Abstract: Accomplishing the sustainable development goal is challenging and requires the joint effort of the whole community, especially when humans are approaching the climate tipping point [1]. To contribute to promoting sustainable development, the AISDL Team has aggregated reliable and open-access scientific journals about environmental issues here as sources of knowledge for any interested researchers.
“As Canada moves to follow the open access example set by Europe and the USA, questions about financial sustainability and equity must be addressed.
On June 4th, 2023, Canada’s federal research granting agencies announced a review of the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications*, with the goal of requiring immediate open and free access to all academic publications generated through Tri-Agency supported research by the end of 2025. At Queen’s, this will mean significant changes to relevant policies and processes, primarily related to navigating the pay-to-publish model currently dominating the publishing landscape in the form of article processing charges (APCs).
APCs are extra fees that authors pay to academic publishers to make their articles openly available rather than barriered behind paywalls. Academic publishers are increasingly embracing this pay-to-publish business model, making the cost of open access publishing prohibitively expensive for many authors. APC fees vary by publisher and journal and can range from less than $1,000 USD to over $11,000 USD. Estimates indicate that Canadian authors spent at least $27.6 million USD on APCs related to Tri-Agency funded work from 2015 to 2018. This is in addition to the millions of dollars spent annually by academic libraries to provide access to paywalled articles, sometimes in the same journals in which the APC-paid open access articles appear. There are ongoing questions and concerns about not only the financial sustainability of academic publishers’ APC-driven business model, but the potential of this model for creating and reinforcing global inequities to the detriment of authors, libraries, and academic institutions. Ensuring open, accessible, and sustainable scholarly publishing is all the more urgent given Queen’s University’s strongly established commitment to advancing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals including ensuring equal access to university education and strengthening protection and safeguards for the world’s cultural and natural heritage.
While the University does not currently fund individual author APC fees, it does support open access through other means, including publishing agreements with select publishers, support for open infrastructure like Open Journal Systems and QSpace, and membership and participation in provincial, national, and international bodies promoting and supporting sustainable open access….”
“…Through this pilot Fund, IOI intends to:
Partner with at least (3) networks, focusing on networks with a strong existing service relationship to a set of communities or institutions, a public commitment to open research principles, and a specific opportunity for using funds to develop open infrastructure adoption among members
Raise $5-7M USD to support these network collaborations for 3-5 years, providing direct funding and strategic support to enable the adoption of open infrastructure for those networks and their members, with a focus on infrastructures enabling immediate and equitable open access to data and content.
Create a mechanism to expand the pool of funders for open infrastructure, including calling for commercial service providers and others who derive significant value from the open ecosystem to reinvest in the open systems from which they profit….”
“Sustainability & Circularity NOW publishes latest research on benign molecules and materials, closed-loop, waste-free systems, and other actionable solutions to tackle global environmental crises. The new journal is the first open access publication with a multidisciplinary focus on sustainability and circularity in chemistry and beyond. Authors benefit from fast and professional crowd peer-review processes to publish and disseminate their research open access….”
“The Digital Public Goods Alliance is a multi-stakeholder initiative with a mission to accelerate the attainment of the sustainable development goals in low- and middle-income countries by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods.”
“The year 2023 marks a significant milestone for Knowledge Unlatched’s library crowdfunding initiative, as it celebrates a decade of facilitating the publication of thousands of Open Access (OA) monographs. This landmark achievement has led to some exciting new developments at KU.
In this webinar, Alexandra Brown and Elaine Lambert will provide an overview of the new OA collections that libraries can support until the end of 2023. The webinar will also highlight the significant changes made to KU’s multi-disciplinary collection, KU Select, which now exclusively focuses on HSS subjects aligned with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. This shift aims to provide greater value to institutions and researchers and enables libraries to support timely, relevant, and sought-after OA content.”
Abstract: This paper examines the extent to which research has been published open access in response to two global threats: COVID-19 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including climate change. We compare the accessibility of COVID-19 content versus SDG literature using the Dimensions database between 2000 and 2021, classifying each publication as gold open access, green, bronze, hybrid, or closed. We found that 79.9% of COVID-19 research papers published between January 2020 and December 2021 was open access, with 39.0% published with gold open access licenses. In contrast, just 55.7% of SDG papers were open access in the same time period, with only 36.0% published with gold open access licenses. Papers related to the climate emergency overall had the second-lowest level of open access at just 55.5%. Papers published by the largest for-profit publishers that committed to both the SDG Publishers Compact and climate actions were not predominantly published open access. The paper highlights the need for continued efforts to promote open access publishing to facilitate scientific research and technological development to address global challenges.
“If the United Nations’ development plans are going to succeed, all voices need a chance to contribute to and access knowledge.
Experts gathered on May 3 for an online discussion on the importance of embracing open science and equitable scholarly publishing ecosystems to help solve the world’s biggest problems. [See video recording here.]
The United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library and UNESCO hosted the event, which focused on recommendations on expanding access to scientific knowledge in service of the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) – including the need for a Global Science Commons. The UN’s 2030 Agenda calls for mechanisms to advance science and technology through knowledge-sharing in open access, online platforms….”
