“What opportunities do legal deposit web archives offer to those advocating for openness, and what are the potential risks?”
Monthly Archives: April 2018
Funder Perspectives on Open Infrastructure
“In March, 2019, the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) issued an open call for participation in a survey to better understand funder perspectives with respect to supporting open infrastructure. Sixteen funders completed the questionnaire, evenly split between ORFG members and other funding organizations. The vast majority of respondents (four in five) have some form of open access position, nearly evenly split between policies and recommendations. Beyond open access, however, there is very little consensus on other open activities. Data sharing is the only other activity supported by more than half of the respondents (four data sharing policies and six data sharing recommendations). Publication of null results, protocol sharing, and code sharing are each in play at roughly a third of responding foundations.”
Funder Perspectives on Open Infrastructure — Open Research Funders Group
“The Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) recently conducted a survey to better understand funder perspectives with respect to supporting open infrastructure. Sixteen organizations completed the questionnaire, evenly split between ORFG members and other funding bodies.”
The Open Scholarship Initiative – The future of global scholarly publishing
“The Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) is a collaborative, global effort between all stakeholder groups in scholarly communication working together to improve the flow of information within research and between researchers, policymakers and the public.”
BITSS Preprints
“An interdisciplinary archive of articles focused on improving research transparency and reproducibility. Maintained by The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS). Powered by OSF Preprints.
BITSS Preprints | Why We Need Open Policy Analysis
Abstract: The evidence-based policy movement promotes the use of empirical evidence to inform policy decision-making. While this movement has gained traction over the last two decades, several concerns about the credibility of empirical research have been identified in scientific disciplines that use research methods and practices that are commonplace in policy analysis. As a solution, we argue that policy analysis should adopt the transparent, open, and reproducible research practices espoused in related disciplines. We first discuss the importance of evidence-based policy in an era of increasing disagreement about facts, analysis, and expertise. We then review recent credibility crises of empirical research (difficulties reproducing results), their causes (questionable research practices such as publication biases and p-hacking), and their relevance to the credibility of evidence-based policy (trust in policy analysis). The remainder of the paper makes the case for “open” policy analysis and how to achieve it. We include examples of recent policy analyses that have incorporated open research practices such as transparent reporting, open data, and code sharing. We conclude with recommendations on how key stakeholders in evidence-based policy can make open policy analysis the norm and thus safeguard trust in using empirical evidence to inform important policy decisions.
Minutes, Faculty Senate Meeting, March 21, 2018, Florida State University
See pp. 2-5 for the minutes of the Florida State University Faculty Senate discussion of cancelling the Elsevier big deal.
Open Science Comes To Policy Analysis – CEGA – Medium
“This post is co-authored by Fernando Hoces de la Guardia, BITSS postdoctoral scholar, along with Sean Grant (Associate Behavioral and Social Scientist at RAND) and CEGA Faculty Director Ted Miguel. It is cross-posted with the BITSS Blog.
The Royal Society’s motto, “Take nobody’s word for it,” reflects a key principle of scientific inquiry: as researchers, we aspire to discuss ideas in the open, to examine our analyses critically, to learn from our mistakes, and to constantly improve. This type of thinking shouldn’t guide only the creation of rigorous evidence?—?rather, it should extend to the work of policy analysts whose findings may affect very large numbers of people. At the end of the day, a commitment to scientific rigor in public policy analysis is the only durable response to potential attacks on credibility. We, the three authors of this blog?—?Fernando Hoces de la Guardia, Sean Grant, and Ted Miguel?—?recently published a working paper suggesting a parallel between the reproducibility crisis in social science and observed threats to the credibility of public policy analysis. Researchers and policy analysts both perform empirical analyses; have a large amount of undisclosed flexibility when collecting, analyzing, and reporting data; and may face strong incentives to obtaining “desired” results (for example, p-values of <0.05 in research, or large negative/positive effects in policy analysis)….”
5 Great Reasons to Work in Academic Publishing
Reason #4: “Be at the centre of exciting debates and advances in the industry. Join the debate on Open-Access.”
Will the revolution be open? May 17, 2018 Webinar Registration – Zoom
“Will the revolution be open? This is an important question and the jury is out. In this webinar series we examine what it will take for the academic library community to develop the human, technical and financial resources that will be required to support an open future for global scholarship. The Elsevier purchase of Bepress was for many a wake-up call. It indicated that much of the infrastructure academic libraries rely on to manage and make content openly accessible was at risk of being monopolized by proprietary interests, just as scholarly journals have been. While the problem is clear — academic libraries need to control the infrastructure they depend on to make scholarly content open and discoverable and accessible. It seems clear that the level of support now provided is barely adequate at best, and that the academic library community faces a collective action problem that makes the necessary investments difficult. How to escape the current situation is not clear. In this webinar series the problem will be considered from both North American perspectives and those from outside of North America — in the hope of devising a way forward to create the infrastructure necessary to support a global open scholarly commons.
