“Joint response by the European University Association (EUA), Science Europe, Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA), Association of ERC Grantees (AERG), Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc), cOAlition S, OPERAS, and French National Research Agency (ANR). We welcome the adoption by the Council of the European Union (EU) of the conclusions on highquality, transparent, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly publishing. As key public research and innovation actors in Europe, we are committed to supporting the development of a publicly owned, not-for-profit scholarly communication ecosystem in collaboration with policymakers in Europe and beyond….”
Category Archives: oa.floss
Open Science: stakeholders welcome European efforts towards publicly owned and not-for-profit scholarly communication | Plan S
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’.
Draft Council conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing
The European Council’s recommendatinos on open scholarship to the European Commission and Member States, adopted May 23, 2023.
Council calls for transparent, equitable, and open access to scholarly publications – Consilium
“In its conclusions, the Council calls on the Commission and the member states to support policies towards a scholarly publishing model that is not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers. Some Member States have introduced secondary publication rights into their national copyright legislation, enabling open access to scholarly publications which involve public funds. The Council encourages national open access policies and guidelines to make scholarly publications immediately openly accessible under open licences. The conclusions acknowledge positive developments in terms of monitoring progress, like within the framework of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and suggest including open science monitoring in the European Research Area monitoring mechanism. The Council conclusions also encourage Member States to support the pilot programme Open Research Europe (to create a large-scale open access research publishing service), the use of open-source software and standards, to recognise and reward peer review activities in the assessment of researchers as well as to support the training of researchers on peer-review skills and on intellectual property rights.”
Data Rivers: Carving Out the Public Domain in the Age of Generative AI by Sylvie Delacroix :: SSRN
Abstract: The salient question, today, is not whether ‘copyright law [will] allow robots to learn’. The pressing question is whether the fragile data ecosystem that makes generative AI possible can be re-balanced through intervention that is timely enough. The threats to this ecosystem come from multiple fronts. They are comparable in kind to the threats currently affecting ‘water rivers’ across the globe.
First, just as the fundamental human right to water is only possible if ‘reasonable use’ and reciprocity constraints are imposed on the economic exploitation of rivers, so is the fundamental right to access culture, learn and build upon it. It is that right -and the moral aspirations underlying it- that has led millions to share their creative works under ‘open’ licenses. Generative AI tools would not have been possible without access to that rich, high-quality content. Yet few of those tools respect the reciprocity expectations without which the Creative Commons and Open-Source movements cease to be sustainable. The absence of internationally coordinated standards to systematically identify AI-generated content also threatens our ‘data rivers’ with irreversible pollution.
Second, the process that has allowed large corporations to seize control of data and its definition as an asset subject to property rights has effectively enabled the construction of hard structures -canals or dams- that has led to the rights of many of those lying up-or downstream of such structures to be ignored. While data protection laws seek to address those power imbalances by granting ‘personal’ data rights, the exercise of those rights remains demanding, just as it is challenging for artists to defend their IP rights in the face of AI-generated works that threaten them with redundancy.
To tackle the above threats, the long overdue reform of copyright can only be part of the required intervention. Equally important is the construction of bottom-up empowerment infrastructure that gives long term agency to those wishing to share their data and/or creative works. This infrastructure would also play a central role in reviving much-needed democratic engagement. Data not only carries traces of our past. It is also a powerful tool to envisage different futures. There is no doubt that tools such as GPT4 will change us. We would be fools to believe we may leverage those tools at the service of a variety of futures by merely imposing sets of ‘post-hoc’ regulatory constraints.
Beyond the Repository – ACM Queue
“Open source is much more than a repository—it is a rich multilevel ecosystem of human contributors who collaboratively cooperate, in many capacities, to accomplish a shared creative endeavor. Consequently, when studying open source ecosystems, numerous interacting parts must be considered to understand the dynamics of the whole. Research on open source ecosystems is ultimately research about a sociotechnical ecosystem. Researchers should take care to retain the socio- element in research and understand how both their methods and results may impact entire open source ecosystems.
