Septentrio Conference Series

National approaches to Open Access publishing

2024-11-04T14:27:57+01:00

Open Access implies universal access to scholarly publications. While the goals are global, many of the necessary changes need to be implemented in national settings. The goal of this panel discussion is to highlight various examples of activities and developments in a variety of countries. The session will begin with four lightning talks (6–7 minutes each), in which representatives of Spain, Algeria, the Netherlands, and Lithuania will highlight various aspects of Open Access development in their respective countries. After the lightning talks, there will be a discussion moderated by Iva Melinščak Zlodi, scholarly communication and e-resources librarian at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb (Croatia).

In Spain, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) has conducted a survey of 254 scholarly journals to see whether they fulfill a variety of standards in the domain of open access publishing. These standards include publication of content under open access licences, the promotion of supplementary material deposition, and the possibility of open peer review, among others. María Ángeles Coslado, responsible fo the journal evaluation process at FECYT will give a lightning talk titled “Raising Open Science through the editorial quality assessment processes of scientific journals: a Spanish perspective.”

A comparable survey on the awareness and implementation of open access among scholarly journals in Algeria was conducted in 2014 by Samir Hachani, professor of library science at the Université d’Alger 2. Since then, Algeria has embarked on a vigorous and ambitious program of implementing open access and open science at the national level. Enhancing the editorial and technical quality is as important as the quantitative increase of open access figures. Hachani will summarize the successes and deficiencies of this program in a lightning talk on “Open Access in Algeria: Ten Years Later”.

"Strengthening Diamond Open Access in the Netherlands (2024–2026)", a program funded by the Universities of the Netherlands and carried out by the Dutch consortium of university libraries (UKB) is in full swing. The project arises from the awareness that Diamond journals are often struggling. With little to no budget, reliance on volunteering, and a culture of evaluation centered on impact factors, Diamond Open Access is not flourishing to its full potential. In her lightning talk, Susanne van Rijn, program manager at the Dutch Academic Library Consortium UKB/Erasmus University Rotterdam will give a short overview of the projects involved.

Another key aspect of the publication landscape is what software scholars choose for their journals. Together with a group of colleagues from Vilnius University In Lithuania, professor at the Faculty of Communication and managing director of Vilnius University Press Arūnas Gudinavičius has investigated the use of software for different stages of the production and publication process of Lithuanian journals. In many cases, a mix of proprietary and open source software is being used. Gudinavičius’s lightning talk is titled “Publishing technologies of scholarly journals: the preferences of using publishing software in a small language country.”

Traditional Publishers and the Transition towards Open Access

2024-10-31T14:40:01+01:00

The entire publishing landscape appears to be slowly but steadily moving towards universal open access. Over the years, traditional publishers have tested out a variety of models to ensure that academic literature can be made openly available in an economically viable manner. These include Pledge to Open for books, Transformative Agreements (aka Read-and-Publish deals) and Subscribe to Open (S2O) for journals, and various forms of Diamond Open Access facilitated by public funding streams. While everybody tends to agree that open access is desirable, it may be the case that every model has both positives and negatives. In this discussion, representatives from four traditional publishers will get together and share their experiences and thoughts about the future.

The session will begin with four lightning talks (6–7 minutes each), in which representatives of Springer Nature, Universitetsforlaget, Taylor & Francis Group, and De Gruyter Brill share their experiences with different models of open access publishing. After the lightning talks, there will be a panel discussion chaired by Per Pippin Aspaas, head of Library Research and Publishing Support at UiT and member of the institution’s Library collections budget committee.

Timon Oefelein, Head of Academic Affairs – Northern and Central Europe, Springer Nature: “Accelerating open access at scale: addressing the needs of institutions and researchers worldwide.”

Nils Ivar Lahlum, Head of Publishing, Scandinavian University Press:
“How to prosper in a Diamond Open Access landscape: experiences from a publisher in Scandinavia.”

Corinna Mayer, Manager Open Access Journal Transformation, De Gruyter Brill:
“Making Open Access a reality for Humanities and Social Sciences journals: S2O as a promising path.”

Becky Hill, Head of Open Research, Taylor & Francis Group:
“Collaborative funding for Open Access books: reflections on a pilot year.”

Openness and Transparency in Peer Review

2024-11-04T13:39:56+01:00

Peer review is recognized as a fundamental part of the scholarly communication ecosystem. With the current push for increased transparency and openness in science, new ways of organizing and documenting the peer review process are emerging.

Some argue that the traditional practice of ‘double blind’ peer review favours already privileged scholars from well-esteemed institutions in North America and Europe. Mechanisms preventing less privileged groups, including scholars from low- and middle-income countries in the global south, from publishing their papers in high impact journals should be combatted. One way of levelling the field, it is argued, is to promote various forms of open peer review. Another push for openness and transparency stems from debates regarding reform of research assessment. Peer review is a fundamental contribution to research that should be appreciated when evaluating the CV of a researcher. More streamlined ways of documenting peer review will be welcomed by such reformists. Finally, cases of misconduct, such as peer reviewers asking for citation of their own papers for the sole reason of boosting their number of citations, will be easier to detect if the identity of the reviewer is revealed along with the published paper.

The session will begin with four lightning talks (6–7 minutes each), in which representatives of PREreview, eLife, Reviewer Credits, and PLOS share their experiences with different ways of promoting and facilitating more transparency in peer review. After the lightning talks, there will be a panel discussion chaired by Roald A. Øien, full professor of Special Education and Developmental Psychology at UiT and adjunct assistant professor at the Child Study Center at Yale University’s School of Medicine. Øien is part of the editorial team for the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders and teaches peer review to early career researchers.

Vanessa Fairhurst, Head of Community, PREreview:
“Why we need greater equity and transparency in peer review.”

Alessio Bolognesi, Head of Publishing Development, eLife:
“Learnings from a publishing model focussed on preprint review and curation.”

Sven Fund, Managing Director, Reviewer Credits:
“Ensuring Peer Review is a Force for Good in Open Science.”

Rebecca Kirk, Associate Editorial Director, PLOS:
“Open Science in Practice: The Evolution and Impact of Published Peer Review History.”

