Group items tagged

"Given that "Open Science" is becoming a popular policy object around the world, this study sought to identify key narratives about Open Science in policy, and critically examine the extent to which they are sustaining or strengthening multi-layered domination and inequality schemes that pre-exist in scientific knowledge production. To do so, we conducted a content analysis of Open Science policies stemming from Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia and Africa to understand which narratives about Open Science policies are produced, reproduced and by whom; and in turn, whose interests may be neglected in this process. We found that Open Science policies, mostly stemming from Europe, frame "openness" as a vehicle to promote technological change as part of an inevitable and necessary cultural shift to modernity in scientific production. The global reach of these narratives, and the technologies, standards and models these narratives sustain, are dictating modes of working and collaborating among those who can access them, and creating new categories of exclusion that invalidate knowledge that cannot meet this criteria, putting historically marginalized researchers and publics at further disadvantage."

"The effective implementation of OpenScience calls for a scientific communication ecosystem capable of enabling the "Open Science publishing principles" of transparency and reproducibility. Such ecosystem should provide tools, policies, and trust needed by scientists for sharing/interlinking (for "discovery" and "transparent evaluation") and re-using (for "reproducibility") all research products produced during the scientific process, e.g. literature, research data, methods, software, workflows, protocols, etc. OpenAIRE fosters OpenScience by advocating its publishing principles across Europe and research communities and by offering technical services in support of OA monitoring, research impact monitoring, and Open Science publishing. Its aim is to provide Research Infrastructures (RIs) with the services required to bridge the research life-cycle they support - where scientists produce research products - with the scholarly communication infrastructure - where scientists publish research products - in such a way science is reusable, reproducible, and transparently assessable. OpenAIRE is fostering the establishment of reliable, trusted, and long lasting RIs by compensating the lack of OS publishing solutions and providing the support required by RIs to upgrade existing solutions to meet OpenScience publishing needs (e.g. technical guidelines, best practices, OA mandates). To this aim, OpenAIRE is working closely with existing RIs to extend its service portfolio by introducing two services implementing the concept of "Open Science as a Service" (OSaaS): The Research Community Dashboard. Thanks to its functionality, scientists of RIs can find tools for publishing all their research products, such as literature, datasets, software, research packages, etc. (provide metadata, get DOIs, and ensure preservation of files), interlink such products manually or by exploiting advanced mining techniques, and integrate their services to automatically publish

"Citizen science (CS) terms the active participation of the general public in scientific research activities. With increasing amounts of information generated by citizen scientists, best practices to go beyond science communication and publish these findings to the scientific community are needed. This letter is a synopsis of authors' personal experiences when publishing results from citizen science projects in peer-reviewed journals, as presented at the Austrian Citizen Science Conference 2018. Here, we address authors' selection criteria for publishing CS data in open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journals as well as barriers encountered during the publishing process. We also outline factors that influence the probability of publication using CS data, including 1) funding to cover publication costs; 2) quality, quantity and scientific novelty of CS data; 3) recommendations to acknowledge contributions of citizen scientists in scientific, peer-reviewed publications; 4) citizen scientists' preference of the hands-on experience over the product (publication) and 5) bias among scientists for certain data sources and the scientific jargon. These experiences show that addressing these barriers could greatly increase the rate of CS data included in scientific publications."

"Almost everyone is enthusiastic that 'open science' is the wave of the future. Yet when one looks seriously at the flaws in modern science that the movement proposes to remedy, the prospect for improvement in at least four areas are unimpressive. This suggests that the agenda is effectively to re-engineer science along the lines of platform capitalism, under the misleading banner of opening up science to the masses. "

"In this article two scholars engage in a conversation about open access and open science in research communication with a specific focus on the Humanities.  The two scholars have very different points of departure. Whereas Jean-Claude Guedón has been a professor of Literature in North-America for many years and part of the open access movements since its beginning, Thomas Wiben Jensen is in the early part of his carreer and fairly new to the concept of open access.  The conversation begins with a focus on the Danish national strategy for open access and this strategy's consquenses for the journal NyS where Thomas Wiben is part of the editorial board. However, the conversation brings the reader on an unexpected journey through the history of science communication and through alternative ways of understanding knowledge production as frozen moments or crystals in the Great Conversation of science. It is the hope of the editor and the contributors that the conversation can lead to a debate about innovative ways of communicating and distributing scientific results. "