This article describes best practices for open source ecosystems research through multiple overarching best practices. It offers practical guidelines for conducting rigorous, ethical, respectful research that maintains the integrity of the open source ecosystem under consideration….”
Bioinformatics, data and the value of open science
“Bioinformaticians were recently described as “hidden heroes of the Covid-19 pandemic” for the rate at which they adapted to the challenges of the crisis and came up with methods to “dramatically reduce experimental lab time and enabled the communication of key information”.
Doyle is UL’s community manager for Bioconductor, a global open-source software project that has more than 1,000 developers and is downloaded by more than 1m users every year. She works in Prof Aedín Culhane’s group and leads the Bioconductor global training programme, website redesign, community outreach and support….
Doyle is keen to emphasise the importance of open-source tools and resources in research. She mentions the Lero Open Source and Open Science Programme Office as an exciting recent initiative launched to promote and support open science. Earlier this year, Lero was awarded a European prize in recognition of its commitment to open science principles….”
Single Source Publishing and HTML for Publishers
Definition: Single Source Publishing (SSP) is an approach used by technical publishing systems that focuses on using one source file, shared across content creation and production stages.
In the world of publishing, content creation and production are often disconnected processes. Content creation happens in isolation from the production phases, and the technical systems and file formats used in each stage are often completely separate.
Single Source Publishing (SSP) utilizes a single source file throughout the content creation and production phases.
A thriving international community of digital preservation services built around LOCKSS open-source software – Digital Preservation Coalition
“LOCKSS stands for “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”. Many people in the international digital preservation community will recognize this as the name of the open source preservation software developed at Stanford University Library.
But did you know that LOCKSS is also shorthand for a community of varied distributed preservation services all operating on LOCKSS software? Sometimes called Private LOCKSS Networks or PLNs, these preservation services are: the Alabama Digital Preservation Network (ADPNet), Cariniana in Brazil, CLOCKSS, the MetaArchive Cooperative, the Michigan Digital Preservation Network (MDPN), the SAFE Archive Federation serving 7 universities in Europe and Canada, the US Digital Federal Depository Library Program which preserves government documents published on the US govinfo site (USDOCS), the CGI Preservation Network in Canada, Perma.cc, the Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network (PKP PN), and COPPUL’s WestVault. And just to make things a bit more confusing, it is also shorthand for the Global LOCKSS network which provides digital preservation services and a mechanism for building local collections of web-based scholarly open access publications in a wide array of academic libraries.
The general model is the same for each service in this community of preservation: multiple geographically distributed preservation nodes run the LOCKSS software, each uses a crawler to obtain a copy of the target content for preservation, then these are stored on servers participating in the LOCKSS polling and voting protocol to establish consensus on the authenticity and integrity of that content. When one of these servers detects damage to its preserved copy, it fetches repairs from the original source or from a proven peer.
What varies greatly from one PLN to another are governance and policy matters: the users of the preservation network, the content that is in scope, who operates the service, who has access to the preserved content and under what circumstances, who provides financial backing for various kinds of costs, what services beyond preservation are provided (e.g. bibliographic metadata, usage reports, etc.)…”
Experimental Publishing Compendium | Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)
The Experimental Publishing Compendium is a guide and reference for scholars, publishers, developers, librarians, and designers who want to challenge, push and redefine the shape, form and rationale of scholarly books. The compendium brings together tools, practices, and books to promote the publication of experimental scholarly works. Read more
Beta 1.0 (2023)
Version 1.0 has been curated by Janneke Adema, Julien McHardy, and Simon Bowie. Future versions will be overseen, curated, and maintained by an Editorial Board (members TBC).
Back-end coding by Simon Bowie, front-end coding by Joel Galvez, design by Joel Galvez & Martina Vanini.
Special thanks to Gary Hall, Rebekka Kiesewetter, Marcell Mars, Toby Steiner, and Samuel Moore, and everyone who has provided feedback on our research or shared suggestions of examples to feature, including the participants of COPIM’s experimental publishing workshop, and Nicolás Arata, Dominique Babini, Maria Fernanda Pampin, Sebastian Nordhoff, Abel Packer, and Armanda Ramalho, and Agatha Morka.
