Open Science Talk is a podcast about Open Science, Open Access, Open Education, Open Data, Open Software … pretty much «open anything». We invite guests to explain different topics or share with us some of their research practises and reflections related to Open Science.
A realistic researcher’s take on Open Science services
Katie Smart served as a research librarian at UiT The Arctic University of Norway from 2022 to 2025. A geologist specializing in research on mantle petrology, she has experience from three countries (Canada, Germany, South Africa) before she arrived at UiT. In this episode, she discusses different local and national services for open science that she has been involved in during her time in Norway and emphasizes that marketing open science to academia must include the perspective of the target audience: the researchers. Understanding the academic mindset and catering to researchers’ needs is key for success in widespread adoption of open science practices, she argues. Words matter: do not use the jargon of librarians and other service staff but find expressions that trigger researchers’ interest. Do not take for granted that researchers are idealists willing to change habits just for the sake of the common good. Although open science can be framed benefiting academia and society as a whole, in order to get strong buy-in from academia it must also be framed as to how it will propel each individual’s career. First published online: July 4, 2025.
Copyright (c) 2025 Katie Smart, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
National Diamond Open Access funding models
How can Diamond Open Access be funded? Three different approaches are presented in this conversation. The Finnish Federation of Learned Societies (TSV) hosts a platform with more than 150 learned society journals. For the last couple of years, they have been distributing funds specifically to cover the operating costs of under-financed Diamond journals. The grantees are required to not make any profit in addition to the governmental funds they get through TSV. In Canada, the centralized dissemination platform Érudit showcases more than 250 active, non-commercial scholarly journals. Thanks to government funding of scholarly journals, a thriving library publishing sector, and Érudit's own coordinated funding scheme, the majority of Canadian journals are by now Diamond. In the Netherlands, a special fund for flipping journals to Diamond Open Access has just closed its first call. The fund is designed to help medium to large size journals transition away from a commercial business model. The three interlocutors each have prominent roles in these funding schemes. Together they reflect upon the future of academic publishing and how the present landscape might look when viewed 150 years from now. Recording made April 8, 2025. First published online: May 28, 2025.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sami Syrjämäki, Jessica Dallaire-Clark, Jeroen Sondervan, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
In 2017, the University of Lorraine cancelled its subscription to Springer and in 2023, it cancelled its deal with Wiley. The money saved has been channeled into an Open Science Fund which supports open research infrastructures, training and support programmes for open research, and diamond open access publishing. With additional financing from regional research institutes and the national ministry, its annual budget currently amounts to approximately 500,000 Euros. A broad representative committee has been set up to decide on the use of the fund. The support for diamond open access journals – whose editors are affiliated with Université de Lorraine or whose scope is especially important for the Lorraine region – typically entails support in the range of 2000 Euros per year. With this money, editors of small and medium-sized scholar-led journals can hire copy-editing assistance, arrange editorial board meetings and workshop, et cetera. As Vice-President for Open Science at the University, Nicolas Fressengeas stresses the importance of involving the right stakeholders within and around the university to make the best possible use of the Open Science Fund. He is also concerned with research assessment reforms aiming to assure that the extra work required to follow open research practices is properly rewarded. As Head of Research Support at the University Library, Jean-François Lutz argues that the consequences for researchers and students as a result of the cancellation of the Springer and Wiley deals were less acutely felt than one might have expected. The responsibility of supporting open science may be a new challenge to most librarians, but it does make the library relevant and useful for a broad group of researchers, many of whom would not have been in contact with the library if it wasn’t for the Open Science Fund and the services and projects associated with it. The episode was recorded shortly after Norway cancelled its deal with Wiley and will likely serve as inspiration for many institutions that wish to channel money saved on big deals into support for Open Science. First published online: March 31, 2025.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nicolas Fressengeas, Jean-François Lutz, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing) published its first dataset on June 13, 2014. Since then, the repository has grown to 173 datasets, each of which is available in open access and equipped with metadata explaining its contents. Two of the most frequent users of the archive, professor of Russian linguistics Laura A. Janda and postdoc of English linguistics Lukas Sönning share their experiences and ideas for the future. A key message is how using a curated data repository has helped raising the quality of their own research by making it more transparent and reusable for others. Materials referred to in the episode include: a humorous YouTube clip (2014) featuring Laura A. Janda and others; a Leiden dissertation (later published as a book) by Jaap Kamphuis; a workshop at the ISLE 5 conference (2018) organised by Lukas Sönning and Valentin Werner; a paper at the ICAME 45 conference (2024) by Lukas Sönning, Jason Grafmiller and Raquel P. Romasanta. First published online: June 12, 2024.