Inclusive Approaches to Open Access: The AEUP Network of European University Presses

2024-08-15T22:39:12+02:00

The Association of European University Presses (AEUP) serves as a support network for over 50 university presses spanning 18 European countries. These presses are remarkably diverse, particularly in their approaches to open access (OA) publishing. While some are fully committed to OA, others are at the beginning stages, reflecting the wide spectrum of practices and challenges within the organization. This diversity is a testament to AEUP's inclusive ethos, which embraces and supports its members regardless of their position on the OA journey.
This poster will highlight the varied levels of OA adoption among AEUP members, revealing that nearly 30% of these presses currently publish between zero and 25% of their content as open access, while over half have embraced OA more fully, with 75 to 100% of their publications available in open formats. This variation not only underscores the inclusive nature of AEUP but also illustrates the organization's capacity to support publishers at different stages of their transition to OA.
Transitioning to OA, however, is not without its challenges. AEUP members face several critical obstacles, including the financial sustainability of their operations, the complexities of copyright and licensing in an OA environment, and the cultural shift required within the broader academic community. The traditional revenue models—rooted in print book sales and journal subscriptions—are increasingly disrupted by OA practices, necessitating the exploration of alternative funding strategies. Furthermore, the shift to OA requires presses to navigate intricate copyright agreements and adopt licensing models such as Creative Commons, all while ensuring that authors retain appropriate rights and that their work is widely disseminated.
AEUP addresses these challenges by fostering dialogue and collaboration among its members through meetings, conferences, and knowledge-sharing initiatives. This presentation will also feature a few case studies from member presses, showcasing a range of approaches to OA and emphasizing the importance of community-driven models like Diamond Open Access, where scholarly communities maintain control over the content.
In an era marked by rapid changes in academic publishing, AEUP's commitment to innovation, inclusivity, and collaboration positions it as a partner for university presses navigating the challenges of adaptation and growth.

Sustainable Support for Diamond Open Access Journals: The Case of the Open Library of Economics

2024-08-01T10:41:42+02:00

In recent years, the discourse around Open Access has highlighted the importance of Diamond Open Access. Diamond Open Access removes financial barriers for both authors and readers, thereby enabling more equity in the dissemination of scientific research. Science policy makers and funders also have recognized the value of Diamond Open Access. The Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (Ancion et al., 2022) and the planning of global, regional and local Diamond Open Access hubs (Mounier & Rooryck, 2023) illustrate this development.

A major challenge that arises when Open Access is free for readers and authors is the issue of funding. Diamond Open Access initiatives are often community-governed and frequently independent of big commercial publishers. These initiatives need sustainable funding to be able to continue operating.

Collective funding models offer a solution to this problem. For example, consortial funding has successfully financed the Open Library of the Humanities for almost 10 years now, and commercial companies such as Knowledge Unlatched also utilize similar models. However, there are some challenges with this kind of funding model, particularly as more initiatives seek collective funding.

The presentation will focus on some of the challenges and solutions of collective funding models form Diamond Open Access at the example of the Open Library Economics (OLEcon). OLEcon is an initiative from ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre Economics (Germany). OLEcon offers support for journal editors in the disciplines business and economics who want to establish a scholar-led Diamond Open Access model for their journals. Additionally, OLEcon organizes a funding consortium for these journals.

The first challenge that OLEcon encounters is that institutions receive “nothing” in return if they contribute to Diamond Open Access initiatives. This is in contrast to transformative agreements where institutions receive exclusive rights for their affiliates if they participate in the agreement. Second, libraries have limited funds for Open Access so they can not finance every Open Access initiative. In a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), OLEKonsort (2023-2026), these problems are addressed by establishing several stabilising mechanisms for the funding consortium. These include an easy participation process, and a community building approach. The presentation discusses the experiences that were made in the first two years of the project.

Are Open Access Ebooks Accessible?

2024-08-16T17:27:12+02:00

The ideals of open access do not exclude the blind and reading-disabled, but the realities of limited funding frequently do. In this work, we survey the 36,000 open-access ebooks and chapters supported by OAPEN to determine the extent of this exclusion and to explore strategies for remediation of poorly accessible ebooks. Only 1144 of these are available in EPUB format, which is more easily used for text-to-speech or braille reading devices than the more common PDF format. Of these 1144 ebooks, we found that only 156 of these contained useful descriptions of images in alt-text attributes. 31% of the images had no descriptions at all, and most of the rest contained single words such as "image" or simply a file name.

Rapid advances in machine vision and large language models may provide useful tools towards mitigation of poor ebook accessibility. Our initial experience with these tools suggests that combinations of AI tools together with simple editing and reviewing platforms will provide a cost-effective way forward for the open access community. We are evaluating these tools for automatic description of a set of images and assessing the results. This is a first step to the development of advanced tools to deal with complex tables, graphs and figures which will improve access for all of us, not just the reading disabled.

Machine actionable DMPs in practice

2024-08-13T11:48:38+02:00

Data management planning is a key task and an essential element in the process to manage the whole FAIR data life cycle. It is also a mandatory requirement from several major funders, as well as some research organizations, including Chalmers. Yet writing and updating a data management plan - even with the support of a DMP system - is often considered a rather tedious task that, despite the intentions, in the end often fails to return any substantial added value, other than policy compliance, for either researchers or other parties involved.

By automating central workflows and involving key stakeholders in that process we have found that it is quite possible to accomplish a solution that not only facilitates the researcher tasks, but also ensures controlled, re-usable metadata and enables central stakeholders to be automatically connected with relevant parts of the process, from planning to sharing and preservation of data. This include identifying issues concerning personal and sensitive data, as well as special or large storage needs, at an early stage in the process.

Using the DMP tool Data Stewardship Wizard, funder project databases and not at least the locally developed CRIS system (research.chalmers.se) and supporting locally developed routines, the first steps were implemented in our production workflows (in 2022). This poster presents both the work done so far, as well as ongoing work and planned future developments. We are happy to receive input from participants and to communicate how this could be used to further facilitate the process of making research data open and FAIR.

Supporting resources for and conceptual reflections on data management planning in Norway

2024-08-15T17:24:10+02:00

Academic libraries face a growing demand to support researchers with research data management (RDM) and, alongside increasing funder requirements, the writing of data management plans (DMP). We are sharing insights from the 1-year project Data Management Plans: Support package for Norwegian higher education libraries (Oct. 2023-2024). The project facilitated an aligned understanding of DMPs, mapped DMP stakeholders in Norway, and developed a support package with resources for both researchers and support staff.

With their raising popularity, DMPs have been highlighted as an educative tool as well as bearing the potential to act as a hub for seamless integration of data management services. Alongside conceptual reflections on user needs and dimensions that influence DMP complexity, the project therefore mapped DMP stakeholders in Norway and their expectations, machine-actionable DMP (maDMP) coverage, and funder requirements.

