“This study found that data sharing among psychologists is driven primarily by their perceptions of community benefits, academic reciprocity and the norms of data sharing. This study also found that academic reciprocity is significantly influenced by psychologists’ perceptions of community benefits, academic reputation and the norms of data sharing. Both academic reputation and academic reciprocity are affected by psychologists’ prior experiences with data reuse. Additionally, psychologists’ perceptions of community benefits and the norms of data sharing are significantly affected by the perception of their academic reputation.”
Category Archives: oa.incentives
G7 Science and Technology Ministers’ Communique
“We share a growing concern that some actors may attempt to unfairly exploit or distort the open research environment and misappropriate research results for economic, strategic, geopolitical, or military purposes. This undermines the principles and values that underpin open, transparent, reciprocal, and accountable international research cooperation and the integrity of research and may pose security risks….
The G7 will collaborate in expanding open science with equitable dissemination of scientific knowledge and publicly funded research outputs including research data and scholarly publications in line with the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles. This is so that researchers and people throughout the world can benefit from them as well as contribute to the creation of new knowledge, stimulation of innovation, democratization of access to knowledge by society and the development of solutions for global challenges. This will also help to build more reproducible and trusted research results.
We recognize openness, freedom, and inclusiveness should be enhanced globally for the sound development of scientific research. When making decisions about openness, the respect for universal human rights and the protection of national security are essential, and principles and rules related to academic freedom, research integrity, privacy, and protection of intellectual property rights should be applied and upheld.
We acknowledge that open science platforms can allow the rapid sharing of pathogen samples and pathogen genetic sequence data on a global scale. They should also enable early development and more rapid, effective, and equitable access to MCMs for the prevention and control of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. Robust multilateral data sharing is needed to ensure continued societal resilience to the global issues of today and the future….
The G7 also supports immediate open and public access to government-funded scholarly publications and scientific data, and supports the endeavors of the scientific community to address challenges in scholarly publishing for broader sharing of appropriate scientific outputs. To this end, we support the efforts of the G7 Open Science Working Group in promoting the interoperability and sustainability of infrastructure for research outputs, supporting research assessment approaches that incentivize and reward open science practices, and encouraging “research on research”, aimed at helping to shape a more effective evidence-based research policy…. ”
Incentivizing Collaborative and Open Research (ICOR) Public Meeting
“Incentivizing Collaborative and Open Research (ICOR) is building a collaborative research culture by strategizing, connecting and implementing projects that seek to change the status quo of competition throughout the research cycle. We have identified and begun to implement practical, real-life solutions involving tools and processes, aiming to gather evidence that sharing early research results will result in faster, more reproducible outcomes. ICOR is building a body of evidence and library of best practices and case studies on the impact of projects that facilitate collaborative open research. We have begun to register projects with similar aims as described here with the goal of presenting to funders and research groups a unified approach to problem solving.
At our inaugural webinar, we will present some of the representative projects and resources that have been curated to promote standardized best practices. More info: https://bit.ly/3MfnLm8 Agenda: https://bit.ly/3VXXkED ”
English – Knowledge Equity Network
“For Higher Education Institutions
Publish a Knowledge Equity Statement for your institution by 2025, incorporating tangible commitments aligned with the principles and objectives below.
Commit to institutional action(s) to support a sustained increase of published educational material being open and freely accessible for all to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research.
Commit to institutional action(s) to support a sustained increase of new research outputs being transparent, open and freely accessible for all, and which meet the expectations of funders.
Use openness as an explicit criteria in reaching hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions. Reward and recognise open practices across both research and research-led education. This should include the importance of interdisciplinary and/or collaborative activities, and the contribution of all individuals to activities.
Define Equity, Diversity and Inclusion targets that will contribute towards open and inclusive Higher Education practices, and report annually on progress against these targets.
To create new mechanisms in and between Higher Education Institutions that allow for further widening participation and increased diversity of staff and student populations.
Review the support infrastructure for open Higher Education, and invest in the human, technical, and digital infrastructure that is needed to make open Higher Education a success.
Promote the use of open interoperability principles for any research or education software/system that you procure or develop, explicitly highlighting the option of making all or parts of content open for public consumption.
Ensure that all research data conforms to the FAIR Data Principles: ‘findable’, accessible, interoperable, and re-useable.
For Funding Agencies
Publish a statement that open dissemination of research findings is a critical component in evaluating the productivity and integrity of research.
Incorporate open research practices into assessment of funding proposals.
Incentivise the adoption of Open Research through policies, frameworks and mandates that require open access for publications, data, and other outputs, with as liberal a licence as possible for maximum reuse.
Actively manage funding schemes to support open infrastructures and open dissemination of research findings, educational resources, and underpinning data.
Explicitly define reward and recognition mechanisms for globally co-produced and co-delivered open educational resources that benefit society….”
Spotlight Series Recap: Incentivizing Open in Reappointment, Promotion, Tenure, and Hiring — Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship
“On March 22, 2023 the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) convened academic leaders to discuss incentivizing open scholarship practices in hiring, reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT)….
