Results of PLOS experiments to increase sharing and discovery of research data – The Official PLOS Blog

“For PLOS, increasing data-sharing rates—and especially increasing the amount of data shared in a repository—is a high priority. 

Research data is a vital part of the scientific record, essential to both understanding and reproducing published research. And data repositories are the most effective and impactful way to share research data. Not only is deposited data safer and more discoverable, articles with data in a repository have a 25% higher citation rate on average.

With support from the Wellcome Trust, we’ve been experimenting with two solutions designed to increase awareness about data repositories and promote data repository use among both authors and readers. One solution didn’t achieve its expected outcome in the context we tested it (a “negative” result) while the other shows promise as a tool for increasing engagement with deposited data. The mixed outcomes are an example of why it’s so important to share all research results regardless of their outcome – whether “positive” or “negative” results. We hope that our experiences, what we’ve learned, and above all the data and results, can help the scholarly communications community to develop new and better solutions to meet the challenges we all face, and advance Open Science.

Read on for a quick summary of the studies we conducted. Or get the full details from our new preprint on Figshare, and explore the data for yourself….”

FAQs | Wellcome Open Research

“Wellcome Open Research provides Wellcome-funded researchers a place to rapidly publish any of their results, including data sets, negative results, protocols, case reports, incremental findings as well as more traditional articles.

Wellcome Open Research publishes original research on all topics that receive grant funding from Wellcome. This includes:

biomedical science
population health
applied research
humanities and social sciences
public engagement and arts projects, where it includes original research…”

Extending Accessible Data to more articles, repositories, and outputs – The Official PLOS Blog

“In March 2022, with support from the Wellcome Trust, we launched an experimental “Accessible Data” feature designed to increase research data sharing and reuse. Having observed some interesting preliminary results, we’re extending – and extending the scope of – our “Accessible Data” experiment….

The Accessible Data icon rewards sharing data (and code) in a repository via a weblink. Best practice is sharing via a link-able persistent identifier, such as a DOI, but many PLOS articles link to data in other ways, such as via URLs or private links that are intended to be used for peer review only (a common problem for publishers). There is clearly work to do to improve consistency and practice of how data links are shared, but we decided to be inclusive in how we deploy the Accessible Data icon. It displays as long readers can access the data. We decided it was more important to help researchers as authors  – who may be unaware of the nuances of DOIs and private links – and also help them as readers, by including imperfect but functional links to data in our articles.”

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.

[Clip]

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…”