Category Archives: oa.collaboration

Factors that influence data sharing through data sharing platforms: A qualitative study on the views and experiences of cohort holders and platform developers

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Abstract:  Background

Infrastructures are being developed to enhance and facilitate the sharing of cohort data internationally. However, empirical studies show that many barriers impede sharing data broadly.

Purpose

Therefore, our aim is to describe the barriers and concerns for the sharing of cohort data, and the implications for data sharing platforms.

Methods

Seventeen participants involved in developing data sharing platforms or tied to cohorts that are to be submitted to platforms were recruited for semi-structured interviews to share views and experiences regarding data sharing.

Results

Credit and recognition, the potential misuse of data, loss of control, lack of resources, socio-cultural factors and ethical and legal barriers are elements that influence decisions on data sharing. Core values underlying these reasons are equality, reciprocity, trust, transparency, gratification and beneficence.

Conclusions

Data generators might use data sharing platforms primarily for collaborative modes of working and network building. Data generators might be unwilling to contribute and share for non-collaborative work, or if no financial resources are provided for sharing data.

ManyBirds: A multi-site collaborative Open Science approach to avian cognition and behaviour research

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Abstract:  Comparative cognitive and behaviour research aims to investigate cognitive evolution by comparing performance in different species to understand how these abilities have evolved. Ideally, this requires large and diverse samples, however, these can be difficult to obtain by single labs or institutions, leading to potential reproducibility and generalisation issues with small, less representative samples. To help mitigate these issues, we are establishing a multi-site collaborative Open Science approach called ManyBirds, with the aim of providing new insight into the evolution of avian cognition and behaviour through large-scale comparative studies, following the lead of exemplary ManyPrimates, ManyBabies and ManyDogs projects. Here, we outline a) why we should study birds, including the origin of modern birds, avian brains, convergent evolution of cognition, and the replicability crisis; b) the current state of the avian cognition field, including a ‘snapshot’ review; c) the ManyBirds project, with plans, infrastructure, limitations, implications and future directions. In sharing this process, we hope that this may be useful for other researchers in devising similar projects in other taxa, like non-avian reptiles or mammals, and to encourage further collaborations with ManyBirds and related ManyX projects. Ultimately, we hope to promote collaboration between ManyX projects to allow for wider investigation of the evolution of cognition across all animals, including potentially humans.

 

How the COVID pandemic is changing global science collaborations

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“Another long-term trend that researchers are watching out for is the push for scientists to share their research data more openly. This was mandated by the biomedical funding charity, Wellcome, for research that it funded on COVID-19, although there have been instances of people circumventing the rules by making data available ‘upon request’.

In theory, the push for open data might lessen international collaboration if it is no longer necessary to establish personal relationships to access data. Sugimoto says this could happen, but also wonders whether open data might help to link researchers from across the world by making their work more visible. “It could actually, in some ways, enhance and increase international collaboration rather than diminish it,” she says….”

Open Hardware Distribution and Documentation Working Group: Pyramids versus circles — the need for more cooperative/collaborative business models for OScH | by Journal of Open HW | Jun, 2021 | Medium

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“One of the biggest challenges in scaling open science hardware is finding the right business model. It’s a topic that has come up at every GOSH event I’ve been to, and it’s something we as a community need to figure out if we hope to “make OScH ubiquitous by 2025”. I’ve been thinking about this problem deeply over the past 5 years as part of my entrepreneurial journey at Sci-Bots where I’ve been working to commercialize DropBot, an open-source digital microfluidics controller that was the product of my PhD research. Starting a business is hard even in the best-case scenario, but it can be especially difficult when the type of business you are trying to create doesn’t follow the traditional narrative….”

Biodiversity Heritage Library and Plazi: Biodiversity Literature Repository

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“This document describes the cooperation and collaboration of BHL and Plazi, on common goals. It outlines common goals and areas of common interests, and clarifies key areas of responsibility. The digital arena allows building a large corpus of literature and from that a “graph” of knowledge or knowledge graph through identification, extraction and linking of data. It provides an emerging access platform to the knowledge beyond the conventional traditional human-reader focused access. It allows new modes of access, including text and data mining, search, visualization and the discovery of new findings based on the accessibility of data. This knowledge graph does not replace existing media, but rather complements them. In the case of biodiversity sciences, it is based on both the estimated 500 Million pages of biodiversity literature and on increasingly born-digital publications. In biodiversity, the very rich data centric publications with the highly sophisticated implicit citation networks are a perfect base to build such a knowledge graph. In order to build the knowledge graph, the data in the publications must be liberated and made open, findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR) for machine use. This is the necessary additional step after the digitization of existing literature….”

