Category Archives: oa.collaboration

CoNOSC – Council for National Open Science Coordination

Posted on by
Reply

“On 21 October 2019, in Helsinki, France, the Netherlands and Finland invited representatives of the ERAC countries to discuss the creation of a network of open science coordination. The program of the day is included. Twenty-one countries were present, as well as the European Union. Participants agreed that it was necessary to create such a network to enable the coordination of national efforts in the field of open science.

The objectives and organizational principles of this network, which we have named ‘Council for National Open Science Coordination’ (CoNOSC), are specified in the attached Memorandum of Understanding. Here is the summary:

 

 

– CoNOSC helps to fill  in the gaps in national open science coordination.

– CoNOSC will provide a valuable insights through the dialogue with other international partners.

– CoNOSC membership is in principle open to all countries within the European Research Area….”

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

Posted on by
Reply

“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….”

The case for the Humanities Citation Index (HuCI): a citation index by the humanities, for the humanities

Posted on by
Reply

Abstract:  Citation indexes are by now part of the research infrastructure in use by most scientists: a necessary tool in order to cope with the increasing amounts of scientific literature being published. Commercial citation indexes are designed for the sciences and have uneven coverage and unsatisfactory characteristics for humanities scholars, while no comprehensive citation index is published by a public organization. We argue that an open citation index for the humanities is desirable, for four reasons: it would greatly improve and accelerate the retrieval of sources, it would offer a way to interlink collections across repositories (such as archives and libraries), it would foster the adoption of metadata standards and best practices by all stakeholders (including publishers) and it would contribute research data to fields such as bibliometrics and science studies. We also suggest that the citation index should be informed by a set of requirements relevant to the humanities. We discuss four: source coverage must be comprehensive, including books and citations to primary sources; there needs to be chronological depth, as scholarship in the humanities remains relevant over time; the index should be collection-driven, leveraging the accumulated thematic collections of specialized research libraries; and it should be rich in context in order to allow for the qualification of each citation, for example by providing citation excerpts. We detail the fit-for-purpose research infrastructure which can make the humanities citation index a reality. Ultimately, we argue that a citation index for the humanities can be created by humanists, via a collaborative, distributed and open effort.

 

An Open-Publishing Response to the COVID-19 Infodemic

Posted on by
Reply

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.

 

Opening doors to discovery: Partnerships are key to advancing open science

Posted on by
Reply

Abstract. The evolution of scholarly communications has accelerated in recent years, and 2020 for obvious reasons put even more pressure on the sector to evolve and adapt. By opening up access to research publications, by simplifying or customising the digital experience, or by improving the speed of publishing – the focus is firmly placed on the need for publishers to work more in partnership with each other, with institutions, funders, and new players in the market to develop solutions that meet the evolving needs of researchers and the wider community. Partnerships between different actors in the research process address challenges in practice and help advance open science, publishing, and the research system as a whole.

Open Grant Proposals · Business of Knowing, summer 2021

Posted on by
Reply

“One of those informal frontiers is crowdfunding for scientific research. For the past year, I’ve worked on Experiment, helping hundreds of scientists design and launch crowdfunding campaigns for their research questions. Experiment has been doing this for almost a decade, with more than 1,000 successfully funded projects on the platform. The process is very different than the grant funding mechanisms set up by agencies and foundations. It’s not big money yet, as the average fundraise is still ~$5,000. But in many ways, the process is better: faster, transparent, and more encouraging to early-career scientists. Of all the lessons learned, one stands out for broader consideration: grant proposals and processes should be open by default.

Grant proposals that meet basic requirements for scientific merit and rigor should be posted online, ideally in a standardized format, in a centralized (or several) database or clearinghouse. They should include more detail than just the abstract and dollar amount totals that are currently shown now on federal databases, especially in terms of budgets and costs. The proposals should include a DOI number so that future work can point back to the original question, thinking, and scope. A link to these open grant proposals should be broadly accepted as sufficient for submission to requests from agencies or foundations….

Open proposals would make research funding project-centric, rather than funder-centric….

Open proposals would promote more accurate budgets….

Open proposals would increase the surface area of collaboration….

Open proposals would improve citation metrics….

Open proposals would create an opportunity to reward the best question-askers in addition to the best question-answerers….

Open proposals would give us a view into the whole of science, including the unfunded proposals and the experiments with null results….”

Re-thinking Academic Publishing: The Promise of Platform Cooperativism · Business of Knowing, summer 2021

Posted on by
Reply

Sustainable, just, and equitable open access academic publishing may sometimes seem to be a utopia. There are just too many “buts” — “but the academic career depends on your scholarly output,” “but you have to publish in ‘high-ranking’ journals.” Yes, there is much to say about the injustices of the academic publishing system, and how we got there and the need for “high-level” action to change funding models and incentives. Yes, it may seem that there are just too many factors outside our control. But are they? Or could we imagine a future where scholars are the ones at the helm of the scholarly publishing ecosystem? In this contribution, we propose to do just that: imagine a different — fairer, more economically sustainable, and inclusive — approach to open access. However, to do that, we need to think not only outside the scope of existing business and publishing models but also the existing organisational models.

NEH grant to support training for high-impact public digital humanities collaborations | The University of Kansas

Posted on by
Reply

“The Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas has been awarded $190,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to offer training in public digital humanities and academic-community collaborations. An intensive weeklong summer institute — to be offered in June 2022 at the Hall Center for the Humanities — will provide foundational knowledge, skills and resources to successfully advance 12 public humanities projects, increasing their longevity, visibility and impact. This will be followed by a year of further online training, support and discussion, with a final symposium and showcase in June 2023….”

