Category Archives: oa.aau

Open Science Advocacy and Capacity Building for Leadership in African Higher Education Institutions – The Official PLOS Blog

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“The Association for African Universities (AAU), the Public Library of Science (PLOS), and the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) are pleased to share the results of the first two of four regional policy workshops that we are hosting with Presidents, Vice Chancellors, Rectors, Deputy Vice Chancellors, Directors of Research and Libraries in African Higher Education Institutions. 

The workshops aimed to increase education and awareness on the benefits of Open Science, to support development and implementation of Open Science policies, and adoption of Open Science and Open Access practices and publishing in African Higher Education Institutions

Workshop programmes included both global and local perspectives on Open Science and its adoption and implementation in institutions, including support and speakers from UNESCO, DORA, University of Leiden, NRF and the African Open Science Platform….”

AAU Statement on OSTP Decision to Make Federally Funded Research Publicly Available | Association of American Universities (AAU)

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“AAU has always been a strong proponent of making federally funded studies publicly available. We also were strong proponents of the previous 12-month embargo period for making publications accessible when the policy was originally announced in 2013. The announcement today by OSTP represents an important step forward in further advancing public access. We are currently reviewing the announcement to determine what specific implications it has for our institutions and their faculty members.”

Advancing Open Science in Africa – three organizations collaborate to increase education and awareness with African Higher Education institutional Leadership. | Training Centre in Communication (TCC AFRICA)Training Centre in Communication (TCC AFRICA)

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“University of Dar-Es-Salaam, Association of  African  Universities (AAU), Public Library of Science (PLOS) and Training Centre in Communication (TCC  Africa)  jointly held the first in a series of blended Open Science workshops, supporting Presidents, Rectors, Vice-Chancellors, Deputy Vice Chancellors, Directors of Research and Directors of Library Services in African Universities in Creating and Implementing Open Access and Open Science policies and mandates in their respective institutions. 

The hybrid workshop, hosted by the University  of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania , targeted institutional leaders in East and Central African universities, but the resulting participation was from wider afield, with 80 participants from across the continent: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania,  Ethiopia (Eastern  Africa), Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Botswana (Southern Africa), Morocco (North Africa) and Nigeria (West Africa).

The Tanzania workshop is the first in a series of four free regional workshops advocating for the Adoption and Implementation of Open Science and Open Access practices in member institutions of the AAU, addressing barriers and challenges to this, with the  desired outcome being engagement and buy-in by the academic community on the adoption of Open Science….”

Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data

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“On behalf of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), we are pleased to present this Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data. The Guide is intended to serve as a resource to help university administrators develop robust support systems to accelerate sharing of research data. It provides advice to universities concerning actions they can take, as well as the infrastructure and support that may be required to improve access to research data on their respective campuses. It also offers examples of how institutions are approaching specific challenges to providing public access to research data and results. Advancing public access to research data is important to improving transparency and reproducibility of scientific results, increasing scientific rigor and public trust in science, and — most importantly — accelerating the pace of discovery and innovation through the open sharing of research results. Additionally, it is vital that institutions develop and implement policies now to ensure consistency of data management plans across their campuses to guarantee full compliance with federal research agency data sharing requirements. Beyond the establishment of policies, universities must invest in the infrastructure and support necessary to achieve the desired aspirations and aims of the policies. The open sharing of the results of scientific research is a value our two associations have long fought to protect and preserve. It is also a value we must continue to uphold at all levels within our universities. This will mean overcoming the various institutional and cultural impediments which have, at times, hampered the open sharing of research data….”

Libraries and Librarians as Key Partners in Accelerating Public Access to Research Data – Association of Research Libraries

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“The Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) have released their Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data, the result of two years of work and national summits as part of the Accelerating Public Access to Research Data (APARD) program.

As a tool and framework for university administrators—specifically provosts, senior research officers, and IT leaders—the four-part guide is meant to “facilitate adoption of new institutional policies, procedures, and approaches that actively support and promote research data sharing, while at the same time ensuring rigor in the research process and the veracity of its intellectual outputs.” Included throughout the guide are recommendations, actions, and institutional examples and case studies for public access to research data….

