Category Archives: oa.services

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

CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR ACCESSING NI4OS-EUROPE SERVICES – NI4OS- Europe

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ia this call, NI4OS-Europe opens possibilities for scientists to access the advanced services on-boarded to EOSC (thematic, generic and repositories). The services provided have been tested in the use-cases ran by scientific teams that were assigned to this task. The services were then fine-tuned according to the feedback received from the demonstrators and now can be further tested via the open call. The list of services and resources offered by the NI4OS-Europe project can be found at: https://catalogue.ni4os.eu/?_=/resources. Access to underlying computational resources (generic) can be awarded for a maximum period of 6 months, while access to underlying storage resources may be provided for up to 8 months. The call enables researchers from Europe to obtain access to the advanced services, which have been on-boarded on the European Open Science Cloud with the support of NI4OS-Europe. Throughout the open call, all research teams participating in the call are expected to harmonize the management of their data according to the FAIR principles hroughout the whole lifetime of their work, thus, engaging with the rules of Open Science.

Community support discussions: FAIR implementation for NI4OS-Europe service providers | EOSCSecretariat

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EOSC raises to become the “Web of FAIR data” calling data services to support responsible and effective Research Data Management (RDM) by enabling FAIR data workflows, behaviours, and outputs through their systems. That practically means the allocation of roles and responsibilities, adoption of principles/policies, and technical integrations and enhancements, such as adaptation to global standards. In order to reply to these questions, the NI4OS-Europe and OntoCommons projects have co-organised the workshop “Community support discussions: FAIR implementation for NI4OS-Europe service providers”. During the 3-hours workshop, the participants have the opportunity to engage in tailored discussions with service providers to answer their FAIR-related questions and support their needs with respect to metadata, ontologies and semantics. In this interactive event, service providers will have the exceptional opportunity to learn about best practices from the experts of the NI4OS-Europe semantics experts group and the OntoCommons projects as well as present their services and get customised support.

Research Update: COIs, Defining Infrastructure, and Exploring Utility Financing as a Useful Model

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The following is a brief summary of our current plans for Catalog of Infrastructures, our work understanding the nature of infrastructure, and our initial working models for understanding the funding and operation of infrastructure services.

 

Open Access, Open Data Increase Demand for STM Online Services

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“Scientific, technical and medical publishers face upheaval from open access and open data, but this transition represents opportunity in online services, particularly for competitors that can develop broader discovery tools and dynamic content capabilities to win users’ loyalty—this according to the most recent report from Simba Information, a leader in media and publishing intelligence.

The report STM Online Services 2019-2023 focuses on the databases that offer online content or abstracting and indexing and are sold to academic, government and commercial customers. It found that between 2016 and 2018, online services revenue grew at a compound annual rate of 5.1% after elimination of trade between competitors — faster than STM journals or books. Growth was boosted somewhat by currency exchange in the period. Simba estimates the currency impact at roughly 1% over the two years.

Many of the products and services are already considered “must have” information sold in multi-year, multi-million-dollar bundles. As the corpus of data made open by research funder mandates grows, the value publishers provide will shift back toward discovery and integration….

STM Online Services 2019-2023 provides detailed market information for STM online services, segmented by: sci-tech standards, patents and online content, drug databases, clinical reference, training and certification, reference management and analytical tools, sci-tech abstracting and indexing, medical abstracting and indexing. It analyzes trends impacting the industry and forecasts market growth to 2023….”