“The Open Pedagogy Portal is an open repository created by the Open Education Network (OEN) as an online source for open pedagogy case studies, student work, and teaching/learning resources in higher education. The site officially went live August 15, 2023, and welcomes submissions. You do not need to be affiliated with an OEN institution to participate….”
“The costs of Open Access publishing increase year by year (e.g. Zhang et al. 2022). Diamond Open Access (OA), in which journals and platforms do not charge fees to either authors or readers, has been hoped to provide solutions for the current situation. Also, the Council of the EU highlights the importance of Diamond OA in the recent Council Conclusions (8827/23). Various incentives, such as Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, DIAMAS and Craft-OA are established to support the development of Diamond OA. However, do researchers really use Diamond OA publication venues? Is Diamond OA a researcher’s best friend or just a rarely met distant relative?…”
Abstract: Rapid developments and methodological divides hinder the study of how scientific knowledge accumulates, consolidates and transfers to the public sphere. Our work proposes using Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, as a historiographical source for contemporary science. We chose the high-profile field of gene editing as our test case, performing a historical analysis of the English-language Wikipedia articles on CRISPR. Using a mixed-method approach, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed the CRISPR article’s text, sections and references, alongside 50 affiliated articles. These, we found, documented the CRISPR field’s maturation from a fundamental scientific discovery to a biotechnological revolution with vast social and cultural implications. We developed automated tools to support such research and demonstrated its applicability to two other scientific fields–coronavirus and circadian clocks. Our method utilizes Wikipedia as a digital and free archive, showing it can document the incremental growth of knowledge and the manner scientific research accumulates and translates into public discourse. Using Wikipedia in this manner compliments and overcomes some issues with contemporary histories and can also augment existing bibliometric research.
“Traditionally, research articles comprise the majority of publications across all disciplines, with journals prioritizing these above all else. However, in Open Research Europe, they represent 51% of all articles – so what are the remaining 49%?
In this blog, we highlight why broadening this focus of publishable work is important and the benefits different article types on Open Research Europe can bring to your research….”
“Justin Barrett, Lead Machine Learning Engineer for OpenAlex at OurResearch, talks with ROR Technical Community Manager Amanda French and ROR Curation Lead Adam Buttrick about using ROR both as an identifier for institutions in OpenAlex and as a dataset for training machine learning models that enrich OpenAlex metadata….”
“Today, the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) published a report on corporate-academic partnerships that provides practical recommendations for companies and researchers who want to share data for research. The Report, Data Sharing for Research: A Compendium of Case Studies, Analysis, and Recommendations, demonstrates how, for many organizations, data-sharing partnerships are transitioning from being considered an experimental business activity to an expected business competency….
Corporate data-sharing partnerships offer compelling benefits to companies, researchers, and society to drive progress in a broad array of fields. However, organizations have long faced complex commercial, legal, ethical, and reputational risks that accompany the activity and act as disincentives to sharing data for academic research.
This report contains eight case studies that look at specific corporate/academic data-sharing partnerships in depth, from initiation through the publication of research findings. These case studies illuminate practical challenges for implementing corporate data sharing with researchers. Some common themes that emerged from the case studies include:
Successful data-sharing partnerships use Data-Sharing Agreements that require both the company and researchers to take steps to protect privacy.
Some of the challenges of data sharing include technical knowledge and infrastructure gaps between companies and researchers, and the continuing need for ethics and privacy review for industry-based research.
Promising practices for data sharing include the use of Privacy Enhancing Technologies and company-created, public-facing data-sharing menus to facilitate new partnerships.
While data sharing has significant costs and inherent risks, the risks can be managed, and the benefits to researchers, companies, and society make data sharing worth the effort….”
