Category Archives: oa.reports

Publication of the French National Fund for Open Science’s activity report

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The French National Fund for Open Science’s first activity report provides a summary of the work carried out over the 2019-2021 period covered by the first National Plan for Open Science.

The National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) set up in 2019 is one of the first major achievements deriving from the First French Plan for Open Science. It is a scientific interest group managed by the CNRS’s Open Research Data Department. Its governance has been entrusted to a Steering Committee made up of the heads of France’s main higher education and research institutions and chaired by Claire Giry, the Director General of Research and Innovation at the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation.

French National Fund for Open Science activity report

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“The first report on the French National Fund for Open Science (FNSO) activities covers the period 2020-2021.

After reminding us of the organisation and the functioning of the scientific interest group, the origin and the amount of the financial resources, the activity report presents the results of its actions for the period. In order to financially sustain projects and initiatives contributing to the development of open science, the FNSO has set up two key actions: calls for projects, where projects are financed after a selection process, and direct financial support to initiatives structuring the open science landscape. These actions are complemented by dedicated funding.

The activity report concludes with the commitments of the FNSO for the period 2022-2023…”

WorldFAIR and a Festival of Data – Looking back on 2022 and forward to 2023: a report on CODATA activities and achievements | Zenodo

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“WorldFAIR and a Festival of Data, looks back on 2022 and forward to 2023.  It provides a report on CODATA activities and achievements and highlights the most important upcoming events.

2022 has been another busy and successful year for the CODATA community.  We are very grateful for your committed collaboration and engagement with our mission.  As a global, membership organisation, CODATA depends on the generosity of our funders and collaborators and the often voluntary efforts of committee, Task Group and Working Group members.  

In 2023, the International Data Week theme will be ‘a festival of data’ and an occasion to celebrate the richness and diversity of our community.  That starts with this expression of gratitude.  We are very fortunate to have an extremely committed group of Officers and Executive Committee members, dynamic leadership throughout our various initiatives and a secretariat that works beyond the call of duty.  Through all these factors, and more, CODATA is genuinely greater than the sum of its parts and achieves a great deal more than our budget would suggest.

As is customary, we would like to provide a summary of activities and achievements and take the opportunity to alert you to events in the coming year.  This is a genuinely exciting time, as we see the vision for a Decadal Programme on Making Data Work for Cross-Domain Grand Challenges begin to come into fruition with the WorldFAIR project, a set of related Case Studies, and important work on units, vocabularies and a Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework.  Also notable is new impetus and direction for our International Data Policy Committee and the new International Programme Office to support the Open Science initiatives.

The report published here ended up a bit longer than intended!  I hope it provides an informative and interesting snapshot of CODATA activities.  An updated version and a revised CODATA Strategy will be published in 2023 in preparation for our General Assembly, Salzburg, Austria, 27-28 October.”

The State of Journal Production and Access 2022: Report on survey of independent academic publishers

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“Among the main findings on the topic of journal production were:

• Compared to 2020, there was apparent growth in journals producing HTML articles.

• Full-text XML article production remained flat since 2020 (38% in 2020 and 2022).

• 50%+ respondents included ORCIDs and DOIs in metadata, but other PIDs like author/ contributor roles, funder IDs, and organizational IDs had lower adoption rates. That said, some PIDs increased across the two surveys, including Funder ID (20% in 2022 versus 16% in 2020) and CRediT (22% in 2022 versus 16% in 2020).

• Most respondents said PDF and HTML are the most important article formats for their readers, as well as reaching publishing program goals.

• When asked to rate their publishers’ primary production goals, most respondents chose “journal/article search engine optimization” (86% reported that this was “very” or “somewhat” important).

Among the main findings on the topic of journal access were:

• 95% of respondents said at least one of their publisher’s journals offered OA options.

• 80% of respondents said their organization utilizes fully-OA publishing models.

• When asked to rate their publishers’ primary funding/revenue priorities, most respondents chose “identifying viable funding model(s) for publishing one or more fully-OA journals” (68% reported it’s “very” or “somewhat” important).

• Institutional subsidies and grants were seen as having the highest OA funding potential…”

The State of Journal Production and Access 2022: Report on survey of independent academic publishers

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“For independent academic publishers, the digital landscape presents many new opportunities to expand the reach and influence of research along with new challenges — often at the intersection of article production and access. Publishers are weighing evolving content formatting and metadata standards as well as open access (OA) mandates, which increasingly go hand in hand and can directly affect journal discoverability and impact.

The 2022 “State of Journal Production and Access” report details the results of a global, cross-disciplinary survey of scholarly society, university, and research institution publishers about how they are approaching journal production and access now and in the future, spanning:

Article production processes and formats
Metadata tagging standards and approaches
OA journal development plans and funding models

The goal of the survey and this subsequent report is to help publishers benchmark their immediate and long-term production and access priorities against their peers and provide a snapshot of the evolution of academy-led publishing programs up to this point in these discrete but related areas of publishing for all stakeholders….”