It is important that researchers experience writing a DMP as useful process on the way to good RDM routines and publication of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) research data, and not as pure administrative burden. Helpful guidance is essential. Yet, keeping up with developments, guidelines and resources in a fast-paced field can be challenging for support roles. In response, the project build a knowledge base that includes annotation in a Norwegian context of the Science Europe DMP guidance, which is recommended across funders.

For researchers, the project developed a discipline-agnostic DMP template, implemented in the DMP-tool Data Stewardship Wizard, accompanied by a website with supporting information. A challenge we experienced was to balance complexity in projects and different stakeholder interests with a manageable questionnaire for users across various disciplinary traditions. To not expose users to irrelevant questions, we apply conditional follow-up questions and project phases. In addition, a filtering function allows us to adjust complexity and provide distinct questionnaires catering to different user groups, without having to maintain parallel template versions. Furthermore, an independent set of guiding questions for RDM considerations in grant proposals was developed. Several organizations which were not part of the project group contributed to testing the pilots, ensuring the relevance of the template for large and small institutions.

Summarizing, the project has produced three products: 1) a knowledge base for support staff, 2) a DMP template, and 3) supporting information for users. All project results are available under an open license and all generated text resources are maintained through an open contribution and maintenance process. We encourage the Norwegian research data community to actively take part in maintenance and further development of these open resources. We believe that the results and insights from this project will be valuable for institutions in and outside of Norway.

Changing Publication Culture

2024-08-16T15:38:23+02:00

TU Delft OPEN Publishing, the diamond Open Access publisher of the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), is celebrating five years this year, starting in 2019. TU Delft OPEN Publishing challenges the status quo by providing a sustainable alternative to commercial publishing with researchers at the heart of our activities. We are a not-for-profit publisher founded by the university with a free-to-read and free-to-publish model.

What does it take to run an innovative professional diamond open access publisher? The answer is a good operational foundation. TU Delft OPEN Publishing gives special attention to the effective running of our growing publishing house, which has published more than one hundred books, fifty textbooks and fourteen journals. We aim to meet the needs of the communities we serve with high-quality publications by using our available resources and being mindful of our capacity. This poster presentation will discuss the lessons learned in professionalizing the diamond Open Access publisher of TU Delft, focusing on the operational side.

Paving the way: A national approach to Diamond OA

2024-08-15T15:17:02+02:00

Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA), in which no fees are charged to authors or readers, is currently in the spotlight. For two years, in a row the theme of International Open Access Week, has been “Community over Commercialization” and this year marks the Second Global Summit on Diamond Open Access among many other events. Despite its growing momentum and the fact that Diamond OA journals constitute 73% of the journals registered in DOAJ, these journals publish 3* times fewer articles than APC-based- Gold OA journalsⁱ. One reason for this discrepancy is the lack of professionalization of Diamond OA Journals, primarily due to insufficient funding ⁱⁱ.

To ensure that Diamond OA journals in the Netherlands thrive, we are establishing a national expertise center—a hub dedicated to facilitating the exchange of information and the creation of new resources and events around Diamond OA. This poster summarizes the different approaches we will use for various (scholarly) community members—researchers, editors, librarians, institutional publishing service providers, policymakers, and funders—to foster a thriving Diamond OA community.

Could these approaches be applicable in your country? We invite you to visit our poster to learn more.

The national expertise center is part of the program Diamond Open Access in the Netherlands, funded by the Universities of the Netherlands (UNL) and launched by the Dutch Consortium of University Libraries (UKB) to reinforce and future-proof the national Diamond OA publishing landscape The other two projects part of the program are the monitoring of Diamond OA journals, articles and books in the Netherlands and developing a collective publication infrastructure for journals and books.

Open Science in Policy and Practice - Lessons Learned from the National Contributions to EOSC and Open Science 2023 Survey

2024-08-16T21:28:54+02:00

The European OS Cloud (EOSC) is central to Europe’s mission to advance Open Science (OS), fostering a collaborative and inclusive research environment across the continent. However, the implementation and monitoring of OS practices differ significantly among European countries, each facing unique challenges, priorities, and levels of adoption.

This poster presents the key findings from the "National Contributions to EOSC and OS 2023" survey, conducted as part of the EOSC Future and EOSC Track projects. This comprehensive survey is designed to monitor policies and practices related to EOSC and OS at the national (and where applicable, regional) levels across Europe.

The survey results provide key insights into policies and practices among eight key areas of OS: Publications, Data, Software, Services, Infrastructure, Skills/Training, Assessment, and Engagement. The poster will present the results of the survey, identifying the key enablers of OS, as well as the best practices and successful strategies that have been effective in the adoption of OS across different European countries. These findings offer valuable insights into what drives success in OS and how these strategies can be replicated or adapted in different contexts.

This poster will also introduce the EOSC Track project, which aims to further develop the EOSC OS Observatory into a comprehensive, one-stop-shop policy intelligence tool. Building on the foundation laid by the EOSC Future project, EOSC Track seeks to enhance the usability, adoption, and impact of the Observatory by streamlining data ingestion, harmonizing monitoring frameworks, and improving the dissemination of policy best practices. The project emphasizes a formative approach that values iterative feedback, co-creation, and community engagement, all while upholding the principles of OS.

Through a comparative analysis of the survey results, this poster will showcase key insights into the status of OS across Europe. It will explore how these findings are being used to refine and enhance the European OS Observatory, ensuring that it becomes an indispensable tool for policymakers, researchers, and other stakeholders in the OS community. By presenting these insights, the poster aims to foster a deeper understanding of the complex and varied landscape of OS in Europe and stimulate discussion on how to address the challenges identified. Ultimately, it seeks to contribute to the broader goal of creating a more cohesive and effective European OS ecosystem that benefits all stakeholders.

Research Data Curation Network Norway

2024-07-12T12:01:30+02:00

Our poster presents the background, current work, and future plans for the Research Data Curation Network Norway, established through a project funded by the National Library of Norway.

1. Why do research data need to be curated by curators in the first place?

Research needs to be reproducible so that findings may be tested and verified or disputed. This requires data to be available and correctly understood. Trained curators will carefully assess the quality of metadata and other information about the data, and suggest improvements where needed, before the data are archived. The Norwegian Research Data Curation Network will support its members in the curation task, to optimize and FAIRify archived and published research data.

