Category Archives: oa.policies.data

Public Domain Day 2022: Welcoming Works from 1926 to the Public Domain | Authors Alliance

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“Once in the public domain, works can be made freely available. Organizations that have digitized text of these books, like Internet Archive, Google Books, and HathiTrust, can now open up unrestricted access to the full text of these works. HathiTrust alone will open up full access to more than 35,000 titles originally published in 1926. This increased access provides richer historical context for scholarly research and opportunities for students to supplement and deepen their understanding of assigned texts. And authors who care about the long-term availability of their works may also have reason to look forward to their works eventually entering the public domain: A 2013 study found that in most cases, public domain works are actually more available to readers than all but the most recently published works. 

What’s more, public domain works can be adapted into new works of authorship, or “derivative works,” including by adapting printed books into audio books or by adapting classic books into interactive forms like video games. And the public domain provides opportunities to freely translate works to help fill the gap in works available to readers in their native language.”

COVID-19 research freely accessible, but research data sharing and preprinting are low

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“Levels of COVID-19 research data sharing have remained low during the pandemic, and preprinting of research on the virus has been lower than two initiatives tried to ensure it would be. This is according to a new report that examines the effectiveness of initiatives taken by players in the research ecosystem to promote sharing of COVID-19 research by stepping up open science approaches.

While the efforts of scientific publishers and the research community have speeded up publication times for COVID-19 research, and made much of it freely accessible, more effort is needed if society is to truly benefit from open science, the Scholarly Communication in Times of Crisis: The response of the scholarly communication system to the COVID-19 pandemic report says. The sharing of the SARS-CoV-2 genome is seen as the poster child for open science, and the pandemic held up as a turning point for open science. Yet the report finds this has only partly been realised. It makes a series of key recommendations, three of which focus on opening up data, encouraging preprinting and strengthening collaboration across the scholarly communication ecosystem:

 

 

Only joint efforts will improve the availability and quality of research data sharing. Common data policy templates should be developed to require data sets and software to be posted to a trusted, FAIR-enabling repository, and to require formal citations to data sets and software.  
Mandating preprinting and rewarding researchers who use preprints could shift the needle. Publishers should include posting of preprints in their submission workflows and leaders should advocate for preprints.  
Publishers and other scholarly communication organisations should intensify their joint efforts to improve the availability and quality of data and metadata on scholarly publishing, allowing for robust evidence-informed approaches to innovation in scholarly communication….”

 

 

Whitepaper: Proposal to leverage Article 17 to build a public repository of Public Domain and openly licensed works. · Open Future

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“The German implementation includes a number of provisions that are specifically designed to reduce the risk of so-called overblocking: The unjustified blocking or removal of uploads subsequent to rightholder requests to prevent the availability of their works in accordance with Article 17(4) of the directive. These provisions include the requirement not to block “presumably legitimate” uploads and the requirement to keep disputed uploads available until the dispute is resolved.

In addition the German implementation law contains a specific provision aimed at preventing the unjustified blocking of works that are in the Public Domain or that have been licensed under open licenses….

To comply with this provision, OCSSPs operating in Germany will need to maintain an internal repository of works for which they have (1) received a blocking request and where (2) such blocking request has turned out to be abusive because the works are either in the Public Domain or where the use of the work is authorised under the terms of an open license…. 

Over time such repositories can be expected to grow and will likely start to contain a substantial number of entries relating to a wide variety of openly licensed and public domain works. This will result in the repositories obtaining value beyond the relatively narrow use case of preventing overblocking of openly licensed and PD works by OCSSPs: They will become repositories of freely reusable works that can help to unlock the societal value of these works…”

Ouvrir la Science – “Data policy” linked to publications: recommendations to journals

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The Research Data College has set up a working group on the link between publications and research data. The aim is to contribute to the implementation of the Second Commitment of National Plan For Open Science.

Open science, the replication crisis, and environmental public health: Accountability in Research: Vol 0, No ja

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Abstract:  Concerns about a crisis of mass irreplicability across scientific fields (“the replication crisis”) have stimulated a movement for open science, encouraging or even requiring researchers to publish their raw data and analysis code. Recently, a rule at the US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) would have imposed a strong open data requirement. The rule prompted significant public discussion about whether open science practices are appropriate for fields of environmental public health. The aims of this paper are to assess (1) whether the replication crisis extends to fields of environmental public health; and (2) in general whether open science requirements can address the replication crisis. There is little empirical evidence for or against mass irreplicability in environmental public health specifically. Without such evidence, strong claims about whether the replication crisis extends to environmental public health — or not — seem premature. By distinguishing three concepts — reproducibility, replicability, and robustness — it is clear that open data initiatives can promote reproducibility and robustness but do little to promote replicability. I conclude by reviewing some of the other benefits of open science, and offer some suggestions for funding streams to mitigate the costs of adoption of open science practices in environmental public health.

