Six years of Wellcome Open Research | Wellcome Open Research Blog

“The end of 2022 marked six years of publishing on Wellcome Open Research – the innovative publishing Platform launched by Wellcome to support its grantees in publishing their findings openly and transparently.

In our blog, we explore the role of Wellcome Open Research in supporting Wellcome-funded researchers around the world and some of the key publishing highlights from the last six years….”

About Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative (GLIDE)

“The Oxford-Johns Hopkins Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative (GLIDE) aims to provide a flexible collaborative platform for identifying and analysing ethical issues arising in infectious disease treatment, research, response, and preparedness, through the lens of global health ethics.

Bringing together scholars, trainees and partners from around the world, GLIDE undertakes both responsive research on pressing issues and forward-looking projects with longer timeframes. GLIDE is funded by a Wellcome Humanities and Social Science Award.

The GLIDE Gateway hosts articles about global infectious disease ethics published on Wellcome Open Research by researchers who have received funding from GLIDE or other Wellcome mechanisms….”

Join the conversation: Building the Open Global Data Citation Corpus – YouTube

“Wellcome Trust and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Partners with DataCite to Build the Open Global Data Citation Corpus

Aggregated references to data across outputs will help the community monitor impact, inform future funding, and improve the dissemination of research DataCite is pleased to announce that The Wellcome Trust has awarded funds to build the Open Global Data Citation Corpus to dramatically transform the data citation landscape. The corpus will store asserted data citations from a diverse set of sources and can be used by any community stakeholder. This webinar is the virtual kick-off and shows a conversation between DataCite, Wellcome Trust, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, EMBL-EBI, COKI, OpenAIRE, and OpenCitations. For more information, please read this DataCite blog post: https://doi.org/10.5438/vjz9-kx84…”

Data Sharing Across Sectors Creates Better Early Warning Systems – data.org

“The existing public sector’s early warning systems for infectious disease and climate events are commonly disconnected; there are limited mechanisms in place that relate the two. In other words, there is a lack of data that helps understand and predict the impacts of extreme weather events and environmental changes on disease risk.

Attempting to find and connect climate and health data proves next to impossible with the current infrastructure in developing countries. For instance, when faced with an outbreak of dengue fever in Peru, the health minister has data on only health and demographics. If you wanted to combine that with climate data you would need to ask the minister of the environment. Want to relate economic data? Ask the minister of the economy and finance….

 

The Harmonize Project seeks to build a digital infrastructure of harmonized databases to feed early warning systems for epidemics exacerbated by climate change in the LAC region.

 

In collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)—and a network in Brazil, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic—and supported by Wellcome, the project will bring together ministries, universities, private companies, social impact organizations, and more to create a complex data infrastructure and collect real longitudinal data on the ground. These new data sets will provide valuable information on seasonal variation in land use and human behavior has given climate hazards, which are generally assumed to be unchanging in health impact models.

The outcome of such an infrastructure? Actionable knowledge to inform local risk mapping and create strong early warning systems to drive resilience in low-resource communities….”

Funders Support Use of Reviewed Preprints in Research Assessment

eLife’s new publishing model has sparked vigorous discussion about the role of editors in selecting research articles for publication. In October, the organisation announced that it is eliminating accept/reject decisions after peer review and instead focusing on preprint review and assessment.

In support, a group of nine funders have committed to including reviewed preprints in the evaluation process, even if they lack the traditional stamp of approval from journal editors. Among these supporters are the Gates Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and Wellcome.

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Supporting organisations:

Cambridge University Libraries
Champalimaud Foundation
cOAlition S
Gates Foundation
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation
Research Libraries UK
Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute
Wellcome

Six recommendations for open sharing statements: Lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic – Research Consulting

“In January 2020, Wellcome coordinated the release of a Joint Statement, calling on researchers, journal publishers and funders to ensure that research findings and data relevant to the COVID-19 outbreak are shared rapidly and openly to inform the public health response and help save lives. The Joint Statement was developed internally by Wellcome, followed statements which were issued during the Zika and Ebola outbreaks, and built on work by the WHO and GloPID-R.

Since November 2021, Research Consulting and Science-Metrix (an Elsevier company) have been investigating the impact of the Joint Statement on open sharing practices during the pandemic, in a project commissioned by Wellcome, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Building on extensive desk research, interviews with policymakers and experts, an online survey and a bibliometric analysis, the findings of this work are now available in the form of a public report and executive summary.

In this blog post, we summarise a range of lessons learned, success factors, opportunities for improvement and recommendations for similar initiatives in the future….”

 

Microbiology Society launches an innovative open research platform | Microbiology Society

“The Microbiology Society is delighted to announce that our sound science journal, Access Microbiology, has been re-launched as an innovative open research platform and is now open for submissions. It is free for authors to submit and publish on the platform during the first year of launch, so we encourage early submission to take advantage of this.