The Invisible Citation Commons · Business of Knowing

Posted on by
Reply

“In recent years, there has been a push to openly license citation metadata to better enable large-scale analyses and discoverability of scholarly work. The “Initiative for Open Citations” (I4OC),undefined launched in 2017, has led the way in helping publishers share citations to their works under a public domain CC0 license. As of early 2021, over a billion citations from one scholarly article to another are collected in public domain databases, a major shift from just a few years earlier.undefined These open databases provide the backbone for new discovery tools, and are used by academics training artificial intelligence tools. Open corpora like the Microsoft Academic Graph are themselves widely cited.undefined However, Microsoft Academic Graph will be shuttered in 2021; despite their importance, new citation projects are reliant on continued funding and support by their host, and longevity is not always guaranteed….

Wikidata is a freely licensed and editable online database of linked data, with 94 million items as of June 2021.undefined Like its sister project Wikipedia, it has a vibrant multilingual volunteer community that develops and maintains it, and is supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikidata also includes bibliographic metadata: as of June 2021, nearly 40 million items on Wikidata represented publications, accounting for 43% of all items.undefined These are a combination of semi-automated uploads of citations from other open databases, items about notable publications that have their own Wikipedia articles, and items added manually by editors. Wikidata is also attractive for libraries, archives, and cultural institutions that want to make their metadata more openly available and reusable, and there are several ongoing projects to incorporate Wikidata into library and archival cataloging processes and connect Wikidata to new open knowledgebases….”

The Invisible Citation Commons · Business of Knowing

Posted on by
Reply

“In recent years, there has been a push to openly license citation metadata to better enable large-scale analyses and discoverability of scholarly work. The “Initiative for Open Citations” (I4OC),undefined launched in 2017, has led the way in helping publishers share citations to their works under a public domain CC0 license. As of early 2021, over a billion citations from one scholarly article to another are collected in public domain databases, a major shift from just a few years earlier.undefined These open databases provide the backbone for new discovery tools, and are used by academics training artificial intelligence tools. Open corpora like the Microsoft Academic Graph are themselves widely cited.undefined However, Microsoft Academic Graph will be shuttered in 2021; despite their importance, new citation projects are reliant on continued funding and support by their host, and longevity is not always guaranteed….

Wikidata is a freely licensed and editable online database of linked data, with 94 million items as of June 2021.undefined Like its sister project Wikipedia, it has a vibrant multilingual volunteer community that develops and maintains it, and is supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikidata also includes bibliographic metadata: as of June 2021, nearly 40 million items on Wikidata represented publications, accounting for 43% of all items.undefined These are a combination of semi-automated uploads of citations from other open databases, items about notable publications that have their own Wikipedia articles, and items added manually by editors. Wikidata is also attractive for libraries, archives, and cultural institutions that want to make their metadata more openly available and reusable, and there are several ongoing projects to incorporate Wikidata into library and archival cataloging processes and connect Wikidata to new open knowledgebases….”

Das scholar-led.network-Manifest | Zenodo

Posted on by
Reply

Fokusgruppe scholar-led.network. (2021). Das scholar-led.network-Manifest. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4925784

English abstract (via deepl.com): We are the scholar-led.network and are working collaboratively for a non-profit publishing culture beyond APCs and BPCs that is independent of major publishers. The scholar-led.network manifesto sums up our central critique of the current scholarly publishing system in the German-speaking world and identifies areas of action for fair, planned, and diverse publishing.

German abstract: Wir sind das scholar-led.network und setzen uns gemeinsam und kollaborativ für eine von Großverlagen unabhängige, nicht profitorientierte Publikationskultur jenseits von APCs und BPCs ein. Das scholar-led.network-Manifest bringt unsere zentrale Kritik am gegenwärtigen wissenschaftlichen Publikationssystem im deutschsprachigen Raum auf den Punkt und benennt Handlungsfelder für faires, planvolles und vielfältiges Publizieren.

Live document: https://preview.graphite.page/scholar-led-manifest/

English version via Google Translate

Informationsplattform Open Access: scholar-led Open Access: Manifesto for fair publishing

Posted on by
Reply

In its scholar-led.network manifesto, the focus group scholar-led.network, which was established within the framework of the open-access.network project, criticises the current scholarly publishing system in the German-speaking world and, at the same time, provides fields of action for the development of a fair, planned and bibliodiverse publishing culture.

Integrating Qualitative Methods and Open Science: Five Principles for More Trustworthy Research* | Journal of Communication | Oxford Academic

Posted on by
Reply

Abstract:  Recent initiatives toward open science in communication have prompted vigorous debate. In this article, we draw on qualitative and interpretive research methods to expand the key priorities that the open science framework addresses, namely producing trustworthy and quality research. This article contributes to communication research by integrating qualitative methodological literature with open communication science research to identify five broader commitments for all communication research: validity, transparency, ethics, reflexivity, and collaboration. We identify key opportunities where qualitative and quantitative communication scholars can leverage the momentum of open science to critically reflect on and improve our knowledge production processes. We also examine competing values that incentivize dubious practices in communication research, and discuss several metascience initiatives to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion in our field and value multiple ways of knowing.

 

Ouvrir la Science – On the road to opening up research codes

Posted on by
Reply

In November 2018, the Committee for Open Science set up a ‘free and open source software group’, or the GPLO for short.

The creation of this group was based on a simple observation – that software is at the core of research and that open source practices are one of the founding elements of open science. The GPLO’s mission is to help the committee support the development of free and open software in scientific communities as such software is considered to be a pillar of open science.