“We, as Associate Editors (AEs) for the Journal of Biogeography, have serious concerns about the widespread shifts by John Wiley & Sons Ltd (Wiley) and other academic publishers to full Open Access (OA), which appears to be imminent for journals in the Wiley portfolio (Rieseberg et al., 2023) and has been discussed as a possibility for the Journal of Biogeography itself. We commend the philosophy of OA—to make research freely available online, but for many journals that shift to full OA, article publication is accompanied by expensive article processing charges (APCs) payable by the authors (see Laakso et al., 2011; Tennant et al., 2016). This creates a financial burden that falls heaviest on early career scientists and scientists from low- to middle-income countries, erecting barriers to equity in publishing. The typical APC fees for OA range from 2000 to 3500 USD but can even surpass 11,000 USD, while the Journal of Biogeography APC is currently 4800 USD per article. A shift from subscription-based to full OA-based business models with APCs also clearly shifts the economic incentives for journals away from quality and toward quantity. High-throughput and high-output publishing models in academia severely risk lowering research standards and jeopardise the reputation of journals that adopt this practice.
As a way of signalling the depth of our concerns, 85% of the AEs of the Journal of Biogeography recently carried out a work stoppage, during which we refused to handle any new manuscript submissions. We view this as a temporary measure, as a way of encouraging further dialogue between Wiley, the publisher of the Journal of Biogeography, and the chief editorial team charged with ensuring journal quality….
Wiley, the owner and publisher of the Journal of Biogeography, has had a reported annual revenue in recent years of over 2 billion USD per annum with a gross profit margin averaging nearly 70%….”
“Open research is the practice of making the processes and outputs of research transparent and freely accessible, whenever possible.
The case studies below, gathered from the winners and runners up of the University of Sheffield’s Open Research Prize (first held in 2021 and most recently in 2023), demonstrate some of the excellent practice in open research taking place across the University. ???”
“The European Council’s recommended open, equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing system, free to readers and authors, has been dismissed as unsustainable and too costly (see Nature https://doi.org/kjwj; 2023). However, institutional repositories run by research institutions offer an inexpensive and sustainable route to realizing this aspiration.
Such non-profit repositories are ubiquitous and capable of hosting ‘diamond’ open-access academic journals, which are free to publish and to read. In Spain, for example, the journal Psicológica is owned by the Spanish Society for Experimental Psychology and published on DIGITAL.CSIC, the institutional repository of the Spanish National Research Council (see go.nature.com/3jxaw9z).
Transferred in 2022 from a commercial publisher, Psicológica publishes about 50 articles, preprints and peer reviews annually. Publication costs are shared between the journal — which is financially supported by the society — and the publicly funded repository, which provides services such as archiving, DOI assignation and metadata curation. At an estimated cost of €30 (US$34) per publication, Psicológica can increase its output without incurring substantial extra costs. This underscores the sustainability of such models.”
Abstract: Researchers in South Africa publish in journals that have a high impact factor and are accredited by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) as this will bring financial support to the researcher and the affiliated Institution for continuous publication. Moreover, these researchers do so for possible ranking of their universities and to seek collaboration with international and national researchers. However, publishers make it difficult for researchers to publish because of the Article Processing Charges that increase annually. Therefore, the study’s main objective is to propose general benefit guidelines for the use of open access by researchers. The unit of analysis was the university’s Institutional Repository (IR) and Scopus, a database which the university subscribes to. The IR has a collection of research outputs that include peer-reviewed articles, conference proceedings, and datasets. Hence, a quantitative and qualitative research approach was selected, where content analysis was used to collect data whereby research output from 2016 to 2020 was identified from both the IR and Scopus. The study examined, investigated, and explored the hindrances and challenges faced by researchers when publishing in open access journals (OAJ) with specific reference to South Africa. The study drew from a few organised threads of confirmation which make up the current dialogue on OAJ, comprising of peer-reviewed literature, grey literature, and other forms of communication. A manual Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method was applied to collect data from Scopus and the IR. The ethical considerations for conducting the study included permission to use the university’s IR and to collect primary data from academics in the selected university. The results show that publishers are making it difficult for researchers to publish in open access, because of the outrageous publishing costs involved.
