Category Archives: oa.ecrs

“Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual” by Jill Cirasella and Polly Thistlethwaite

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“The process of completing a dissertation is stressful—deadlines are scary, editing is hard, formatting is tricky, and defending is terrifying. (And, of course, postgraduate employment is often uncertain.) Now that dissertations are deposited and distributed electronically, students must perform yet another anxiety-inducing task: deciding whether they want to make their dissertations immediately open access (OA) or, at universities that require OA, coming to terms with openness. For some students, mostly in the humanities and some of the social sciences, who hope to transform their dissertations into books, OA has become a bogeyman, a supposed saboteur of book contracts and destroyer of careers.

This chapter examines the various access-related anxieties that plague graduate students. It is a kind of diagnostic and statistical manual of dissertation anxieties—a ‘Dissertation Anxiety Manual,’ if you will—describing anxieties surrounding book contracts, book sales, plagiarism, juvenilia, the ambiguity of the term online, and changes in scholarly research and production.”

Climate scientists versus climate data | Climate Etc.

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“I read with great irony recently that scientists are “frantically copying U.S. Climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump” (e.g., Washington Post 13 December 2016). As a climate scientist formerly responsible for NOAA’s climate archive, the most critical issue in archival of climate data is actually scientists who are unwilling to formally archive and document their data. I spent the last decade cajoling climate scientists to archive their data and fully document the datasets. I established a climate data records program that was awarded a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 2014 for visionary work in the acquisition, production, and preservation of climate data records (CDRs), which accurately describe the Earth’s changing environment…..”

A whistleblower challenges NOAA’s climate data

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From John Bates: “Some on the [National Centers for Environmental Information, NCEI] Science Council, particularly the younger scientists, indicated they had not known of the Science requirement to archive data and were not aware of the open data movement. They promised to begin an archive request for the K15 datasets that were not archived; however I have not been able to confirm they have been archived….”

Research guild calls for radical improvements to H2020 – University World News

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“The Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities has called for significant increases in European funding through Horizon 2020 and the next Framework Programme, FP9, and improved success rates for applicants, to ensure continued applications and optimal impact….The guild supports the work on ‘open innovation’ including the creation of the European Innovation Council to coordinate the open, radical and disruptive innovation driven by universities, industry and entrepreneurs, although it wants the funding to come from additional funds, not from Horizon 2020. It also supports measures on ‘open access’. …”

Unleashing the potential of Europe’s universities

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 “The [Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities] is a recently established network of eighteen research-intensive universities from thirteen countries across Europe….We make nine core propositions for how European funding through Horizon 2020 (H2020) and the next Framework Programme (FP9) can strengthen research and innovation: …We welcome the three Os: Open Innovation, Open Science and Open to the World and urge a focus on the ‘quick wins’, removing barriers and enhancing initiatives to collaboration….We support measures to improve Open Access, and the inclusion of the Open Access requirement (with the possibility of opt-outs) for H2020-funded research. We also support the work of the Open Science Policy Platform (OSSP) and the High-Level Expert Groups reporting into it. At the same time, we urge that: [a] Open Science can relate to national initiatives effectively, and that it builds on, rather than duplicates, relevant aspects of the ERA (notably the development, under ESFRI, of einfrastructures). [b] The requirement to publish on Open Access does not transfer resource from research and innovation to the publishing industry. The Commission needs to have an active coordinating role in bringing publishers and universities together to agree optimal ways of ensuring Access. [c] There is an active engagement with national university representations and research councils to consider questions around (i) career advancement and recognition for researchers engaged in Open Science; (ii) research parameters; and (iii) challenges to achieve research integrity, including the reproducibility of research results….”