Abstract: Research software plays a crucial role in advancing scientific knowledge, but ensuring its sustainability, maintainability, and long-term viability is an ongoing challenge. To address these concerns, the Sustainable Research Software Institute (SRSI) Model presents a comprehensive framework designed to promote sustainable practices in the research software community. This white paper provides an in-depth overview of the SRSI Model, outlining its objectives, services, funding mechanisms, collaborations, and the significant potential impact it could have on the research software community. It explores the wide range of services offered, diverse funding sources, extensive collaboration opportunities, and the transformative influence of the SRSI Model on the research software landscape
Category Archives: oa.communities
Community of Practice on Open Science and Responsible Research Assessment – GraspOS
“In bimonthly conversations, research funders, research managers, researchers and anyone interested in these topics come together to discuss the multiple ways in which research assessment considers Open Science. Our guests tell stories about issues, frustrations and the successes of research assessment in relation to Open Science. The goal of this community is to create a bouquet of stories of translation from which we can learn and draw inspiration for our own research assessments.”
Who’s afraid of open infrastructures? | Research Information
“Joanna Ball, Yvonne Campfens and Tasha Mellins-Cohen underline the importance of non-profit infrastructure and standards bodies…
both COUNTER and DOAJ are essential components of the knowledge ecosystem – but new challenges arise and new organisations are needed to help meet them. In 2018 the idea for the OA Switchboard (https://www.oaswitchboard.org/) was conceived to allow publishers, libraries and research funders to easily share information about OA publications throughout the publication journey, synchronising data from a multitude of systems and processes that would otherwise have to be manually connected within each separate organisation.
What do these organisations have in common? We are all owned and led by our community, and we’re not for sale or for profit. We are foundational open infrastructure and standards bodies, operating behind the scenes with low budgets and limited staffing – none of us have salespeople, marketing teams, exhibition budgets or in-house technology support. We collaborate with one another and with bigger bodies like Crossref, ORCID and NISO to create the foundations on which much scholarly infrastructure relies.
And foundations is absolutely the right word: scholarly communications is an exciting and innovative space with new commercial and non-commercial services springing up almost daily. We deliver value through open infrastructure, data and standards, and naturally services and tools have been built by commercial and not-for-profit groups that capitalise on our open, interoperable data and services – many of which you are likely to recognise and may use on a regular basis….”
Invitation to join PKP’s Community Contributor Pathway | Public Knowledge Project
PKP invites you to become a Community Contributor through our pathway!
At PKP, we rely on the support of a diverse and enthusiastic community of contributors to strengthen and expand our projects. Our mission is to increase scholarly publishing access, quality, and diversity.
Ways to Contribute
When you become a Community Contributor at PKP, you’ll have the opportunity to engage in a variety of exciting and meaningful ways:
Join an Interest Group or Committee: Become part of our dynamic committees, such as the Documentation Interest Group (DIG), Education Interest Group (EIG), Multilingualism Interest Group (MIG), Members Committee (MC), Technical Committee (TC), or Advisory Committee (AC). Each group plays a crucial role in shaping the future of PKP’s initiatives.
Share Your Expertise on the Community Forum: Respond to support inquiries and engage in lively discussions on our Community Forum.
Contribute Code: Help enhance our projects by developing plugins and contributing to the ongoing development of PKP’s tools and platforms.
Benefits of becoming a Community Contributor
By taking the Community Contributor pathway, you gain access to exclusive membership benefits. One exciting perk is the chance to apply for our scholarship to collaborate with the PKP community during our in-person sprints.
The Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform—An open science framework for the neuroscience community | PLOS Computational Biology
Abstract: The Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) takes a multifaceted approach to enabling open neuroscience, aiming to make research, data, and tools accessible to everyone, with the ultimate objective of accelerating discovery. Its core infrastructure is the CONP Portal, a repository with a decentralized design, where datasets and analysis tools across disparate platforms can be browsed, searched, accessed, and shared in accordance with FAIR principles. Another key piece of CONP infrastructure is NeuroLibre, a preprint server capable of creating and hosting executable and fully reproducible scientific publications that embed text, figures, and code. As part of its holistic approach, the CONP has also constructed frameworks and guidance for ethics and data governance, provided support and developed resources to help train the next generation of neuroscientists, and has fostered and grown an engaged community through outreach and communications. In this manuscript, we provide a high-level overview of this multipronged platform and its vision of lowering the barriers to the practice of open neuroscience and yielding the associated benefits for both individual researchers and the wider community.