Possible actions ARL member representatives can take with the release of the Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data include:

Establish public access to research data as a library organization priority through incorporation into strategic plans, statements of principles, mission, and value statements.
Articulate the libraries’ role in accelerating public access to data with the mind frame of culture change. How is your library working from the bottom up (with faculty and graduate students), middle out (with department chairs and center directors) and top down (provosts, presidents, vice presidents for research, and others) to engage and influence public access to data?
Partner with campus stakeholders identified in the guide to begin mapping campus research data resources….”

Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data

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“Advancing public access to research data is important to improving transparency and reproducibility of scientific results, increasing scientific rigor and public trust in science, and — most importantly — accelerating the pace of discovery and innovation through the open sharing of research results. Additionally, it is vital that institutions develop and implement policies now to ensure consistency of data management plans across their campuses to guarantee full compliance with federal research agency data sharing requirements. Beyond the establishment of policies, universities must invest in the infrastructure and support necessary to achieve the desired aspirations and aims of the policies. The open sharing of the results of scientific research is a value our two associations have long fought to protect and preserve. It is also a value we must continue to uphold at all levels within our universities. This will mean overcoming the various institutional and cultural impediments which have, at times, hampered the open sharing of research data….”

APLU and AAU Issue Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data

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“The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and the Association of American Universities (AAU) today released a Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data with recommendations for how institutions can develop and promote systems to support sharing of research data.

[Read the Report: Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data]  

Advancing public access to research data is essential to improving transparency and reproducibility of scientific results, increasing scientific rigor and public trust in science, and accelerating the pace of discovery and innovation.   

The guide is designed to help institutions develop and promote systems to support sharing of research data. It provides actions institutions can take to improve access to research data. It also contains information concerning the infrastructure and support that may be required to facilitate data access, and it offers specific examples of how various institutions are approaching challenges to sharing research data and results.  

In 2018,?APLU and AAU led a National Science Foundation-funded?workshop?(NSF #1837847) helping institutions develop strategic plans for making data resulting from federally funded research publicly available. The?workshop?provided?a venue for learning, sharing, and planning to support research universities as they implement systems for public access to research data….”

SHARE Database Shutting Down While SHARE Services Enter New Phase – Association of Research Libraries

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“After amassing a database of tens of millions of metadata records over several years, SHARE will be shutting down a portion of its harvesting operation in 2020 and the data set is archived in CurateND (doi:10.7274/r0-0daz-j832), the University of Notre Dame’s institutional repository managed by Hesburgh Libraries. Examples of interacting with the data are also available on Github: https://github.com/ndlib-cds/share-samples. COS will be evaluating the future of SHARE as the index for searching across its popular OSF Preprints and OSF Registries platforms, in hopes of evolving the service to be cost-effective to operate and maintain to meet the constrained scope….”

New Report Provides Recommendations for Effective Data Practices Based on National Science Foundation Research Enterprise Convening – Association of Research Libraries

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“Today a group of research library and higher education leadership associations released Implementing Effective Data Practices: Stakeholder Recommendations for Collaborative Research Support. In this new report, experts from library, research, and scientific communities provide key recommendations for effective data practices to support a more open research ecosystem. In December 2019, an invitational conference was convened by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the California Digital Library (CDL), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU). The conference was sponsored by the US National Science Foundation (NSF).

The conference focused on designing guidelines for (1) using persistent identifiers (PIDs) for data sets, and (2) creating machine-readable data management plans (DMPs), two data practices that were recommended by NSF. Professor Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, of Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, designed and facilitated the convening with the project team….”

TOME – Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem

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“TOME brings together scholars, universities, libraries, and presses in pursuit of a common goal—a sustainable open monograph ecosystem.

