Category Archives: oa.dynamic

Open Science Success Stories

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“The Open Science Success Stories Database compiles research articles, perspectives, case studies, news stories, and other materials that demonstrate the myriad ways in which open science benefits researchers and society alike. 

Scientists, scholars, librarians, department chairs, university administrators, philanthropic program officers, government agency representatives, policymakers, publishers, journalists and other stakeholders can use the curated resources to understand how open science is positively impacting specific disciplines and communities, as well as how these lessons can be applied to the global scientific endeavor.

The Open Science Success Stories Database is a collaboration between Arizona State University and the Open Research Funders Group, in conjunction with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science. …”

An open repository of real-time COVID-19 indicators | PNAS

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Abstract:  The COVID-19 pandemic presented enormous data challenges in the United States. Policy makers, epidemiological modelers, and health researchers all require up-to-date data on the pandemic and relevant public behavior, ideally at fine spatial and temporal resolution. The COVIDcast API is our attempt to fill this need: Operational since April 2020, it provides open access to both traditional public health surveillance signals (cases, deaths, and hospitalizations) and many auxiliary indicators of COVID-19 activity, such as signals extracted from deidentified medical claims data, massive online surveys, cell phone mobility data, and internet search trends. These are available at a fine geographic resolution (mostly at the county level) and are updated daily. The COVIDcast API also tracks all revisions to historical data, allowing modelers to account for the frequent revisions and backfill that are common for many public health data sources. All of the data are available in a common format through the API and accompanying R and Python software packages. This paper describes the data sources and signals, and provides examples demonstrating that the auxiliary signals in the COVIDcast API present information relevant to tracking COVID activity, augmenting traditional public health reporting and empowering research and decision-making.

 

EIFL Checklist for DSpace Repositories updated! | EIFL

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“We have updated and revised How To Make Your OA Repository Work Really Well, the EIFL checklist that repository managers and administrators, librarians and others can use to improve institutional open access (OA) repositories that use DSpace free and open source software.

DSpace is the most commonly used repository software in EIFL partner countries.

This is the fifth revision of the Checklist. We have included the new DSpace 7.1 software release – the largest release in the history of DSpace software. We have updated information about repository interoperability, and added COAR controlled vocabularies, OpenAIRE and Wikipedia to the discoverability section. We have also updated the repository policy and licensing sections and added more tips on ORCID-DSpace integrations….”

‘New journals concept’ from CUP’s Research Directions | The Bookseller

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“Cambridge University Press is launching an initiative it describes as a “new concept” for the journal, bringing researchers from different fields together to explore fundamental questions which cut across traditional disciplines.

Research Directions is the brainchild of Fiona Hutton, CUP executive publisher and its head of STM Open Access publishing. A former research scientist, Hutton wants to provide alternatives to traditional journal formats and bring communities together to frame research to problems that no one discipline would be able to tackle alone, said the publisher.

CUP said the approach would “speed discovery by fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing between subject communities” as well as provide “opportunities to publish research from areas not well served by traditional, discipline-specific journals”. 

The first titles under the Research Directions banner will be published in 2022, with an initial set of questions to answer, informed by feedback from hundreds of researchers. The publishing model will “mirror the research lifecycle”, with the results, analysis and impact reviews all published as separate, Open Access, peer-reviewed and citable outputs on CUP’s Cambridge Core platform….”

Getty Publications: how Quire is creating solutions to open access publishing – MuseumNext

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“In anticipation of MuseumNext’s Digital Collections Summit next week (4-6 October) we caught up with Erine Cecele Dunigan, Community Manager for Quire, an open-source digital publishing tool developed by Getty.

Erin will be giving a talk on Wednesday 6 October entitled, Open Access: Getty’s Approach to Digital Collection Catalogues….

Quire is a modern digital publishing tool developed by Getty. It’s ideal for creating dynamic publications in a variety of formats, including web, print, and e-book. In addition to being optimised for scholarly and visually rich publishing, Quire books are designed for longevity, sustainability, and discoverability.

