“NWO teamed up with the Research Council Norway (RCN) and the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) to create an open science course. This course was offered last year to employees of NWO and RCN. Its content is now available to anyone through an open knowledge platform set up by CWTS….”
“Over the course of 2022, CWTS organised a seminar series on Open Science, together with the research councils of the Netherlands (NWO) and Norway (RCN). The main audience was composed of policy officers within the two councils and connected professionals interested in the subject. The series was designed around four individual seminars:
Introduction to Open Science;
Open scholarly communication;
Open data, software and infrastructures;
Recognition & rewards, and responsible research assessment….”
“Open science has gained significant momentum over the past few years, with various movements and initiatives emerging to promote sharing of scientific knowledge, data, and resources with the wider community. Open science is a broad term encompassing a range of practices that strive to increase transparency, inclusivity, and accessibility in science. The expected benefits of open science are manifold, from accelerating scientific progress, enhancing scientific rigour, promoting responsible research, and ensuring public trust in science.
With that in mind, the research councils of the Netherlands (NWO) and Norway (RCN) joined hands with CWTS to organize a seminar series on open science throughout 2022. The seminars aimed to enrich and expand the understanding of open science within the agencies, focusing on programme and policy officers and connected professionals interested in the subject.
Aware of the challenges to reaching all those interested within NWO and RCN, we decided to create a knowledge platform to store and share the content from the seminars so they could be attended asynchronously. Moreover, recognizing the value of the produced content to a broader audience, we decided to put the idea of openness into practice, making the platform open to the public….”
“In Norway, the proportion of research being published openly has increased considerably in the past ten years. While less than 40% of Norwegian research articles were published openly in 2013, in 2021 that proportion had increased to around 75%, according to the OA barometer from the service provider, Sikt.
Sharing data is not quite as common….
Wenaas and Gulbrandsen also believe that data sharing is a question of culture. It is new to many, for others it may have been the practice for a long time….”
“UiO has adopted the introduction of an institutional rights retention policy (IRRP). The rights retention policy has effect from and including 1.1. 2023, and applies to manuscripts submitted to scholarly journals after this date.
Main points of the rights retention policy:
Ensures that UiO’s authors retain rights to share and use their accepted manuscript version (AAM) freely.
UiO has a non-exclusive right to make all scholarly articles authored by students and staff associated with the institution available with a CC BY 4.0 license in UiO’s research archive, currently DUO.
Employees and students who wish to opt out of this have the opportunity to apply for exemptions for individual articles. Applications are sent in a separate web form and do not need to be substantiated.
The Rector is legally responsible for interpreting the rights policy and for resolving any disputes about its interpretation and application.
UB processes uploads from Cristin and makes them available in the research archive, as well as processes applications for exceptions for individual articles….
The requirement for full and immediate open access to scientific publications cannot be met without a rights retention policy which ensures that articles published in closed journals are also self-archived in the institutional research archive (the green track).
The rights retention policy makes it possible to fulfill the current Open Access policy (#2): “All members of staff employed by UiO after 4 July 2013 shall undertake to do their best to ensure that scientific articles deposited into the institutional repository can be made openly available as soon as possible.”
Institutional rights policy ensures that all UiO authors retain rights to AAM so that this can be uploaded to Cristin and made available in UiO’s research archive, at the same time as the article is published by the journal. In this way, the requirements for immediate open access are met, while at the same time UiO ensures that researchers can freely choose the publication channel….”
Google translate: “Open Access Week in Norway is a collaboration between several subject libraries. They invite you to a series of lectures on topics related to open research, open publishing and the sharing of research data. All lectures are digital and open to all interested parties….”
In this paper, we investigate how open access is reflected and implemented in all Norwegian universities and how they responded to national policy developments for open access in the period 2009–2021. We analyse how the universities adapted arguments for the three core missions of the universities–research, education, and societal impact–when they reacted to increasing pressures to facilitate open access. Our analysis is based on 182 institutional strategy documents, open access policies and annual reports. When considering the profile of the institutional policies and the explicit referrals to national policies, we find there is a great deal of homogeneity between Norwegian universities, and they are mostly aligned with national policy. Open access is connected to the third mission in all university strategies, but often in a very general manner and without documenting benefits for non-academic users. We find limited emphasis on open access as advantageous for education. All universities show commitment to open access, and several can be described as proactive as they tie it to different types of local incentives. Development over time suggests more mature and institutionalised polices that do not challenge what we may call the academic heartland and its core value of academic freedom, including where and how to publish. We propose a framework for analysing similar institutionalisation processes with three main dimensions: mimesis, adaptation/integration with existing practices, and maturation/commitment.
