scholarly journals Open Science: Reinventing the Librarianship

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esa-Pekka Keskitalo ◽  
Tanja Vienonen

Better utilisation of publicly funded research output is an aim of the Finnish Government. To reach that aim, the Open Science and Research (ATT) Initiative was launched in 2014. Lead by the Ministry of Education and Culture, the ATT Initiative has funded a number of projects that support good research data management, opening of research data, and Open Access in general. The Initiative also emphasises cooperation and interoperability nationally, and internationally.The National Library of Finland and other research libraries have an important role in the ATT Initiative. Libraries are in a good position to make meaningful contributions as they can repurpose their expertise on metadata, information retrieval, and collection management. They are finding new ways of collaboration and creating services in the fields of Open Access and Open Science.Libraries and other service providers should, first and foremost, respect the needs of research and researchers: science should always be the guiding force. But Open Access and Open Science do have an effect on how research is conducted and published. Therefore, it must be possible to have a critical look on conventional research practices. Increasing amounts of data, new technological possibilities, and new methods of analysis mean that old practices need to be revised. The more pronounced demands of interoperability and innovative re-usability drive for change, too. Of course, the funders are also very keen on cost-efficiency and measurable impact. There is a demand for harmonisation, collaboration, and shared infrastructures and services.The Open Scientific Publishing Project (TAJUA) in the National Library of Finland is a part of the ATT Initiative. The main focus of the project is to increase and improve the availability of Finnish research output. It comprises of several subprojects that build on the existing expertise of the Library, taking it to new directions. They deal withimproving the institutional repository infrastructure provided by the National Library, with special attention to organisations with restricted resources and basic demands;better guidance for institutional repositories on best practices in metadata creation, licensing, and in gathering statistics in a commensurable manner;a tool for easy creation of metadata about research datasets;improved persistent identifier services (ISNI, ORCID, URN, etc.);better understanding of economics of Open Access publishing, e.g. real level of APC, and recommendations for changes in publishing workflows; andrecommendations for ensuring long-term accessibility of scientific output.The TAJUA project complements others under the umbrella of the ATT Initiative. They deal with more efficient publishing workflows, data management planning, opening datasets, training and education on Open Science, and tools to enrich and work up open linked data. Existing national services on data storage, preservation, and dissemination will also be extended.Research libraries should not be shy about their knowledge and skills. With metadata being the new black, they can really make their mark on the world of Open Science.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helene N. Andreassen ◽  
Erik Lieungh

In this episode, we are discussing how to teach open science to PhD students. Helene N. Andreassen, head of Library Teaching and Learning Support at the University Library of UiT the Arctic University of Norway shares her experiences with the integration of open science in a special, tailor-made course for PhD's that have just started their project. An interdisciplinary, discussion-based course, "Take Control of Your PhD Journey: From (P)reflection to Publishing" consists of a series of seminars on research data management, open access publishing and other subject matters pertaining to open science. First published online February 26, 2020.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Ayris ◽  
Tiberius Ignat

Abstract This collaborative paper looks at how libraries can engage with and offer leadership in the Open Science movement. It is based on case studies and the results of an EU-funded research project on Research Data Management taken from European research-led universities and their libraries. It begins by analysing three recent trends in Science, and then links component parts of the research process to aspects of Open Science. The paper then looks in detail at four areas and identifies roles for libraries: Open Access and Open Access publishing, Research Data Management, E-Infrastructures (especially the European Open Science Cloud), and Citizen Science. The paper ends in suggesting a model for how libraries, by using a 4-step test, can assess their engagement with Open Science. This 4-step test is based on lessons drawn from the case studies.


2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
F.W. Dulle ◽  
M.K. Minishi-Majanja

This research explored the awareness, usage and perspectives of Tanzanian researchers on open access as a mode of scholarly communication. A survey questionnaire targeted 544 respondents selected through stratified random sampling from a population of 1088 university researchers of the six public universities in Tanzania. With a response rate of 73%, the data were analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences. The study reveals that the majority of the researchers were aware of and were positive towards open access. Findings further indicate that the majority of researchers in Tanzanian public universities used open access outlets more to access scholarly content than to disseminate their own research findings. It seems that most of these researchers would support open access publishing more if issues of recognition, quality and ownership were resolved. Thus many of them supported the idea of establishing institutional repositories at their respective universities as a way of improving the dissemination of local content. The study recommends that public universities and other research institutions in the country should consider establishing institutional repositories, with appropriate quality assurance measures, to improve the dissemination of research output emanating from these institutions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yimei Zhu

Data sharing can be defined as the release of research data that can be used by others. With the recent open-science movement, there has been a call for free access to data, tools and methods in academia. In recent years, subject-based and institutional repositories and data centres have emerged along with online publishing. Many scientific records, including published articles and data, have been made available via new platforms. In the United Kingdom, most major research funders had a data policy and require researchers to include a ‘data-sharing plan’ when applying for funding. However, there are a number of barriers to the full-scale adoption of data sharing. Those barriers are not only technical, but also psychological and social. A survey was conducted with over 1800 UK-based academics to explore the extent of support of data sharing and the characteristics and factors associated with data-sharing practice. It found that while most academics recognised the importance of sharing research data, most of them had never shared or reused research data. There were differences in the extent of data sharing between different gender, academic disciplines, age and seniority. It also found that the awareness of Research Council UK’s (RCUK) Open-Access (OA) policy, experience of Gold and Green OA publishing, attitudes towards the importance of data sharing and experience of using secondary data were associated with the practice of data sharing. A small group of researchers used social media such as Twitter, blogs and Facebook to promote the research data they had shared online. Our findings contribute to the knowledge and understanding of open science and offer recommendations to academic institutions, journals and funding agencies.