Lost in translation? Revisiting notions of community- and scholar-led publishing in international contexts | Flavours of Open
This cross-post has originally been published on the ScholarLed blog.
This blog delves into the meanings of ‘community-led’ and ‘scholar-led’ publishing in different contexts, arguing against using these terms imprecisely while exploring the generative ‘messiness’ of these ways of publishing that defies easy categorisation.
Position Opening: Conference and Community Manager – SPARC
“The conference and community manager position will support the Open Education Conference, an annual convening for sharing and learning about open educational resources, open pedagogy, and initiatives that strive to make education accessible, affordable, and equitable for all. Led by a volunteer Board of Directors and currently incubated by SPARC, the conference serves a vibrant community of educators, learners, and advocates who have convened annually for 20 years. The position is responsible for coordinating the logistics of the annual conference, working closely with the Board and community members to shape the event, in addition to supporting and engaging the community year round. The role offers opportunities for growth and fresh ideas working with a dynamic community and event.
This role will start no later than September 1, ideally sooner, with a well-supported transition of responsibilities from existing staff. Planning is on track for the 2023 Open Education Conference, which will take place as a virtual event on November 7-9, 2023 with 1,600 attendees expected. Early planning has also started for the 2024 conference, which will be an in-person/virtual hybrid event….”
The Book Analytics Dashboard project: reflections on coordination, collaboration, and community consultation | COKI
by Kathryn Napier, BAD project Technical Lead, Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), Curtin University
The Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) project (2022-2025) is a 3-year, Mellon Foundation funded project that is creating a sustainable analytics service to support diverse Open Access (OA) book publishers. Affectionately referred to as the BAD project, our goal is to provide publishers with user-friendly tools to navigate complex data about how their books are being used. The project is grounded in the premise that efficient, user-friendly usage analytics services are needed to safeguard and support diversity in the voices, perspectives, geographies, topics, and languages made visible through OA books.
The BAD project is building on the earlier (2020-2022) Mellon-funded Developing a Pilot Data Trust for Open Access Ebook Usage project, affectionately referred to as the OAeBU project. The BAD project is scaling workflows, infrastructure and customer support processes originally developed during the earlier project. In addition to technical refinement and scaling, BAD is developing a long-term plan for housing, maintenance, and funding of the analytics service as a sustainable community infrastructure.
The team working on BAD is truly international. The Principal Investigator (PI) team comprises: Lucy Montgomery from Curtin University (Australia); Cameron Neylon (Curtin University); Niels Stern and Ronald Snijder (OAPEN Foundation, the Netherlands), as well as community cultivation expert Katherine Skinner (Research Lead at IOI, based in the United States).
[…]
Creating resilient publishing infrastructures | PubPub Community Spotlight
Adema, J., Deville, J., Steiner, T., & Gulliford (Kearns), S. (2023). Creating resilient publishing infrastructures. PubPub Help. Retrieved from https://help.pubpub.org/pub/n5lqcqb4
In this Spotlight interview, we chat with a few of the folks at COPIM — Janneke Adema, Joe Deville, and Tobias Steiner — about the many work packages and projects that have come out of their organization. This includes, but is not limited to, the Open Book Collective, Experimental Publishing Compendium, Thoth, and their latest project Open Book Futures. Given all these ideas and projects, we talk about what it means to adapt as an organization with shifting funding all the while “scaling small.”
Predicting psychologists’ approach to academic reciprocity and data sharing with a theory of collective action | Emerald Insight
“This study found that data sharing among psychologists is driven primarily by their perceptions of community benefits, academic reciprocity and the norms of data sharing. This study also found that academic reciprocity is significantly influenced by psychologists’ perceptions of community benefits, academic reputation and the norms of data sharing. Both academic reputation and academic reciprocity are affected by psychologists’ prior experiences with data reuse. Additionally, psychologists’ perceptions of community benefits and the norms of data sharing are significantly affected by the perception of their academic reputation.”
Research Libraries Advance Open Scholarship and Community Engagement – Association of Research Libraries
“The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published brief profiles of the eight institutions that participated in the 2021–2022 pilot program Accelerating the Social Impact of Research (ASIR). The pilot engaged small teams from eight ARL member libraries who wanted to share strategies to accelerate the adoption and implementation of open-science principles for social-impact and community-engaged research and scholarship.
