Compliance is not the whole story | Unlocking Research

“Today, Research England released Monitoring sector progress towards compliance with funder open access policies the results of a survey they ran in August last year in conjunction with RCUK, Wellcome Trust and Jisc.

Cambridge University was one of the 113 institutions that answered a significant number of questions about how we were managing compliance with various open access policies, what systems we were using and our decision making processes.”

Funder Perspectives on Open Infrastructure

“In March, 2019, the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) issued an open call for participation in a survey to better understand funder perspectives with respect to supporting open infrastructure. Sixteen funders completed the questionnaire, evenly split between ORFG members and other funding organizations. The vast majority of respondents (four in five) have some form of open access position, nearly evenly split between policies and recommendations. Beyond open access, however, there is very little consensus on other open activities. Data sharing is the only other activity supported by more than half of the respondents (four data sharing policies and six data sharing recommendations). Publication of null results, protocol sharing, and code sharing are each in play at roughly a third of responding foundations.”

Funder Perspectives on Open Infrastructure — Open Research Funders Group

“The Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) recently conducted a survey to better understand funder perspectives with respect to supporting open infrastructure. Sixteen organizations completed the questionnaire, evenly split between ORFG members and other funding bodies.”

Use of Free Textbooks Is Rising, but Barriers Remain – The Chronicle of Higher Education

“A growing number of professors are replacing the traditional textbook with an openly licensed one, according to a survey released on Tuesday. But their overall numbers remain small — and widespread adoption of the practice could remain out of reach unless key barriers are overcome.”

Adoption of Open Access Publishing by Academic Researchers in Kenya | Journal of Scholarly Publishing

“This study investigates Kenyan scholars’ adoption of open access (OA). The authors used a questionnaire to collect data from academic researchers at selected Kenyan public universities. The findings of this study indicate that while Kenyan researchers have embraced the concept of OA, challenges such as a lack of mechanisms to guide academic researchers on where to publish, a dearth of funding mechanisms to cover article processing charges, and a lack of accreditation mechanisms for regional and national journals are exposing Kenyan academic researchers to unscrupulous journal publishers and predatory publishing outlets. OA advocates in Kenyan universities need to devise innovative ways of raising awareness about OA, and these universities should provide the environment, infrastructure, and capacity building needed to support OA.”

OpenAIRE survey about Horizon2020 template for Data Management Plans

“The European Commission provides Guidelines on FAIR Data Management in Horizon 2020. A template for writing a Data Management Plan (DMP) is provided in the annex of those Guidelines. The OpenAIRE project aims to support the Commission’s ambitions regarding Open Science and FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable – data. Therefore we are interested to learn about your experience with this specific template.”