Abstract: Presented October 19, 2023: “Developing New Approaches to Promote Equitable and Inclusive Implementation of Open Scholarship Policies.” Hosted by The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship.
Abstract: Background: Research and researchers are heavily evaluated, and over the past decade it has become apparent that the consequences of evaluating the research enterprise and particularly individual researchers are considerable. This has resulted in the publishing of several guidelines and principles to support moving towards more responsible research assessment (RRA). To ensure that research evaluation is meaningful, responsible, and effective the International Network of Research Management Societies (INORMS) Research Evaluation Group created the SCOPE framework enabling evaluators to deliver on existing principles of RRA. SCOPE bridges the gap between principles and their implementation by providing a structured five-stage framework by which evaluations can be designed and implemented, as well as evaluated.
Methods: SCOPE is a step-by-step process designed to help plan, design, and conduct research evaluations as well as check effectiveness of existing evaluations. In this article, four case studies are presented to show how SCOPE has been used in practice to provide value-based research evaluation.
Results: This article situates SCOPE within the international work towards more meaningful and robust research evaluation practices and shows through the four case studies how it can be used by different organisations to develop evaluations at different levels of granularity and in different settings.
Conclusions: The article demonstrates that the SCOPE framework is rooted firmly in the existing literature. In addition, it is argued that it does not simply translate existing principles of RRA into practice, but provides additional considerations not always addressed in existing RRA principles and practices thus playing a specific role in the delivery of RRA. Furthermore, the use cases show the value of SCOPE across a range of settings, including different institutional types, sizes, and missions.
Abstract: Software and data citation are emerging best practices in scholarly communication. This article provides structured guidance to the academic publishing community on how to implement software and data citation in publishing workflows. These best practices support the verifiability and reproducibility of academic and scientific results, sharing and reuse of valuable data and software tools, and attribution to the creators of the software and data. While data citation is increasingly well-established, software citation is rapidly maturing. Software is now recognized as a key research result and resource, requiring the same level of transparency, accessibility, and disclosure as data. Software and data that support academic or scientific results should be preserved and shared in scientific repositories that support these digital object types for discovery, transparency, and use by other researchers. These goals can be supported by citing these products in the Reference Section of articles and effectively associating them to the software and data preserved in scientific repositories. Publishers need to markup these references in a specific way to enable downstream processes.
“The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship will organize a half-day hybrid public workshop, Developing New Approaches to Promote Equitable and Inclusive Implementation of Open Scholarship Policies on Thursday, October 19 from 9 am to 2:30 pm EDT. The workshop will be held in conjunction with the Fall 2023 meeting of the Roundtable. The public is invited to register to join virtually.
The workshop will explore specific steps and new approaches that research institutions, governmental agencies, research funders and other organizations can take to promote equitable and inclusive implementation of policies and practices being developed in response to the August 2022 memorandum of the Office of Science and Technology Policy on Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research. The discussion will build on a June 2023 workshop that explored the implications of new policies for various stakeholders. A Proceedings of a Workshop-in Brief will be prepared by designated rapporteurs and distributed broadly….”
“We are excited to announce that Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) has received a generous grant of USD $299,454 from the National Science Foundation to investigate “reasonable costs” for public access to United States federally funded research and scientific data.
The Nelson Memo from the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy incentivizes national adoption of open science practices and aims to ensure all Americans benefit from ready, immediate, and free access to federally funded research. Even when those digital research outputs are free for users, there are significant costs involved with their creation, publication and management. How much are these costs? And who should pay for them?
In a publishing market notorious for extractive practices and perpetuation of inequities in knowledge production and dissemination, public access to research could come at a steep and uneven price to researchers and research institutions. Without clear guardrails, these costs are likely to be passed on to taxpayers by including publishing fees in research project budgets as “allowable expenses”.
This new NSF-sponsored research project from IOI seeks to gather the information needed about publishing costs in order to provide a foundation to address these concerns. Over the course of the next two years, we seek to deepen our understanding of the true cost of “public access” publishing today for prevalent science publication formats (including articles and data), how much research institutions are spending in anticipation of compliance with public access mandates, and how similar or different the approaches and choices are for research institutions of different tiers and demographics. We will identify the range of implementation scenarios arising in research institutions today while investigating and reporting on any disparities or challenges we find. This project is an opportunity to provide actionable research outputs, consistent with IOI’s focus on delivering tools that institutions, funders, and publishers can use to inform their policies, budget allocations, and future planning….”