Copyright (c) 2024 Laura A. Janda, Lukas Sönning, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
KOALA – Building Support for Diamond Open Access
A discussion with Marco Tullney, initiator of the bottom-up initiative KOALA (Konsortiale Open Access Lösungen Aufbauen, i.e. Establishing Consortial Open Access Solutions). Building upon an established role in the organisation of library consortia that negotiate deals with commercial publishers, Tullney and his colleagues have succeeded to acquire small sums from more than a hundred partner libraries to fund journals and books series. Each funding period lasts for three years, with the consortia covering all legitimate costs of running a publication outlet. So far, ten small to medium sized journals have received funding, as well as two smaller book series. Based on his experience from the German-speaking area, Tullney shares several pieces of advice on how to set up similar funding mechanisms in other regions. He also raises the fundamental question about how to make sure that Diamond OA can grow from its current status as a nieche phenomenon in a limited spectrum of disciplines to becoming a sustainable and attractive model for scholars across all fields. First published online: May 3, 2024.
Copyright (c) 2024 Marco Tullney, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is a non-profit initiative specialising in undertaking research on infrastructure tailor-made for open science and in discussing their findings with stakeholders to increase the investment in, and adoption of, open infrastructure. With a team of eight based in Europe, the USA and Africa, IOI also supports the adoption of open infrastructure through research-based funding pilots such as the IOI Fund. Its most recent tool is a collaboratively developed, openly available database designed to help institutions identify and evaluate open infrastructure solutions. This database, the Infra Finder, at the time of its launch contains structured information on 57 infrastructure providers that can be compared in a side-by-side view. First published online: April 23, 2024.
Copyright (c) 2024 Emmy Tsang, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The European Landscape of Institutional Publishing
This episode of Open Science Talk deals with Diamond Open Access publishing services provided by instutitions. The EU-funded project DIAMAS (Developing Institutional Open Acces Publisihing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication) has recently published a 240-page landscape report on «Institutional Publishing in the E[uropean] R[esearch] A[rea]; results from the DIAMAS survey». Work Package leader Jan Erik Frantsvåg discusses the main findings of the report together with Sona Arasteh, co-author of a synopsis of the same report, comprising 30 richly illustrated pages. In the discussion, the landscape report and its synopsis is contextualized alongside an earlier study on the global landscape of Diamond Open Access Publishing; on-going projects such as DIAMAS’ sister projects CRAFT-OA and PALOMERA; and plans for capacity building for Diamond Open Access Publishing on global, regional and national levels. Digital recording, unfortunately with problematic sound quality. First published online: Feb 13, 2024.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sona Arasteh, Jan Erik Frantsvåg, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
A discussion on SPARC Europe's report Opening Knowledge: Retaining Rights and Open Licensing in Europe (made public via Zenodo, 28 June 2023). Three of the authors of the report share their thoughts on why the landscape differs so much between countries. Questions include why so many institutions in the United Kingdom and Norway stand out as early adopters, whereas other countries have yet to start implementing Rights Retention Policies, be it a national or institutional level. Various outreach and dissemination activities are on-going, and there appears to be promising developments in several European countries that might radically change the landscape for open licensing and self-archiving across Europe, thereby speeding up the transformation towards full open access to the scholarly record. The recording was made in conjunction with the 18th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing in Tromsø, November 2023. First published online: January 23, 2024.