Abstract: This paper investigates different uses of the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) in national journal rankings and discusses the merits of supplementing metrics with expert assessment. Our focus is national journal rankings used as evidence to support decisions about the distribution of institutional funding or career advancement. The seven countries under comparison are China, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Poland, and Turkey—and the region of Flanders in Belgium. With the exception of Italy, top-tier journals used in national rankings include those classified at the highest level, or according to tier, or points implemented. A total of 3,565 (75.8%) out of 4,701 unique top-tier journals were identified as having a JIF, with 55.7% belonging to the first Journal Impact Factor quartile. Journal rankings in China, Flanders, Poland, and Turkey classify journals with a JIF as being top-tier, but only when they are in the first quartile of the Average Journal Impact Factor Percentile. Journal rankings that result from expert assessment in Denmark, Finland, and Norway regularly classify journals as top-tier outside the first quartile, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. We conclude that experts, when tasked with metric-informed journal rankings, take into account quality dimensions that are not covered by JIFs.
“ZSL [Zoological Society of London], as a sub-grantee alongside Global Canopy, will be launching a revolutionary platform in 2022 bringing together the best data available on corporate exposure to, and reporting on, deforestation and other related environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.
The project aims to provide market-leading data to help financial institutions identify risks and find opportunities for sustainable investments to meet the growing demand for responsible financial products in light of the biodiversity and climate crises.
The database will be underpinned by the data collected through ZSL’s SPOTT assessments, Global Canopy’s Forest 500 assessments and the Stockholm Environment Institute, Global Canopy and Neural Alpha’s Trase Supply Chains and Trase Finance data, and will be aligned with the Accountability Framework Initiative and its guidance.
Supported by a five-year grant from the Norwegian government, the resulting data and metrics will provide a more comprehensive view of company performance on deforestation, conversion and associated human rights risks. The dataset will also provide broader coverage of the most exposed forest risk supply chains (in particular: palm oil, soy, timber, pulp, rubber and cattle products) and geographies where corporate performance data on these topics is currently missing. By mapping and integrating data from aligned initiatives and external datasets, more complete and in-depth coverage of corporate performance data will be available….”
“Submissions are invited for the 17th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing, 29 November–1 December 2022! The Munin Conference is an annual event on scholarly communication, primarily revolving around open access, open data and other aspects of open science. Held two years in a row as a digital event, this year the conference will be both digital and on-site at the Tromsø campus of UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
This year the Munin conference has a special focus on interactivity and discussions. Submissions will be published before the conference to allow for a “flipped conference” format. Participants will have to get acquainted with the content of submissions before the conference, whereas during the conference the focus will be on discussions and other interactive work with the content.
We invite papers (up to 2500 words), presentation videos (up to 10 minutes) and posters on the following three main topics for this year’s Munin conference:
Economics and equity in Open Science infrastructures
Open Science policies
Connecting the building blocks of Open Science…”
Abstract: Open Access (OA) emerged as an important transition in scholarly publishing worldwide during the past two decades. So far, this transition is increasingly based on article processing charges (APC), which create a new paywall on the researchers’ side. Publishing is part of the research process and thereby necessary to perform research. This study analyses the global trends towards paying to perform research by combing observed trends in publishing from 2015 to 2020 with an APC price list. APC expenses have sharply increased among six countries with different OA policies: the USA, China, the UK, France, the Netherlands, and Norway. The estimated global revenues from APC among major publishers now exceed 2 billion US dollars annually. Mergers and takeovers show that the industry is moving towards APC-based OA as the more profitable business model. Research publishing will be closed to those who cannot make an institution or project money payment. Our results lead to a discussion of whether APC is the best way to promote OA.
“The OpenAIRE team has the pleasure of speaking to Jens H. Aasheim, Senior Advisor at the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. Read his reflections on Open Science….”
“At UiT The Arctic University of Norway, all academic publications shall be accessible in open access journals or open repositories.
The following applies to scientific work with a publication date of 1. January 2022 or later: Regardless of the publication channel, full-text copies of scientific articles written by employees and students at UiT shall be uploaded (deposited) in the national register (currently called Cristin).
If the article is published with open access with the publisher (gold open access), the publisher’s PDF (Published version, Version of Record) must be uploaded.
If the article is published in a closed channel (subscription journal) that does not allow self-archiving of the publisher’s PDF, the latest peer-reviewed manuscript version (accepted manuscript, Author’s Accepted Manuscript, postprint) must be uploaded.
