Category Archives: oa.practices

CRAFT-OA Deliverable 3.1 Report on Standards for Best Publishing Practices and Basic Technical Requirements in the Light of FAIR Principles | Zenodo

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Armengou, Clara, Edig, Xenia van, Laakso, Mikael, & Umerle, Tomasz. (2023). CRAFT-OA Deliverable 3.1 Report on Standards for Best Publishing Practices and Basic Technical Requirements in the Light of FAIR Principles (Draft). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8112662

“Diamond OA Journals have an enormous potential to establish and sustain an open scholarly communication. This is uncovered by the “Open Access Diamond Journals Study” (OADJS).” From 17 000 to 29 000 Open Access Diamond Journals (OADJ) published worldwide are responsible for publishing 8-9% of the world’s scientific articles. This makes up 45% of Open Access (OA) publishing in general.
To develop this potential serious challenges need to be overcome, mastered and robust support needs to be provided to the Diamond OA Journals community. In 2022 the broadly supported “Action Plan for Diamond Open Access” (APDOA) was published as the follow up to the OADJS to outline the most pressing issues demanding swift action from the community. APDOA argues that the Diamond Open Access “is held back by challenges related to the technical capacity, management, visibility, and sustainability of journals and platforms”.
Associated projects Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication (DIAMAS) and CRAFT-OA embody this action to support institutional Diamond OA publishing. While DIAMAS focusses on developing non-technical standards and best practices, CRAFT-OA specifically targets the OADJ technology development. CRAFT-OA’s Work Package 3  (WP3) is responsible for Task 3.1 providing a technical standards’ and best publishing practices overview, Task 3.2 preparing a gap  analysis to understand the challenges that OADJ’s face when aiming to comply with the standards and best practices and with/in Task 3.3 offering targeted training to narrow this gap.
This deliverable is related to the Task 3.1 and offers an overview of the technical standards and best publishing practices which is intended to be reused by the community and also to guide the gap analysis and training to be offered through WP3.
We argue that the OADJs find the current dispersion and multiplicity of requirements and standards particularly difficult both to monitor and adhere to due to the OADJs’ insufficient resources and lack of collaborative workflows. This deliverable aims to alleviate this burden through identifying key requirements and policy documents (see 2. Definition and scope), organising the standards they mention (see 4. Technical standards for each of the FAIR principles and 5. Other recommended technical standards) and showcasing best publishing practices exemplifying the implementation of standards or adherence to the requirements (see 6. Examples illustrating several or all of the basic technical standards and best publishing practices).

The scope of this deliverable is impacted by the source documents we decided to concentrate on. We focus on two policy documents: a key, widely supported OA publishing policy paper Plan S and the Extensible Quality Standard in Institutional Publishing (EQSIP) compiled in DIAMAS, and two documents originating from key service providers in the OA publishing (IPSPs): the DOAJ Seal from the Directory of Open Access Journals and the OpenAIRE Guidelines for Literature Repository Managers v4. As this report aims to contribute to the interoperability of Diamond Open Access publishing, especially in the context of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the EOSC interoperability framework was reviewed, but no concrete standards above those mentioned in the other documents were extracted. Chapter 4. Technical standards for each of the FAIR principles represents the overview of technical standards. These documents identify in the view of how they contribute to the OADJ’s findability, accessibility, interoperability or reusability (as defined by the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) principles). The standards expected or recommended by these documents serve as a good representation of what is now considered quality OA publishing by the community.
However, there are also other standards worth mentioning (see and 5. Other recommended technical standards) which are better suited to be discussed outside of the FAIR principles framework. We especially recognise that the larger context for OADJs is the EOSC which is developing its interoperability framework . It is important to be mindful of the interoperability challenges as they are stated in the EOSC ecosystem as onboarding of OADJ in EOSC is recognised by CRAFT-OA as the key factor for their visibility and sustainability. Additionally, as we use the FAIR principles as an important framework structuring this report we need to recognise that the FAIR principles development and implementation have their own dynamic that in some respects may not correspond to the standards development specific for the Diamond publishing. This is because while some OA publishing standards

Building open infrastructure step-by-step: COPIM’s approach to open documentation via PubPub | PubPub Community Spotlight

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by Tobias Steiner and Lucy Barnes

Following in the footsteps of PubPub’s interview with Janneke Adema, Joe Deville, and Toby Steiner, we wanted to take this opportunity to take a step back and reflect upon the different ways that we at Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) have been using PubPub to engage with the variety of different groups that constitute the COPIM community of communities and to document the COPIM project’s progress over time.undefined

Right from COPIM’s very early days, we have been focused on making values-led choices about the platforms we employ to collaborate on writing and publishing the output generated throughout the COPIM project’s Work Packages, thinking particularly about using open-source tools and platforms where possible, documenting our activities openly, and working anti-competitively within different communities.