Author(s):  
Shaghayegh Abdolahzadeh ◽  
Peter G. Braun ◽  
Christina Elsenga ◽  
Marijke Folgering-van der Vliet ◽  
Babette Knauer ◽  
...  

The academic landscape of the Netherlands has been influenced in recent years by new governmental policies regarding open access and open science, national and European legal guidelines, developments in ICT, and changes in how researchers are assessed. The University of Groningen Library (UB) has seized the opportunity in these developments, providing research support in the domains of registration and archiving of research output, open access publishing, research data management, and research analytics. Increased efficiency in traditional library procedures and the introduction of project-based funding have provided staff capacity for these developments. Full-service customization, to meet the needs of researchers and alleviate their time and work pressure, lies at the heart of the UB's research support.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beate Eellend ◽  
Jonas Gilbert

Watch the VIDEO of the presentation.In January 2013 the Swedish Government commissioned the Swedish Research Council to develop a proposal for national guidelines for open access to scientific information, in collaboration with the National Library of Sweden. Comments from different stakeholders were collected through meetings, dialogues as well as an open web forum during 2013 and 2014. Many of the views expressed were utilized in the final document.The final proposal, which includes guidelines for both scientific publications, artistic works and research data, was submitted to the Government in January 2015. Also, the proposal contains recommendations on what needs to be further investigated and solved, in order to enable the fulfillment of the strategic objectives for 2025, when all scientific publications and artistic works resulting from research financed with public funds shall be published immediately with open access.In December 2015 the Swedish Government invited approximately 100 representatives from HEIs, funders, research and library organizations as well as researchers to a national hearing. The aim was to discuss how Sweden and the government can proceed with the transformation to an open access publishing system. During the hearing it was emphasized that the transformation to an open access publishing system in many respects is connected to the existing qualification and funding allocation system. Therefore there is a need for strong incentives for researchers to publish open access. Also, there is a national and international need to get control of both subscription fees and APCs in order to facilitate the transition to an open access publication system.At the end of 2016 the Government is expected to address the national guidelines in the Budget bill, the Research Bill as well as in different appropriation directives to national HEI’s and funders. Also, the Minister for Research and Higher Education has expressed the will to notify a national coordination task to the National Library of Sweden regarding open access to scientific publications and artistic works and a parallel coordination task to the Swedish Research Council regarding open access to research data. The Swedish Government supports the European Council Conclusions on the transition towards and Open Science System.Our proposed presentation aims to give a state of the art report of the current development, both from a national perspective and from an institutional perspective. How are we are preparing to implement the guidelines? What strategies are institutions and libraries using, both with regard to publishers and researchers? We hope to inspire a discussion and exchange of experiences, since several countries now are in a similar process.


Author(s):  
Adi Alter ◽  
Eddie Neuwirth ◽  
Dani Guzman

Academic libraries are looking for ways to grow their involvement in and scale-up their support for research activities. The successful transition depends to a large extent on the library's ability to systematically manage data, break down information silos and unify workflows across the library, research office and researchers. Data repositories are at the heart of this challenge, yet often institutional repositories are not built to address the needs of modern research data management due to inability to store all research assets, lack of consistent data models, and insufficient workflows. This chapter will present a new approach to research data management that ensures visibility of research output and data, data coherency, and compliance with open access standards. The authors will discuss a ‘Next-Generation Research Repository' that spans multiple data management activities, including automated data capture, metadata enrichment, dissemination, compliance-related workflows, automated publication to scholarly profiles, as well as open integration with the research ecosystem.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leif Longva ◽  
Tamer Abu Alam ◽  
Per Pippin Aspaas ◽  
Noortje Dijkstra ◽  
Lars Figenschou ◽  
...  

