Category Archives: oa.era

DIAMAS Project: OA Diamond and Institutional publishing landscape survey of Institutional Publishing Services Providers (IPSPs)

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DIAMAS is a new EU-funded project which aims to support Open Access Diamond and institutional publishing by setting new standards, increasing visibility, and promoting the sustainability of a diverse publishing landscape. The project is issuing this survey as a starting point to understand the landscape of institutional publishing in Europe.

With this survey, we hope to map how this sector of scholarly communication is currently organised in order to understand existing challenges and begin to develop resources, tools,  policies and strategies which support the relevant stakeholders. 
By “OA Diamond and institutional publishing”, we understand publishing by an institution, unit, or person that is part of an institution. An ‘institution’ is defined in the DIAMAS context as an academic organisation or unit whose main mission and scope is to perform, fund, or promote the practice of research and scholarship. Special attention will be paid to publishing initiatives that do not charge fees for publication to either authors or readers (OA Diamond)

The information we collect will be used to develop a range of outputs and tools which will offer practical help to institutional publishers. Through the landscape mapping conducted in this survey, DIAMAS will create a registry of “institutional publishing service providers”, building a community ready to share knowledge and collaborate. A series of best practices, policy recommendations, and guidelines will be created to help strengthen the community  and set evidence-based quality standards. 

The work of the project will culminate in an online portal which can be used by the community to retrieve information and guidance. In order to effectively do this, your input is essential.

Respondents have until 30 April to complete the survey. 

Who should complete the survey?

In short, Institutional Publishing Services Providers (IPSPs) from the European Research Area, including third countries associated and to be associated with Horizon Europe.

By IPSP, we understand an entity that provides or coordinates a set of services for institutional academic publishing to the academic community. These services may be provided by the institutional publisher itself (in which case the institution publisher is also the IPSP) or by other entities inside or outside the institution.

Within each IPSP, persons with a good overview of publishing activities, including the provision and organisation of related services, should complete the survey. Answers can be saved and returned to at a  later stage if respondents must consult others to collect accurate information. We ask for one completed survey per organisation.

Developing Institutional open Access publishing Models to Advance Scholarly communication (DIAMAS) | Funding & tender opportunities Single Electronic Data Interchange Area (SEDIA)

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In the transition towards Open Access (OA), institutional publishing is challenged by fragmentation and varying service quality, visibility, and sustainability. To address this issue, DIAMAS gathers 23 organisations from 12 European countries, well-versed in OA academic publishing and scholarly communication.

The project will:

1. Map the current landscape of Institutional Publishing Service Providers (IPSPs) in 25 countries of the ERA with special attention for IPSPs that do not charge fees for publishing or reading. This will yield a taxonomy of IPSPs and an IPSP landscape report, a basis for the rest of the project.

2. Coordinate and improve the efficiency and quality of IPSPs by developing a European Quality Standard for Institutional Publishing (EQSIP). This quality seal will professionalise, strengthen and reduce the fragmentation of institutional publishing in Europe. EQSIP will serve as a benchmark for a gap analysis of the data in (1). Buy-in and capacity-building is ensured by co-creation with the relevant IPSP communities of practice, creating a Common Access Point for IPSPs, an IPSP registry with 80% of IPSPs in the ERA, publishing guidelines, training materials, self-assessment tools, financial models, and shared cost frameworks. DIAMAS embraces diversity, equity, and inclusion by addressing gender equity in OA publishing and multilingualism in 15 European languages. Special attention is paid to building and enabling the financial sustainability of IPSPs.

3. Formulate community-led, actionable recommendations and strategies for institutional leaders, funders/sponsors/donors, and policymakers in the European Research Area (ERA). Workshops and targeted networking actions will reach and engage institutional decision-makers. In 36 months, DIAMAS will deliver an aligned, high-quality, and sustainable institutional OA scholarly publication ecosystem for the ERA, setting a new standard for OA publishing, shared and co-designed with all stakeholders.

 

ERAC Guideline Paper ‘Research evaluation in a context of Open Science and gender equality’

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The European Research Area and Innovation Committee (ERAC) “triangle task force” has recently published the guideline paper “Research evaluation in a context of Open Science and gender equality”. The ERAC “triangle task force” combines combines forces of the ERAC group on open science, gender and human resources. This report provides stakeholders involved in research evaluation reforms with a set of guidelines that aim at fostering both Open Science and gender equality. Both topics are key dimensions in the implementation of a new European Research Area and provide policy and decision makers, funders as well as researchers with a unique opportunity to substantially renegotiate, through evaluation, the social roles and responsibilities of publicly funded research, as well as to rethink the science system as a whole.

eLife authors relay their experiences with Executable Research Articles | Labs | eLife

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“We are grateful to these authors for taking their time to share their feedback with us, and for helping us showcase how Executable Research Articles can help improve the transparency, reproducibility and discoverability of research content across a variety of research subjects. Executable Research Articles are an open-source technology available to all, and we encourage any authors or publishers interested in the format to [get in touch] for more information….”

