Category Archives: oa.history_of

Zenodo’s Open Repository Streamlines Sharing Science – SPARC

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“A decade ago, the scientific community recognized that to move from open access to open science, there was a need for free unrestricted access to scientific knowledge. This meant valuing, sharing and preserving data, software and other digital artifacts from research, but the on-ramp to participate had to be faster and simpler if the practice was going to gain traction.

The European Union decided to fund CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) through the OpenAIRE project to build a catch-all repository to ensure all researchers had a place to easily upload software, data, preprints and other digital outputs.

That was the beginning of Zenodo, which CERN and OpenAIRE launched in 2013. Since, the free global platform has expanded faster than imagined. It now has 25 million visits a year, hosts 3+ million uploads and over 1 petabyte of data. This year marks the platform’s 10th anniversary and today Zenodo is widely viewed as a trusted place to preserve research materials that could be of use to others in advancing science….”

Zenodo’s Open Repository Streamlines Sharing Science – SPARC

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“A decade ago, the scientific community recognized that to move from open access to open science, there was a need for free unrestricted access to scientific knowledge. This meant valuing, sharing and preserving data, software and other digital artifacts from research, but the on-ramp to participate had to be faster and simpler if the practice was going to gain traction.

The European Union decided to fund CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) through the OpenAIRE project to build a catch-all repository to ensure all researchers had a place to easily upload software, data, preprints and other digital outputs.

That was the beginning of Zenodo, which CERN and OpenAIRE launched in 2013. Since, the free global platform has expanded faster than imagined. It now has 25 million visits a year, hosts 3+ million uploads and over 1 petabyte of data. This year marks the platform’s 10th anniversary and today Zenodo is widely viewed as a trusted place to preserve research materials that could be of use to others in advancing science….”

Book Talk: Athena Unbound | 28 March 2023 | Chris Bourg in conversation with Peter Baldwin

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“Join CHRIS BOURG in conversation with author PETER BALDWIN about the history & promise of the open access movement….Open access (OA) could one day put the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. But the goal of allowing everyone to read everything faces fierce resistance. In Athena Unbound, Peter Baldwin offers an up-to-date look at the ideals and history behind OA, and unpacks the controversies that arise when the dream of limitless information slams into entrenched interests in favor of the status quo. In addition to providing a clear analysis of the debates, Baldwin focuses on thorny issues such as copyright and ways to pay for “free” knowledge. He also provides a roadmap that would make OA economically viable and, as a result, advance one of humanity’s age-old ambitions….”

Twenty years of Wikipedia in scholarly publications: a bibliometric network analysis of the thematic and citation landscape | SpringerLink

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Abstract:  Wikipedia has grown to be the biggest online encyclopedia in terms of comprehensiveness, reach and coverage. However, although different websites and social network platforms have received considerable academic attention, Wikipedia has largely gone unnoticed. In this study, we fill this research gap by investigating how Wikipedia is used in scholarly publications since its launch in 2001. More specifically, we review and analyze the intellectual structure of Wikipedia’s scholarly publications based on 3790 Web of Science core collection documents written by 10,636 authors from 100 countries over two decades (2001–2021). Results show that the most influential outlets publishing Wikipedia research include journals such as Plos one, Nucleic Acids Research, the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, IEEE Access, and Information Processing and Management. Results also show that the author collaboration network is very sparsely connected, indicating the absence of close collaboration among the authors in the field. Furthermore, results reveal that the Wikipedia research institutions’ collaboration network reflects a North–South divide as very limited cooperation occurs between developed and developing countries’ institutions. Finally, the multiple correspondence analysis applied to obtain the Wikipedia research conceptual map reveals the breadth, diversity, and intellectual thrust of the Wikipedia’s scholarly publications. Our analysis has far-reaching implications for aspiring researchers interested in Wikipedia research as we retrospectively trace the evolution in research output over the last two decades, establish linkages between the authors and articles, and reveal trending topics/hotspots within the broad theme of Wikipedia research.

 

A Genealogy of Open

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The term open has become a familiar part of library and education practice and discourse, with open source software being a common referent. However, the conditions surrounding the emergence of the open source movement are not well understood within librarianship. After identifying capitalism and neoliberalism as structures that shape library and open practice, this article contextualizes the term open by delineating the discursive struggle within the free software movement that led to the emergence of the open source movement. An understanding of the genealogy of open can lend clarity to many of the contradictions that have been grappled with in the literature, such as what open means, whether it supports social justice aims, and its relation to neoliberal and capitalist structures. The article concludes by inquiring into how librarianship and open can reframe practices that are typically oriented toward mitigation and survival to encompass an orientation toward life and flourishing. 

A Genealogy of Open

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The term open has become a familiar part of library and education practice and discourse, with open source software being a common referent. However, the conditions surrounding the emergence of the open source movement are not well understood within librarianship. After identifying capitalism and neoliberalism as structures that shape library and open practice, this article contextualizes the term open by delineating the discursive struggle within the free software movement that led to the emergence of the open source movement. An understanding of the genealogy of open can lend clarity to many of the contradictions that have been grappled with in the literature, such as what open means, whether it supports social justice aims, and its relation to neoliberal and capitalist structures. The article concludes by inquiring into how librarianship and open can reframe practices that are typically oriented toward mitigation and survival to encompass an orientation toward life and flourishing. 