CARBIS BAY G7 SUMMIT COMMUNIQUÉ | The White House

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“13. To get and stay ahead of the virus, we commit to continue our investment in cutting edge research and innovation, seeking to ensure that global vaccines remain effective against variants of concern, and that effective tests and treatments are available. To this end, we will boost global surveillance  and genomic sequencing and swift information sharing needed to enable the rapid detection to combat the virus and its emerging variants. G7 countries should extend every effort to achieve, wherever possible, a level of genomic sequencing of at least 10 per cent of all new positive COVID-19 samples during the pandemic phase and share genomic sequencing information with existing global databases….

36. Underpinning all of these future frontiers, and wider challenges of the coming century, is the importance of scientific discovery and its deployment. We will therefore work together to promote stronger collaboration on research and development, and promote principles of research security and integrity and open science building off the historical levels of collaboration seen in the past year to internationally beneficial results. Central to this should be building a diverse and resilient science and research community, inclusive for all groups  including women. Domestically we will seek to redress the imbalance in women’s and girls’ under-representation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) which acts as a barrier to access to these growing industries. We will explore how existing and potential new mechanisms and initiatives can support risk reduction, prevention and response to future systemic crises, natural disasters and pace of technological change. As such we endorse the G7 Compact on Research Collaboration and its commitment to: support policies, legal frameworks and programmes to promote research collaboration; promote sharing of research data; explore enhancements to research assessment and rewards for collaboration and knowledge sharing; and develop a common set of principles which will help protect research and innovation ecosystem across the G7 to open and reciprocal research collaboration….”

G7 Research Compact

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As Open Societies with democratic values we believe in academic freedom. The freedom to pursue intellectual enquiry and to innovate allows us to make progress on shared issues and drive forward the frontiers of knowledge and discovery for the benefit of the entire world. We recognise that research and innovation are fundamentally global endeavours. Nations, citizens,  institutions,  and  businesses  have  made  huge  strides  forward,  not  otherwise possible, through open research collaboration across borders. Working together we will use our position as leading science nations to collaborate on global challenges, increase the transparency and integrity of research, and facilitate data free flow with trust to drive innovation and advance knowledge.

 

 

Radical Collaboration: Library Publisher Partnerships to Advance the Global Knowledge Commons | CRL

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“The present and future of research libraries and scholarly publishers are inextricably aligned. Both exist to advance the creation, dissemination, and preservation of a diverse scholarly record; and both are facing existential challenges, particularly in finding sustainable business models to advance open scholarship.  

Join us on May 25th, 2021 from 12 p.m. – 1 p.m. Central to explore the shared aims and challenges of research libraries and scholarly publishers and discover how partnerships across professional and disciplinary boundaries are working to find sustainable models to support an open knowledge ecosystem. After an introduction by CRL President Greg Eow, this webinar will look at two innovative library-publisher collaborations, assessing the challenges and opportunities in this space, and ideating future directions….”

Guest Post – Scaffolding a Shift to a Values-driven Open Books Ecosystem – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“Pressure from all sides of the ecosystem has propelled growth, experimentation, and commitment to making more scholarship accessible to more people. There is increased awareness, too, that making research open does not resolve all issues of equity and access to knowledge, that more critical engagement with the moral economy of open access is still to come. Living in a pandemic has accelerated the momentum and heightened the sense of urgency, not only in discourse, but in concrete steps being taken and strategies developed by institutions and publishers alike. Libraries, scholars, students, and readers of all kinds have had to move rapidly to adopt and adapt digital resources and tools. Open access books offer increased access to knowledge for the reader, but they also present an opportunity to remake a fragmented ecosystem, and to increase channels of communication about the processes involved in researching, writing, shepherding, financing, publishing, acquiring, and reading research….

Digital books, open or not, require infrastructure. Disintermediating hosting, distribution, and sales helps simplify cost structures. Non-profit presses are developing their own infrastructure to support greater strategic choice. Fulcrum, from Michigan Publishing, and Manifold, from the University of Minnesota Press, are two such developments that expand the new universe of values-aligned platforms. The MIT Press Direct platform launched in 2019 in an effort to disintermediate the relationship between the press and libraries. The platform aligns ebook distribution with the university press mission and opens space for dialogue with libraries. The greater connection with libraries has confirmed a gap in knowledge sharing between librarians, editors, library sales, and authors that, when filled, could make the monograph publication process clearer. Each stakeholder, internal and external to a press, holds valuable information about open access book development, funding, hosting, and discovery. Creating channels to share this information, and doing so through new, collective models, has the potential to benefit the system as a whole….”

Open access publishing and the promise of collaboration · COPIM

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“In the discussions about the merits and demerits of collaboration, what tends to be missed though are the untapped potentials that exist in collaborations not just between academics, or between disciplines, or between academics and external organisations, or between academics and the public, but between academics, scholarly libraries, and publishers of scholarly work. This the subject of a new report co-authored by Elli Gerakopoulou, Izabella Penier and me. It focuses on the possibilities that might exist for collaboration between scholarly libraries and open access book publishers, including the kinds of open access publishers led by academics represented by ScholarLed, one of the partners in the COPIM project and with which I am also involved. The report draws on a combination of interviews, workshop discussions (including one workshop with librarians in the US, one in the UK, and one with publishers), and pre-workshop surveys with librarians and individuals involved in library consortia, as well as desk research.

