Abstract: Májovský and colleagues have investigated the important issue of ChatGPT being used for the complete generation of scientific works, including fake data and tables. The issues behind why ChatGPT poses a significant concern to research reach far beyond the model itself. Once again, the lack of reproducibility and visibility of scientific works creates an environment where fraudulent or inaccurate work can thrive. What are some of the ways in which we can handle this new situation?
“Yesterday was the first of four listening sessions by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. These are specifically geared towards Early-Career Researchers (ECRs), which I guess I technically would still be had I stayed in academia.
I had the opportunity to briefly participate and share some prepared remarks. Sharing those here to document my own thoughts and make them more accessible. The quality of other’s input was inspiring….”
“The OSTP is hosting a series of virtual public listening sessions to explore perspectives from the early career researcher community on the challenges and opportunities for advancing open science in the United States. Hosted as part of a Year of Open Science, these listening sessions aim to elevate the needs, priorities, and experiences of this community in shaping a future of open and equitable research.
OSTP is seeking input from undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows from a diverse range of backgrounds and disciplines, as well as those involved in training and capacity building, including librarians, educators, and administrators. We are therefore writing to invite your community to join the conversation. We welcome your support in sharing this opportunity with your broader community/network….”
Abstract: Journal editors have a large amount of power to advance open science in their respective fields by incentivising and mandating open policies and practices at their journals. The Data PASS Journal Editors Discussion Interface (JEDI, an online community for social science journal editors: www.dpjedi.org) has collated several resources on open science in journal editing (www.dpjedi.org/resources). However, it can be overwhelming as a new editor to know where to start. For this reason, we have created a guide for journal editors on how to get started with open science. The guide outlines steps that editors can take to implement open policies and practices at their journal, and goes through the what, why, how, and worries of each policy/practice.
“CESSDA [Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives] has been recognised in the new Horizon Europe Programme Guide and the Open Research Europe publishing platform for its contribution to Open Science practices. These recognitions highlight the importance of trusted repositories in Open Science practices, particularly in preserving and making research data accessible….”
“How to accelerate the transition to Open Science? Join us!
Join us for an upcoming event at the Nordic House in Brussels, on June 12th.
As part of the build-up to the Swedish Presidency conference on “The Potential of Research Data”, the EOSC Association, alongside its esteemed Swedish members, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and the Swedish Research Council (VR), will be hosting a remarkable joint session on Accelerating the Transition to Open Science: the possible pathways for impact to accelerate the transition to Open Science as the norm for scientific publishing.
This highly anticipated gathering will take place after work on Monday, 12 June, at 17:30, and is hosted at the EOSC Association headquarters located at Rue du Luxembourg 3 in Brussels….”
“OSC-NL is a network of coordinators of Dutch Open Science Communities (OSC). We stimulate collaboration amongst Dutch OSCs and provide input to research policy, infrastructure and services.
By the same token, OSC-NL is the Dutch national chapter of the International Network of Open Science Communities (INOSC)….”
Abstract: Supervision is one important way to socialize Ph.D. candidates into open and responsible research. We hypothesized that one should be more likely to identify open science practices (here publishing open access and sharing data) in empirical publications that were part of a Ph.D. thesis when the Ph.D. candidates’ supervisors engaged in these practices compared to those whose supervisors did not or less often did. Departing from thesis repositories at four Dutch University Medical centers, we included 211 pairs of supervisors and Ph.D. candidates, resulting in a sample of 2062 publications. We determined open access status using UnpaywallR and Open Data using Oddpub, where we also manually screened publications with potential open data statements. Eighty-three percent of our sample was published openly, and 9% had open data statements. Having a supervisor who published open access more often than the national average was associated with an odds of 1.99 to publish open access. However, this effect became nonsignificant when correcting for institutions. Having a supervisor who shared data was associated with 2.22 (CI:1.19–4.12) times the odds to share data compared to having a supervisor that did not. This odds ratio increased to 4.6 (CI:1.86–11.35) after removing false positives. The prevalence of open data in our sample was comparable to international studies; open access rates were higher. Whilst Ph.D. candidates spearhead initiatives to promote open science, this study adds value by investigating the role of supervisors in promoting open science.