Copyright (c) 2024 Vanessa Proudman, John Treadway, Iva Melinščak Zlodi; Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Research Assessment – Navigating Pitfalls and Promoting Change
This is a podcast version of the closing panel discussion at The 18th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing (Tromsø, Norway, 8–10 November 2023). The main theme of the conference was scholarly communication in its myriad of forms. The push for a reform of research assessment argues for precisely the need to recognize and reward a wider set of research activities and competencies, not least in order to ensure that science – and scientics – remain in close contact with society. The demands for change will surely impact how and where research is disseminated and communicated. A key question then is how to evaluate research activities and outputs beyond academic publications. The panelists reflected on questions such as: how do we measure the impact of citizen science, or document quality in innovative research practices and scholarly outputs? And how to ensure consensus on assessment methods for a wider and more inclusive range of research activities within a diverse academic landscape? The panel consisted of champions of research assessment reform (Yensi Flores Bueso, University of Washington / University College Cork; Kirstie Whitaker, The Alan Turing Institute) and university leaders (Hervé Dole, vice-president for arts, culture and society at Université Paris-Saclay; Jan-Gunnar Winther, pro-rector for research and development, UiT). Questions were prepared by Tanja Larssen (open science adviser, UiT) in collaboration with Per Pippin Aspaas (head of library research and publishing support, UiT), who chaired the panel on the day. First published as a podcast: December 19, 2023. A video recording of the same session – with metadata providing more detailed information on each panelist – can be found at https://doi.org/10.7557/5.7276.
Copyright (c) 2023 Yensi Flores Bueso, Kirstie Whitaker, Hervé Dole, Jan-Gunnar Winther, Tanja Larssen, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Felix Schönbrodt, Professor of Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich, tells about an initiative that he coordinates within the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie (German Psychological Society). Motivated by the Reproducibility Crisis and a rising frustration with the publishers of high-ranking journals, Schönbrodt has co-authored three position papers on the theme of responsible research assessment. The suggestion is to develop a two-stage evaluation system for hiring, the first of which will use responsible metrics with emphasis on open data, pre-registration and several aspects of reproducibility, whereas the second stage will focus on a qualitative (content-oriented) evaluation of selected candidates. The propositions of Schönbrodt’s group have so far led to published feedback from more than 40 different scholars. Besides his nation-wide work within the German Psychological Society, Schönbrodt is the managing director of LMU’s Open Science Centre, where scholars from different disciplines convene for workshops on various aspects of Open Science. Under the nickname «nicebread» (Schön = nice, Brodt = bread), he also runs a personal blog and a project webpage on GitHub. Interview recorded in Munich, October 2023. First published online: November 29, 2023.
Copyright (c) 2023 Felix Schönbrodt, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Janine Bijsterbosch, member of the editorial team of Imaging Neuroscience, informs about their recent break with publishing giant Elsevier. Collectively, the entire team of editors of Neuroimage left Elsevier to form a new journal, Imaging Neuroscience, at MIT Press. While Neuroimage already was an open access journal, it charged 3,450 dollars in Article Processing Charge (APC). At MIT Press, Imaging Neuroscience will charge 1,600 dollars in APC, with waivers for authors from low- and middle-income countries. Bijsterbosch explains why the editors collectively resigned from Neuroimage and what they hope to achieve with the move to a less costly model. At the time when the editors left Neuroimage, they published around 1,000 peer reviewed articles per year, with an Impact Factor of 7.4. With the non-profit Imaging Neuroscience, they hope to bring authors and peer reviewers with them in their effort to build the (new) leading publishing outlet for researchers in the field. The reception has been quite positive and large amounts of manuscripts are already being submitted to the new journal. Besides the economics and ethics of sustainability, Bijsterbosch is concerned with other aspects of open and transparent science, such as Open Code and Open Data. She sees Imaging Neuroscience as a player in this field as well, with Author’s Instructions including statements about the sharing of code and data whenever possible.