2. Why do we need a national network focusing on curation of research data?

Curation of research data can at times be straight forward. But quite often the curator role can be challenging and include tasks that involves complex problem solving. This is where a network of curators will be most valuable. Questions may be raised and discussed among all the network members, issues may be elaborated through organised webinars and get-together-sessions, and guidelines may be developed and published. This will not least be highly valued by curators at smaller institutions with just one or a few curators.

3. Why do the efforts within the network need to be coordinated?

To maximize the benefits from a network of curators, tasks may be distributed among the network members. This includes working groups with dedicated tasks and organising webinars and (regular) meetings within the network. To achieve this, efforts need to be coordinated.

The Research Data Curation Network Norway will furthermore be a node in The Research Data Alliance (RDA), and also within EOSC. Our Network will be able to utilize the work and the knowledge these organisations hold, if the Network is well organised and coordinated.

4. What are our plans for the future?

We need to agree upon, and establish an organisational model, including a Governing Board and regulations including how to secure a sustainable financing model for the Network, to be presented at a first General Assembly. Membership will be available to individual curators in Norwegian Higher Education and research institutions. At the same time, institutional membership will likely be needed, in order to commit institutions to support the Network financially (e.g. through membership fees) and also to form an organisational fundament for the Network.

But first of all, we need to spread the word about the Network, and make sure everyone working with research data curation will see the benefit and join the Network.

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Text (EDIT) Publication Grant

2024-08-16T10:18:15+02:00

The objective of this poster is to present a new and unique upcoming initiative by the Utrecht University library, the EDIT (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Text) Publication Grant, bringing together OS values such as equity, collaboration, and bibliodiversity in the publishing ecosystem.

The geographic, linguistic, and economic barriers to access to research have proven to be pervasive, affecting both the publication process and access to research outputs. The current research landscape privileges established over early career researchers, larger institutions and industries over smaller ones, the needs of the global North over those of the global South, and well-funded areas of research over equally important, but less well-resourced areas In response, UNESCO’s recommendation on Open Science emphasizes the need to not only ensure that scientific knowledge is accessible but also that “the production of that knowledge itself is inclusive, equitable, and sustainable.”[2] One way to promote a fair redistribution of both funding and scientific attention is increased collaboration between researchers from the global North and the global South. In practice, however, such collaborations are often hindered by other inequalities, such as the (over)emphasis on English as a scientific lingua franca[3] and the prioritisation of journal articles over other output types that are more accessible or useful to the communities directly affected by the research.

Acknowledging the critical role of libraries in knowledge equity, we at the UU library have proposed a new publishing grant that will reward best practices in research. We aim to identify publication projects that demonstrate a deliberate commitment to Open Science (OS) practices, like openness and global collaboration. The grant will award a broad spectrum of publishing services to the selected projects, allowing them to publish in diverse languages and accessible modes and formats. We hope to have a twofold impact: first, shifting emphasis from traditional metrics to best practices in knowledge production; and second, promoting greater accessibility and diversity with regards to underserved groups, languages and output types. In the long term, we also hope to establish measurable alternative metrics that will guide a formal reshaping of rewards and recognition.

This presentation will highlight the underlying philosophy of the grant, alongside the project's desired outcomes, and metrics for evaluation. In designing the grant, we also surveyed UU researchers over their publication preferences, challenges, and views on global collaboration, receiving over 60 insightful responses. The key findings of this survey will also be discussed, highlighting how they inform the grant’s design, also in line with Utrecht University’s ongoing efforts and future vision towards equitable publishing.

Finally, the aim of this poster is as much for us to be informed as to inform our audience: while we hope that some of the ideas presented will be informative and inspiring for other universities, we also welcome feedback from the community before the rollout of the grant early next year.

Geographical Disparities Across Editorial Boards in Lithuanian Scientific Journals: A Cross-Disciplinary Analysis

2024-08-19T11:24:20+02:00

Editorial boards of academic journals represent a key institutional mechanism in the governance and functioning of the academic community. Members of these boards play a critical role in knowledge production and the advancement of their respective disciplines. Their roles encompass critical tasks in scientific publishing process, such as peer review management, manuscript selection, and setting editorial policies, which collectively shape the academic discourse and research priorities.

Geographical disparities on the editorial boards of scientific journals have garnered growing attention and concern in the field of scientific publishing in recent years. Research conducted across various countries has highlighted significant imbalances in regional and geographical representation within academic publishing. Notably, there is a marked under-representation of scholars from the Global South and low-income countries on editorial boards, underscoring critical issues of equity and inclusivity in the governance and dissemination of scientific knowledge.

Paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the geographical composition of editorial boards in Lithuanian scientific journals. The study involved a thorough review of publicly available information from all scientific journals published in Lithuania, with the aim of determining the geographical affiliations of their editorial board members. By systematically collecting and analyzing data on the countries of origin of these members, the study sought to uncover patterns of geographical representation across different scientific disciplines. The findings reveal significant disparities in the proportions of editorial board members from various countries, with notable variations observed across different fields of science. These results underscore the presence of regional imbalances in editorial board composition, which may have implications for the internationalization of Lithuanian scientific publishing and the broader representation of diverse scientific perspectives.

Beyond the PI: Extending Open Science training to non-traditional audiences

2024-08-16T11:25:31+02:00

Traditionally, those of us who provide support, training, and outreach in Open Science have focused the greater part of their energy and attention on one particular group of researchers: viz. PIs who have or are trying to get funding. This makes sense because funders are the ones who mandate Open and FAIR practices: they provide the requirement; we provide the tools to meet it. At the University of Edinburgh, however, Research Data Management and other Open Science policies apply to all research projects undertaken across the university. Given this, it is incumbent upon us to look beyond this primary group. Insofar as resources allow, every effort is made to engage with the wider population of researchers, many of whom do not have external funding.

Developments in the world of Open Science are now pointing us towards a wider horizon: those many members of the University who play important, often essential, roles in research, but who are not classed as researchers and therefore are not targeted for training in data management and other Open Science practices.

Among those developments, one of the most significant is the move to provide visibility, recognition, and career development for technicians and professional service staff, particularly as embodied in the Technician Commitment – to which the University of Edinburgh is a signatory – and the development of the CRediT or Contributor Role Taxonomy. Furthermore, a recent study conducted by members of Edinburgh’s Open Research team indicates growing interest in having more bespoke Open Science training for PhD students.