Our appreciation also goes out to the Next Generation Library Publishing Project for sharing an early catalogue-in-progress version of SComCat with us, which formed one of the inspirations behind the Compendium.
The compendium grew out of the following two reports:
Adema, J., Bowie, S., Mars, M., and T. Steiner (2022) Books Contain Multitudes: Exploring Experimental Publishing (2022 update). Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). doi: 10.21428/785a6451.1792b84f & 10.5281/zenodo.6545475.
Adema, J., Moore, S., and T. Steiner (2021) Promoting and Nurturing Interactions with Open Access Books: Strategies for Publishers and Authors. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). doi: 10.21428/785a6451.2d6f4263 and 10.5281/zenodo.5572413
COPIM and the Experimental Publishing Compendium are supported by the Research England Development (RED) Fund and by Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.
Why open-source generative AI models are an ethical way forward for science
“From my perspective as a political and data scientist who is using and teaching about such models, scholars should be wary. The most widely touted LLMs are proprietary and closed: run by companies that do not disclose their underlying model for independent inspection or verification, so researchers and the public don’t know on which documents the model has been trained.
The rush to involve such artificial-intelligence (AI) models in research is a problem. Their use threatens hard-won progress on research ethics and the reproducibility of results.
Instead, researchers need to collaborate to develop open-source LLMs that are transparent and not dependent on a corporation’s favours.
It’s true that proprietary models are convenient and can be used out of the box. But it is imperative to invest in open-source LLMs, both by helping to build them and by using them for research. I’m optimistic that they will be adopted widely, just as open-source statistical software has been. Proprietary statistical programs were popular initially, but now most of my methodology community uses open-source platforms such as R or Python….”
Why open-source generative AI models are an ethical way forward for science
“From my perspective as a political and data scientist who is using and teaching about such models, scholars should be wary. The most widely touted LLMs are proprietary and closed: run by companies that do not disclose their underlying model for independent inspection or verification, so researchers and the public don’t know on which documents the model has been trained.
The rush to involve such artificial-intelligence (AI) models in research is a problem. Their use threatens hard-won progress on research ethics and the reproducibility of results.
Instead, researchers need to collaborate to develop open-source LLMs that are transparent and not dependent on a corporation’s favours.
It’s true that proprietary models are convenient and can be used out of the box. But it is imperative to invest in open-source LLMs, both by helping to build them and by using them for research. I’m optimistic that they will be adopted widely, just as open-source statistical software has been. Proprietary statistical programs were popular initially, but now most of my methodology community uses open-source platforms such as R or Python….”
Etica
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New revenue streams for Open Science organisations
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All proposals shared within Etica are immediately available for anyone to use without patent restrictions…”
Open Science Left in the Dust
“But, while open resources are becoming more widely used, there is still a significant barrier to achieving open science. According to an Open Science India report, a survey conducted among researchers revealed that only 36.74% of those who relied on openly available publications on the internet for their research shared their findings through open access repositories. Similarly, for data, the percentage of researchers who shared their findings openly was even lower, at 31.78%….
Besides the communitarian notion that open source will help advance science, there is an ethical reason given to it. “Majority of research is still funded by public funds. I think if the government is funding research, and most of the government research funding money comes from taxpayer money, it’s not unfair to say that there should be a requirement that whatever you produce should be released as open source,” he said.
The realm of science is currently experiencing a crisis of reproducibility, wherein a significant number of published studies fail to withstand the test of replication when conducted with the same datasets. The push for open science will help counteract the “publish or perish” mentality of academic institutions which has led to journals printing embellished, flashy, positive results….”
Curvenote for Journals and Publishers
“Curvenote Journals are built with MyST, an open-source project curated by Executable Books. Curvenote has partnered with MyST and ExecutableBooks to ensure that improvements we make to Curvenote Journals are open, accessible, and benefit everyone — helping move humanity towards open-science….”