“At the recent Researcher to Reader conference in London, Mark Allin (@allinsnap) had the job of doing the conference round-up, which is the slot immediately before the closing keynote where the themes and take-homes of the conference are brought together. In his four summary themes, Allin inevitably drew out Open Access / Open Science. It’s almost impossible to have a publishing or library conference without it, however, in terms of significance, he put it at the bottom of the list, almost as an afterthought. His reasoning is that open science now feels like an inevitability. With a clear trend towards both open access and open data mandates among funders, institutions, and publishers, the question that each of us must ask ourselves isn’t whether it will or should happen, but how are we going to adapt as change continues….
Practices around open research data are gaining traction. In 2019’s The State of Open Data Report, 64% of respondents claimed that they made their data openly available in 2018. That’s a rise of 4% from the previous year. Comprehensive information on the prevalence of open data policies is hard to come by, but there is a general sense that publishers, funders, and institutions alike are all moving towards firstly having data policies and then steadily strengthening those policies over time.
The JoRD project, based at Nottingham University in the UK was funded by Jisc and ran from December 2012 until its final blog post in 2014. In this article, Sturges et al., report that JoRD found the state of open data policies among journals to be patchy and inconsistent, with about half of all the journals they looked at having no policy at all, and with 75% of those that did exist being categorized as weak….
Unfortunately, the short timescale of the JoRD project limits its findings to a snapshot. However, there has since been piecemeal evidence of progress towards a more robust open research data landscape. The case studies presented in this article by Jones et al., — a different Jones, not me — describe how both Taylor and Francis, and Springer Nature have followed the path of steadily increasing the number of journals with data policies while strengthening those that exist….”