All uploaded full-text copies will be made openly available in the institutional archive (currently called Munin). Authors who wish to make a reservation against making a full-text copy available in Munin can apply for an exemption. More information about this can be found under Self-archiving.
By not applying for an exemption, UiT’s employees and students give the institution permission to make full text copies available in the open institutional archive (currently called Munin) under a Creative Commons license, in line with prevailing international practice in gree Open Access infrastructure. Read more about the rules and procedures in Principles for open access to scientific publications at UiT Norway’s Arctic University….”
”
In 2008 Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted unanimously to adopt a ground-breaking open access policy. Since then, over 70 other institutions, including other Harvard faculties, Stanford and MIT, have adopted similar policies based on the Harvard model. In Europe such institutional policies have, so far, been slow to get off the ground.
We are beginning to see that situation change. In 2021 the University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) adopted an Open Access policy that came into force on 1st January 2022.
Here, UiT members Camilla Brekke (Prorector for Research and Development), Johanne Raade (Library Director), Tanja Larssen (Open Science Advisor) and Per Pippin Aspaas (Head of Library Research and Publishing Support), tell us about the process of creating and implementing their policy….”
Røeggen, Vidar. 2021. “Introducing Level X in the Norwegian Publication Indicator: Involving the Research Community When Evaluating Journals Operating in the Borderland Between Predatory and Reputable Practice”. Nordic Perspectives on Open Science, December. https://doi.org/10.7557/11.6376.
By introducing the Norwegian Publication Indicator in 2004 Norway became part of an international development in which the allocation of basic funds to research institutions is increasingly linked to performance indicators (Dansk center for forskningsanalyse, 2014). Denmark and Finland have also implemented what is frequently labeled as “The Norwegian Model”. The model has inspired changes in similar national models in Flanders (Belgium) and Poland, and it is used for local purposes by several universities in Sweden and by University of Dublin, in Ireland (Sivertsen, 2018). The research community has been deeply involved in designing and adopting the model in Norway, and the annual processes evaluating journals depend on involvement by panels in every field of research. The indicator has an interactive webpage where researchers can communicate and discuss publication channels openly, and the final decisions made by panels when nominating journals to the highest level (level 2) are transparent and openly available at the webpage.
The indicator depends on information from a national registry of approved publication channels that is managed by The Directorate of Higher Education and Skills (HK-dir.). As of November 2021, The Norwegian register for scientific journals, series and publishers contains 26 127 journals at the basic level (level 1) and 2 193 journals at the highest level (level 2), and level 2 journals are identified by research panels in 84 different fields of research. Researchers can suggest new publication channels to the registry and these suggestions are examined according to our four criteria:
Journals/series must:
Be identified with a valid ISSN, confirmed by The International ISSN Register (demand from 2014)
Have an academic editorial board (or an equivalent) primarily consisting of researchers from universities, institutes or organizations that do research
Have established procedures for external peer review
Have a national or international authorship, meaning that maximum 2/3 of the authors can belong to the same institution
Publishers must:
Be organized in an editorial way to publish publications in accordance with the definition of a scientific publication
Have a scientific publishing program with external advisors and aiming for distribution to scholars and research institutions
Have a national or international authorship, meaning that maximum 2/3 of the authors can belong to the same institution
New suggestions are prepared by the secretariate at the register, and then finally approved by The National Board of Scholarly Publishing (NPU). So, the research community is deeply involved, both in the operations and further development of the indicator.
The secretariate at HK-dir. processes approximately 1 600 new proposals annually and NPU observe a new tendency in recent years: that an ever-increasing number of the incoming suggestions represents channels where there is uncertainty about approval or rejection. On the one hand, an examination of the available information on these journals’ webpages shows that the journals apparently satisfy our criteria. However, NPU sometimes identify ongoing discussion in the research community as to whether editorial practice is in accordance with how the journals describe their own routines. In addition, researchers often inform both NPU and the secretariate at HK-dir. about their own (bad) experience with a journal and ask us to investigate further.
Researchers often refer to these journals as “predatory journals” or the activity they represent as “predatory publishing”. But what does predatory publishing mean in 2021? The term has been co-opted to describe a range of activities including lack of rigorous peer review to exploitative publishing models (Hanson, 2021). Journals or publishers are not either predatory or representatives of high standards – they are rather on a continuum from predatory to high standards of research integrity and practice. Therefore, NPU discuss where to draw the line on this continuum.