As Toby has previously written about in more detail elsewhere, for internal purposes, we quickly settled on open-source tools such as Mattermost for team communications, Nextcloud & OnlyOffice for file sharing and collaboration on documents, and BigBlueButton, Jitsi, and edumeet as viable alternatives to omnipresent corporate tools Slack, Google Drive, and Zoom.

COPIM’s Outreach Working Group – which we had established early on to keep in touch between the different Work Packages on the overarching topic of Outreach – conducted a short exercise to scope options that would align with our set of values and quickly settled on running COPIM’s dedicated website, copim.ac.uk, via the Gitea repository-hosted static site generator Hugo. Conceptually, we conceived of the website as the “formal” window into the world of COPIM, where we would document key facts, official statements, and funder-facing reporting information such as an overview of Milestones and Deliverables.

We also wanted to have a more vibrant and flexible addition to that website, a space that would allow us to experiment with multimodal publishing, ranging from shorter blog posts documenting project workshops, to more expansive advocacy papers and actual long-form scholarship that was going to be written by the Work Package teams over the project’s initial lifespan of three years. What we wanted was really quite an ask: a place where we could write simple short posts, but also these more extended formal pieces that might be downloaded and shared as separate documents, together with the occasional embedded video – all of which could be curated into different collections in order to best showcase our work! And this is where PubPub entered the picture. Attracted by its (mostly) open-source foundationsundefined and following encouraging conversations with the KF team jointly led by our former colleague Dan Rudmann, the COPIM team decided to use PubPub as our official Open Documentation Site, which – as Dan has put it in our first ‘Hello World’ message – reflects “our strategies and aims by serving as a space for open documentation. Herein we will chronicle our efforts in research and implementation as they occur. We invite you to utilize PubPub’s commenting and annotation system to converse with us, as well.” (An Introduction to our Open Documentation site)

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Webinar #2 on collective funding models for open access books, 19 July 2023, 2pm (BST) | Jisc

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This is the second event in the series where library colleagues will discuss how their libraries are adapting policies and practices to meet the challenges of supporting open monographs.

In August 2021, UKRI launched a new open access policy, which for the first time includes a provision for long-form scholarly works including monographs, book chapters and edited collections published from 1 January 2024. In preparation for policy implementation, Jisc and the Open Access Books Network have come together to hold a series of online events which will focus on different publishing models for Open Access books. This online event is the second in the series, and in it, three library colleagues working in scholarly communications and open research will speak about how their libraries are at various stages of success in adapting policies and practices to meet the challenges of supporting open monographs.

 

DIAMAS launches an open call to identify reference materials | DIAMAS

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As part of its scope to support Open Access Diamond and institutional publishing, DIAMAS is launching a campaign to gather resources addressing the Extensible Quality Standard for Institutional Publishing (EQSIP) components: Funding; Ownership and governance; Open Science practices; Editorial quality, editorial management and research integrity; Technical service efficiency; Visibility; and Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI).

The resources will be used to develop a range of outputs (best practices, recommendations, guidelines) and a toolsuite offering support to publishers and service providers to address challenges related to skills, management, visibility, and sustainability.

We encourage you to join us in identifying resources for the DIAMAS registry of reference materials and become part of a community that actively participates in the development of a portal and knowledge-exchange hub to improve the efficiency and quality of institutional publishing.