Curry, Gadd, and Wilsdon (2022) Harnessing the Metric Tide: indicators, infrastructures & priorities for UK responsible research assessment.

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posted on 2022-12-12, 06:12 authored by Stephen Curry, Elizabeth Gadd, James Wilsdon

This review was commissioned by the joint UK higher education (HE) funding bodies as part of the Future Research Assessment Programme (FRAP). It revisits the findings of the 2015 review The Metric Tide to take a fresh look at the use of indicators in research management and assessment.  While this review feeds into the larger FRAP process, the authors have taken full advantage of their independence and sought to stimulate informed and robust discussion about the options and opportunities of future REF exercises. The report should be read in that spirit: as an input to ongoing FRAP deliberations, rather than a reflection of their likely or eventual conclusions. The report is written in three sections. Section 1 plots the development of the responsible research assessment agenda since 2015 with a focus on the impact of The Metric Tide review and progress against its recommendations. Section 2 revisits the potential use of metrics and indicators in any future REF exercise, and proposes an increased uptake of ‘data for good’. Section 3 considers opportunities to further support the roll-out of responsible research assessment policies and practices across the UK HE sector. Appendices include an overview of progress against the recommendations of The Metric Tide and a literature review. We make ten recommendations targeted at different actors in the UK research system, summarised as:  1: Put principles into practice.  2: Evaluate with the evaluated.  3: Redefine responsible metrics.  4: Revitalise the UK Forum. 5: Avoid all-metric approaches to REF.  6: Reform the REF over two cycles.  7: Simplify the purposes of REF. 8: Enhance environment statements. 9: Use data for good.  10: Rethink university rankings. 

What LPC accomplished under our first strategic plan | Library Publishing Coalition

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by Melanie Schlosser

LPC’s current 5-year strategic plan (PDF) is winding down. Published in summer 2018, it was our young community’s first concrete statement of our strategic goals. From LPC’s seed-funded project period (2013-14) through our first two years as a full-fledged membership association (2015-2017), we relied for guidance on our original scoping materials and focused much of our energy on getting the community’s infrastructure and ongoing programs on solid footing. By 2017, it had become apparent that we were ready to think more strategically about the future and put in the work to make sure we were pulling in the same directions across the community. The strategic planning process we undertook was a traditional one, involving a SWOT Analysis, an environmental scan, and community consultation. The outcome was a traditional 5-year strategic plan consisting of three goals, with nested objectives and action items.

[…]

 

Library Publishing Coalition: Annual Report 2021-2022

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“While scholarly publishing is a core function of academia, the commercial companies that have traditionally controlled a majority of publications often hold values that run counter to those of the faculty whose work they publish. This includes the publication of content behind paywalls, which ties breadth of dissemination to profits. In efforts to better serve their parent institutions, faculty, and the common good, libraries began establishing publishing programs that support the publication needs and efforts of their institution while maximizing access to publications. While each library publishing program differs in its structure, goals, and focus, these programs build on the skills of librarians in scholarship, metadata, and publishing, and align with the values of their institutions, often prioritizing open access, open source software, and new and emerging publication types. This scaffolding and expertise ensure that those producing the scholarship have increased control over the production, publication, and ownership of their publications….”

Taking Open Access book usage from reports to operational strategy | Digital Science

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By Christina Drummond

While the term “usage data” most often refers to webpage views and downloads associated with a given book or book chapter, scholarly communications stakeholders have identified a near future where linked open access (OA) scholarship usage data analytics could directly inform publishing, discovery, and collections development in addition to impact reporting.

In the 2020-2022 Exploring Open Access Ebook Usage research project supported by the Mellon Foundation, publisher and library representatives expressed their interests in using OA eBook Usage (OAeBU) data analytics to inform overall OA program investment, strategy and fundraising. A report summarizing a year of virtual focus groups noted multiple operational use cases for OA book usage analytics, spanning book marketing, sales, and editorial strategy; collections development and hosting; institutional OA program strategy, reporting, and investment; and OA impact reporting for institutions and authors to support reporting to their funding agencies, donors, and policy-makers.

 

Leveraging Data Communities to Advance Open Science – Ithaka S+R

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“Several recent studies have indicated that large numbers of researchers in many STEM fields now accept the value of openly sharing research data. Yet, the actual practice of sharing data—especially in forms that comply with FAIR principles—remains a challenge for many researchers to integrate into their workflows and prioritize among the demands on their time.[1] In many disciplines and subfields, data sharing is still mostly an ideal, honored more in the breach than in practice.[2]

The barriers to open data sharing are numerous.[3] However, sustained funding from federal agencies in the United States including the NSF and NIH and important initiatives in other countries such as Canada’s Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy and the European Union’s OpenAire, is creating a growing infrastructure for open sharing of research data, albeit one that highlights the tension between scientific research practices that are now regularly multi-national in scope yet exist within funding and regulatory structures determined largely by national entities.[4] In the US context, the most visible fruits of these efforts are the decentralized network of repositories that have become available to researchers in many fields and are now a vital infrastructure for data sharing across many fields. As incentive structures have slowly shifted, the number of researchers taking advantage of these resources has also grown.