"CON­FER­ENCE ON PHILO­SOPHY AND HIS­TORY OF OPEN SCI­ENCE #PHOS16 (HEL­SINKI, NOV 30 - DEC 1, 2016) Open communication has been a central cornerstone of research since the early days. In our increasingly data-intensive era, research practice and dissemination are facing new challenges as well as opportunities. What is the overall significance of the open science movement and what are, if any, the historical roots and varieties of this movement? This two-day conference brings together contemporary open science advocates and scholars to discuss particular themes relevant to openness in contemporary research practice, including reproducibility, transparency, reusability, politics of science, and other topics as well as their historical roots, in order to gain a broader perspective on these issues. Participation is free and open for the research and the general public"

"In the past decade, a number of initiatives have been taken to provide new sources of information on scholarly book publishing. Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate Analytics) has supplemented the Web of Science with a Book Citation Index (BCI), while Elsevier has extended Scopus to include books from a selection of scholarly publishers. More complete metadata on scholarly book publishing can be derived at the national level from non-commercial databases such as Current Research Information System in Norway and the VIRTA (Higher Education Achievement Register, Finland) publication information service, including the Finnish Publication Forum (JUFO) lists (Finland). The Spanish Scholarly Publishers Indicators provides survey-based information on the prestige, specialization profiles from metadata, and manuscript selection processes of national and international publishers that are particularly relevant for the social sciences and humanities (SSH). In the present work, the five information sources mentioned above are compared in a quantitative analysis identifying overlaps and uniqueness as well as differences in the degrees and profiles of coverage. In a second-stage analysis, the geographical origin of the university presses (UPs) is given a particular focus. We find that selection criteria strongly differ, ranging from a set of a priori criteria combined with expert-panel review in the case of commercial databases to in principle comprehensive coverage within a definition in the Nordic countries and an open survey methodology combined with metadata from the book industry database and questionnaires to publishers in Spain. Larger sets of distinct book publishers are found in the non-commercial databases, and greater geographical diversity is observable among the UPs in these information systems. While a more locally oriented set of publishers which are relevant to researchers in the SSH is present in non-commercial databases, the commercial databases seem to focus on high

"Open access (OA) is advocated by science funders, policymakers and researchers alike. It will most likely be the default way of publishing in the not-so-distant future. Nonetheless, the dominant approach to achieve OA at the moment - journal flipping - could have adverse long-term effects for science. To try to stir debate, we here present two dichotomic scenarios for open access in 20 years' time. Our approach is collaborative and open - we recognise that our position is not uncontroversial and welcome engagement from those who would advocate otherwise. What is missing in the scenarios presented below? Which scenario would be better? Which is most realistic?"

"Open peer review (OPR) is a cornerstone of the emergent Open Science agenda. Yet to date no large-scale survey of attitudes towards OPR amongst academic editors, authors, reviewers and publishers has been undertaken. This paper presents the findings of an online survey, conducted for the OpenAIRE2020 project during September and October 2016 that sought to bridge this information gap in order to aid the development of appropriate OPR approaches by providing evidence about attitudes towards and levels of experience with OPR. The results of this cross-disciplinary survey, which received 3,062 full responses, show the majority of respondents to be in favour of OPR becoming mainstream scholarly practice, as they also are for other areas of Open Science, like Open Access and Open Data. We also observe surprisingly high levels of experience with OPR, with three out of four (76.2%) respondents reporting having taken part in an OPR process as author, reviewer or editor. There were also high levels of support for most of the traits of OPR, particularly open interaction, open reports and final-version commenting. Respondents were against opening reviewer identities to authors, however, with more than half believing it would make peer review worse. Overall satisfaction with the peer review system used by scholarly journals seems to strongly vary across disciplines. Taken together, these findings are very encouraging for OPR's prospects for moving mainstream but indicate that due care must be taken to avoid a "one-size fits all" solution and to tailor such systems to differing (especially disciplinary) contexts. More research is also needed. OPR is an evolving phenomenon and hence future studies are to be encouraged, especially to further explore differences between disciplines and monitor the evolution of attitudes. "