 

Forschungsdaten-Policy / Research Data Policy, Freie Universität Berlin

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This policy covers both research-relevant analog data, documents and objects that are digitized in the course of research, and genuinely digital data, documents and objects (“born digital”) that are created during a research process and are the object or result of research. In addition, information that ensures the documentation, traceability and – depending on the field of research – reproducibility of the results (metadata) also counts as research data.
 

Gegenstand der vorliegenden Policy sind sowohl forschungsrelevante, im Forschungsverlauf zu digitalisieren-de analoge Daten, Dokumente und Objekte, sowie genuin digitale Daten, Dokumente und Objekte („born digi-tal“), die während eines Forschungsprozesses entstehen, Forschungsgegenstand oder -ergebnis sind. Darüber hinaus zählen hier auch solche Informationen als Forschungsdaten, die die Dokumentation, Nachvollziehbar-keit und – abhängig vom Forschungsgebiet – Reproduzierbarkeit der Ergebnisse gewährleisten (Metadaten).

Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data

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“On behalf of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), we are pleased to present this Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data. The Guide is intended to serve as a resource to help university administrators develop robust support systems to accelerate sharing of research data. It provides advice to universities concerning actions they can take, as well as the infrastructure and support that may be required to improve access to research data on their respective campuses. It also offers examples of how institutions are approaching specific challenges to providing public access to research data and results. Advancing public access to research data is important to improving transparency and reproducibility of scientific results, increasing scientific rigor and public trust in science, and — most importantly — accelerating the pace of discovery and innovation through the open sharing of research results. Additionally, it is vital that institutions develop and implement policies now to ensure consistency of data management plans across their campuses to guarantee full compliance with federal research agency data sharing requirements. Beyond the establishment of policies, universities must invest in the infrastructure and support necessary to achieve the desired aspirations and aims of the policies. The open sharing of the results of scientific research is a value our two associations have long fought to protect and preserve. It is also a value we must continue to uphold at all levels within our universities. This will mean overcoming the various institutional and cultural impediments which have, at times, hampered the open sharing of research data….”

Libraries and Librarians as Key Partners in Accelerating Public Access to Research Data – Association of Research Libraries

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“The Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) have released their Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data, the result of two years of work and national summits as part of the Accelerating Public Access to Research Data (APARD) program.

As a tool and framework for university administrators—specifically provosts, senior research officers, and IT leaders—the four-part guide is meant to “facilitate adoption of new institutional policies, procedures, and approaches that actively support and promote research data sharing, while at the same time ensuring rigor in the research process and the veracity of its intellectual outputs.” Included throughout the guide are recommendations, actions, and institutional examples and case studies for public access to research data….

Possible actions ARL member representatives can take with the release of the Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data include:

Establish public access to research data as a library organization priority through incorporation into strategic plans, statements of principles, mission, and value statements.
Articulate the libraries’ role in accelerating public access to data with the mind frame of culture change. How is your library working from the bottom up (with faculty and graduate students), middle out (with department chairs and center directors) and top down (provosts, presidents, vice presidents for research, and others) to engage and influence public access to data?
Partner with campus stakeholders identified in the guide to begin mapping campus research data resources….”

COVID-19 and the research scholarship ecosystem: help! – Journal of Clinical Epidemiology

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Highlights

Data sharing is not common as part of biomedical publications
To increase data sharing biomedical journals, funders and academic institutions should introduce policies that will enhance data sharing and other open science practices
As part of research assessments incentives and rewards need to be introduced

Abstract

Objectives

Data sharing practices remain elusive in biomedicine. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the problems associated with the lack of data sharing. The objective of this article is to draw attention to the problem and possible ways to address it.

Study Design and Setting

This article examines some of the current open access and data sharing practices at biomedical journals and funders. In the context of COVID-19 the consequences of these practices is also examined.

Results

Despite the best of intentions on the part of funders and journals, COVID-19 biomedical research is not open. Academic institutions need to incentivize and reward data sharing practices as part of researcher assessment. Journals and funders need to implement strong polices to ensure that data sharing becomes a reality. Patients support sharing of their data.

Conclusion

Biomedical journals, funders and academic institutions should act to require stronger adherence to data sharing policies.

Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data

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“Advancing public access to research data is important to improving transparency and reproducibility of scientific results, increasing scientific rigor and public trust in science, and — most importantly — accelerating the pace of discovery and innovation through the open sharing of research results. Additionally, it is vital that institutions develop and implement policies now to ensure consistency of data management plans across their campuses to guarantee full compliance with federal research agency data sharing requirements. Beyond the establishment of policies, universities must invest in the infrastructure and support necessary to achieve the desired aspirations and aims of the policies. The open sharing of the results of scientific research is a value our two associations have long fought to protect and preserve. It is also a value we must continue to uphold at all levels within our universities. This will mean overcoming the various institutional and cultural impediments which have, at times, hampered the open sharing of research data….”

5 Things with Peter B. Kaufman

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“Newtonian Principia for intellectual property thus would suggest that the natural laws of gravity for ideas and inventions require any and all of them eventually – some sooner than others, but all, eventually – to fall, drift, settle, end up, crash into . . . the public domain. The common good, in other words, is where these things ultimately arrive, by intent, by social design, by gravity, even with today’s intricate systems of private licenses and contracts.

One day, who knows, a grad student in the discipline might actually draft a formula free of the arbitrary time dimensions legislated by private interests, such that the proper pull of our public domain might be explained. Perhaps it would be a formula like Newton’s law of universal gravitation…where, irrespective of the form of the creative act (song, photo, poem, play, book, film, drawing, tapestry), there is some math that predicts when every act becomes fully part of our free common heritage. Intellectual property, as we call it, is not meant to be private, except for a term, and then it’s meant to be public forever….”

 

Improving Domain Repository Connectivity: Establishing a Baseline — Metadata Game Changer

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“As I have been working with domain repositories to understand and describe their practices and apply for Core Trust Seal certification, I have been struck by the close, long-term relationships that these repositories form with their communities. In some cases, like UNAVCO, the repository is an integral part of an extensive community support system that extends from proposal planning and writing, through project initiation and implementation, data collection, management, and archive, to publication of results and access to data by other community members. Scientists, engineers, logistics specialists, data managers, software developers, and educators work together to create and extend our understanding of the shape of the earth and how it changes (the science of Geodesy). 

The UNAVCO Community described the responsibilities of players in open science communities during 2012 (https://doi.org/10.1029/2012EO260006) and developed an open data policy based on those responsibilities. These responsibilities included identifying datasets with PIDs and connecting data to papers with citations, that is, establishing an important element of the PID Graph: connections between papers and data.

I introduced the concept of Connectivity last month and have been thinking about it ever since. Connectivity measures how well research objects or collections of research objects are connected to the global research web, represented by the PID Graph. These connections depend on identifiers for all kinds of research objects. I am initially focusing on people, identified by ORCIDs, and organizations, identified by RORs.

As the breadth of identifiers and connections continues to expand, I made the leap from the strong connections between real people and organizations in the UNAVCO Community and connections between these entities in the PID Graph. Specifically, I wondered if the multitudinous real-world connections could help populate identifiers in the metadata and related connections in the PID Graph. I begin the exploration of this question here with UNAVCO datasets described in DataCite….”

Research Data Management

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“The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) (the agencies) are pleased to announce the launch of the Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy. The agencies would like to thank the stakeholders and partners who contributed to the policy’s development….

The policy includes requirements related to institutional research data management (RDM) strategies, data management plans (DMPs), and data deposit. It is aligned with the data deposit requirement in the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications (2015), CIHR’s Health Research and Health-Related Data Framework (2017), the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans—TCPS 2 (2018), and the agencies’ Setting new directions to support Indigenous research and research training in Canada 2019-2022 (2019)….”

SPARC: Setting the Default to Open in Research and Education

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“This is a community resource for tracking, comparing, and understanding current U.S. federal funder research data sharing policies. Originally completed by SPARC & Johns Hopkins University Libraries in 2016, the content of this resource was updated by RDAP and SPARC in 2021….”

A Review of Open Research Data Policies and Practices in China

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Abstract:  This paper initially conducts a literature review and content analysis of the open research data policies in China. Next, a series of exemplars describe data practices to promote and enable the use of open research data, including open data practices in research programs, data repositories, data journals, and citizen science. Moreover, the top four driving forces are identified and analyzed along with their responsible guiding work. In addition, the “landscape of open research data ecology in China” is derived from the literature review and from observations of actual cases, where the interaction and mutual development of data policies, data programs, and data practices are recognized. Finally, future trends of research data practices within China and internationally are discussed. We hope the analysis provides perspective on current open data practices in China along with insight into the need for additional research on scientific data sharing and management.