“Not-for-profit is a quick and dirty proxy for the values that we want in open science, but it is not necessary or sufficient to ensure those values….”
“Quala Lab is a collaboratively-run working group that works to find ways to find connections between the open science movement and qualitative and mixed methods research. The group formed shortly after the the 2021 Virtual Unconference on Open Scholarship Practices in Education Research, where Rachel Renbarger and Lisa Ridgley led a session on using open science practices with non-quantitative studies. The group meets weekly to discuss ongoing projects, the philosophy of open science, and current events inside and outside of academia.”
Abstract: Science journalists are uniquely positioned to increase the societal impact of open science by contextualizing and communicating research findings in ways that highlight their relevance and implications for non-specialist audiences. Through engagement with and coverage of open research outputs, journalists can help align the ideals of openness, transparency, and accountability with the wider public sphere and its democratic potential. Yet, it is unclear to what degree journalists use open research outputs in their reporting, what factors motivate or constrain this use, and how the recent surge in openly available research seen during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the relationship between open science and science journalism. This literature review thus examines journalists’ use of open research outputs, specifically open access publications and preprints. We focus on literature published from 2018 onwards—particularly literature relating to the COVID-19 pandemic—but also include seminal articles outside the search dates. We find that, despite journalists’ potential to act as critical brokers of open access knowledge, their use of open research outputs is hampered by an overreliance on traditional criteria for evaluating scientific quality; concerns about the trustworthiness of open research outputs; and challenges using and verifying the findings. We also find that, while the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged journalists to explore open research outputs such as preprints, the extent to which these explorations will become established journalistic practices remains unclear. Furthermore, we note that current research is overwhelmingly authored and focused on the Global North, and the United States specifically. Finally, given the dearth of research in this area, we conclude with recommendations for future research that attend to issues of equity and diversity, and more explicitly examine the intersections of open science and science journalism.
Several slide presentations 1st UNESCO Working Group on Open Science Policies and Policy Instruments, May 23, 2022.
Abstract: Evidence-based policy uses intervention research to inform consequential decisions about resource allocation. Research findings are often published in peer-reviewed journals. Because detrimental research practices associated with closed science are common, journal articles report more false-positives and exaggerated effect sizes than would be desirable. Journal implementation of standards that promote open science—such as the transparency and openness promotion (TOP) guidelines—could reduce detrimental research practices and improve the trustworthiness of research evidence on intervention effectiveness. We evaluated TOP implementation at 339 peer-reviewed journals that have been used to identify evidence-based interventions for policymaking and programmatic decisions. Each of ten open science standards in TOP was not implemented in most journals’ policies (instructions to authors), procedures (manuscript submission systems), or practices (published articles). Journals implementing at least one standard typically encouraged, but did not require, an open science practice. We discuss why and how journals could improve implementation of open science standards to safeguard evidence-based policy.
For European public research and innovation actors, scholarly knowledge is a public good. Publicly funded research and its results should be immediately and openly available to all without barriers such as subscription fees or paywalls. This is essential in driving knowledge forward, promoting innovation and tackling social issues.
Key representative organisations of the public research and innovation sector have welcomed today’s adoption of the ‘Council conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly publishing’.
“European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) offers researchers, innovators, companies and the general public a federated and open multi-disciplinary environment. Using the e-infrastructure of this environment, users can publish, search and reuse data-sets, various tools and services for research, innovation and education. Data and related services in EOSC are established on FAIR principles.
In this presentation, we will give a short introduction to EOSC and show the process by which the providers – organizations like universities – of services can register themselves and then onboard their respective services. Some of the examples of such services will be shown. We will also present the benefits that the users of the EOSC gain by using the tools and e-infrastructure of the EOSC….”