Copyright (c) 2023 Janine Bijsterbosch, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
An online conversation with two representatives of Brill, a publisher that is particularly strong in the Humanities and Social Sciences. A 340-year-old publishing house, Brill still primarily sells books and journals in a traditional manner, i.e. as hardcopies and online fulltexts behind a paywall. Currently, Brill has a total output of around 1,400 academic books per year. Just over 10% of these titles are published in Open Access thanks to authors (or their institutions) paying a Book Processing Charge (BPC). Among its 300+ peer-reviewed journals, approx. 10% are published according to the Diamond Open Access model, meaning that some sort of sponsorship allows Brill to offer its services with no author- or reader-facing charges. In the discussion, Open Research Officer Stephanie Veldman explains the economic mechanisms and strategic thinking behind Brill’s work in the field of open access. Publishing director for History, Social Sciences and Biology Arjan van Dijk highlights the author’s and editor’s perspectives, using the successful Journal of Jesuit Studies (launched in 2013) as a concrete example. Both Veldman and van Dijk see it as an important part of their mission to increase the proportion of books and journals that are published in open access. First published online: June 7, 2023.
Copyright (c) 2023 Stephanie Veldman, Arjan van Dijk, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as promoter of Open Research
An online interview with Ashley Farley, program officer of Knowledge and Research Services at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As of 2023, the Gates Foundation earmarks some 8,000,000,000 US Dollars annually to its various philanthropic goals. Focusing on global health and global development, the Gates Foundation supports a wide range of research and development activities in fields such as child nutrition, family planning, eradication of poverty and diseases, etc. In this podcast, Farley explains why open research lies at the heart of the Gates Foundation’s strategies. The Gates Foundation has been an early adopter and partner of the European Plan S initiative, which from the very start has been very well aligned to its own policies. Gates Foundation grantees are obliged to make all publications stemming from project funding available in open access, and, if possible, to archive their research datasets openly as well. The Gates Open Research Platform (a combination of a preprint-service and a megajournal) is an alternative route for grantees who do not want to publish their articles through traditional publication outlets. Accompanying datasets are stored elsewhere but with links from the platform. In addition, the non-profit organization OA.Works helps the Gates Foundation monitor that requirements are met. Among other things, OA.Works has been instrumental in setting up a Share Your Paper service to help researchers (not just grantees of the Gates Foundation) verify whether a version of their article can be legally uploaded to the Green Open Access repository Zenodo. Farley is also working directly with publishers to make sure that Gold Open Access that has been paid for is provided properly and in line with the contract. The Biden Administration recently announced a Year of Open Science in the USA. Farley sees various agencies, such as NASA, as driving forces behind this declaration. Gradually, a cultural shift is bound to take place, as prejudices towards open sharing of data, peer review reports and even grant applications will be replaced with a culture permeated by more open and transparent ways of doing research, Farley argues. She also argues strongly in favor of the Rights Retention Strategy and sees it as a way of empowering researchers by securing that they have more control of their work. First published online January 31, 2023.
Copyright (c) 2023 Ashley Farley, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was founded by Lars Bjørnshauge in 2003; the current managing director is Joanna Ball. A cornerstone in the global Open Science landscape, DOAJ currently lists more than 18,000 peer-reviewed, strictly open access journals (Gold or Diamond). Dominic Mitchell, who has worked for DOAJ for the last ten years, explains how the indexing process is managed by a combination of volunteers and salaried staff like himself, how they work to exclude predatory journals from the list, and how DOAJ is financed. Furthermore, DOAJ is involved in several collaborative projects promoting high-quality scholarly publishing, including The Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (4th ed., 2022). Recording made during the 17th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing. First published online: December 30, 2022.