A slide presentation by Rachel Miles, Research Impact Coordinator at Virginia Tech University Libraries.
“In this essay, we explore how digital publishing can intervene in these processes and serve as a form of feminist activism. We take as our focus the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP), founded in 2011 to expand the perspectives and standpoints that count as scholarly knowledge production and provide graduate students with editorial experience. As three long-standing members of the journal’s editorial collective, we have firsthand knowledge of how JITP’s publishing methods were developed through debate, struggle, and dialogue, including many missteps and failures along the way. We argue that JITP’s collaborative knowledge practices of inclusive editorial governance, open access, and open peer review are fundamentally feminist, as they diversify scholarly voices and increase access to the material channels in and through which knowledge circulates. At stake in our reflective analysis is a broader claim that extends beyond the parameters of our work with one particular journal: that feminist digital publishing methods can expand what counts as knowledge production….”
” Another example of taking advantage of open data is what is happening in Mexico as part of the implementation of Open Infrastructure[1]. An initiative promoted by INAI[2], México Evalúa, INFO-NL, OCP and CoST that promotes (1) the publication of information in open and accessible formats about public works projects and their contracts, (2) citizen participation and monitoring of the public budget and, (3) the use of open data to improve the quality and price of goods and services contracted by the State. It is important to note that, implicitly, this openness effort based on the empowerment of communities also encourages the participation of women in public affairs.
In 2022, this project began with the participation of public institutions from nine states of Mexico. Among them is the Vista Hermosa Municipality in Michoacán, with a population of around 20,000 people (50.62% are women[3]). In this town, the municipal government decided to publish data and documents about the project called “Colector Poniente”, an underground conduit in which the town’s sewers discharge their drainage. In the process, the municipal government disseminated information related to the work program and the assigned budget, which motivated the participation and involvement of the beneficiaries to supervise and follow up until ensuring that the project was completed on time and in accordance with the quality that had been contracted….”
“Abstract: This paper introduces CORE, a widely used scholarly service, which provides access to the world’s largest collection of open access research publications, acquired from a global network of repositories and journals. CORE was created with the goal of enabling text and data mining of scientific literature and thus supporting scientific discovery, but it is now used in a wide range of use cases within higher education, industry, not-for-profit organisations, as well as by the general public. Through the provided services, CORE powers innovative use cases, such as plagiarism detection, in market-leading third-party organisations. CORE has played a pivotal role in the global move towards universal open access by making scientific knowledge more easily and freely discoverable. In this paper, we describe CORE’s continuously growing dataset and the motivation behind its creation, present the challenges associated with systematically gathering research papers from thousands of data providers worldwide at scale, and introduce the novel solutions that were developed to overcome these challenges. The paper then provides an in-depth discussion of the services and tools built on top of the aggregated data and finally examines several use cases that have leveraged the CORE dataset and services.”
Knoth, P., Herrmannova, D., Cancellieri, M. et al. CORE: A Global Aggregation Service for Open Access Papers. Sci Data 10, 366 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02208-w
Abstract: This case study aims at describing how transformative agreements (TAs) have affected our profession with new tasks and workflows at two university libraries in Sweden, namely Karolinska Institutet University Library and Södertörn University Library. TAs are one of the mechanisms by which scientific publications are made open access; they involve moving libraries’ contracts with publishers from payment to read toward payment to publish. We will summarize the status and progress of open access in Sweden, in particular the significant growth of TAs over a short time span. We will then focus on describing how TAs have affected our everyday work and what new tasks they have imposed. We will share our experiences and point out things we find challenging, for example, we will explore questions about eligibility, the verification process, publication types and title changes during the contract period. We will also give some recommendations on how we would prefer the workflows surrounding the TAs to be. Finally, we will share our conclusions and comments about the impact of TAs on the publishing landscape and speculate about what will happen next.