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Biomedical supervisors’ role modeling of open science practices | eLife

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Abstract:  Supervision is one important way to socialize Ph.D. candidates into open and responsible research. We hypothesized that one should be more likely to identify open science practices (here publishing open access and sharing data) in empirical publications that were part of a Ph.D. thesis when the Ph.D. candidates’ supervisors engaged in these practices compared to those whose supervisors did not or less often did. Departing from thesis repositories at four Dutch University Medical centers, we included 211 pairs of supervisors and Ph.D. candidates, resulting in a sample of 2062 publications. We determined open access status using UnpaywallR and Open Data using Oddpub, where we also manually screened publications with potential open data statements. Eighty-three percent of our sample was published openly, and 9% had open data statements. Having a supervisor who published open access more often than the national average was associated with an odds of 1.99 to publish open access. However, this effect became nonsignificant when correcting for institutions. Having a supervisor who shared data was associated with 2.22 (CI:1.19–4.12) times the odds to share data compared to having a supervisor that did not. This odds ratio increased to 4.6 (CI:1.86–11.35) after removing false positives. The prevalence of open data in our sample was comparable to international studies; open access rates were higher. Whilst Ph.D. candidates spearhead initiatives to promote open science, this study adds value by investigating the role of supervisors in promoting open science.

 

(Why) Are Open Research Practices the Future for the Study of Language Learning? – Marsden – Language Learning – Wiley Online Library

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Abstract:  Open research practices are relevant to all stages of research, from conceptualization through dissemination. Here, we discuss key facets of open research, highlighting its rationales, infrastructures, behaviors, and challenges. Part I conceptualizes open research and its rationales. Part II identifies challenges such as the speed and cost of open research, the usability of open data and materials, the difficulties of conducting replication research, and the economics and sustainability of open access and open research generally. In discussing these challenges, we have sought to provide examples of good practice, describe and evaluate emerging innovations, and envision change. Part III considers ongoing coevolutions of culture, infrastructure, and behaviors and acknowledges the limitations of our review and of open research practices. We argue that open research is indeed a large part of our future, and most—if not all—challenges are surmountable, but doing so requires significant changes for many aspects of the research process.

Alignment of Top?Down Policies With Emerging Bottom?Up Practices: A Commentary on “(Why) Are Open Research Practices the Future for the Study of Language Learning?” – Laakso – Language Learning – Wiley Online Library

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“In their article, Marsden and Morgan-Short comprehensively review the current state and development trajectories for key areas within open research practices, both in general as well as more particularly in the context of language sciences. As the article reveals, the scope of open research practices is enormous and essentially touches upon every aspect of performing and interacting with research. The authors touch upon the lack of an established metascience within language sciences that would help inform and guide development of research practices, but, as I see it, the problem is universal, and there would be benefit in creating a stronger and more cohesive metascience discipline in general. While researchers have established practices of research, education, and dedicated scholarly communication outlets within the philosophy of science, history of science, information science, and higher education policy, metascience has remained an area where the discussion is highly distributed and appears sporadically across diverse research disciplines. As Marsden and Morgan-Short’s review demonstrates, there are a lot of open questions relating to how to move forward on a global scale in the best interest of research and researchers. A more cohesive core of metascience would aid in the creation of immediately useful knowledge….”

Open science practices in research published in surgical journals: A cross-sectional study | medRxiv

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Open science practices are research tools used to improve research quality and transparency. These practices have been used by researchers in various medical fields, though the usage of these practices in the surgical research ecosystem has not been quantified. In this work, we studied the use of open science practices in general surgery journals. Eight of the highest-ranked general surgery journals by SJR2 were chosen and their author guidelines were reviewed. From each journal, 30 articles published between January 1, 2019 and August 11, 2021 were randomly chosen and analyzed. Five open science practices were measured (preprint publication prior to peer-reviewed publication, use of Equator guidelines, study protocol preregistration prior to peer-reviewed publication, published peer review, and public accessibility of data, methods, and/or code). Across all 240 articles, 82 (34%) used one or more open science practices. Articles in the International Journal of Surgery showed greatest use of open science practices, with a mean of 1.6 open science practices compared to 0.36 across the other journals (p<.001). Adoption of open science practices in surgical research remains low, and further work is needed to increase utilization of these tools.

‘Good, Better, Best’: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs | Zenodo

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Barnes, Miranda, Cole, Gareth, Fry, Jenny, Gatti, Rupert, & Higman, Ross. (2023). ‘Good, Better, Best’: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7876048

Good, Better, Best: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs brings together the project’s growing knowledge and understanding around this community of practice, as well as reports on the Work Package’s research and development over the course of the project.