“As a major voice for repositories at the international level, COAR joins other organizations in welcoming the Council of European Union’s Conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing, which highlight the importance of not-for-profit, scholarly open access publishing models….
There are over 3,000 open access repositories in Europe (1) – mainly hosted by universities, research centers and government agencies – that are a critical component of a not-for-profit scholarly communications infrastructure; one that can and should be leveraged to achieve the aims of the Council’s Conclusions. Repositories are much more than a parallel system (collecting manuscripts of paywalled papers). They reflect an investment in public research infrastructure that can expand and support innovation in scholarly publishing by connecting repository resources to value-added services, such as peer review (see for example, the model adopted by HAL and Peer Community In)….”
“Representing the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation comprised of 13 academic libraries, we write to express our strong opposition to Section 552 of the House Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations bill, which would block American taxpayers from immediately accessing the results of the more than $90 billion in scientific research that the US government funds each year. We urge you to remove this language from the final bill.
As representatives of libraries at institutions with high research output, we support our researchers in achieving the highest impact possible for their research results. There is a need for the United States to invest in the infrastructure that is the critical foundation for a more open system of research that will result in better, faster answers to the problems of our time.
Immediate access to this research will advance discovery, spur the economy, and accelerate innovation across the state and our nation, helping to address our shared priorities. The result will be faster progress toward curing diseases, preventing pandemics, mitigating the impacts of natural disasters, and improving public wellbeing.
The policy guidance outlined in the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s August 25, 2022, Memorandum is the culmination of many years of steady progress towards making research more openly available. It provides a much-needed update to strengthen U.S. policy that will bring our country to equal footing with governments across the world that have established strong open access policies to promote their national innovation agendas.
We hope you will remove any appropriations language that bars implementation of this important Office of Science & Technology Policy guidance that guarantees taxpayers immediate access to the results of research they fund….”
“Yet another skill training resource, this time specifically for you, a librarian. Want to learn more about how you educate researchers in OA? We got you covered! Or maybe you’d like to pick up tools and tips on how to manage OA via a platform? In which case, this masterclass will walk you through how the ChronosHub platform supports this journey.
There’s a few “need to know’s” before signing up:
This is for librarians only. You’ll need to fill out a form, and after doing so, we’ll provide you with a link.
Of course, you’ll receive training material after the class, but we would love to be acknowledged for the hard work we put in. We operate under an open license….”
Abstract: Many institutions face low deposit rates with their institutional repositories despite investing substantial resources in implementing and supporting these systems. Deposit rates are higher in IRs that offer mediated deposits; however, this can be a time and labor intensive process. This article describes a method for copying open access articles and corresponding descriptive metadata from open repositories for archiving in an institutional repository using Beautiful Soup and Selenium as web scraping tools. This method quickly added hundreds of articles to an IR without relying on faculty participation or consulting publisher policies, increasing repository downloads and usage.
Abstract: Background/Aims Deidentified individual participant data (IPD) sharing has been implemented in the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors journals since 2017. However, there were some published clinical trials that did not follow the new implemented policy. This study examines the number of clinical trials that endorsed IPD sharing policy among top ophthalmology journals.
Method All published original articles in 2021 in 10 highest-ranking ophthalmology journals according to the 2020 journal impact factor were included. Clinical trials were determined by the WHO definition of clinical trials. Each article was then thoroughly searched for the IPD sharing statement either in the manuscript or in the clinical trial registry. We collected the number of published clinical trials that implemented IPD sharing policy as our primary outcome.
Results 1852 published articles in top 10 ophthalmology journals were identified, and 9.45% were clinical trials. Of these clinical trials, 44% had clinical trial registrations and 49.14% declared IPD sharing statements. Only 42 (48.83%) clinical trials were willing to share IPD, and 5 (10.21%) of these share IPD via an online repository platform. In terms of sharing period, 37 clinical trials were willing to share right after the publication and only 2 showed the ending of sharing period.
Conclusion This report shows that the number of clinical trials in top ophthalmology journals that endorsed the IPD sharing policy and the number of registrations is lower than half even though the policy has been implemented for several years. Future updates are necessary as policy evolves.