We are also seeing an increasing demand for support and training aimed at postgraduate taught students, especially in the social and health sciences. These students undertake projects which, while usually small in scale, often involve complex issues around the collection and storage of sensitive data.

And it’s not just staff and students at the University who need and want support. There is, besides, a whole new world of Participatory Research and Citizen Science, the population of which is likely to be in search of training and support specifically tailored to their non-professional status.

Although Edinburgh’s Open Research team has already begun working with some of these groups –PhD and PGT students, in particular – we still have some way to go. Looking to the future, we must develop more tailored services that meet the needs of specific audiences. Further, those services must be marketed more effectively, targeting those who may not be aware of or think they have access to our support and training activities. Beyond this, many important questions remain, not least around how to measure the success of our training, particularly when working with non-traditional and non-professional members of our research community.

Collecting, Analysing and Learning From Open Access Policies for Academic Books

2024-08-02T15:40:05+02:00

The PALOMERA (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area; Grant agreement ID: 1010942701) project, funded by Horizon Europe, addresses the complexities of Open Access policies relevant to academic books across the European Research Area. Over its two-year duration (2023–2025) PALOMERA aims to enhance accessibility to pertinent documentation through a specialized Knowledge Base. This poster synthesizes the project's data collection phase, highlighting the workflow and methodology applied by the international team of researchers.

The poster aims to showcase the PALOMERA project's systematic approach to researching and documenting Open Access policies for academic books within the European Research Area. By illustrating the structured methodologies and robust project management practices employed, the poster highlights the project's success in aggregating extensive bibliometric data and preparing it for comprehensive analysis. It underscores the significance of meticulous data collection and management, offering a blueprint for future landscape analyses and collaborative efforts in the European scholarly community. Thanks to the openly available extensive project documentation, the method and the approach can be replicated in other contexts.

Throughout the first year, PALOMERA focused on aggregating a diverse range of data, encompassing both qualitative and quantitative material. The process began with resource identification across 39 countries and 29 languages, subsequently translated and curated using Zotero and MaxQDA. This comprehensive approach involved gathering: legal documents, grey literature, research articles, reports, statistical data, and outputs from related projects. In addition to that, during summer 2023 the survey deployed via LimeSurvey garnered 454 responses from different stakeholders, providing additional quantitative data essential for mapping OA policy adoption and implementation trends. A significant component of the data collection effort also included conducting 42 interviews (both individual and group ones), providing extensive insights into policy landscapes and stakeholder perspectives. These interviews were transcribed, and contributing to a Knowledge Base of over 600 documents (OA policies).

The project's success in data aggregation owes much to its structured methodology and robust project management practices. By employing design thinking methodologies, PALOMERA insured activities were aligned with project objectives, facilitating clear progress tracking and efficient workflow management. This approach not only facilitated the collection of extensive bibliometric data but also prepared the dataset for future comprehensive analysis.

Supporting OA Books in the Netherlands and Beyond

2024-08-16T15:01:04+02:00

Open Access (OA) publishing has gained significant momentum, becoming a priority for numerous funding agencies, governments and institutions worldwide. In the Dutch research landscape, the Dutch Research Council (NWO) is among the funders mandating OA for books. While OA has seen rapid growth in journal articles, thanks to its deep-rooted history in fields where journal articles are the norm, OA for monographs presents unique challenges. These challenges include issues related to publication formats, publishing models, funding, copyright, and licensing, among others. Despite these, OA monograph publishing is on the rise, with new financial models emerging that bring both challenges and opportunities in a diverse and rather unbalanced scholarly communication landscape.

Libraries play a crucial role in promoting OA and facilitating access to scholarly literature. As advocates for OA, libraries emphasize equity and sustainability in scholarly communication, aiming to foster and support open access equally in all different research cultures. Libraries support OA monograph publishing by addressing researchers' questions, highlighting available publishing options and strategies, and developing inclusive collection and publishing policies to allocate funds to foster a more equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing ecosystem. The Working Group Open Access from the University Libraries and the Royal Library of the Netherlands (UKB) has identified OA Books in the national landscape as a key focus in their 2024 annual plan. One of the primary outputs of this initiative is to develop a PubPub community that addresses Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) from researchers and librarians about OA monograph publishing targeted at libraries. This community aims to serve the library community within the Dutch research landscape by mapping available resources on the topic and addressing questions concerning exploring various financing models and funding options for OA books, redirecting collection development budgets towards open initiatives, and providing advice on establishing an OA fund.

The goal is to create a comprehensive platform through the PubPub community, facilitating knowledge exchange by listing existing resources and tools while also covering less-discussed topics relevant to Dutch libraries and the broader research library community. We envision the PubPub community as a dynamic hub where libraries can share experiences, best practices, innovative ideas, and solutions. This community will also feature interviews and case studies that showcase good practices and address challenges in the field. Although it is first envisioned to provide a structured and supportive environment for Dutch libraries to navigate the complexities of OA monograph publishing, it is also expected for the community to be open to everyone interested in these topics, ultimately contributing to the discussion towards a more open and accessible scholarly landscape.

Painting the Mona Lisa?

2024-08-15T11:03:09+02:00

Would Leonardo da Vinci have shared the precise methods behind his masterpieces? Would he guide us step by step through his process to recreate the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa? While art often celebrates the elusive and irreplicable touch of genius, contemporary science expects and relies on reproducibility to maintain trust and rigor. More than a decade has passed since the reproducibility crisis was first diagnosed, yet progress in addressing this issue has been gradual and unevenly distributed (Korbmacher, M. et al, 2023). Researchers are increasingly required to produce detailed data management plans and to ensure that their data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). However, questions often overlooked in the quest for FAIR data include: Where do the data come from, and how were they generated (Weissgerber, T. et al, 2024)? Detailed methods reporting enhances the value of shared data and makes replication of results more efficient, reducing research waste while also fostering a more equitable research culture, ensuring that up-to-date methods are available to all (LaFlamme, M, 2024).

Workshop objectives

This workshop will explore how stakeholders within the research science ecosystem can advance reproducibility by encouraging the uptake of methods and protocols sharing. Drawing on a recent set of recommendations from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, we will spark a meaningful dialogue around translating these recommendations into practice across the scientific community (European Commission et al, 2024). By engaging participants in problem-solving and role-playing exercises, we will consider dilemmas and tradeoffs that may stand in the way of a more responsible, reproducible research culture.