Copyright (c) 2022 Dominic Mitchell, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Pierre Mounier presents OPERAS, the European research infrastructure dedicated to open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities. With 10 core and a further 40+ member institutions from 16 different countries, its aim is to share knowledge between stakeholders across Europe. As a distributed infrastructure, OPERAS consists of a number of multinational Special Interest Groups that work on specific topics with the aim of developing services and conducting projects at a European level. Ranging from technical service providers and libraries through university presses and learned societies to entire research institutes and universities, OPERAS brings together a variety of stakeholders that work collectively to promote open dissemination of research-based knowledge about society and culture. All interest groups are convened twice a year for an "assembly of the commons"; further coordinating and strategic tasks are taken care of by an Executive Committee and a General Assembly. All member organisations are required to work for open access. Individuals that want to contribute are encouraged to check whether there are any member institutions in their country; in case not, they can always contact one of the coordinators (Pierre Mounier or Suzanne Dumouchel) or another member of the Executive Committee directly. Recording made in conjunction with the 17th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing. First published online: December 27, 2022.
Copyright (c) 2022 Pierre Mounier, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Jadranka Stojanovski discusses the evolution of library support for open science from a Croatian perspective. From her vantage point as (former) library director of the Ruđer Bošković Institute and associate professor at the department of information science of the University of Zadar, Stojanovski has been a pioneer in establishing services exploiting the possibilities offered by new information technologies since the 1990s. Many of her activities have been connected to broad European collaborative projects such as OpenAIRE, OASPA, and EOSC. The Croatian approach has been a very proactive one. Already in 1997, the CROSBI was launched, a combined national scientific bibliography and repository for Green Open Access documents. Although deposition of articles and other research documents is entirely voluntary, CROSBI now carries metadata on more than 725,000 documents, a large proportion of which are available in fulltext. Alongisde CROSBI, there are also several institutions running their own institutional repositories. There is now extensive collaboration between these services in the form of DABAR (‘beaver’ in English), aiming to enhance the interoperability and findability of documents stored in the various repositories. Stojanovski has also been involved in setting up an inventory on Who’s Who in Science in Croatia as well as a database on scientific equipment, Šestar (‘pair of compasses’). Set up in 2005, the HRČAK (‘hamster’) platform for Croatian scientific and professional journals has been a massive success. Less than twenty years after its inception, it now carries more than 500 scholarly journals and series of conference proceedings, nearly all of which are Diamond Open Access (i.e., free to the reader and with no author-facing publishing charges). Roughly 150 of these journals receive annual subsidies from the government, the rest are fully based on voluntary work from individual editors and the institutions or learned societies they represent. Only around 25 HRČAK journals charge Article Processing Charges. The Social Sciences and Humanities are particularly well represented on the platform, with many journals publishing in Croatian despite the lack of an official language policy in favor of Croatian as a scholarly language. The University Computing Centre in Zagreb (SRCE, ‘heart’) is responsible for the technical development of HRČAK, which is based on seamless interconnection between in-house developed software and open-source software for editorial processes, primarily Open Journal Systems. A national Research Data Policy or, better still, a general Open Science Policy is highly desirable, Stojanovski argues. Infrastructure is in place, but usage will undoubtedly rise significantly as soon as open science practices become mandatory. Alongside Dominic Tate (episode 43) and Pierre Mounier (episode 44), Jadranka was a keynote speaker at the 17th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing. This interview was first published online on December 13, 2022.
Copyright (c) 2022 Jadranka Stojanovski, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
In this episode, we are discussing the project Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication, in short: DIAMAS. At the heart of the project is support for Diamond Open Access, i.e. free for the reader as well as the author (no publishing charges). Co-lead of DIAMAS, Pierre Mounier explains the importance of lending support to not-for-profit institutional publishing. Besides the diversity offered by such scholar-led, high quality publication outlets, the multilingualism that they represent is key when the dissemination of knowledge and the promotion of citizen science across Europe is taken into account. The Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Publishing lends verbal support to linguistically diverse scholarly outputs; the EU-funded DIAMAS Project paves the way for stronger and more sustainable infrastructures facilitating them. Since its inception in September 2022, the project will last for 3 years. An ultimate goal of DIAMAS is to help the providers of publishing services raise the quality and visibility of diamond open access by establishing a Europe-wide capacity center. A sister project, CRAFT-OA, focusing on the purely technical aspects of institutional diamond open access publishing begins in January 2023. The preliminary Diamond OA Journals Study (published March 2021), the first ever global survey of diamond open access journals, serves as foundation for both projects. The recording was made in conjunction with the Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing in December 2022. First published online January 10, 2023.