Europe struggles to build common science area

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” “This is not going to work if you want … free circulation of researchers, students and knowledge between member states,” said Kurt Deketelaere, secretary general of the League of European Research Universities. “It’s an illusion to think that you are going to create a fifth freedom without a legislative framework.”…

It can boast notable successes: E.U. member states now routinely build scientific infrastructure together, with nearly 20 billion euros ($24 billion) spent across 37 projects over the last two decades. Observers also hail big strides in open science and open access to papers….”

The case for an inclusive scholarly communication for social sciences and humanities

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Abstract:  This article presents a vision for a scholarly communication research infrastructure for social sciences and humanities (SSH). The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the pressing need to access research outputs without the traditional economic and temporal barriers. This article explores the current scholarly communication landscape, assessing the reasons for the slower uptake of open access in SSH research. The authors discuss such frontiers as commercial interests, sources of academic prestige and discipline-specific genres.

This article defines and discusses the key areas in which a research infrastructure can play a vital role in making open scholarly communication a reality in SSH: (1) providing a federated and easy access to scattered SSH outputs; (2) supporting publication and dissemination of discipline-specific genres (e.g. monographs, critical editions); (3) providing help with evaluation and quality assurance practices in SSH; (4) enabling  scholarly work in national languages, which is significant for local communities; (5) being governed by researchers and for researchers as a crucial factor for productive, useful and accessible services; (6) lastly, considering the needs of other stakeholders involved in scholarly communication, such as publishers, libraries, media, non-profit organisations, and companies.
They conclude that a scholarly-driven, inclusive, dedicated infrastructure for the European Research Area is needed in order to advance open science in SSH and to address the issues tackled by SSH researchers at a structural and systemic level.

First Thoughts on the New European Research Area: An Ambitious Plan Calls for Inclusiveness and Collaboration

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“Science Europe welcomes the European Commission’s ambitious Communication for ‘A New ERA for Research and Innovation.’ To further strengthen Europe’s world-leading research, a strong European Research Area is essential and must be based on research excellence, international collaboration, openness, inclusiveness, and academic freedom….

Several initiatives are foreseen by the ERA Roadmap on research careers, transnational research funding, assessment, and Open Science, that could have a transformative impact on the way research is funded and performed….”

Welcome to a new ERA of reproducible publishing | Labs | eLife

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“Since 2017, we have been working on the concept of computationally reproducible papers. The open-source suite of tools that started life as the Reproducible Document Stack is now live on eLife as ERA, the Executable Research Article, delivering a truly web-native format for taking published research to a new level of transparency, reproducibility and interactivity.

From today, authors with a published eLife paper can register their interest to enrich their published work with the addition of live code blocks, programmatically-generated interactive figures, and dynamically generated in-line values, using familiar tools like R Markdown and Jupyter in combination with Stencila Hub’s intuitive asset management and format conversion interface. The resulting new ERA publication will be presented as a complement to the original published paper. Very soon, a Google Docs plugin will also be made available to let authors insert executable code and data blocks into their documents using the cloud service.

Readers of ERA publications will be able to inspect the code, modify it, and re-execute it directly in the browser, enabling them to better understand how a figure is generated. They will be able to change a plot from one format to another, alter the data range of a specific analysis, and much more. All changes are limited to an individual’s browsing session and do not affect the published article, so anyone can experiment safely. Readers can also download the ERA publication – with all embedded code and data preserved – and use it as a basis for further study or derivative works….”

TRIPLE USER RESEARCH QUESTIONNAIRE

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“The following questionnaire is part of the user research conducted for the European H2020 project TRIPLE. The questionnaire is aimed at researchers/academics in Social Sciences and Humanities at any stage of their careers.

In the following you will be asked mainly a number of questions about your discoverability research work practices and about the future of TRIPLE.

The questionnaire contains 21 questions and it should take between 10 to 15 minutes to complete.

TRIPLE was launched on 7 October 2019. It will be one of the dedicated services of OPERAS, the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the Social Sciences and Humanities in the European Research Area. At the heart of the project is the development of the TRIPLE platform, an innovative multilingual and multicultural discovery solution….”