Following an introduction chapter giving a brief background landscape summary alongside employed methodologies, Chapter 2, ‘A basic guidebook for the small and scholar-led press’ considers good, better, and best practices around file formats, metadata, content packaging, existing routes to digital publication archives, archiving and preservation workflows, and challenges surrounding copyright, reuse, and licensing. Additional chapters detail the repository workflow experimentations, both manual and automated, as well as successful proof-of-concept archiving in two online repositories: one, and institutional repository, and the other, the Internet Archive. Along with a chapter (Chapter 6) that explores the current understanding around implications for archiving and preserving complex and experimental monographs, two further chapters (7 and 8) look at future work: the expansion and development of the Thoth Archiving Network and the new Open Book Futures project, beginning May 2023. Appendices include signposting to toolkits, guides, and resources, as well as a brief glossary that provides links to more comprehensive archiving and preservation glossaries already in existence. We hope this will be a useful resource for the small and scholar-led press community and beyond.

This is the final output of the Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project’s Work Package 7.

 

Performing Patents Otherwise: Archival conversations with 320,000 clothing inventions

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Performing Patents Otherwise is one of several experimental book pilot projects conducted by the experimental publishing group at the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs project. In the spirit of open infrastructures, we documented the publication process for each pilot book. Towards this end, the experimental publishing group curated the Experimental Publishing Compendium, which collates experimental book publishing tools and practices and examples of experimental scholarly publications. While we share some insights on the making of experimental scholarly books in the compendium, we will zoom in here on what it takes to make database books and Performing Patents Otherwise in particular.
In the Compendium, we categorised Performing Patents Otherwise as a database book. We define database books as books containing a dynamically searchable database within their pages; or books generated from a database. In ‘making of,’ we reflect on the making Performing Patents Otherwise in the hope that it will be helpful to other authors and publishers who are experimenting with database books.

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© 2023 Julien McHardy & Kat Jungnickel, chapters by respective authors. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. Data from the Politics of Patents research project hosted at Goldsmiths, University of London, and funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (#819458).

 

Experimental Publishing Compendium | Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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The Experimental Publishing Compendium is a guide and reference for scholars, publishers, developers, librarians, and designers who want to challenge, push and redefine the shape, form and rationale of scholarly books. The compendium brings together tools, practices, and books to promote the publication of experimental scholarly works. Read more

Beta 1.0 (2023)

Version 1.0 has been curated by Janneke Adema, Julien McHardy, and Simon Bowie. Future versions will be overseen, curated, and maintained by an Editorial Board (members TBC).

Back-end coding by Simon Bowie, front-end coding by Joel Galvez, design by Joel Galvez & Martina Vanini.

Special thanks to Gary Hall, Rebekka Kiesewetter, Marcell Mars, Toby Steiner, and Samuel Moore, and everyone who has provided feedback on our research or shared suggestions of examples to feature, including the participants of COPIM’s experimental publishing workshop, and Nicolás Arata, Dominique Babini, Maria Fernanda Pampin, Sebastian Nordhoff, Abel Packer, and Armanda Ramalho, and Agatha Morka.

Our appreciation also goes out to the Next Generation Library Publishing Project for sharing an early catalogue-in-progress version of SComCat with us, which formed one of the inspirations behind the Compendium.

The compendium grew out of the following two reports:

Adema, J., Bowie, S., Mars, M., and T. Steiner (2022) Books Contain Multitudes: Exploring Experimental Publishing (2022 update). Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). doi: 10.21428/785a6451.1792b84f & 10.5281/zenodo.6545475.

Adema, J., Moore, S., and T. Steiner (2021) Promoting and Nurturing Interactions with Open Access Books: Strategies for Publishers and Authors. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). doi: 10.21428/785a6451.2d6f4263 and 10.5281/zenodo.5572413

COPIM and the Experimental Publishing Compendium are supported by the Research England Development (RED) Fund and by Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

How to cultivate good closures: ‘scaling small’ and the limits of openness | Samuel Moore

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Text of a talk given to the COPIM end-of-project conference: “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”, April 20th 2023.

Open access publishing has always had a difficult relationship with smoothness and scale. Openness implies seamlessness, limitlessness or structureless-ness – or the idea that the removal of price and permission barriers is what’s needed to allow research to reach its full potential. The drive for seamlessness is on display in much of the push for interoperability of standards and persistent identifiers that shape the infrastructures of openness. Throughout the evolution of open access, many ideas have been propagated around, for example, the necessity of CC BY as the one and only licence that facilitates this interoperability and smoothness of access and possible reuse. Similarly, failed projects such as One Repo sought to create a single open access repository to rule them all, in response to the perceived messy and stratified institutional and subject repository landscape.