 

Access Microbiology was originally launched in 2018 as a new service to members of our community, allowing the publication of replication studies, negative or null results, research proposals, data management plans, additions to established methods, and interdisciplinary work. By 2020 the number of submissions had exceeded expectations, showing that there is demand for a Society-owned, sound science microbiology journal.

In recent times, there has been a complete overhaul in the way research is being both undertaken and shared. Researchers need to rapidly share their work and are increasingly required to share the data underlying their research. The Council of the Society is keen to be at the forefront of these changes, and we recognised there was a need for a trusted place for our community to disseminate their work rapidly, rigorously and transparently. In response to this need, we applied for and won a grant from the Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes Medical Institute to convert Access Microbiology into an open research platform….”

Highlights from 5 years of publishing | Wellcome Open Research Blog

“2021 marked another successful year for the Wellcome Open Research (WOR) publishing platform. Publication output on WOR continued to grow, with the diversity of research outputs published increasing. The Platform showcases the broad portfolio of research that Wellcome funds.

In this blog, Hannah Hope, Open Research Lead at Wellcome Trust, provides an overview of WOR’s publishing activity of the past year as well as the initiatives we plan to implement in 2022….

This growth has enabled us to continue to be the most used publication venue (by volume of articles) for Wellcome-funded researchers according to Europe PMC and Dimensions data….”

 

The Moonshot: Crowdsourcing To Develop The First Open-Source, Generic COVID-19 Antiviral Pill – Health Policy Watch

“A global grassroots movement of scientists based on crowdsourcing ideas, expertise, and goodwill has already generated – and freely released – more than half of the known structural information on the main protease of SARS-CoV-2. Based on this, they are now on a quest for an open-source drug that can block the virus from replicating….”

Images from Wellcome Collection pass 1.5 billion views on Wikipedia | by Alice White | Dec, 2021 | Stacks

“In November, we reached a remarkable milestone: the number of times that images from Wellcome Collection have been viewed on Wikimedia passed 1.5 billion views. This post will talk about how the images got there, how people engage with them, and why it matters that our images are in Wikipedia articles….”

 

Your right to make your work open access: cOAlition S, Wellcome and UKRI – Leeds University Library Blog

“The Rights Retention Strategy developed by cOAlition S helps researchers retain sufficient rights to their own work so they can make it immediately open access from a repository without an embargo period. It has been adopted in some form by funders including The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as well as the Wellcome Trust, UKRI and the European Union.

While the Devil is in the detail, the overriding message is simple…”

 

Research funders invest in ‘publish, then review’ model for science publishing | For the press | eLife

eLife has announced that its four funders, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Max Planck Society and Wellcome, are extending their support for the non-profit organisation. The new investment will boost eLife’s efforts to openly review and curate research published as preprints.

From belief to evidence – Investigating the long-term impact of open sharing commitments – Research Consulting

“Research Consulting and Science-Metrix are pleased to announce that we have been commissioned to undertake a new study for leading research funders Wellcome, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

This work seeks to understand the impact of requirements for the rapid and open sharing of research findings and data in public health emergencies: we will focus on Covid-19 and the Wellcome-led data sharing Statement, including in comparison with the previous Statement released during the Zika and Ebola outbreaks….

To address such an ambitious brief, we have assembled a unique project team: Research Consulting’s expertise in the open research policy landscape is complemented by Science-Metrix’ (an Elsevier company) bibliometric and informetrics expertise. Our combined efforts will support the project funders in shifting from a belief that the Statement is impactful towards an evidence base that seeks to demonstrate said impact.

Our Science-Metrix colleagues have already started their analysis, and the Research Consulting team is preparing a comprehensive survey that will be shared with signatories of the Statement over the next few months….”

From belief to evidence – Investigating the long-term impact of open sharing commitments – Research Consulting

“Research Consulting and Science-Metrix are pleased to announce that we have been commissioned to undertake a new study for leading research funders Wellcome, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

This work seeks to understand the impact of requirements for the rapid and open sharing of research findings and data in public health emergencies: we will focus on Covid-19 and the Wellcome-led data sharing Statement, including in comparison with the previous Statement released during the Zika and Ebola outbreaks….

To address such an ambitious brief, we have assembled a unique project team: Research Consulting’s expertise in the open research policy landscape is complemented by Science-Metrix’ (an Elsevier company) bibliometric and informetrics expertise. Our combined efforts will support the project funders in shifting from a belief that the Statement is impactful towards an evidence base that seeks to demonstrate said impact.

Our Science-Metrix colleagues have already started their analysis, and the Research Consulting team is preparing a comprehensive survey that will be shared with signatories of the Statement over the next few months….”