Join us on Thursday, May 17 at 12:00 ET for “The 2.5% Commitment: Investing in Open.” This webinar will focus on the David Lewis’ proposal for a 2.5% investment in open infrastructure and how it aims to make visible the investments academic libraries make in open infrastructure and content. It will also review actions that have taken place in the past nine months to advance these ideas. For background on the “Invest in Open Initiative” see the initiative website at: https://scholarlycommons.net and a recent College & Research Library News article describing the initiative at: https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/16902.
Time May 17, 2018 12:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)”
What Happens When Science Just Disappears? | WIRED
“KAY DICKERSIN KNEW she was leaping to the front lines of scholarly publication when she joined The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials. Scientific print-publishing was—and still is—slow and cumbersome, and reading its results sometimes required researchers to go to the library. But as associate editor at this electronic peer-reviewed journal—one of the very first, launched in the summer of 1992—Dickersin was poised to help bring scientists into the new digital age. Dickersin, an epidemiologist, acted as an associate editor, helping researchers publish their work. But the OJCCT was a bit ahead of its time. The journal was sold in 1994 to a publisher that eventually became part of Taylor & Francis, and which stopped the e-presses just a couple years later. And after that happened, its papers—reports, reviews, and meta-analysis of clinical trials—all disappeared. Dickersin wasn’t just sad to lose her editing gig: She was dismayed that the scientific community was losing those archives. “One of my important studies was in there,” she says, “and no one could get it.” Couldn’t, that is, until Dickersin decided to go spelunking for science. For more than a decade, Dickersin’s paper was missing along with about 80 others. Sometimes, the ex-editors would try to find out who had the rights to the articles, whether they could just take copies and put them on their own website. “We don’t want to do that,” they’d always conclude. “We don’t want to get in trouble.” Finally, Dickersin went to the librarians at Johns Hopkins University, where she is a professor, for help—and that’s how she found Portico. Portico is like a Wayback Machine for scholarly publications. The digital preservation service ingests, meta-tags, preserves, manages, and updates content for publishers and libraries, and then provides access to those archives. The company soon signed on to the project and got permission from Taylor & Francis to make the future archives open-access….”
EU officials pitch ‘Horizon Europe’ as name for next research programme | Science|Business
“More funding would be put aside for “open access to research results and data, availability to publications, knowledge repositories and other data sources.” …”
FIRECLOUD | Home
“An open platform for secure and scalable analysis on the cloud….FireCloud is free to use, however, [it resides in the Google Cloud and] any activity that uses Google Cloud resources comes with a cost….”
Principles for disseminating scientific innovations | Broad Institute
“As an academic non-profit research institute [associated with Harvard and MIT], Broad recognizes the unique role that such institutions play in propelling the biomedical ecosystem by exploring fundamental questions and working on risky, early-stage projects that often lack clear economic return.
To maximize its impact, our work (including discoveries, data, tools, technologies, knowledge, and intellectual property) should be made readily available for use, at no cost, by other academic and non-profit research institutions….
With respect to commercial licensing, our most important consideration is maximizing public benefit.
- In most cases, we believe that this goal is best accomplished through non-exclusive licensing, which allows many companies to use innovations and thus compete to bring to market products incorporating them.
- In some cases, we recognize that an exclusive license to an innovation may be necessary to justify the level of private investment required to develop a product and bring it to market. (An example is the composition-of-matter of drug. Without an exclusive license, a company would be reluctant to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a clinical trial to demonstrate safety and efficacy, because competitors could subsequently ‘free-ride’ on their results to bring the same product to market.)
In each case, we evaluate the justification for exclusivity and seek to limit the scope of exclusivity….”
Open Science | Your guide to Open Access publishing and Open Science
“The OpenScience.com blog is affiliated with De Gruyter Open Access, an Open Access imprint of De Gruyter.
This blog strives to serve as a comprehensive guide to Open Access publishing for scholars across a wide variety of academic fields. The blog provides information and advice on how to publish books and articles in the open access format. Additionally, it shares suggestions on how to increase publication visibility and citation counts. The blog also publishes articles that pertain to the wider cultural, social and economic context in which the open access model operates….”