OSI 2018 Summary Report

The Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) is an ambitious, global, multi-stakeholder effort to improve the flow of information within research and between researchers, policymakers, funders and the general public. OSI’s main goals are to improve the openness of research and scholarly outputs, lower the barriers for researchers and scholars everywhere to engage in the global research community, and increase opportunities for all countries and people everywhere to benefit from this engagement. Closely connected to this work, OSI is also focusing on correcting a broad range of scholarly communication deficiencies and inefficiencies—without these corrections, open will not be achievable or sustainable.

OSI 2017 Summary Report

The Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) is the world’s only global, large-scale, multi-stakeholder effort to improve the flow of information within research and between researchers, policymakers, funders and the public. This effort, which is nearing its third full year of operation, was developed in partnership between the Science Communication Institute (SCI) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in early 2016. There is no other initiative like this, focusing on improving the entire landscape of research communication (from peer review to open access to publish or perish pressures in academia) by working together instead of separately through dozens of individual and often conflicting efforts. As you will see in this report, OSI participants are beginning to understand how they might be able to work together as a global community on this issue. Most participants see eye to eye on the broad outlines of this challenge, and their reports—considered together and building upon each other—point to specific solutions that can be developed starting this year with minimal funding. Fully pursuing all the recommendations will require much more funding, but our hope is that we can get started now on a tight budget and build from there.On behalf of SCI and OSI, thank you to our sponsors who have made this work possible, and to OSI participants who have contributed so much of their time and energies to this important effort.

Peer Review Workgroup Report

Building on the peer review workgroup’s proposals from OSI2016, this workgroup will develop a broader and clearer description of peer review that considers the different needs for different stages of review, as well as discuss possibly emerging issues such as the need to promote uniform interpretation and enforcement of peer review definitions, and will develop proposals for moving forward.

Impact Factors Workgroup Report

Following up on recommendations from OSI 2016, this team will dig deeper into the question of developing and recommending new tools to repair or replace the journal impact factor (and/or how it is used), and propose actions the OSI community can take between now and the next meeting. What’s needed? What change is realistic and how will we get there from here?

Rogue Solutions & New Open Resources Workgroup Report

What are the impacts of Sci-Hub and other rogue solutions on open access and what is the future of this approach, which may be gaining new mainstream support (noting for instance Wellcome’s recent funding of ResearchGate). What new resources should the scholarly community develop (and how) that would be useful and legal additions to our progress toward open (a new blacklist for instance, or new repositories)? This group will also integrate (to the extent possible) ideas raised by the information overload workgroup from OSI 2016.

Open IP Workgroup Report

As a new issue for OSI2017, this workgroup (originally designated as the Patent Literature workgroup) will look at patent literature, research reports, databases and other published information. OSI by design has a university-centric and journal-centric bias to the perspectives being considered. Patent literature, research reports, and databases are also important sources of research information—more so than journals in some disciplines (although these still reference journal articles). As with journal articles, this information isn’t always free or easy to find and is suffering from some of the same usability issues as journal articles.

Global Flip & Other Studies Workgroup Report

In their report, delegates of the Who Decides? workgroup of the OSI2016 conference put forth three proposals in which key stakeholders might convene to enact an economically viable and sustainable transformation of the current scholarly communications system to one of open access. The “Global Flip” workgroup of OSI2017 discussed the previous year’s “Proposal 3: Transformation: a “global flip” of research journals to open access” in which “libraries, publishers, and funders, convened by an organization with global standing, come together to redirect subscription funding toward transforming existing journals to open access publication.” Tasked with creating broad action plans for further research into the feasibility and impact of such a transformation, we identify a number of driving forces in the envisioned transformation, which could be further developed to assure its ultimate success as well as possible barriers to its desired fruition and suggested actions to remove them.

Culture of Communication Workgroup Report

Following a common thread from throughout OSI2016, this workgroup will develop partnership proposals for this community to work together to improve the culture of communication inside academia, particularly inside research. As part of this effort, it may be important to clarify messaging surrounding the benefits and impacts of open access (OA) inside academia, particularly inside research. It may also be important to determine what resources and information are needed before this messaging can be effective, including showing the benefits of OA to a skeptical research community; addressing the many concerns of stakeholders; clearly explaining its pros and cons; and demonstrating the case for why the transition to OA is worth the trouble.