OPERAS resources

"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. "

"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.  "

" This month, Kentucky's General Assembly overrode Gov. Matt Bevin's veto of the budget, restoring many of the cuts in education that Bevin had proposed in January. But the funding Bevin eliminated for the University Press of Kentucky was not restored. To remain open, the press has a rough road ahead."

"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."

"When you're offered the chance to speak about one of your favorite topics, in one of your favorite cities, it's very hard to say no. So of course, when Anthony Watkinson invited me to participate in a panel on Collaboration to Improve Scholarship at the Fiesole Library Collection Retreat in Barcelona in April, I enthusiastically agreed. My fellow speakers were Bob Boissy (Springer Nature), Toby Green (OECD), Pierre Mounier (OpenEditions), and Roger Schonfeld (Ithaka S+R and fellow Scholarly Kitchen chef). Collectively, we covered a wide range of issues and initiatives around the topic, some of which I was already familiar with, some of which I learned about for the first time."

"Simply adding an 'open access' option to the existing prestige-based journal system at ever increasing costs is not the fundamental change publishing needs, says Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman "

"Everything we have gained by opening content and data will be under threat if we allow the enclosure of scholarly infrastructures. We propose a set of principles by which Open Infrastructures to support the research community could be run and sustained. - Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin, Cameron Neylon"

"El portal AccesoAbierto.net quiere ser el principal canal de divulgación de los avances del grupo de investigación "Acceso abierto a la ciencia" respecto de la situación del acceso abierto en España y también concentrar la información existente sobre esta cuestión en el ámbito hispánico. El portal se dirige fundamentalmente a los autores (que buscan información sobre derechos y condiciones para poder autoarchivar sus publicaciones), a los bibliotecarios (que necesitan datos sobre los derechos de las revistas y los repositorios existentes), los gestores científicos y universitarios (que precisan conocer cuáles son las políticas que se están llevando a cabo en este ámbito) y a los interesados en el acceso abierto en general."

"The open access model for publishing monographs by the members of the Spanish Universities Publishers Association (UNE) is analyzed. The study focused on production data from 2015-2017, as well as the positioning and arguments of the editors in relation to the open access movement, publication, related policies, and financing modalities. Data was collected by a questionnaire (with a response rate of 58% of the publishers associated with UNE) and includes in-depth interviews with seven of them. The results show that 75% of UNE members publish titles in open access, most consider open access a good way to increase the dissemination of monographs, and that there are no differences in content quality with non-open access works. Publishers do not see that publishing in open access is compatible with the commercial exploitation of printed copies. Publishers consider the most effective financing channels to be institutional payment (i.e., the university), followed by publisher's self-financing, and payment by the author."

"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."

"Key points Sci-Hub has made nearly all articles freely available using a black open access model, leaving green and gold models in its dust. Why, after 20 years of effort, have green and gold open access not achieved more? Do we need 'tae think again'? If human nature is to postpone change for as long as possible, are green and gold open access fundamentally flawed? Open and closed publishing models depend on bundle pricing paid by one stakeholder, the others getting a free ride. Is unbundling a fairer model? If publishers changed course and unbundled their product, would this open a legal, fairer route to 100% open access and see off the pirates?"

"A new economic model for analysis of scholarly publishing-journal publishing in particular-is proposed that draws on club theory. The standard approach builds on market failure in the private production (by research scholars) of a public good (new scholarly knowledge). In that model publishing is communication, as the dissemination of information. But a club model views publishing differently: namely as group formation, where members form groups in order to confer externalities on each other, subject to congestion. A journal is a self-constituted group, endeavouring to create new knowledge. In this sense 'a journal is a club'. The knowledge club model of a journal seeks to balance the positive externalities due to a shared resource (readers, citations, referees) against negative externalities due to crowding (decreased prospect of publishing in that journal). A new economic model of a journal as a 'knowledge club' is elaborated. We suggest some consequences for the management of journals and financial models that might be developed to support them. "

"The European Commission held a workshop on 12 October 2015 in Brussels to collect information about the alternatives to Green and Gold open access, including how the alternatives work, how they have evolved, whether they work well, and what challenges they don't manage to tackle. This report synthesises the presentations and discussions from the workshop."

"When researchers, funders, universities and libraries started thinking about open access and improving scholarly communication in the late 1990s, the focus was on access. Indeed, the most immediate challenge was to make it possible to access scientific literature resulting from public funding."