Workshop Structure

Role-Playing Group Activities: Participants will be divided into groups, each presented with a real-life scenario related to methods and protocols sharing. Participants will assume different roles, such as a researcher, a department head, a librarian, or a funder. Within their respective groups, participants will:

Discuss potential strategies to advance reproducibility within their assigned roles.
Identify challenges (e.g., incentives and/or disincentives) and propose practical action plans to address them.
Develop tools and communication strategies tailored to their stakeholder group.

Group Presentations: Each group will present their scenario and proposed actions, explaining how they developed their approach.
Synthesis: The workshop will conclude with a collaborative session where participants will discuss common challenges surfaced by the scenarios and collectively identify the most effective approaches to overcome them. Participants will be encouraged to state practical, tangible steps they will take after the workshop to promote methods and protocols sharing in their organizations.

Target Audience: This workshop is designed for anyone who is committed to advancing reproducibility in scientific research. We hope that attendees from the stakeholder groups mentioned above will participate.

Supporting publication choices in an open research context

2024-08-16T15:43:00+02:00

Scholars are confronted with myriad options when publishing: taking into account their topic, their publishing goals, intended audience, institutional and funder policies and collaborator preferences. Libraries and their institutions are there to support their authors in this process. In this session we will discuss potential new ways to help researchers, teams and department leadership to make choices and formulate publication strategies. We will do this using two resources created recently at Utrecht University Library (the Open Access Faculty Toolkit (De Boer et al. 2024) and the Publication Strategy Tool (Bosman & Kramer 2022)). Together they provide both top-down and bottom-up approaches to support changing publication practices. This session will address both the range of choices researchers and their institutions need to make (why, what, when, how and where to publish, open access types) and how to support this informed publication strategy as a library or librarian. In doing so, we will differentiate between individual, departmental/team and institutional levels. We invite participants to bring in their own disciplinary and research policy contexts and will then discuss the different publishing options. We will also discuss the balance libraries need to strike between supporting whatever choices researchers make, supporting institutional and funder polices and advocating to bring open science into publishing and make publishing more equitable. The session aims to inspire and help participants in creating and using informed approaches to supporting open publishing.

Participant preparation: we ask the participants to in advance briefly take a look at the two resources mentioned and think about how using these could be beneficial in their function or for their organisation.

A practical workshop on Diamond OA publishing

2024-07-17T22:24:45+02:00

Diamond Open Access publishing faces challenges that include fragmentation across the landscape, varying standards of quality, visibility and financial sustainability. Nonetheless, this ‘no fee’ publishing model can be the path towards more equitable and more diverse scholarly publishing. It is important to work together to secure the future of Diamond OA publishing.

The workshop will showcase a toolsuite for supporting Diamond OA publishing that has been developed by the DIAMAS project https://diamasproject.eu/ based on good practices. It is both a chance for participants to start to utilise DIAMAS resources to make their work easier and an essential moment for the DIAMAS team to test how their outputs are working.

In interactive sessions, participants will be walked through how to use two different outputs of the DIAMAS project:

The Diamond OA Standard or DOAS, that enables self-assessment of the quality of Diamond OA publications (the Diamond OA Standard or DOAS),
The Diamond OA Sustainability Check, that enables self-assessment of the financial sustainability of Diamond OA services

When they are used together, these resources can help Diamond OA publishers and service providers to ensure the quality of their publications, improve their operations and plan strategically for the future.

Participants will also be able to sign up to join the registry of Diamond OA publishers and services providers and the Diamond OA knowledge-exchange hub (the Common Access Point or CAP) that DIAMAS will launch in 2025.

We hope that this post conference workshop will be useful to university presses, library publishers, service providers and journal editors, whether they already publish Diamond OA or would like to do so in future.

What about Open Science?

2024-07-03T14:56:58+02:00

This is a 90-minute interactive workshop session presenting the game we have been developing with our UKSG Innovation Award – "Open Science Wheel of Prosperity". This is a competitive Open Educational Resource ‘game’ designed to create discussion around common open science concepts and ideas that everyone should understand but do not always fully grasp. This workshop is suitable for all audiences with, or without previous understanding of open science. Through this game participants will be introduced to the key concepts for discussion of open science, what that means for them and their institution, and what concrete steps they can take to make a difference going forward as part of the open science movement. The aim of our workshop is not only to play the game to enhance knowledge but to facilitate playing it in institutions everywhere with implicit advocacy for Open Science built in. Participants do not need to prepare for this workshop in advance.

Just get rid of the journal!

2024-08-16T16:52:08+02:00

We can all name a few problems around the current scholarly publishing system. One could talk about the steep rising costs of subscriptions and author processing charges, or impact factors dominating where to publish and pushing small journals out of the market. Or maybe we could discuss the retention of publishing rights from authors and/or universities by the big publishers.

However, to solve the problems mentioned maybe we shouldn’t talk about these right now, but more so about taking away the format causing these, namely the journal? Aren’t we just better off shaping open scholarly- or university owned platforms as online libraries? And get rid of the print-based workflows used before the coming of the internet age?

In this unconference style workshop we’ll discuss how an academic world without journals would look like, what would go forward and are there features of the journal we can’t do without? Then together we’ll design the ideal alternative. We can take a look at publishing formats, peer review, editorial workflow, or what else you would like to see included. What do you think researchers need to publish, disseminate and find the publications they need? Let’s share our expertise, exchange our wildest ideas and discuss future developments!

Unlocking the power of Open Education

2024-09-16T14:27:28+02:00

The workshop will be based on the ENOEL Toolkit, a resource developed by the network librarians and supported by SPARC Europe. The ENOEL Toolkit aims to help raise awareness of the importance of Open Education by pointing out the benefits of its adoption for students, teachers, institutions, librarians and society at large. One way to discover and interact with the ENOEL Toolkit is by playing with one of its tools, which will be available before the MUNIN Conference. In this workshop, the facilitator will launch a conversation and community-focused problem-solving session to address the challenges that we face in Open Education. Participants in the workshop will enact a way to find and finesse solutions that players can work towards implementing in real life. The activity participants will experience is designed to be adaptable to local needs. During the workshop, the facilitator will suggest one of the possible ways to use it and share the rules to shape this experience.

Collaborating for reproducibility: How can we work together better?

2024-08-16T16:07:44+02:00

To address growing concerns about research integrity and reproducibility, stakeholders across the research ecosystem—including institutions, publishers, funders, researchers, and others—must collaborate more effectively across disciplines, regions, and contexts. Urgent issues include lack of transparency in reporting/data/analysis, lack of replication studies, publication bias, and questionable research practices. These are collective problems, requiring concerted responses across the research system from a variety of actors. How can institutions, publishers, funders, researchers and others collaborate better on these issues, across disciplines, regions and stakeholder contexts?

