arXiv sets new record for monthly submissions – arXiv blog

“Since its founding in 1991, arXiv has been growing exponentially – and in October, we hit a new milestone! arXiv has tracked the number of new submissions we receive every month from our very first submission in August 1991, and we share our monthly submission data on our stats page (which houses lots of interesting break downs of the data).

In the month of October of 2023, there were a total of 20,710 new submissions to arXiv, beating the previous monthly record from May 2023. This past May is when we first broke the 20,000 marker for number of submissions received in a single month. This brings arXiv’s overall total submission count, from August 1991 to today, to 2,358,545!

The three subjects with the most submissions in October 2023 were computer science, math, and physics – there were over 15,000 new submissions to arXiv in those subject areas alone.”

Celebrate International Open Access Week with Milner Library – News – Illinois State

“International Open Access Week is upon us, and Milner Library has some ideas to help you celebrate. Defined by Peter Suber as, “Digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions,” Open Access expands access to publications, increases the impact of scholarship (by number of citations, for example), ?speeds up the rate of research, ?promotes one’s profile as a public scholar?, is altruistic, contributes to materials that can be used in classrooms, and ensures compliance with funder mandates. As a partner in university research and creative activities, Milner Library is committed to supporting Open Access initiatives.

Despite the long list of benefits associated with Open Access, obstacles to adoption persist. Most notably, publishers often charge fees to publish open access, and many scholars don’t have the funding to pay sometimes exorbitant fees. Another concern is that Open Access publishers can be associated with predatory practices or less rigorous peer-review processes. Scholars need to publish their work in venues where it will reach the intended audience. Milner Library facilitates connecting researchers to their readers in two significant ways:

The first is by hosting an institutional repository (ISU ReD) that preserves the scholarly and creative outputs of University authors and artists. ISU ReD currently hosts four peer-reviewed, Open Access journals, conference proceedings, student and faculty research, and University documents.
The second is by negotiating Open Access agreements with scholarly publishers that cover the cost of Open Access publishing for University authors. Milner Library entered into its first Open Access agreement with Cambridge University Press in 2021 and has since added agreements with Annual Reviews, Company of Biologists, IGI Global, and Taylor & Francis. Upcoming agreements, set to be effective January 2024 include Association for Computing Machinery, American Chemical Society, Institute of Physics, and Sage Publications. Recent University scholarship that has benefited from these agreements is available in ISU ReD’s Open Access Publishing Support collection.

Beginning Monday, October 23, Milner librarians will be reaching out to Illinois State authors who have published their work open access with the offer to deposit it in ISU ReD. Research shows that more (copies of) publicly available full-text means more opportunities for access and impact. For example, a recent study found that “making OA copies of manuscripts available in self-archiving or ‘green’ repositories results in a positive citation effect.” ”

Full article: Data sharing and re-use in the traumatic stress field: An international survey of trauma researchers

“Background:

The FAIR data principles aim to make scientific data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. In the field of traumatic stress research, FAIR data practices can help accelerate scientific advances to improve clinical practice and can reduce participant burden. Previous studies have identified factors that influence data sharing and re-use among scientists, such as normative pressure, perceived career benefit, scholarly altruism, and availability of data repositories. No prior study has examined researcher views and practices regarding data sharing and re-use in the traumatic stress field.

Objective:

To investigate the perspectives and practices of traumatic stress researchers around the world concerning data sharing, re-use, and the implementation of FAIR data principles in order to inform development of a FAIR Data Toolkit for traumatic stress researchers.

Method:

A total of 222 researchers from 28 countries participated in an online survey available in seven languages, assessing their views on data sharing and re-use, current practices, and potential facilitators and barriers to adopting FAIR data principles.

Results:

The majority of participants held a positive outlook towards data sharing and re-use, endorsing strong scholarly altruism, ethical considerations supporting data sharing, and perceiving data re-use as advantageous for improving research quality and advancing the field. Results were largely consistent with prior surveys of scientists across a wide range of disciplines. A significant proportion of respondents reported instances of data sharing and re-use, but gold standard practices such as formally depositing data in established repositories were reported as infrequent. The study identifies potential barriers such as time constraints, funding, and familiarity with FAIR principles.