McKiernan framed the day’s conversation: “when we are talking about incentives within promotion, tenure, and hiring, what we’re really talking about is what universities value, what they recognize, and whether they are the same things.” In McKiernan’s research, she and her co-authors have discovered that what gets rewarded in these policies is not what universities always state they value. University mission statements often talk about the importance of community and public engagement for the betterment of society. Open scholarship practices like making our work openly available by sharing data, code, notebooks, and all kinds of outputs allow individuals to engage with the work, collaborate, and build on the work. There are many public aspects of what faculty do in their day-to-day work, including openly disseminating scholarly outputs, but tenure and promotion guidelines at many universities do not adequately reward public engagement and outreach that open scholarship practices enable….”
Open everything, everywhere, all at once
“This is the first in a series of blog posts exploring the evolving Open landscape, library roles and OCLC’s place within it. This post provides a general overview of Open, sign-posting important categories as they relate to libraries and exploring motivations that draw libraries – and other stakeholders – into this ecosystem. Subsequent posts will describe OCLC’s engagement in the Open landscape and examine our distinctive position as a member-driven infrastructure partner.”
A Manifesto for Rewarding and Recognising Team Infrastructure Roles | Zenodo
Abstract: Abstract: Large research teams benefit from people with diverse skills.This has necessitated the growth of professional team infrastructure roles (TIRs) who support research through specialised skills. TIRs play an important role in ensuring the success of a research project, but are neglected under current reward and recognition procedures that focus on research articles as the primary way for scholarly communication. We propose system level changes to recognise TIR contributions that will affect scholarly communication in the long term. We particularly welcome feedback from regions other than the EU and US, since our suggestions are based on our personal experiences of the systems in these regions.
A Manifesto for Rewarding and Recognising Team Infrastructure Roles | Zenodo
Abstract: Abstract: Large research teams benefit from people with diverse skills.This has necessitated the growth of professional team infrastructure roles (TIRs) who support research through specialised skills. TIRs play an important role in ensuring the success of a research project, but are neglected under current reward and recognition procedures that focus on research articles as the primary way for scholarly communication. We propose system level changes to recognise TIR contributions that will affect scholarly communication in the long term. We particularly welcome feedback from regions other than the EU and US, since our suggestions are based on our personal experiences of the systems in these regions.
How covid-19 bolstered an already perverse publishing system | The BMJ
“This was the first global pandemic that the scientific publishing industry had ever faced—while journals existed, no organised industry did when the 1918 flu pandemic occurred—and the first in a new digital age of internet communication and publishing. An estimated 1.5 million articles were added to the global literature in 2020—the largest single year increase in history, says Vincent Larivière, who studies bibliometrics at the University of Montreal, Canada. This peaked in April 2020, when many countries were deep into lockdown or applying heavy restrictions.
Some saw it as an opportunity. There were promises of more open science and publishing: a number of journals and research institutions agreed to a data sharing pledge issued by the funder the Wellcome Trust on 31 January 2020 that intended to “ensure that research findings and data relevant to this outbreak are shared rapidly and openly to inform the public health response and help save lives.”2 But it also stoked an already, some say, twisted industry—one that thrives on competitiveness—to publish the first data or to have the greatest visibility and impact. This changed the ways that papers were produced and vetted, for good and bad….
Medical journals halved their turnaround times in the first half of 2020.5 Despite the unknown nature of the virus and its science, editors took far less rather than more time over decisions, a February 2023 analysis of 339?000 papers has found.6
Naomi Lee, senior executive editor for research at the Lancet during the pandemic, recalls how the usually rare practice of “fast tracking” select papers was expanded so that “practically everyone and everything was accelerated with the goal of disseminating critical knowledge.” The PubMed database shows that the five most cited articles in the Lancet since 2020—most reporting early coronavirus data—were accepted within 14 days and published within 22 days of receipt.
Alarms were raised early on about the mix of sheer volume and unprecedented speed….
Proponents of open science had breathlessly heralded a revolution.10 medRxiv, a BMJ affiliated preprint server, saw a 10-fold rise in submissions within two months of the first reported covid case. But this enthusiasm receded, and submissions at medRxiv and others stabilised by mid-2020.
Analysis shows that just 5% of all peer reviewed journal articles about covid-19 published in 2020 started out as preprints.11 And, while some pivotal trials such as Recovery and Solidarity were first reported as open access preprints, none of the phase 3 covid vaccine trials supported by Oxford-AstraZeneca, Moderna, or Pfizer was, and only the Oxford-AstraZeneca phase 3 trial report was published with a gold open access licence. A 2022 evaluation by Wellcome of the data sharing commitment it initiated found that fewer than half of signatories’ covid papers contained information about where and how to access available data,12 raising concern about a lack of transparency, particularly in clinical trials.
Progress towards more open research has also disappointed. While the leading publishers agreed to make their covid content open and reusable,2 Wellcome’s assessment found that just 46% of signatories’ covid papers were genuinely open access, where re-use is permitted and authors retain copyright.12
Instead, most journals retained commercial rights and simply took down a paywall (“bronze” open access15), says Larivière. He adds that, while major publishers including Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley continue to make covid content freely available, only about half of papers on the climate crisis are similarly available….”
