scholarly journals Opening doors to discovery: Partnerships are key to advancing open science

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Frank Vrancken Peeters

The evolution of scholarly communications has accelerated in recent years, and 2020 for obvious reasons put even more pressure on the sector to evolve and adapt. By opening up access to research publications, by simplifying or customising the digital experience, or by improving the speed of publishing – the focus is firmly placed on the need for publishers to work more in partnership with each other, with institutions, funders, and new players in the market to develop solutions that meet the evolving needs of researchers and the wider community. Partnerships between different actors in the research process address challenges in practice and help advance open science, publishing, and the research system as a whole.

Author(s):  
Kaja Scheliga ◽  
Sascha Friesike

Digital technologies carry the promise of transforming science and opening up the research process. We interviewed researchers from a variety of backgrounds about their attitudes towards and experiences with openness in their research practices. We observe a considerable discrepancy between the concept of open science and scholarly reality. While many researchers support open science in theory, the individual researcher is confronted with various difficulties when putting open science into practice. We analyse the major obstacles to open science and group them into two main categories: individual obstacles and systemic obstacles. We argue that the phenomenon of open science can be seen through the prism of a social dilemma: what is in the collective best interest of the scientific community is not necessarily in the best interest of the individual scientist. We discuss the possibilities of transferring theoretical solutions to social dilemma problems to the realm of open science.


Author(s):  
Olena Kuzminska

Education and science digitalization belongs to the priority areas of information society development. However, we can observe that while Ukraine enters the European educational and scientific space, Ukrainian scientists cannot yet efficiently compete in the international labor market. One of the reasons behind this is that Ukrainian scientists and researchers are not fully integrated into the world system of digital scholarly communication. To help researchers use digital tools supporting scholarly communication, many companies carry out various educational events to support open science and initiate international research and projects. Under modern conditions the digitalization of scientific communication went to the front-burner due to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the forced transition to digital scholarly communications through the COVID-19 pandemic can help integrate young scientists, including masters of higher education, into the international scientific space. This article provides an analysis of tools to support scholarly communication developed within the «101 innovation of scholarly communication» project. The international survey demonstrates the tools that scientists prefer to use at each stage of the research. This paper characterizes the advantages of particular tools on different stages of the masters’ research process induced by the current tendency for scholarly communication digitalization and the limitations for masters’ research. During the work, we outlined the scope for future research and found it necessary to conduct an additional survey for the scholarly community.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeroen Bosman

<p>There is growing consensus that making our research process and outputs more open is necessary to increase transparency, efficiency, reproducibility and relevance of research. With that we should be better able to contribute to answering important questions and overcoming grand challenges. Despite considerable attention for open science, including citizen science, there is no overall baseline showing the current state of openness in our field. This presentation shows results from research that quantitatively charts the adoption of open practices across the geosciences, mostly globally and across the full research workflow. They range from setting research priorities, collaboration with global south researchers and researchers in other disciplines, sharing code and data, sharing posters online, sharing early versions of papers as preprints, publishing open access, opening up peer review, using open licenses when sharing, to engaging with potential stakeholders of research outcomes and reaching out to the wider public. The assessment uses scientometric data, publication data, data from sharing platforms and journals, altmetrics data, and mining of abstracts and other outputs, aiming to address the breadth of open science practices. The resulting images show that open science application is not marginal anymore, but at the same time certainly not mainstream. It also shows that limited sharing, limited use of open licenses and limited use of permanent IDs makes this type of assessment very hard. Insights derived from the study are relevant inputs in science policy discussions on data requirements, open access, researcher training and involvement of societal partners.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernadette Fritzsch ◽  
Daniel Nüst