Conclusions:

These results carry crucial implications for promoting change and devising a FAIR Data Toolkit tailored for traumatic stress researchers, emphasizing aspects such as study planning, data preservation, metadata standardization, endorsing data re-use, and establishing metrics to assess scientific and societal impact.

Facilitated Preprint Posting is now available for Lab Protocols at PLOS ONE – EveryONE

“When authors submit a Lab Protocol to PLOS ONE, they prepare a short manuscript that contextualizes their step-by-step protocol, describing the value it adds to the published literature and providing evidence that the protocol works. This additional context helps readers to decide whether and, if so, how to adapt the protocol for their own research.

In 2023, PLOS is making it easier for authors to share these protocol manuscripts as preprints, by expanding our partnership with the preprint server bioRxiv to include Lab Protocols.

During the submission process, Lab Protocol authors will now be asked if they want PLOS to forward their manuscript to bioRxiv to be considered for public posting within a few days. Facilitated posting to bioRxiv has been offered at PLOS ONE since 2018. Extending this service to Lab Protocols means that authors can share and get credit for their methods development work sooner, even as the peer review process unfolds….”

Open science and data sharing in cognitive neuroscience with MouseBytes and MouseBytes+ | Scientific Data

Abstract:  Open access to rodent cognitive data has lagged behind the rapid generation of large open-access datasets in other areas of neuroscience, such as neuroimaging and genomics. One contributing factor has been the absence of uniform standardization in experiments and data output, an issue that has particularly plagued studies in animal models. Touchscreen-automated cognitive testing of animal models allows standardized outputs that are compatible with open-access sharing. Touchscreen datasets can be combined with different neuro-technologies such as fiber photometry, miniscopes, optogenetics, and MRI to evaluate the relationship between neural activity and behavior. Here we describe a platform that allows deposition of these data into an open-access repository. This platform, called MouseBytes, is a web-based repository that enables researchers to store, share, visualize, and analyze cognitive data. Here we present the architecture, structure, and the essential infrastructure behind MouseBytes. In addition, we describe MouseBytes+, a database that allows data from complementary neuro-technologies such as imaging and photometry to be easily integrated with behavioral data in MouseBytes to support multi-modal behavioral analysis.

 

ResearchGate and Royal Society extend scope of partnership after successful trial phase

 

ResearchGate and The Royal Society have today expanded the partnership that sees all articles from the Royal Society’s ten-journal portfolio syndicated directly to ResearchGate.

The Transformation of the Green Road to Open Access[v1] | Preprints

Abstract:  (1) Background: The 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative recommended on self-archiving of scientific articles in open repositories as the “green road” to open access. Twenty years later, only one part of the researchers deposits their publications in open repositories; moreover, one part of the repositories’ content is not based on self-archived deposits but on mediated nonfaculty contributions. The purpose of the paper is to provide more empirical evidence on this situation and to assess the impact on the future of the green road. (2) Methods: We analyzed the contributions on the French national HAL repository from more than 1,000 laboratories affiliated to the ten most important French research universities, with a focus on 2020, representing 14,023 contributor accounts and 166,939 deposits. (3) Results: We identified seven different types of contributor accounts, including deposits from nonfaculty staff and import flows from other platforms. Mediated nonfaculty contribution accounts for at least 48% of the deposits. We also identified difference between institutions and disciplines. (4) Conclusions: Our empirical results reveal a transformation of open repositories from self-archiving and direct scientific communication towards research information management. Repositories like HAL are somewhere in the middle of the process. The paper describes data quality as the main issue and major challenge of this transformation.

 

How the Public Access Submission System is Ideally Suited to Address the New Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Memorandum | December 2022

“In August of this year, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced new guidance that requires all federal agencies to define, by 2025, policies that ensure immediate public access to federally funded research publications in agency-designated repositories. These policy changes have the potential to dramatically increase access to public research, but they also come with implementation challenges. These agency-designated repositories can have highly variable submission requirements and capabilities, and research institutions often have their own open access policies and guidelines, which introduce additional expectations. Taken together, all of these requirements place a considerable burden on researchers who wish to comply with all applicable public access policies with minimal effort. The Public Access Submission System (PASS) was designed specifically to address these challenges. PASS was created to take into account the requirements of multiple federal agency and institutional repository systems and to guide researchers through the deposit process, ensuring that all of the necessary information is collected at one time and then submitted to all of the required deposit endpoints….”