“To do this, we recommend:
As part of their updated policy plans submitted in response to the 2022 OSTP memo, US federal agencies should, at a minimum, articulate a pathway for developing guidance on research software sharing, and, at a maximum, incorporate research software sharing requirements as a necessary extension of any data sharing policy and a critical strategy to make data truly FAIR (as these principles have been adapted to apply to research software [12]).
As part of sharing requirements, federal agencies should specify that research software should be deposited in trusted, public repositories that maximize discovery, collaborative development, version control, long-term preservation, and other key elements of the National Science and Technology Council’s “Desirable Characteristics of Data Repositories for Federally Funded Research” [13], as adapted to fit the unique considerations of research software.
US federal agencies should encourage grantees to use non-proprietary software and file formats, whenever possible, to collect and store data. We realize that for some research areas and specialized techniques, viable non-proprietary software may not exist for data collection. However, in many cases, files can be exported and shared using non-proprietary formats or scripts can be provided to allow others to open files.
Consistent with the US Administration’s approach to cybersecurity [14], federal agencies should provide clear guidance on measures grantees are expected to undertake to ensure the security and integrity of research software. This guidance should encompass the design, development, dissemination, and documentation of research software. Examples include the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s secure software development framework and Linux Foundation’s open source security foundation.
As part of the allowable costs that grantees can request to help them meet research sharing requirements, US federal agencies should include reasonable costs associated with developing and maintaining research software needed to maximize data accessibility and reusability for as long as it is practical. Federal agencies should ensure that such costs are additive to proposal budgets, rather than consuming funds that would otherwise go to the research itself.
US federal agencies should encourage grantees to apply licenses to their research software that facilitate replication, reuse, and extensibility, while balancing individual and institutional intellectual property considerations. Agencies can point grantees to guidance on desirable criteria for distribution terms and approved licenses from the Open Source Initiative.
In parallel with the actions listed above that can be immediately incorporated into new public access plans, US federal agencies should also explore long-term strategies to elevate research software to co-equal research outputs and further incentivize its maintenance and sharing to improve research reproducibility, replicability, and integrity….”
“At the recent SSP Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon, a cross-functional panel considered the challenge of “Solving for OA/UX: The Powerful Potential in Improving User Experience (UX).”
Drawing on her work as a scholarly author and as Research Impact and Open Scholarship Librarian, Indiana University Bloomington, Willa Tavernier moderated an interactive session with three panelists. Together, they reflected on successful collaborations that streamline OA processes, remove unnecessary work for the researchers, and enable cross-stakeholder transparency.
A real-time audience poll first quizzed the room on their own “level of pain (experienced) in managing Open Access.” Half the room who voted said they felt moderate pain, while another quarter said they experienced very severe pain – or worse….”
“We’re thrilled to share that The Michael J.Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF) has signed up to use OA.Report to help implement its Open Access Policy. OA.Works currently supports Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) open access policy implementation, and through ASAP’s partnership with MJFF and collaborative discussions, OA.Works and MJFF agreed to work together on open access policy implementation. Some areas we’re especially excited for OA.Report to support include: Tracking the research they’re funding, and producing open data that can be used to demonstrate the foundation’s impact to the public via their scientific publications page. Accurately assessing their Open Access Policy…”
“FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Implementing the FAIR principles for data can be a challenge though. In this post I want to dive into how to do it in practice….”
“The project The socioeconomics of scientific publication of the French Committee for Open Science has published a study on Diamond open access journals business models.
The aim of this study is to test the feasibility, and also the desirability, of a direct, recurrent funding model for Diamond open access journals, the examples of have been very scarce up to now. It is a follow up on the OA Diamond Journals survey and, in particular, on its recommendation to set up a direct funding for Diamond open access journals from institutions that do not currently support them.
The study is based on a questionnaire survey of over 1,000 journals, to which 260 responded. The questions covered four themes aiming at understanding their financial situation: the journal’s economic configuration, publishing acts, relationship with funders and reporting, and their opinion on a direct funding model.
The final report presents the results by proposing four models for Diamond open access journals direct support, highlighting the parts of the publication process that could be directly funded (after identifying the various players), and specifying the technical conditions for implementing a direct funding model. The report also identifies the advantages and limitations of such models.”