<p>Open Science has established itself as a movement across all scientific disciplines in recent years. It supports good practices in science and research that lead to more robust, comprehensible, and reusable results. The aim is to improve the transparency and quality of scientific results so that more trust is achieved, both in the sciences themselves and in society. Transparency requires that uncertainties and assumptions are made explicit and disclosed openly. <br>Currently, the Open Science movement is largely driven by grassroots initiatives and small scale projects. We discuss some examples that have taken on different facets of the topic:</p><ul><li>The software developed and used in the research process is playing an increasingly important role. The Research Software Engineers (RSE) communities have therefore organized themselves in national and international initiatives to increase the quality of research software.</li> <li>Evaluating reproducibility of scientific articles as part of peer review requires proper creditation and incentives for both authors and specialised reviewers to spend extra efforts to facilitate workflow execution. The Reproducible AGILE initiative has established a reproducibility review at a major community conference in GIScience.</li> <li>Technological advances for more reproducible scholarly communication beyond PDFs, such as containerisation, exist, but are often inaccessible to domain experts who are not programmers. Targeting geoscience and geography, the project Opening Reproducible Research (o2r) develops infrastructure to support publication of research compendia, which capture data, software (incl. execution environment), text, and interactive figures and maps.</li> </ul><p>At the core of scientific work lie replicability and reproducibility. Even if different scientific communities use these terms differently, the recognition that these aspects need more attention is commonly shared and individual communities can learn a lot from each other. Networking is therefore of great importance. The newly founded initiative German Reproducibility Network (GRN) wants to be a platform for such networking and targets all of the above initiatives. GRN is embedded in a growing network of similar initiatives, e.g. in the UK, Switzerland and Australia. Its goals include </p><ul><li>Support of local open science groups</li> <li>Connecting local or topic-centered initiatives for the exchange of experiences</li> <li>Attracting facilities for the goals of Open Science </li> <li>Cultivate contacts to funding organizations, publishers and other actors in the scientific landscape</li> </ul><p>In particular, the GRN aims to promote the dissemination of best practices through various formats of further education, in order to sensitize particularly early career researchers to the topic. By providing a platform for networking, local and domain-specific groups should be able to learn from one another, strengthen one another, and shape policies at a local level.</p><p>We present the GRN in order to address the existing local initiatives and to win them for membership in the GRN or sibling networks in other countries.</p>


Author(s):  
Josiline Phiri Chigwada

The open science movement enables the accessibility and reusability of research output across the globe. Researchers and other stakeholders in the research process can now easily collaborate to add to the body of knowledge. This chapter documents how open science is impacting the role of libraries, publishers, and authors in the digital era. A structured document analysis and web analysis were done to find out how authors, publishers, and librarians are affected by open science. It was found that librarians are taking advantage of open science to provide various information sources to patrons, the publishers are now charging article processing fees to make the journal articles open access upon publishing, and authors are now able to access many information sources during the research process and enjoy greater visibility of their research output. The author recommends the adoption of open science especially in the developing countries and the enactment of policies that support open science at national, regional, and international levels.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahul Ramachandran ◽  
Kaylin Bugbee ◽  
Kevin Murphy

<p>Open science is a concept that represents a fundamental change in scientific culture. This change is characterized by openness, where research objects and results are shared as soon as possible, and connectivity to a wider audience. Understanding about what Open Science actually means  differs from various stakeholders.</p><p>Thoughts on Open Science fall into four distinct viewpoints. The first viewpoint strives to make science accessible to a larger community by focusing on allowing non-scientists to participate in the research process through citizen science project and by more effectively communicating research results to the broader public. The second viewpoint considers providing equitable knowledge access to everyone by not only considering access to journal publications but also to other objects in the research process such as data and code. The third viewpoint focuses on making both the research process and the communication of results more efficient. There are two aspects to this component which can be described as social and technical components. The social component is driven by the need to tackle complex problems that require collaboration and a team approach to science while the technical component focuses on creating tools, services and especially scientific platforms to make the scientific process more efficient. Lastly, the fourth viewpoint strives to develop new metrics to measure scientific contributions that go beyond the current metrics derived solely from scientific publications and to consider contributions from other research objects such as data, code or knowledge sharing through blogs and other social media communication mechanisms. </p><p>Technological change is a factor in all four of these viewpoints on Open Science. New capabilities in compute, storage, methodologies, publication and sharing enable technologists to better serve as the primary drivers for Open Science by providing more efficient technological solutions. Sharing knowledge, information and other research objects such as data and code has become easier with new modalities of sharing available to researchers. In addition, technology is enabling the democratization of science at two levels. First, researchers are no longer constrained by lack of infrastructure resources needed to tackle difficult problems. Second, the Citizen Science projects now involve the public at different steps of the scientific process from collecting the data to analysis.</p><p>This presentations investigates the four described viewpoints on Open Science from the perspective of any large organization involved in scientific data stewardship and management. The presentation will list possible technological strategies that organizations may adopt to further align with all aspects of the Open Science movement. </p>