The existence of these repositories are necessary enabling conditions for data sharing, but their ability to transform researcher’s practices around data depositing and sharing absent changes to incentive structures and the culture of research communities will remain uneven. Furthering the goals of open science requires convincing more researchers of the value of data sharing to themselves and to the community of researchers with whom they most tangibly identify. Creating and encouraging community norms that reward sharing is necessary because data sharing, especially FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) compliant sharing, is hard work. Absent strong incentive and reward structures, researchers are often reluctant to take on this “extra” labor. Successful data sharing ultimately depends on cultural and social infrastructures as much as on technical infrastructures….”

Opening the Future: How to Implement an Equitable Revenue Model for Open Access Monographs | Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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Eve, Martin Paul, Pinter, Frances, Poznanski, Emily, & Grady, Tom. (2022). Opening the Future: How to Implement an Equitable Revenue Model for Open Access Monographs (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6907707

Abstract:

COVID-19 has thrown many aspects of university research culture into acute relief. As the reality of the virus dawned and campuses worldwide went into lockdown, publishers scrambled to unpaywall their research. Publishers made topical works and more general material openly available, through their own sites and platforms such as Project Muse and JSTOR. Physical collections became inaccessible and demand for openly accessible research skyrocketed. It is unclear that it is desirable to return to the previous systems of scholarly communication in the book publishing world, in which physical copies may remain affordable, even while e-licensing agreements for libraries are not.

This has been recognised in several recent global policy announcements including the cOAlition S/Plan S guidelines, and the recent UKRI consultation on OA. The latter’s proposed measures include the possibility of zero-embargo green OA, more liberal open licensing, and the long- vaunted requirement for funded monographs to be in scope. This last element built on a longstanding policy history in the UK foreshadowing a mandate for OA monographs.

That said, the path to OA monographs is not free of obstacles. Among the many issues, the most frequently raised is the business model of Book Processing Charges (BPCs) and their apparent unaffordability, mostly due to distributional allocation of library resources. Happily, several recent reports have detailed non-BPC OA revenue and business models that presses could use to transition to OA – one of the most recent being COPIM’s Revenue models for Open Access monographs 2020.

That report describes a variation on the journal ‘Subscribe to Open’ model whereby members ‘subscribe to a backlist, with the revenue then used to make the frontlist openly accessible’. This constitutes a new business model for OA monographs that had not previously been implemented. We implemented this model, dubbed ‘Opening the Future,’ in a partnership between the COPIM project, the Central European University Press (CEUP), and Liverpool University Press (LUP). This model presents a potential route for the mass and sustainable transition to OA of many small-to-mid sized university presses.

This document sets out how we implemented this model, including the documentation of challenges, resources, timetables, and activities. It is intended as a roadmap for other presses that wish to implement an ‘Opening the Future’-esque model. Of course, this document is unlikely to cover everything, but the authors are happy to respond to individual queries where this will prove helpful.

COPIM’s toolkit for running an Opening the Future programme at an academic press | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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Grady, Tom, Eve, Martin P., & WP3 (2022). COPIM’s toolkit for running an Opening the Future programme at an academic press. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/copim-toolkit-for-running-an-opening-the-future-programme

Step-by-step guide for presses that wish to implement an ‘Opening the Future’ model now published

 

Study on EU copyright and related rights and access to and reuse of data – Publications Office of the EU

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European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Senftleben, M., Study on EU copyright and related rights and access to and reuse of data, Publications Office of the European Union, 2022, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/78973

EU legislation in the field of copyright, related rights and sui generis database rights can have a deep impact on access to data resources for scientific research and the availability of data resulting from publicly funded research. To establish a copyright and related rights framework that offers appropriate data access and reuse opportunities for scientific research, it is necessary to identify potential barriers and challenges that may arise from EU copyright and related rights legislation and corresponding rights management. This study analyses the interaction between copyright and related rights law and data access and reuse for scientific research purposes. It proposes legislative and non-legislative measures to improve the current EU regulatory framework.

New COPIM Scoping Report Published on Archiving and Preserving Open Access Monographs | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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by Miranda Barnes

Work Package 7 of the COPIM Project has released their Scoping Report, identifying and examining the key challenges associated with archiving and preserving open access monographs, particularly those published by small and scholar-led presses.