This workshop, inspired by ongoing collaborative efforts between Taylor & Francis and the EC-funded TIER2 project on reproducibility, seeks to stimulate open dialogue on cross-stakeholder action, individual roles and responsibilities, and current bottlenecks where further collaboration is needed. Attendees will gain insights into practical steps and collaborative strategies that can be implemented in funding, research and publishing workflows.

During the workshop, attendees will be invited to sit at one of 4 tables, each with a distinct thematic focus: (1) Infrastructure, tools and practices, (2) Awareness, training, and community-building, (3) Incentives, evaluation and assessment, (4) Policies and mandates.

Enhancing Diamond Open Access

2024-08-15T13:07:17+02:00

Science Europe, cOAlition S, OPERAS, and the French Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR) presented an action plan in 2022 to establish an "equitable, community-driven, academic-led and -owned" publication infrastructure, marking a significant step in developing the Open Diamond publication model. Despite over 30,000 Diamond OA journals worldwide, challenges persist, including funding, long-term quality assurance, sustainable publication workflows, and scalability options (Action Plan for Diamond Open Access).

The Open Source Academic Publishing Suite (OS-APS) addresses these challenges, promoting sustainable Diamond OA publications. This open-source application supports a single-source workflow for media-neutral publishing, accommodating formats like PDF, HTML and JATS-XML, and integrates with platforms such as OJS, OMP and DSpace. OS-APS includes Pandoc for DOCX import and uses community-shared open source templates, requiring minimal technical expertise. This enables small and medium-sized publishers to produce scholarly articles and journals efficiently, enhancing the OA Diamond model‘s viability.

OS-APS‘s open-source nature and user-driven development culture allow extensive customization through open source code development. The Specialized Information Service for Philosophy, the official test user, has utilized OS-APS for media-neutral publication of various OA journals, including the "2nd Philosophical Symposia of the DFG." A comparison between the media-neutral 2nd Symposia and the traditionally published 1st Symposia shows a significant increase in article visibility due to more flexible usage options. The access rates of the 2nd Symposia articles more than doubled in a short time compared to the 1st Symposia and additionally, a shift in users reading habits can be noted.

OS-APS can be pivotal in establishing Diamond OA as a sustainable publication model, promoting FAIR principles, democratizing knowledge and strengthening an independent scientific sector.

In our workshop, we will provide a comprehensive insight into the practical use of OS-APS, offering an overview of the project and its goals, ensuring participants understand the necessary details and context. The second part will be a practical session, covering the entire application process from Docker installation to article publication in Open Journal Systems (OJS), designed for both experienced software developers and people with little technical know how. In this way, participants should be able to set up their own OS-APS instance in order to be able to use the advantages of the software independently.

The Diamond Discovery Hub and its suggested Diamond OA criteria for journals

2024-08-16T18:42:30+02:00

Although Diamond Open Access is gaining momentum as a more equitable, fair, inclusive publishing model, there is no universal definition yet of Diamond OA journals. Most prevalent is defining them by zero APC (article processing charges). There’s widespread understanding that absence of APC’s is not enough and that Diamond OA journals should be owned by scientists, academic institutions or research infrastructures and be operated professionally, based on values of research integrity. Thus, Diamond OA is considered to be a positive alternative to economic distortions parts of the open access publishing market display. The DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA projects introduced operational criteria to identify Diamond OA journals. They are required to enable binary decisions of journals classifying as Diamond OA or not within the Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH), a registry for such journals launching by the end of 2025. DDH will be a responsive, scalable platform with SEO-friendly UI, based on an editorial model including trusted data sources of Diamond OA journals on one side and a DDH editorial team on the other. The editorial team will be volunteers, organised along the emerging system of Diamond Capacity Centres and a central Diamond Capacity Hub. Trusted sources will mostly be European institutional publishing service providers (IPSPs). The DDH will support decision making of authors, funders or institutions and bring more visibility and recognition to Diamond OA journals and the Diamond OA model in general. Therefore, inclusion criteria have to be based on observable data points and be as unambiguous and transparent as possible. They are:
1. use of persistent identifier
2. being a scientific journal
3. immediate Open Access with open licences
4. no fees
5. open to all authors within a journal’s scope
6. community-owned
While criteria 1 and 3 are machine-observable data points and for 2, 4, and 5 approved practices exist, criteria 6 on (scientific) community ownership is challenging to base binary decisions on. If parameters of judging “community owned” are set too wide, the rigorousness of such a collection is watered down with too many questionable entries. If set too narrow, the DDH would risk excluding scientific journals identifying with the overall goals of Diamond OA but failing to meet minor aspects of “community owned”. We’d like to facilitate a community effort in developing flexible, transparent parameters for criteria 6. These parameters will help in two ways: journals identifying with values and ethics of Diamond OA find guidance in how to express this in an observable manner while clear parameters enable the volunteers’ work within the DDH editorial team.
We propose a 90-minute workshop to jointly work on the mentioned parameters of criteria 6 around community-ownership. To give participants a hands-on experience we’ll introduce the DDH’s current alpha-version system and our planned editorial model.

Running a Diamond Open Access Journal (and Surviving It)

2024-05-08T18:27:20+02:00

The workshop is predominantly directed at editors, editorial board members, publishers, and administrators of academic open access journals. During a 90-minutes session, we will offer a venue for discussing key challenges to, and possible supporting frameworks for, the professional running of academic diamond open access journals. Diamond open access publishing is time-consuming and often characterized by lack of sufficient funding and resources. This creates challenges and stresses for editors and editorial board members who must not only assess incoming papers, oversee peer-review processes, and organize revisions, but also deal with technicalities connected to hosting platforms as well as actively engage in copy- and layout-editing. In particular the latter tasks could easily be outsourced if the necessary funding or supporting frameworks could be made available. This would leave considerably more time to focus on the academic aspects of the publishing process and reduce pressures and stresses on journal editors, board members, and volunteers.

Questions the workshop will address include (but are not limited to) the following: What experiences do participants have with OA academic publishing? Which strategies for ensuring proper peer-reviews, editing, and publishing do exist? Which funding schemes exist that journal editors can apply for to cover running expenses for copy- and layout-editing, journal hosting, technical support, and more? Are there options for increased cooperation between journals to address such challenges? …?