Copyright (c) 2023 Pierre Mounier, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
In this episode, a true Nestor of Open Science, Pierre Mounier talks us through the origins and growth of various French infrastructures for open research, especially in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). Based at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), he has been instrumental in transforming revues.org into OpenEdition, a national publishing infrastructure for open-access journals and books in the SSH disciplines. Mounier also discusses whether political ambitions concerning the rayonnement (‘radiance’, i.e. diffusion) of French as an international language has been a factor in acquiring governmental support for a service like OpenEdition. When negotiating with private publishing houses, the situation of the SSH disciplines contrasts to the domain of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine (STEM). In the latter domain, the formation of COSO (Comité pour la science ouverte) has proved extremely important when negotiating read-and-publish deals with major publishers. Regarding the SSH, Mounier argues for a more soft and dialogic approach, since the private companies publishing French books and journals are usually small and far less profit-oriented. The multidisciplinary CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) is a driver for open access and open research in general. For example, when physicists wanted to have a French repository mirroring the preprint server arXiv.org, this initiative grew organically into the all-encompassing HAL repository, thanks to collaboration between various disciplines facilitated by the CNRS. As for research data repositories, the set-up is slightly different. There now exists both a fallback national repository for researchers that lack an institutional or disciplinary service for their data and a federated service connecting the various institutional and disciplinary repositories across the country. One such disciplinary service is the Huma-Num, which runs a repository designated for Digital Humanities (Humanités numeriques). This podcast recording was made in conjunction with the Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing. First published online December 8, 2022.
The Rights Retention Policy of Edinburgh University
As the first UK institution, Edinburgh University adopted a Rights Retention Policy on 1st January 2022. As a result, all research articles written by Edinburgh’s researchers can now be made legally available in open access immediately upon publication in a journal or a volume of conference proceedings. In this episode, head of Library Research Support at Edinburgh University Library, Dominic Tate explains how the policy came into being and how it has been received by academic publishers. In addition to Plan S, the 41 recommendations as stated in an Open Science Roadmap developed by a working group within LERU (League of European Research Universities) served as inspiration for the latest revision of the Open Access Policy at Edinburgh University. The institution has had an institutional repository in place for two decades and most researchers are routinely depositing their articles there. The next step was to enable these articles (usually in the form of the Author's Accepted Manuscript, AAM) to be made immediately available in open access without any embargo periods or other restrictions. About 160 publishers have received prior notice about Edinburgh’s rights retention policy and the reception has been overwhelmingly positive. The podcast recording was made in conjunction with the Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing. It was first published online December 5, 2022.
Copyright (c) 2022 Dominic Tate, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The service for open research datasets Dataverse.no was established in 2017. Five years later, it holds some 1,300 datasets created by researchers at fourteen partner institutions. All submitted datasets are curated (checked) before they are published by curators at the various institutions. In addition, curators have established courses and webinars helping researchers make their datasets as FAIR as possible (FAIR = Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). In this episode, Leif Longva and Philipp Conzett tell about how it has expanded, from a subject-specific archive called TROLLing (Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics) to the generic, CoreTrustSeal-certified service that we see today.