The eight institutional profiles complement the report released by the project in 2022, Accelerating Social Impact Research: Libraries at the Intersection of Openness and Community-Engaged Scholarship. The report set the context, drew examples from the eight participating libraries, and identified opportunities available for research library leaders. The profiles highlight specific projects in each of the eight libraries and illustrate how they are advancing open scholarship and community engagement.
In addition to the eight ASIR profiles, today ARL published a blog post about community-engaged research undertaken by the University of Georgia in collaboration with Putnam County Schools and the Georgia Virtual History Project. The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) named the University of Georgia the winner of the 2022 C. Peter Magrath Community Engagement Scholarship Award….”
Principles of Community-Engaged Research: Conversations with Toby Graham, Christopher Lawton, Christian Lopez, and Winnie Smith
Last Updated on May 19, 2023, 9:34 am ET
Alice Walker’s childhood home in Putnam County, Georgia Photo by Wayne Bellamy, courtesy of Willson Center for Humanities & Arts, University of Georgia
Introduction
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Scholarship and Policy team builds capacity for scholar-focused research services, with a focus on community-based scholarship. As part of its Accelerating the Social Impact of Research (ASIR) initiative, ARL released a report and profiles of how eight participant libraries are working at the intersection of openness and community-engaged scholarship for social impact research.
The Russell Library story below supplements the ASIR work. This story was informed by conversations with Toby Graham, university librarian and associate provost, University Libraries, University of Georgia (UGA), and ARL member representative; Christopher Lawton, director of Experiential Learning for Putnam County Schools and director of the Georgia Virtual History Project; Christian Lopez, head of Oral History and Media at UGA’s Russell Library; and Winnie Smith, associate director, Willson Center for Humanities & Arts at UGA.
Since this article was drafted, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) named the University of Georgia as the winner of the 2022 C. Peter Magrath Community Engagement Scholarship Award.
Students in Putnam County Connect History with Place
Students in Putnam County, Georgia, are deepening their understanding of the community they call home as part of an oral history project, An American Literary Landscape: Life, History, and Memory in Putnam County, Georgia.* I learned about this project from Winnie Smith when we partnered to advocate for humanities funding as part of the National Humanities Alliance (NHA) Humanities Advocacy Day. At UGA, the Willson Center is housed in the university’s Office of Research, giving it the flexibility to facilitate public humanities and arts projects throughout the university by funding projects, speaker series, student travel, fellowships, author visits, and more. In a follow-up conversation, Smith shared that public humanities research projects like these can show students that local stories can help them better understand who they are and where they come from.
Christopher Lawton elaborated on this point, describing how teaching and learning can connect students with the community outside of their classroom. Through activities like recording oral histories and scanning and identifying photographs, students in Putnam get to know the rich literary traditions of the place they are from, and draw from the county’s history of enslavement to give context to current economic conditions. When we spoke, Lawton described how teaching students to collect and record stories allows them to realize what is missing or wrong in the textbook version of American history, and empowers them to “untell” that history, and to create new spaces for the voices that got left out. Lawton is leading a new initiative to create a pipeline from Putnam County Public Schools to Albany State University, which has committed to keeping the students in college for four years; the initiative is meant to support students in not just understanding, but also chipping away at, the socioeconomic weights that may have held them back.
Principles of Community-Engaged Research
Christian Lopez and Toby Graham see the library’s oral history program as one way to ensure that the library’s collections reflect the local community of Athens, Georgia. The Athens African American Oral History Initiative emphasizes shared agency and shared authority, which are key to understanding how oral histories at UGA have evolved. This evolution began when library leadership recognized the need to broaden the scope of its oral histories from reflections on Georgia politics to include representation of the intersection of politics and policy, government and culture. Lopez began to expand this scope by partnering with faculty from UGA’s history department—who also had a background in oral history—on a research project on the intersection of civics and music, art, and theater in the Athens music community. In planning for what became the Athens Music Project Oral History Collection, it took more than a year to train students to conduct outreach, record the interviews, and describe them using archival indexing.
Next, Lopez partnered with music faculty to examine the intersection of politics and economics from the perspective of different local musical communities in Athens. Through a grant from the Georgia Music Foundation, the library trained and compensated community interviewers, who conducted outreach and recorded 20 oral history interviews documenting music history in Athens; half of the interviews were with the hip-hop community. Today, the Athens Music Project Oral History Collection includes dozens of interviews documenting the diversity and depth of Georgia music and culture, and the Athens music culture and community.