Monographs remain the preeminent form of scholarly publication in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, but the funding model is broken. TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) seeks to address this problem by moving us toward a new, more sustainable system in which monograph publishing costs are met by institutionally funded faculty book subsidies. These publication grants make it possible for presses to publish monographs in open access editions, which increases the presence of humanities and social science scholarship on the web and opens up knowledge to a truly global readership.

TOME launched in 2017 as a five-year pilot project of the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses). The pilot is built on a) participating colleges and universities and b) participating university presses. 

Participating colleges and universities commit to providing baseline grants of $15,000 to support the publication of open access monographs of 90,000 words or fewer (with additional funding for works of greater length or complexity). 

Participating university presses (numbering over 60) commit to producing digital open access editions of TOME volumes, openly licensing them under Creative Commons licenses, and depositing the files in selected open repositories….”

OpenMonographs.org Launches to Flip Funding Model for University Publishing – Association of Research Libraries

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“The Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses) have launched a new website, OpenMonographs.org, in a bold new effort to change the landscape of scholarly book publishing in the humanities and social sciences.

AAU, ARL, and AUPresses established TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) in 2017 as a five-year pilot project. Monographs remain the preeminent form of scholarly publication in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, but the funding model is broken. TOME seeks to address this problem by moving us toward a new, more sustainable system that meets monograph publishing costs with institutionally funded faculty book subsidies. TOME’s new website, https://www.openmonographs.org/, highlights the innovative nature of this initiative.

Colleges and universities participating in TOME commit to providing baseline grants of $15,000 to support the publication of average-length open access monographs. (Additional funding may be available for especially long or complex books.) These publication grants make it possible for presses to publish monographs in open access editions, increasing the presence of humanities and social science scholarship on the web and opening up knowledge to a truly global readership….”

US GAO Recommends Actions to Improve Public Access to Research Results – Association of Research Libraries

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“The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released its study, Additional Actions Needed to Improve Public Access to Research Results. The report examines the extent of US agencies’ progress implementing plans to increase public access to federally funded research results (both publications and data), per the 2013 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo directing the development of such plans. The report contains a review of progress across 16 agencies, and issues 37 recommendations for executive action at both the individual agency and interagency level, in such areas as repository development or guidance, requirements for data management plans (DMPs), and compliance checking.

Next month, at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) “Implementing Effective Data Practices” conference, participants—research officers, librarians, tool-builders, and others in the research community—will hear from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy (DOE), and private funding agencies on these issues, including data management plans, repositories, and compliance. ARL is committed to working with the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) on recommendations for intra-institutional workflows and guidelines, and to partnering with the agencies to make publicly funded research outputs findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable….”

TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)

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“TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) advances the wide dissemination of scholarship by humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty members through open access editions of peer-reviewed and professionally edited monographs.

Scholars face growing difficulty in finding publishers for their monographs as academic library budgets shrink and demand for monographs falls. To collaboratively address this problem, the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses) launched this initiative in spring 2017. 

In each of the first five years, colleges and universities participating in TOME are providing at least three baseline publishing grants of $15,000 to support the publication of open access monographs. Publishers accepting these grants—for eligible books that have been approved through the usual editorial and peer-review processes—are making high-quality, platform-agnostic, digital editions freely available. These TOME-supported monographs will make new research freely available online, increasing the presence of humanities and social science scholarship on the web and opening up knowledge to more readers….”

Work | Open-Access Monograph Publishing and the Origins of the ODSP.doc | Work ID: x346dv41v | ScholarSphere

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Abstract:  This essay explains the background of open-access monograph publishing as developed principally by university presses, often in association with libraries. It begins with discussions at Princeton University Press in the early 1970s about how to deal with the crisis of scholarly monograph publishing and moves on to describe a joint library/press project in the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) in the early 1990s. The failure of that project to be funded led the library and press at Penn State to launch a jointly operated Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing in 2005, which supported one of the pioneering programs in open-access monograph publishing. The CIC project, in particular, anticipated the AAU/ARL proposal announced in June 2014 to subvent the publication of first monographs using an open-access model.