Getty originally conceived Quire as a solution to its open access publishing needs, but the tool quickly gained the attention of other organisations within the fields of digital humanities, arts, and academia. While access is currently available for free upon request, we will be launching as a fully open-source publishing tool by Spring 2022. Open-sourcing Quire will enable others to leverage the work Getty has done to create, customise, and distribute critical digital scholarship online, at a low cost, and with little ongoing maintenance….”

An Open-Publishing Response to the COVID-19 Infodemic

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Abstract:  The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed the rapid dissemination of papers and preprints investigating the disease and its associated virus, SARS-CoV-2. The multifaceted nature of COVID-19 demands a multidisciplinary approach, but the urgency of the crisis combined with the need for social distancing measures present unique challenges to collaborative science. We applied a massive online open publishing approach to this problem using Manubot. Through GitHub, collaborators summarized and critiqued COVID-19 literature, creating a review manuscript. Manubot automatically compiled citation information for referenced preprints, journal publications, websites, and clinical trials. Continuous integration workflows retrieved up-to-date data from online sources nightly, regenerating some of the manuscript’s figures and statistics. Manubot rendered the manuscript into PDF, HTML, LaTeX, and DOCX outputs, immediately updating the version available online upon the integration of new content. Through this effort, we organized over 50 scientists from a range of backgrounds who evaluated over 1,500 sources and developed seven literature reviews. While many efforts from the computational community have focused on mining COVID-19 literature, our project illustrates the power of open publishing to organize both technical and non-technical scientists to aggregate and disseminate information in response to an evolving crisis.

 

Advocating for Open Education – BCcampus OpenEd Resources

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“Affordability is often the main driver for the use of OER, but it’s not the only reason. Using OER gives faculty the ability to customize their learning materials to support their curriculum and the learning outcomes for their course. The course materials can be dynamic, with a wide selection of OER available to create engagement, improve understanding, and break down barriers to accessibility….”

A Strengths-Based Approach to Evaluation and Transformational Change in Publishing | Educopia Institute

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“When Katherine Skinner and I published the Values and Principles Framework and Checklist last year, we introduced them as mechanisms to hold actors in the scholarly communication system accountable to their stakeholders and demonstrate their commitment to openness in concrete and documentable ways. We conceived the framework and checklist as living, iterative, and adaptable documents. Our first major revision, to be released this fall, reflects a deliberate shift to a strengths-based model of evaluation and change….

The revised framework will include resources that help organizations demonstrate their signature contributions to a more open, equitable, and productive scholarly communication ecosystem and that help them build towards their ideals….”

Automatic Textbook Billing Contract Library – SPARC

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“SPARC created the Automatic Textbook Billing Contract Library as a resource for advocates and institutions to understand the legal agreements behind automatic textbook billing. Known by brand names like “Inclusive Access” and “First Day,” these programs charge the cost of digital course materials directly to each student’s tuition and fee bill, often without confirming their consent. While vendors say this model provides access, many students think it limits their options. Colleges and universities have a responsibility to prioritize the needs of students—not vendors—and that starts with reading the fine print….”

Some journals say they are indexed in DOAJ but they are not – Google Sheets

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“The following journals say, or have said in the past, that they are indexed in DOAJ. In many cases they carry our logo also, without our permission.

Always check at https://doaj.org/search/journals that a journal is indexed even if its website carries the DOAJ logo or says that it is indexed.

If youhave questions about this list, please email DOAJ: feedback@doaj.org…”

MARKET WATCH – ESAC Initiative

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“The scholarly journal publishing market is in transition. While a great portion of publishers still operate their journals under the subscription paywall business model, open access publishing is keenly on the rise, as fully OA publishers and platforms are launched and come into maturity, scholarly publishers experiment a variety of new open access business models, and, not least, the number of research institutions and library consortia negotiating transformative agreements proliferates.

The visualizations below aim to inform the broader community of a number of key trends in the demographics and distribution of scholarly journal publishing in transition:

the relevance of publishers for scholars and scientists, as expressed in their share of scholarly articles published,
the growth of open access via transformative agreements and the impact these agreements have in enabling universal open access to the research articles produced on a local (country) and global (publisher) level, and
the costs and price points of article processing charges….”