A Genealogy of Open

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The term open has become a familiar part of library and education practice and discourse, with open source software being a common referent. However, the conditions surrounding the emergence of the open source movement are not well understood within librarianship. After identifying capitalism and neoliberalism as structures that shape library and open practice, this article contextualizes the term open by delineating the discursive struggle within the free software movement that led to the emergence of the open source movement. An understanding of the genealogy of open can lend clarity to many of the contradictions that have been grappled with in the literature, such as what open means, whether it supports social justice aims, and its relation to neoliberal and capitalist structures. The article concludes by inquiring into how librarianship and open can reframe practices that are typically oriented toward mitigation and survival to encompass an orientation toward life and flourishing. 

A Genealogy of Open

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The term open has become a familiar part of library and education practice and discourse, with open source software being a common referent. However, the conditions surrounding the emergence of the open source movement are not well understood within librarianship. After identifying capitalism and neoliberalism as structures that shape library and open practice, this article contextualizes the term open by delineating the discursive struggle within the free software movement that led to the emergence of the open source movement. An understanding of the genealogy of open can lend clarity to many of the contradictions that have been grappled with in the literature, such as what open means, whether it supports social justice aims, and its relation to neoliberal and capitalist structures. The article concludes by inquiring into how librarianship and open can reframe practices that are typically oriented toward mitigation and survival to encompass an orientation toward life and flourishing. 

Symplectic celebrates 20th anniversary of serving the global research community – Digital Science

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“Symplectic – a Digital Science company that provides technology solutions to research organisations and their funders – is now celebrating 20 years of powering the global research ecosystem.

Founded initially by four friends studying theoretical physics at Imperial College London – John Fearns, Daniel Hook (who is now Digital Science’s CEO), Marko Ivin, and Philip Parkin – Symplectic has gone on to develop flexible solutions that help universities, institutions and funding organisations on every continent to achieve their research goals.

With its flagship products Symplectic Elements (a research information management system, enabling institutions to showcase their expertise, equipment and facilities) and Symplectic Grant Tracker (a grants management platform for research funding organisations), Symplectic’s deep industry expertise and team-led approach has attracted a global client base of more than 180 organisations worldwide….”

Twenty years of Creative Commons licences: key legal considerations and best practice

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“Creative Commons, the US-based non-profit organisation which has developed a scheme for freely licensing copyright, recently celebrated its twentieth year. While Creative Commons is not the only scheme which facilitates open content licensing, it is by far the most commonplace today. In this article, Owen O’Rorke and Ethan Ezra set out some “best practice” points when encountering these licences and examine the history, strengths, and critiques of the scheme….”

Open access: a journey from impossible to probable, but still uncertain | Profesional de la información

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An overview of the evolution of open access (OA) to scientific publications over the last 20 years is presented. This retrospective look allows us to make two observations that seem to overlap: on the one hand, how close the initial objective seems to be to what initially seemed utopian and, on the other, the unanticipated and solid obstacles that open access has encountered along the way, as well as the unexpected and diverse solutions that are emerging to overcome them. The overall assessment of OA is positive, and it underscores that open access is (or is becoming) possible, that it is good, and that it is necessary. However, this overall positive evolution has come up against two major obstacles that are slowing its progress: the double payments generated by hybrid journals (subscription and article processing charges [APCs]) and the unchecked growth in APCs. In addition, this intensive use of APCs is creating a publishing gap between publishers that charge fees to authors and those that do not, and ultimately, it is causing dissension regarding the (previously shared) strategy toward open access. There are no immediate, one-off solutions to overcome the aforementioned dysfunctions, although three actions that, in the medium term, can remedy them can be mentioned: changing the approach to the evaluation of science, adopting measures to regulate APCs, and promoting alternative publication models. Finally, it should be noted that OA has acted as the vanguard and spearhead of a broader movement: that of open science.

PLOS Biology at 20: Ain’t no mountain high enough | PLOS Biology

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“Although our work is not finished, the progress of the past two decades has been nothing short of remarkable. When PLOS launched in 2000, Harold Varmus, Michael Eisen and Patrick Brown called for articles to be made freely available 6 months after publication —an idea so radical that it failed to gain traction, prompting PLOS to become a publisher to demonstrate what was possible. Now, major funders across the world, such as the signatories of Plan S and the US Office of Science and Technology, request immediate open access (OA) publication for the research that they fund. In 2003, when PLOS Biology appeared on the scene, only a handful of life science journals were OA. The picture is dramatically different now: the Directory of Open Access Journals lists 18,881 journals and >8.5 million articles (up from 1.5 million 10 years ago [2]), and in 2020 more articles were published OA than behind paywalls for the first time, according to data from the Dimensions database. We are proud of our role in starting the ripple effect that has led to this unstoppable wave….”

Twenty-Fifth Year Reflections on PKP – Public Knowledge Project

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“In 1998, I initiated a project that set out to make research a greater part of what constituted public knowledge. I called it a Public Knowledge project. That is, before PKP was PKP, it was PKp. The initial project arose out of a modest gift to the University of British Columbia from Pacific Press, the company that owned Vancouver’s two newspapers, the Vancouver Sun and Province. On learning of this gift to UBC, where I served as a Faculty of Education professor, I proposed that this new Pacific Press Professorship explore how the internet, with all its early promise as an “information highway,” could increase public access to research and scholarship. This would complement the Pacific Press’ journalism, I suggested, as well as advance educational goals, by expanding the storehouse of public knowledge….”