Copyright (c) 2022 Leif Longva, Philipp Conzett, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Dr. h.c. Johan Rooryck – an in-depth interview
On 1 September 2022, professor of linguistics and director of cOAlition S Johan Rooryck was created a doctor honoris causa at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. In this in-depth interview, Rooryck reflects on his career so far and shares his vision of a future where scholar-led, fair and equitable open access prevails over commercial publishing structures. Johan Rooryck starts out by explaining how he became the editor-in-chief of the high-ranking journal Lingua in 1999, how his relations with the publisher Elsevier became increasingly strained, and how he succeeded in bringing all his co-editors along in a sensational break with Elsevier. Instead, they launched the fully open access journal Glossa (now a high-ranking journal of general linguistics) at the platform Open Library of Humanities, in 2015. Rooryck in particular dwells on the non-commercial model known as Diamond Open Access, with no charges facing either readers or authors. Speaking on behalf of Plan S and the cOAlition S, whose executive director he became in 2019, Rooryck also broadens the view to all forms of open access, including open access to books and research data. At the end, he looks ahead to the future, when faced with the final, fundamental question: are you an optimist? First published online: September 12, 2022
Copyright (c) 2022 Per Pippin Aspaas, Johan Rooryck https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
An Institutional Rights Retention Strategy
Prorector for research and development at UiT The Arctic University of Norway informs about the institution's new Open Access Policy, in which Rights Retention takes a prominent place. All authors employed by UiT retain the rights to their peer-reviewed manuscripts, which can now be uploaded and be made available without any embargo period in the institutional repository, Munin, regardless of the policies of the publisher. In case an individual author refuses, (s)he is free to opt out, but no publisher shall have the right to force her/him to not make a manuscript publicly available in green open access through the institution's open repository. The original Norwegian policy document ("Prinsipper og retningslinjer for åpen tilgang til vitenskapelige publikasjoner ved UiT") is available through the website uit.no/publisering; an English translation will follow soon at en.uit.no/publishing. First published online: January 12, 2021
Copyright (c) 2022 Camilla Brekke, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Journal transition to an Open Access platform
The National Library of Sweden recently launched an Open Journal Systems-based platform for Swedish Open Access journals, known as Publicera (publicera.kb.se). So far, three peer-reviewed journals from the humanities and social sciences have completed their transition onto the platform. In this episode, the editors of the journals describe the rationale behind the transition process and reflect upon the economics, workflows, technicalities and not least the long-term strategic goals of their journals in an international open science landscape. The journals are Current Swedish Archaeology (founded 1993), Kulturella Perspektiv: Svensk etnologisk tidskrift (i.e., Swedish journal of ethnology, founded 1992), and Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap (Journal of literary studies, founded 1971). The four interviewees are editors of the three journals. First published online: December 9, 2021.
Copyright (c) 2021 Jenny Gunnarsson Payne, Alison Klevnäs, Sophie Bergerbrant, Isak Hyltén-Cavallius, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Recognition & Rewards in the Netherlands
In this episode, Kim Huijpen from the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) tells about the programme following the publication of Room for Everyone's Talent, a position paper aiming for a wholescale overhaul of the practices of research assessment in the Netherlands. The podcast interview was made in conjunction with the 16th Munin Conference on Scholarly publishing in November 2021 (see abstract and video recording of Kim Huijpen's conference paper). The nation-wide follow-up programme, named Recognition & Rewards, is coordinated by Kim Huijpen. In her dialogue with stakeholder at Dutch institutions, she often meets dilemmas and concerns that are familiar from similar debates in other countries. Nevertheless, more and more institutions are now implementing the the principles and guidelines laid out in the 2019 position paper, thereby stimulating the growth of open science practices and the diversification of career paths in Dutch academia. The on-going process can be followed on several platforms, including: Twitter: https://twitter.com/recogrewards?lang=en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/recognition-rewards/ Youtube: Recognition & Rewards playlist Newsletter: https://recognitionrewards.nl/blog/newsletter-recognition-rewards/ DORA Repository: Updated information on the Dutch Recognition & Rewards Programme See also a recap of the Recognition & Rewards Festival (January 2021) and recorded webinars on rewarding teaching (November 2020). A summary of The Dutch Recognition & Rewards Programme can also be found in the DORA Repository
Copyright (c) 2021 Kim Huijpen, Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
In this episode, we discuss the new service Open Polar: The Global Open Access Portal for Research Data and Publications on the Arctic and Antarctic (openpolar.no). Presenting only freely available documents on the Arctic and Antarctic, Open Polar is a thematic search engine that can be a useful tool for both researchers and decision makers. Tamer Abu-Alam explains the reasons for filtering out all research documents that are not available in open access, thereby promoting open science. Of the 1,8 million records currently included in Open Polar, approx. 22,5 percent are research datasets, which makes the service unique. First published online August 30, 2021.