Research activities and research output, in general, have increased, and keep increasing vastly, and so too is research on the polar regions including Svalbard in the Arctic. Major commercial publishers have built subscription-based services which present research literature for a fee. As Open Science and open access to literature and data is gaining momentum, there is a distinct need for powerful discovery tools that can harvest and present research literature and datasets in open access form - free of charge. Moreover, sharing of underlying data in open access form is becoming the new norm. So, to integrate research papers and datasets in the same search, helps speed up the discovery processes as well as fostering the transparency of research, and minimize duplication of fieldwork and experiments. Open Polar (https://openpolar.no/) is developed by UiT The Arctic University of Norway, and is a free to use discovery tool for open access publications and research data specifically targeting research output on the polar regions, across all subject areas, and irrespective of where the research originates. Through a carefully designed algorithm, Open Polar is extracting metadata (including URL to the landing page of the full text) from more than 4600 sources worldwide and making these accessible through a user-friendly search service - including an option to search via geolocations on a map, and with systematic search features. The algorithm used picks up relevant research located in the most remote content providers and sources. Thus, searching in Open Polar will result in records purely of relevance to the polar regions. In this contribution, we will present the many advantageous features of Open Polar, and show how Open Polar is supporting Open Science and research integrity-enhancing procedures, by enabling search and access to research data as well as research papers.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaisa Hartikainen ◽  
Tuula Rissanen

At the University of Eastern Finland (UEF) Library, the national Open Science and Research initiative (2014–2017, Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland) triggered the planning and construction of open science related research support services. Planning of support services with themes of open access scholarly publishing, open research data and open study material began at full throttle at the UEF Library in November 2015. Information specialists were grouped into teams, which orientated to separate aspects of open science and shared their knowledge by training the whole library staff. Teamwork continued actively over the year 2016. Open science continuously brings new tasks for the Library and has already notably changed the job profiles of the library specialists.Advancing open science has been considered highly important not only at the library but also at the university level. UEF has offered resources e.g. by recruiting new information specialists and a data protection officer and internal auditor. UEF Library has a vital role in conducting open science but it is practiced in close collaboration with University Services, especially that of Development Services, General Administration and Legal Services and IT Services. Open Science team has landed the departments to share information and to discuss about open science practices at UEF. Nowadays these roadshows concerning UEF publishing and data policy, open access (OA) publishing as well as research data management and sharing are our focal operation.Work continues but the results can already be seen: In the OA ranking of research organisations in Finland (Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland), UEF has achieved level four in the five-level maturity model. Also, UEF researchers can order tailored training sessions about open research and support services from the diverse training menu offered by the Library. Updated Open UEF web pages are available for everyone and multi-channeled informing directed to UEF staff and students continues online. One concrete output from conducted open science and active campaigning about self-archiving is UEF institutional publication repository, UEF//eRepository, which was launched in February 2017. At the moment about 31% of UEF scientific publications are open access, but substantial increase is expected. The next big challenge in open research is data management and opening. UEF Library is starting to build a metadata portal for research data in order to conceive the data produced by UEF researchers and to help finding data for potential reuse.Open science will also be included in information retrieval studies of master's degree and doctoral students. To encourage students and teachers in OA publishing, during the international open access week, one student publishing master's thesis openly will be rewarded with a stipend by the Library. Department having the highest rate of OA master's theses will also be adorned with flowers.Open science is a matter of teamwork, committing and keeping up to date.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Söderholm ◽  
Anne Sunikka

Watch the VIDEO here. Presenter – Maria SöderholmResearch data management (RDM) is a complex and dynamic topic, and demands diverse expertise, skills and knowledge. The RDM expertise includes subtopics like collection/provision of data; storage and processing of data; long-term preservation requirements of the data; and funders’ demands and solutions to share, re-find and re-use research data. Usually the expertise related to these RDM subtopics is spread to several university units, both academic and administrative. Therefore, many tasks related to RDM, for example, day-to-day practices, the supply of services and the development work are best carried out in a network-based cooperation.In the presentation, we will introduce our RDM related partnership and networking of Aalto University. As a starting point, we introduce the internal service development working principles that our RDM network work is based on. However, the focus will be on describing our RDM working group and development activities.Aalto’s Research Data Management Programme forms the backbone for RDM work. It establishes seven separate action points for RDM activities: 1) open access  publishing; 2) implementation of data management planning tool; 3) metadata catalogue for open data; 4) data publishing; 5) comprehensive repository service for storage, back-up and collaboration; 6) combining openness and innovation; and 7) RDM awareness building activities. The actors in the RDM network consist of Research and Innovation Services (leading the group), IT Services, and Learning Centre (previously Library).In the presentation, we will introduce the core actors in more detail, paying attention to the complementarity of the roles; and the activities and the aims, which steer the work. We also discuss the meaning and consequences of the network-based cooperation for the working group.First, the RDM group acts as a joint platform for comprehensive RDM information. Important means of data gathering are surveys and informal discussion with researcher. In the future, formal group discussions on RDM needs are hosted. The previous discussions with researchers have underlined the importance of arranging services for both disciplinary and data specific needs in addition to common university level service needs.Second, the group is a messenger of the RDM topics. Our task is to rise internal RDM awareness and disseminate national and international information and development trends in the university.The third and the most challenging aim is the RDM service planning and delivery. Our task is to identify the existing in-house services, to map the suitable services provided by national and international agents as well as to recognize the needs for new services. Our service portfolio covers both consultation/informational services and technical, hands-on services. However, many of our research data services are still in the planning or piloting stage, thus cooperation with researchers is essential.In our experience, the network-based collaboration model that foster individuals’ interconnectedness is crucial for surviving with the built-in dynamism of RDM. This model provides a non-hierarchical and flexible environment for actions to meet the increasing expectations for research data services we face from the funders, governments, and researchers.


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