Panellists:

Bill Branan, Senior Manager, Open Source Programs Office and Digital Research & Curation Center, Johns Hopkins University
John Kellerman, Eclipse Public Access Submission System (PASS) Program Manager, Eclipse Foundation
Sayeed Choudhury, Director of Open Source Programs Office, Carnegie Mellon University

ResearchGate and De Gruyter announce content partnership

“ResearchGate, the professional network for researchers, and De Gruyter, an independent academic publisher disseminating excellent scholarship since 1749, have today announced a content syndication partnership that will see content from 437 of De Gruyter’s journals added to ResearchGate.”

Integration with DSpace and authentication (#797) · Issues · dissemin / dissemin · GitLab

“The presentation about EasyDeposit2 by the University of Oregon at the green OA session of OR2019 showed how https://github.com/osulp/Easydeposit2 is used to allow researchers to upload a PDF to a repository record in reaction to an email without needing to login manually.

Some of the logic might turn out to be useful if we want to deposit on the authors’ behalf on DSpace and/or generate email notifications with access tokens….”

University of Leeds Publications Policy – Research and Innovation Service

“Author requirements

Authors must comply with their funders’ policies relating to open access and research data management. 
Authors must register for an individual ORCiD identifier and should link it to their University Publications Database profile [2], include it on any personal webpage, when submitting publications, when applying for grants, and in any research workflow to ensure that the individual is credited for their work and that the correct institutional affiliation is achieved.  
Authors must use a standardised institutional affiliation “University of Leeds” in all research outputs to ensure clear affiliation with the University of Leeds. 
Authors must specify authors’ contributions in all research outputs to ensure individuals’ roles are identifiable and duly recognised. 
Authors must include a Data Access Statement in all research outputs even where there are no data associated with the publication or the data are inaccessible. The statement informs readers where the associated underlying research materials are available and how they can be accessed.  
Authors must acknowledge the source of grant funding associated with a research output in all research outputs. Information about the grant should also be linked, by the author, to the record of the publication in the University Publications Database. Grant information in the University Publications Database is fed automatically from the University’s Grant Information System [3].  
Authors must retain the necessary rights to make the accepted manuscripts of research articles, including reviews and conference papers, publicly available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. Recommended wording to include in manuscript submissions is in Appendix 1. This requirement does not apply but is strongly recommended for outputs solely or jointly authored by PGRs (only).  
Authors must record bibliographic details of all research outputs in the University’s publications database. For peer-reviewed research articles, including reviews and conference papers, this must be done as soon as possible after acceptance for publication. When creating the record in the University’s publications database, complete the appropriate fields to confirm that a data access and a rights retention statement have been added to the output itself. 
Authors must deposit full text copies of final accepted peer-reviewed research articles, including reviews and conference papers into the institutional repository, via the University’s publications database as soon as possible after acceptance for publication. Where the output is already available open access via the publisher website a link may be provided instead. The deposit of other outputs e.g. monographs is also encouraged where copyright permits. 
Where copyright allows and there are no confidentiality or commercial constraints, the research outputs in the institutional repository must be made ‘open access’, i.e. freely accessible over the internet. 
Outputs must be made open access as soon as possible after acceptance [4]….”

Public Access to Scientific Research Findings and Principles of Biomedical Research—A New Policy for the JAMA Network | Medical Journals and Publishing | JAMA Internal Medicine | JAMA Network

“Beginning in 2023, JAMA and all of the journals in the JAMA Network will adopt a new policy that permits authors of original research investigations to deposit their accepted manuscript in a public repository of their choosing immediately on the day that the manuscript is published by the JAMA Network….

With these and future policies, JAMA and the JAMA Network look forward to working collaboratively with scientists, research institutions, policy makers, funders, and other journals to lean in on first principles that support a thriving, robust scientific enterprise. Stakeholders have a shared responsibility to craft solutions that balance equity, accessibility, and sustainability. Together, we will continue to collegially debate and advance the steps to safeguard and evolve the growth and health of our ecosystem, which manifestly includes timely public access to biomedical research.”