher.

Together, we can cultivate a more inclusive and trustworthy future for science….”

OA Weeks past, but not forgotten – The Official PLOS Blog

Posted on by
Reply

“Open Access (OA) Week is a time that’s dear to our hearts at PLOS. PLOS is a proud co-founder of OA Week. Back in 2008, PLOS alumna Donna Okubo, helped to organize an OA Day, together with representatives from SPARC and Students for Free Culture. Based on the success of that event, the group decided to expand OA Day to a full week the following year. OA Week is also an unofficial birthday of sorts, coinciding as it does with the first issues of our first journals: PLOS Biology in October 2003, and PLOS Medicine in October 2004 (plus PLOS NTDs in October 2007, and PLOS Global Public Health in October 2021).

The Open movement has grown and changed a lot over the past 14 years. Through it all PLOS has remained at the forefront of Open, exemplifying the themes of each celebration—almost like they were tailor-made, just for us. Let’s take a look back at highlights from those past celebrations, and a look ahead at where we think the Open movement is headed next….”

Overview of Year 2 opt in options for CRL/NERL Affiliates to PLOS “All Titles” Publishing Agreement

Posted on by
Reply

“In 2021 PLOS and CRL/NERL kicked off a three year (2021-2024) partnership to make open access publishing and open science services FEE-FREE for authors. Our shared goal was to make reading and publishing open access as equitable as possible — eliminating fees for authors, which are a major barrier to inclusion.

As we approach the end of the first year of the partnership, we’re opening up the agreement to any CRL/NERL members and NERL affiliates that didn’t join for year one but might want to join for the remaining two years of the partnership. This webinar will be an overview of:
• Purpose/goals of the partnership
• Intro to PLOS non-APC business models
• Overview of agreement contours including fees, eligibility, and reporting
• Q&A …”