In the report we examine various forms of collaboration that characterise the existing landscape of open access book publishing. This includes examining library membership programmes, of the kind run by both publishers — examples include programmes run by Lever Press, Luminos, punctum books, and Open Book Publishers — and infrastructure providers — notably the OAPEN library membership programme. We also look at intermediaries that aim to increase the likelihood of open access book publishers being able to receive financial support from scholarly libraries, such as Knowledge Unlatched and TOME. This forms part of a scoping exercise to enable us and our readers to understand the diversity of types of collaboration that already exist between and around open access publishers and scholarly libraries and where there are possibilities to learn from such initiatives….” 

The promise of collaboration: collective funding models and the integration of Open Access books into libraries | Zenodo

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“This report tackles a simple question: how can open access books be more successfully integrated into scholarly libraries? While there are some important practical efforts being made to address this question in a variety of different contexts, we explore the areas where further work is required to progress from a situation in which supporting and integrating open access books often remains a peripheral concern for libraries.

The report draws on desk research alongside a combination of interviews, workshop discussions and pre-workshop surveys with librarians and individuals involved in library consortia. It explores issues such as the discoverability of open access content in library catalogues, the sustainability of open access monograph publishing, the difficulty of articulating the value of open access for supporting universities and the challenge of aligning open access values with those of stakeholders. It also reimagines a more diverse and inclusive system of scholarly communication in relation to open access monographs. As part of this, the report outlines some of the principles that could inform a new open access model/platform aimed at transforming the relationship between open access book publishers and libraries….”

Open Library Foundation

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“The Open Library Foundation enables the development, accessibility and sustainability of open source and open access projects for and by libraries. The Foundation seeks to enable and support creative collaboration among librarians, technologists, designers, service providers and vendors to share expertise and resources and to create innovative new software and resources that support libraries….”

 

Decolonizing Open Access in Development Research Journal Open Access and Plan S: Solving Problems or Shifting Burdens?

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This academic thought piece provides an overview of the history of, and current trends in, publishing practices in the scientific fields known to the authors (chemical sciences, social sciences and humanities), as well as a discussion of how open access mandates such as Plan S from cOAlition S will affect these practices. It begins by summarizing the evolution of scientific publishing, in particular how it was shaped by the learned societies, and highlights how important quality assurance and scientific management mechanisms are being challenged by the recent introduction of ever more stringent open access mandates. The authors then discuss the various reactions of the researcher community to the introduction of Plan S, and elucidate a number of concerns: that it will push researchers towards a pay-to-publish system which will inevitably create new divisions between those who can afford to get their research published and those who cannot; that it will disrupt collaboration between researchers on the different sides of cOAlition S funding; and that it will have an impact on academic freedom of research and publishing. The authors analyse the dissemination of, and responses to, an open letter distributed and signed in reaction to the introduction of Plan S, before concluding with some thoughts on the potential for evolution of open access in scientific publishing.

Collaboration between research institutes and large and small publishers for publishing open access journals

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Abstract:  Research institutes frequently collaborate with for-profit publishers for the publication of open access journals. This study uses a structural break test to examine the effects of the collaboration between research institutes and large and small for-profit publishers for the publication of 15 gold open access journals on the journals’ internationality and academic influence. The results reveal an improvement in the internationality and academic influence for most of the journals following the collaboration. Additionally, the scale and persistence of the effects are not dependent on the size of the publisher. The findings indicate that large publishers do not have any advantage over small publishers in publishing journals for research institutes. This implies that small publishers can compete with large ones in publishing official journals on behalf of research institutes. However, as collaboration with research institutes strengthens the large publishers’ presence in the open access journal market, it is necessary to monitor their activities, including large publishers’ acquisitions of small ones.

 

Librarians’ perceptions and motivations for supporting collaborative models for Open Access monographs · Commonplace

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“While the survey revealed several discoveries regarding librarians’ confidence in collaborative OA models for monographs, one of the key findings was that librarians still support the basic principle of OA—despite the obstacles standing in the way—and are willing to support OA models for scholarly books via crowdfunding to help make them available worldwide. They also do not overlook the importance of local benefits (i.e., the benefits for their own communities) derived from their participation. Previous studies on OA already confirmed librarians’ positive attitudes about supporting OA monograph publishing: OAPEN-UK 2014 librarian survey, for example, revealed that 80 of librarians would support OA monograph publishing merely in principle (Collins & Milloy, 2016). The study did not focus on a particular model, but it did show librarians’ commitment to OA, not only in the context of journals but also monographs….”