“Today, WHO is launching the Health Inequality Data Repository, the most comprehensive global collection of publicly available disaggregated data and evidence on population health and its determinants. The repository allows for tracking health inequalities across population groups and over time, by breaking down data according to group characteristics, ranging from education level to ethnicity.
The data from the repository show that, in just a decade, the rich-poor gap in health service coverage among women, newborns and children in low- and middle-income countries has nearly halved. They also reveal that, in these countries, eliminating wealth-related inequality in under-five mortality could help save the lives of 1.8 million children.
The Health Inequality Data Repository (HIDR) includes nearly 11 million data points and consists of 59 datasets from over 15 sources. The data include measurements of over 2000 indicators broken down by 22 dimensions of inequality, including demographic, socioeconomic and geographical factors. Topics covered include: the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); COVID-19; reproductive, maternal and child health; immunization; HIV; tuberculosis; malaria; nutrition; health care; non-communicable diseases and environmental health….”
“…The United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library and UNESCO will host a virtual panel addressing mechanisms towards an equitable scholarly publishing ecosystems for the SDGs and beyond. In this session, attendees will hear concrete recommendations from experts for generating greater access to scientific knowledge in service of the SDGs and the need for a Global Science Commons. The discussion will be presented as a side-event during one of the most important 2-day global forums the United Nations delivers annually, the 8th Multi-stakeholder Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals.?The event will take place on 2 May 2023 from 10:00AM – 11:30AM EDT (New York Time). Panelists:
Dr. Virginia Barbour, Director, Open Access Australasia
Dr. Chris Bourg, Director of Libraries, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Dr. Tshiamo Motshegwa, Director, African Open Science Platform (AOSP)
Dr. Ana Persic, Program Specialist, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
Mr. Thanos Giannakopoulos, Chief Librarian, UN Dag Hammarskjöld Library
Moderator: Mx. Meg Wacha, Scholarly Communications Officer, UN Dag Hammarskjöld Library…”
Abstract: Purpose
Academic citation and social attention measure different dimensions in the impact of research results. The authors quantify the contribution of funding to both indicators considering the differences attributable to the research field and access type.
Design/methodology/approach
Citation and social attention accumulated until the year 2021 of more than 367 thousand research articles published in the year 2018 are studied. The authors consider funding acknowledgments (FAs) in the research articles. The data source is Dimensions, and the units of study are research articles in the United Nation (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Findings
Most cited goals by researchers do not coincide with those that arouse greater social attention. A small proportion of articles accumulates a large part of the citations and most of the social attention. Both citation and social attention grow with funding. Thus, funded research has a greater probability of being cited in academic articles and mentioned in social media. Funded research receives on average two to three times more citations and 2.5 to 4.5 times more social attention than unfunded research. Moreover, the open access (OA) modalities gold and hybrid have the greatest advantages in citation and social attention due to funding.
Research limitations/implications
Specific topics were studied in a specific period. Studying other topics and/or different time periods might result in different findings.
Practical implications
When funding to publish in open or hybrid access journals is not available, it is advisable to self-archiving the pre-print or post-print version in a freely accessible repository.
Social implications
Although cautiously, it is also advisable to consider the social impact of the research to complement the scientific impact in the evaluation of the research.
Originality/value
The joint evaluation of the effect of both funding and OA on social attention.
Abstract: Social media data are transforming sustainability science. However, challenges from restrictions in data accessibility and ethical concerns regarding potential data misuse have threatened this nascent field. Here, we review the literature on the use of social media data in environmental and sustainability research. We find that they can play a novel and irreplaceable role in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals by allowing a nuanced understanding of human-nature interactions at scale, observing the dynamics of social-ecological change, and investigating the co-construction of nature values. We reveal threats to data access and highlight scientific responsibility to address trade-offs between research transparency and privacy protection, while promoting inclusivity. This contributes to a wider societal debate of social media data for sustainability science and for the common good.
“Indeed, USask [U of Saskatchewan] researchers produce critically important research that could meaningfully advance the SDGs, especially in the Signature Areas of Research. But the results of research can only reach their full impact and potential if everyone everywhere has access to them: to build upon them and apply them in real world contexts. Unfortunately, many of the products of USask research are inaccessible, locked behind expensive publisher paywalls (in the case of publications), or simply not shared at all (in the case of all other products of research such as protocols, data, and working papers or reports). Making the products of research accessible is what Open Science is all about!…”
“The second annual symposium on the theme “Software Source Code as documentary heritage and an enabler for sustainable development” organized by UNESCO and the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) on 7 February 2023, took stock of the initiative’s achievements over the previous few years.
Throughout the conference, five major dimensions of software source code were explored:
as documentary heritage and as an enabler for digital skills education.
as a first-class research object in the open science ecosystem.
as an enabler for innovation and sharing in industry and administration.
its perspectives on long term preservation.
technological advances allowing massive analysis of software source code….”
“The second annual symposium on the theme “Software Source Code as documentary heritage and an enabler for sustainable development” organized by UNESCO and the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) on 7 February 2023, took stock of the initiative’s achievements over the previous few years.
Throughout the conference, five major dimensions of software source code were explored:
as documentary heritage and as an enabler for digital skills education.
as a first-class research object in the open science ecosystem.
as an enabler for innovation and sharing in industry and administration.
its perspectives on long term preservation.
technological advances allowing massive analysis of software source code….”