"Cette étude a pour objet d'évaluer le bien-fondé de la mise en œuvre d'un principe de libre accès aux recherches en sciences humaines et sociales (SHS) en France, à partir d'une étude de ses effets sur la consultation des articles. Il s'agit de savoir si une politique de libre accès améliore effectivement ou non la visibilité des recherches, et dans quelle mesure. L'étude apporte des éclairages indispensables à la prise de décision au sujet de la diffusion des résultats de la recherche et sur l'effet observé des restrictions d'accès sur l'accès des publics (chercheurs et grand public) à ces résultats. Les enjeux du débat sont le choix de la « barrière mobile », c'est-à-dire la durée après la publication pour la mise en libre accès par la revue elle-même, et la durée de « l'embargo », c'est-à-dire la durée minimale avant l'autorisation donnée par la revue à l'auto-archivage par le chercheur de ses articles. L'étude a consisté à quantifier l'impact de la durée de la barrière mobile sur l'audience de la revue et de la recherche. Les résultats obtenus indiquent que l'existence d'une barrière à la diffusion fait perdre de l'audience à la revue, et ce dès une durée d'un an. Dans la mesure où les coûts de marginaux de diffusion des articles sur les plateformes numériques sont très faibles, voire nuls, cette perte d'audience représente ce que l'on appelle une perte « de poids mort ». Nos résultats objectivent donc la mise en place d'une durée de barrière mobile relativement courte (moins d'un an) en comparaison aux durées évoquées dans le débat public pour les SHS (2 à 3 ans)."

"Frustrated with the slow transition toward open access (OA) in scientific publishing, 11 national funding organizations in Europe turned up the pressure today. As of 2020, the group, which jointly spends about €7.6 billion on research annually, will require every paper it funds to be freely available from the moment of publication. In a statement, the group said it will no longer allow the 6- or 12-month delays that many subscription journals now require before a paper is made OA, and it won't allow publication in so-called hybrid journals, which charge subscriptions but also make individual papers OA for an extra fee.  "

"SciPost is a complete scientific publication portal. It is purely online-based, and offers freely, openly, globally and perpetually accessible science. Being managed by professional scientists, and making use of editor-solicited and contributed reviews, its Journals aim at the highest achievable standards of refereeing. SciPost Commentaries allow Contributors to seamlessly comment on all existing literature."

"One of Europe's biggest science spenders could soon branch out into publishing. The European Commission, which spends more than €10 billion annually on research, may follow two other big league funders, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and set up a "publishing platform" for the scientists it funds, in an attempt to accelerate the transition to open-access publishing in Europe. "

"The academic reward structure focuses heavily on the publication of novel results in high impact journals. This talk considers the problems this narrow focus is creating in research and its dissemination and how these activities go against some of the basic tenets of science itself. It suggests that Open Research offers a way to improve the veracity of scientific claims and then looks at some of the recent examples of a move away from the status quo over the past 18 months."

"COASP 2015 Preliminary Program Trippenhuis at The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Amsterdam "

"Higher education is stuffed with overpaid administrators squeezing every ounce of efficiency out of lecturers and focusing on the 'profitable' areas of science, technology, engineering and maths. Are the humanities at risk of being wiped out?"

"Les étudiants doivent-ils moins lire pour réussir ? La politique documentaire suivie par les établissements d'enseignement supérieur français pourrait le laisser croire. alors que le coût de la documentation académique augmente, les dépenses consacrées à l'achat d'ouvrages ne cessent de baisser, pénalisant en premier lieu les étudiants, mais aussi la recherche en sciences humaines et sociales ou en mathématiques. Côté documentation électronique, l'offre de e-books ne décolle pas, et si les dépenses pour l'abonnement à des revues en ligne continuent d'augmenter, certains établissements ont défrayé la chronique en 2015 en coupant drastiquement dans leurs dépenses documentaires de niveau recherche. Retour sur les principales conclusions de l'enquête annuelle de l'adbu sur les dépenses documentaires des bibliothèques universitaires (période 2002 - 2015)."

"La produzione scientifica accademica nel settore HSS (Humanities and Social Sciences) utilizza principalmente la monografia come strumento di diffusione dei risultati della ricerca. Esistono certamente le riviste, e sono in aumento, ma rappresentano tuttora una minoranza dell'intera produzione editoriale; addirittura spesso i fascicoli sono numeri monografici o atti di convegni che a tutti gli effetti sono da considerarsi come monografie, con tanto di codice ISBN per essere venduti singolarmente."