Copyright (c) 2021 Tamer Abu-Alam; Per Pippin Aspaas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
This interview was recorded in July 2020 for DocEnhance, an EU-funded project that aims to broaden the expertise of PhDs by developing courses in transferable skills. One such transferable skill is how to manage your research data in a transparent manner and as much as possible in accordance with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reproducible). Professor of computational chemistry and prorector for research and development at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Kenneth Ruud gives an introduction to FAIR and transparent research data management, emphasizing that this will not only help Science develop, but also help the career of individual researchers. First published online: July 9, 2021.
Copyright (c) 2021 Kenneth Ruud, Per Pippin Aspaas
Eirik Samuelsen, senior meteorologist at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (Met) and UiT The Arctic University of Norway, discusses the importance of citizen science to current meteorology in Norway. Amateurs contribute to the improvement of weather forecasts in various ways, from anecdotic but valuable feedback on errors in the forecast to a large network of private weather stations providing precious data for the free-to-use weather service www.yr.no. Besides yr.no as such, which is maintained by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), there is mention of Eiriks værblogg (Eirik's weather blog) on Facebook, the network of Netatmo Weather Stations, the open database of meteorological models and weather data thredds.met.no, and the project Smart Senja. First published online September 23, 2020.
Copyright (c) 2020 Eirik Samuelsen, Per Pippin Aspaas
Mariann Løkse, head of Library Services, and Øystein Lund, head of the Resource Center for Teaching, Learning and Techology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway discuss library support for open education. They share their thoughts on online education in general and during a period of COVID-19 lockdown in particular. They talk us through information literacy, MOOCs, learning outcomes from online courses as compared to traditional classroom lectures, and a range of other aspects of open education. During the discussion, the following web services and online documents are mentioned: iKomp (a MOOC on information literacy, in Norwegian and English); https://www.sevuppt.no/ (a MOOC on pedagogical supervision, in Norwegian); https://doi.org/10.7557/15.5501 (Mariann Løkse's contribution to a collection of articles dedicated to Stein Høydalsvik on his retirement, in Norwegian); https://hdl.handle.net/10037/3823 (the doctoral thesis of Øystein Lund within the field of digital supervision and learning, in Norwegian). First published online June 25, 2020.
Copyright (c) 2020 Mariann Løkse, Øystein Lund, Per Pippin Aspaas
In this episode, we are discussing SMARTool (Strategic Mastery of Russian Tool), a free-to-use online resource for learners of the Russian language. Professor of Russian Laura Janda explains the pedagogical principles behind the tool and plans for future expansions, whereas IT engineer Radovan Bast shares his views on how the choice of sharing the code openly on GitHub serves the needs of the wider community of programmers as well as language learners.
Copyright (c) 2020 Laura A. Janda, Radovan Bast, Per Pippin Aspaas
In this episode, we are exploring a student's perspective on Open Science – and specifically replication studies. Kristoffer Klevjer recently finished his Master’s degree in psychology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and has now taken on a PhD. But already as a Master student, Klevjer was involved in replication studies. In his experience, replication studies can be beneficial to the student, the supervisor, and the scientific community at large. Furthermore, Klevjer argues that replications can be well suited for students at Bachelor level as well. The replication Klevjer did for his Master's degree can be found here. In the interview, Klevjer refers to several publications and projects, including: - Kool, W., McGuire, J. T., Rosen, Z. B., & Botvinick, M. M. (2010). Decision making and the avoidance of cognitive demand. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 139(4), 665–682. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020198 - The Collaborative Replications and Education Project on the Open Science Framework platform - The Psychological Science Accelerator First published online March 9, 2020.
Copyright (c) 2020 Kristoffer Klevjer, Per Pippin Aspaas