Author(s):  
Laura Fortunato ◽  
Mark Galassi

Free and open source software (FOSS) is any computer program released under a licence that grants users rights to run the program for any purpose, to study it, to modify it, and to redistribute it in original or modified form. Our aim is to explore the intersection between FOSS and computational reproducibility. We begin by situating FOSS in relation to other ‘open’ initiatives, and specifically open science, open research, and open scholarship. In this context, we argue that anyone who actively contributes to the research process today is a computational researcher, in that they use computers to manage and store information. We then provide a primer to FOSS suitable for anyone concerned with research quality and sustainability—including researchers in any field, as well as support staff, administrators, publishers, funders, and so on. Next, we illustrate how the notions introduced in the primer apply to resources for scientific computing, with reference to the GNU Scientific Library as a case study. We conclude by discussing why the common interpretation of ‘open source’ as ‘open code’ is misplaced, and we use this example to articulate the role of FOSS in research and scholarship today. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reliability and reproducibility in computational science: implementing verification, validation and uncertainty quantification in silico ’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Joanna Ball ◽  
Graham Stone ◽  
Sarah Thompson

Momentum is building in the transition to open access for monographs, with a number of funders developing policies and mandates in recent years. The article argues that while libraries play an instrumental role in driving a transition to open science within their institutions this is not reflected in libraries’ approaches to collection development, which are still predicated on purchased content. Libraries are keen to demonstrate that their purchased content is relevant to users, often promoting ‘expensive’ purchased collections over open content. Rather than relegating open to a less-visible second place, the article calls for libraries to acquire and promote open content alongside, and where appropriate with higher priority, than paid-for content. In order to facilitate a transition to open access for monographs, cultural change and leadership is required within libraries to reimagine themselves around open content as the norm, with policies, practices and structures that communicate, enable and promote this shift. The article calls for a collaborative international approach.


Author(s):  
Clara Galliano ◽  
Luc Quoniam ◽  
David Raymond

Issues related to open access to scientific publications and the reuse of research data concern research actors, academic communities and society as a whole. Many countries have mobilised themselves around these issues in order to establish policies in favour of the opening up of science. France is both a promoter and coordinator of open science at national and European level. This country has also expressed its commitment at the international level by joining world-class initiatives and coalitions. Faced with the power of certain private players in the publishing market, France insists on its current position: the aim is not to destroy them but rather not to be totally dependent on them. This communication proposes to take France as an example to complement and reinforce the commitment of certain countries to the Open Science movement.


Author(s):  
Gema Santos Hermosa

This paper provides an overview of open education in Europe, focusing on higher education. It begins by considering how the notion of ‘contemporary open education’ has evolved over time. It then reviews the various open education-related initiatives that have been promoted by the European Commission, from the institution of an open education framework to the current development of education policies. It also reports on specific initiatives and makes a series of recommendations about policy design oriented to opening up education. It analyses the relationship between open education and the open science movement, specifically the manner in which open education can be contextualised in the emergent paradigm of open science. Finally, the paper considers how academic libraries should be supporting open education and examines the influence that information professionals can bring to bear in this field.


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