As it has shifted toward collecting a more diverse set of voices, UGA’s oral history program is informed by the following values and principles of community-engaged research and archiving:
- Community-engaged research is not possible until you have already done meaningful community engagement. This involves multiple conversations, and can take lots of time to build trust. These conversations may not necessarily result in action items. Lopez advises, “Start with a conversation, not an ask.” Throughout our discussion, Lopez emphasized the distinction between community engagement and community-engaged research. In a follow-up email, Lopez reiterated, “It takes a very long time.”
- Understand that the needs of the institution and academy may not necessarily be the same as the needs of nonacademic communities. A community’s needs may not align with grant deliverables or timelines, or even with the academic calendar. Communities may have historic distrust of academic institutions, particularly when they parachute in to purportedly “help” communities without actually taking the time to build the necessary relationships.
- Research libraries can support a culture change on campus by supporting faculty and students in understanding best practices in community-engaged research, and helping them understand what it means to strengthen relationships with community organizations. This includes understanding what it means to share agency, to co-curate, compensate, and follow up. These practices must be sustained before and after the community-engaged research. Working outside of academia may mean being adaptable, for instance, conducting interviews off campus, and outside of the school calendar.
Humanities in Place
Graham pointed out that UGA is a flagship land-grant research university, and that it’s important to correct the disconnect between the institution located in Athens and the community of Athens and around the state through UGA’s mission of research, instruction, and service. For instance, changing the culture of academia to ensure that oral history collections, special collections, and archives include materials created by Black people and organizations will support more inclusive teaching and research by faculty and students. Culture change is a long-term investment, and may involve discomfort, but it is critical to change the way we think about and engage with communities before we do the research. Graham said:
We have a great deal of work to do to correct the historical omissions in our collections. If we fail to build, steward, and share the diverse collection needed by our faculty and students, then we simply are falling short in serving our core teaching and research missions. We take very seriously our obligation to serve the people of Georgia and beyond, as well. Representing the stories, realities, and voices of all of types of communities should be a natural extension of our service mission. Going back to the principles, respectful and inclusive community engagement is key.
Oral history programs are among the most impactful tools we have in this work. There are all kinds of inequities associated with the ability to provide an enduring paper trail of one’s experience—the traditional bedrock of archives. But most people are able to tell their stories. What I most appreciate about Christian Lopez’s approach to community-based oral history is that he prioritizes the empowerment of our partners in engaging with one another to collect their own stories largely on their own terms. Oral history isn’t an extractive industry for him. It’s about listening and building relationships.
The Willson Center is currently partnering with UGA’s Russell Library on a Mellon Foundation–funded expansion of the Global Georgia Initiative, a public humanities program that began in 2013. The expanded Global Georgia Initiative includes Humanities in Place, a program to bolster off-campus public humanities collaborations. As part of its Humanities in Place program, Lopez successfully submitted a proposal for the Athens African American Oral History Initiative, which will build on the community-engaged work of the Athens Oral History Project and Athens Music Project Oral History Collection.
Stay engaged with the Athens African American Oral History Initiative on social media.
Endnote
* The Putnam County project is supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Challenge Grant, with matching funds from the UGA Willson Center for Humanities & Arts.
The post Principles of Community-Engaged Research: Conversations with Toby Graham, Christopher Lawton, Christian Lopez, and Winnie Smith appeared first on Association of Research Libraries.
The Preprint Club: A blueprint for community?based peer review: EMBO reports: Vol 0, No 0
“Here, we would like to discuss how journal clubs could play a role in reviewing preprints. Journal clubs are ubiquitous in academia as nearly every department, institute, or even research group organize one to discuss the latest published research; in fact, journal clubs may be better served by discussing and reviewing preprints instead of already peer-reviewed research. Moreover, it provides a safe environment for ECRs to train their peer reviewing skills (Avasthi et al, 2018). With that in mind, we, a group of ECRs from the immunology departments of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the University of Oxford—later joined by peers from the Karolinska Institute and the University of Toronto—established the Preprint Club in 2020 to discuss manuscripts from the field of immunology….”
2023 OA Week Theme Announcement: Community over Commercialization
Data sharing in the context of community-engaged research partnerships – ScienceDirect
“Highlights
Data sharing policies should consider to whom benefits do and do not accrue.
Community Engaged Research Principles would increase community benefit.
Funders should develop mechanisms to ensure community benefit from data sharing.
Funders should track impact of data sharing on community-relevant outcomes….”