Yet this relationship between openness and scale also leads to new kinds of closure, particularly the commercial closures of walled gardens that stretch across proprietary services and make researcher data available for increasing user surveillance. The economies of scale of commercial publishers require cookie-cutter production processes that remove all traces of care from publishing, in exchange for APCs and BPCs, thus ensuring that more publications can be processed cheaply with as little recourse to paid human labour as possible. Smoothness and scale are simply market enclosures by another name.

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Open Sourcing Reuse | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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Adema, J., Bowie, S., & Kiesewetter, R. (2023). Open Sourcing Reuse. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.6564c3be As part of the documentation for the first book coming out of the Combinatorial Books Pilot Project, we are introducing and discussing the set of modular, open source writing, editing, annotating, and publishing software, tools, and platforms we have used. This is the fifth blogpost in a series documenting the COPIM/OHP Pilot Project Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers. You can find the previous blogposts here, here, here, and here. In the context of the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers Pilot Project one of our aims has been to use, wherever possible, modular and open source writing, editing, annotating, and publishing software, tools, and platforms. We wanted to show how these can be used in the context of reusing and rewriting existing open access books or collections of books. Instead of creating our own custom solutions we have tried to create (technical) workflows that consist of existing open source applications, to enable other authors and publishers to apply or adapt these to their own writing and publishing workflows. At this stage of the Pilot Project we want to share some preliminary insights and reflections in combination with a closer description of the tools and platforms we have used. We will do so in textual form and as part of an audio interview with Simon Bowie, who is working as an open source software developer on the COPIM project. Specifically, we want to share our rationale for using open source applications, and reflect upon how these tools can either be integrated into or require adaptations to classical editorial and publishing workflows, timelines, tasks, and relationalities between those involved in publishing a book (for example those between tool and platform providers, publishers, developers, and editors).    

PhD candidate Monitoring Open Science Policies and Practices – Leiden University

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“The Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences is looking for a

PhD candidate Monitoring Open Science Policies and Practices (1,0FTE)
Vacancy number 13576

Leiden University takes the transition towards Open Science seriously. In the first stages, this transition will aim at further opening of the scholarly communication and publication processes, further improvement of FAIR data management and open data and software practices, and further strengthening of the relationship between the university and society at large through citizen science.

Are you interested in studying this transition and its impact? And do you want to contribute to this important cultural and behavioural change by informing daily research practices with robust scientific evidence? Then we are looking forward to meeting you! We have a job opening for a PhD candidate with good qualitative and/or quantitative research skills to work in the research program Monitoring Open Science Policies and Practices….”

Final WP4 Report: Governing Scholar-Led OA Book Publishers | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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We are pleased to announce the release of the final report from COPIM’s Governance Work Package (WP4), titled Governing Scholar-Led OA Book Publishers: Values, Practices, Barriers. This report develops some of the issues we have previously explored within COPIM with regard to community governance, such as the challenges of governing a collective and the relationship of governance to common resources, to explore how these apply in practice to the publication of books by small-to-medium Open Access publishers, as well as what barriers they have faced in implementing their governance models. It presents and discusses the results of six interviews with small and medium Open Access publishers from the ScholarLed consortium. It then offers some recommendations and insights into how other small and medium Open Access publishers might set up and/or improve their governance practices, including how the Open Book Collective and Open Book Futures project might support them in doing so.

Governing Scholar-Led OA Book Publishers was written by Dr. Judith Fathallah, with the kind assistance of the following interviewees:

François van Schalkwyk, Director of African Minds

Joe Deville, Co-Founder of Mattering Press

Jeff Pooley, Director of mediastudies.press

Mercedes Bunz, Co-Founder of meson press

Alessandra Tosi, Co-Director of Open Book Publishers

Eileen Joy, Co-Director of punctum books.

After a contextual discussion on the need for scholar-led OA publishers and governance issues related to the concept of the knowledge commons, the report presents the interview data. The publishers discuss the impetuses to startup their presses; incorporation and its forms; the elements, resources and actors in their governance structures; the evolution of governance structures and processes; their current mechanisms and procedures;t ransparency and self assessment; their relationships with institutions and organizations; and their perspectives on current governance.

Some reccomendations are then made to assist new publishers in considering their governance, and links to tools and resources provided.

The report has been published as a living document on COPIM’s Open Documentation Site (PubPub), and is also availabe as a time-stamped PDF version on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7801216.