Why research integrity matters and how it can be improved
Scholars need to be able to trust each other, because other – wise they cannot collaborate and use each other’s findings. Similarly trust is essential for research to be applied for individuals, society or the natural environment. The trustworthiness is threatened when researchers engage in questionable research practices or worse. By adopting open science practices, research becomes transparent and accountable. Only then it is possible to verify whether trust in research findings is justified. The magnitude of the issue is substantial with a prevalence of four percent for both fabrication and falsification, and more than 50% for questionable research practices. This implies that researchers regularly engage in behaviors that harm the validity and trustworthiness of their work. What is good for the quality and reliability of research is not always good for a scholarly career. Navigating this dilemma depends on how virtuous the researcher at issue is, but also on the local research climate and the perverse incentives in the way the research system functions. Research institutes, funding agencies and scholarly journals can do a lot to foster research integrity, first and foremost by improving the quality of peer review and reforming researcher assessment
DEAL ist ein Problem – Gespräch mit Thomas Stäcker über die Folgen der Digitalisierung für Bibliotheken (3) – Aus der Forschungsbibliothek Krekelborn
From Google’s English:
“Isn’t it obvious that the DEAL project wants to promote open access, but that this good intention is bought at a high price and the oligopoly structures in the science market are being consolidated?
I agree with you there. However, many colleagues in the library world see things differently and see DEAL as a success. After a few years of observation, however, I have to confirm the diagnosis that expectations in DEAL as a game changer in terms of the publication system are being disappointed. We don’t save any money. Promises of reallocating funds are unrealistic. I consider the still existing restriction to a few players to be fatal, since existing oligopolies are being further entrenched. The really good thing about DEAL is that you negotiate on a national level in a consortium. It is also very important that the German Rectors’ Conference organizes this process, because science itself and not just the libraries are involved.So I think a lot of DEAL as a structure, but I don’t think that DEAL is still addressing the right issues at the moment. Why can’t DEAL as a consortium also serve, for example, to establish Diamond Open Access structures? You could get the funding for this, for example from the DFG….”
Measuring Back: Bibliodiversity and the Journal Impact Factor brand. A Case study of IF-journals included in the 2021 Journal Citations Report. | Zenodo
Abstract: Little attention has been devoted to whether the Impact Factor (IF) can be considered a responsible metric in light of bibliodiversity. This paper critically engages with this question in measuring the following variables of IF journals included in the 2021 Journal CItation Reports and examining their distribution: publishing models (hybrid, Open Access with or without fees, subscription), world regions, language(s) of publication, subject categories, publishers, and the prices of article processing charges (APC) if any. Our results show that the quest for prestige or perceived quality through the IF brand poses serious threats to bibliodiversity. The IF brand can indeed hardly be considered a responsible metric insofar as it perpetuates publishing concentration, maintains a domination of the Global North and its attendant artificial image of mega producer of scholarly content, does not promote linguistic diversity, and de-incentivizes fair and equitable open access by entrenching fee-based OA delivery options with rather high APCs.
Better incentives are needed to reward academic software development | Nature Ecology & Evolution
“Open software underpins most research today, increasing accessibility for scientists to perform state-of-the-art analyses. Positions that require programming skills have correspondingly doubled over the past decade3. The accuracy and reproducibility of scientific results is increasingly dependent on updating and maintaining software. However, the incentive structure in academia for software development — and especially maintenance — is insufficient. It is time that appropriate incentives are embraced to reflect their importance….”
The importance of copyright and shared norms for credit in Open Educational Resources
Open Educational Resources (OER) are reducing barriers to education while allowing creators the opportunity to share their work with the world and continue owning copyright of their work. To support new authors and adaptors in the OER space, we provide an overview of common considerations that creators and adaptors of OER should make with respect to issues related to copyright in the context of OER. Further, and importantly, a challenge in the OER space is ensuring that original creators receive appropriate credit for their work, while also respecting the credit of those who have adapted work. Thus, in addition to providing important considerations when it comes to the creation of open access works, we propose shared norms for ensuring appropriate attribution and credit for creators and adaptors of OER.
Nature welcomes Registered Reports
“This year marks the 50th anniversary of Nature’s decision to mandate peer review for all papers. It’s an appropriate time to introduce readers and authors to Registered Reports, a research-article format that Nature is offering from this week for studies designed to test whether a hypothesis is supported (see go.nature.com/3kivjh1).
The fundamental principle underpinning a Registered Report is that a journal commits to publishing a paper if the research question and the methodology chosen to address it pass peer review, with the result itself taking a back seat. For now, Nature is offering Registered Reports in the field of cognitive neuroscience and in the behavioural and social sciences. In the future, we plan to extend this to other fields, as well as to other types of study, such as more exploratory research.
Why are we introducing this format? In part to try to address publication bias, the tendency of the research system — editors, reviewers and authors — to favour the publication of positive over negative results. Registered Reports help to incentivize research regardless of the result. An elegant and robust study should be appreciated as much for its methodology as for its results….”