The workshop starts with 3 lighting talks of approximately 5 minutes each by Holger Pötzsch (co-editor-in-chief of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture), Justin Parks (editor-in-chief of American Studies in Scandinavia), and Jan Erik Frantsvåg (Septentrio Academic Publishing/UB). The talks will focus on experiences with publishing diamond OA journals and on potential support infrastructures. After the talks we engage in plenary discussions. Dependent upon number of participants, we might engage in group work around specific themes before reconvening for quick presentations and final discussions.

Duration: 90 minutes

No preparations required

Slay the Code: Prompting and Coding in the Humanities

2024-08-16T18:06:54+02:00

Would you like to learn how to use AI to explore and analyze your cultural heritage data? Or have you always wanted to learn how to code and perform data-driven analysis with a little help from cutting-edge tools? This workshop focus on the intersection of generative AI tools and the humanities, offering participants the opportunity to master the art of crafting effective prompts for AI tools like ChatGPT and see practical cases where prompting can be used to work with computational methodologies for example, achieving essential Python coding skills. Emphasizing practical applications, the workshop is designed to enhance research, writing, and problem-solving in the humanities, providing attendees with the confidence to integrate these cutting-edge tools into their academic work.

Structured into two engaging sessions, the first focuses on the theory and practice of creating impactful AI prompts, while the second showcases practical samples of how to support humanities researchers and library specialists when starting working with computational methodologies, with a focus on real-world applications. Participants will also gain insights into ethical considerations, gender biases and decolonial perspectives and best practices related to the FAIR principles and open access, ensuring responsible and effective sharing and publication of their digital projects. The workshop promises an inclusive and supportive environment, tailored to both beginners and those seeking to refine their skills in prompting.

Workshop outline

Session 1: The Art of Prompting

a) Theoretical Presentation
b) Interactive Prompting Exercise

Break

Session 2: Prompting to Code

a) Introduction to Python & Prompting for Coding
b) Coding Exercise & Visualization

Closing Remarks and Next Steps

The Research Game

2024-10-28T13:28:33+01:00

Will your scientific research succeed despite the obstacles and injustices of academic life?

This game needs 3–6 players (preferably over 12 years old) plus a narrator/mediator. The purpose of the game is to explore in a fun way the dynamics of academic research, including the asymmetries and injustices that permeate the way knowledge is produced around the world. The duration of the game is 15–45 minutes, depending on the players.

The Research Game was developed in 2023–2024 by PHIL_OS team in collaboration with Leonardo Durinx and with financial support from the European Research Council. More information about the game can be found at https://opensciencestudies.eu/the-research-game/.

Mechanisms for transdisciplinary co-production

2024-09-17T14:22:22+02:00

In the age of climate emergency, there continues to be a deep disconnection between people’s perception of social concerns (e.g. job and economic security, urban design and uses of technology) and environmental concerns (e.g. weather-related disasters, pollution, loss of green spaces, ecoanxiety). This fuels what many call a ‘democratic deficit’, where representative democracies are struggling to foster and support evidence-based decision-making in the face of extensive misinformation and disinformation campaigns. This is particularly concerning among youth and vulnerable parts of the population, such as immigrant communities and the elderly. This workshop proposes transdisciplinary engagement as a way to engage and inform around those issues, while building and extending Open Science efforts to provide an alternative to bubble chambers created by digital media and some forms of Artificial intelligence. The workshop aims to explore, together with delegates and through break-out groups, experiences of engaging local communities in developing environmental/social interventions together with policy-makers as well as researchers, thinking about challenges and learning from each other’s solutions. Some of the examples will include water research and policy engagement in Italy, youth engagement around environmental themes across European organisations, and the development of the Climate Pact Ambassador network.

Introducing the ‘Support Package for Data Management Plans for Norwegian Higher Education libraries’

2024-08-15T16:10:05+02:00

This workshop presents the resources produced in the 1-year project Data Management Plans: Support package for Norwegian higher education libraries (October 2023-2024). Academic support structures including libraries face a growing demand for supporting researchers with research data management (RDM) and, alongside increasing funder requirements, writing of data management plans (DMP). We will focus on how the project results and insights can be applied in institutional RDM support services.

The presented support package consists of resources for research support staff in the form of a knowledge base, and for researchers in the form of a DMP template and an accompanying supporting information. All generated text resources are sustained through an open contribution and maintenance process and are available under an open license.

The knowledge base for support personnel is based on the DMP guidance by Science Europe, which is recommended across research funders. It has been annotated in the Norwegian context and includes mappings with funder templates, machine-actionable DMP (maDMP) coverage, and stakeholder interests. We will further share reflections on project and user needs and dimensions that define complexity of a DMP. Based on these conceptual insights, we invite colleagues to discuss which project needs, DMP requirements, and stakeholders are central to their organization and users.

For use by researchers, the project furthermore developed short texts for use in digital DMP tools that were implemented as discipline-agnostic knowledge model and connected questionnaires/templates in the DMP-tool Data Stewardship Wizard. To cater to different project needs and not expose users to irrelevant questions, we make use of conditional follow-up questions and project phases. In addition, a filtering function lays basis for providing a set of five distinct questionnaires adjusted to different user groups, without the need to maintain parallel template versions. The DMP questionnaire is accompanied by a website with general and question-specific supporting information. There will be the opportunity for practical testing of different variants of the questionnaire in group work. In addition, we will briefly demonstrate how the questionnaire could be adapted to institutional or disciplinary needs.

We are looking forward to sharing the project results developed in a collaboration of the Universities in Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim, Tromsø, ELIXIR Norway, and PhD-on-Track and supported by the National Library of Norway. With this workshop, we wish to motivate colleagues in research support roles to adopt the DMP support package.

Importantly, we will also include brief demonstrations of how everyone can participate in keeping the common resources updated and how they can be adapted to individual needs. We invite the Norwegian research data community to contribute to maintenance and further development of these open resources.

Creating Collaborative Spaces in the Open – Establishing a Nordic Capacity Centre for Diamond Open Access

2024-10-09T15:07:01+02:00

Since the start of the DIAMAS project (https://diamasproject.eu/) in 2022, there has been a focus on equity in Open Access (OA) scholarly publishing beyond agreements with legacy publishers. In addition, cOAlition S started a working group with funders, librarians, and publishers to discuss possible models that could contribute to a shift to OA beyond article-based charges. Non-profit and community-led journals, which have long awaited these initiatives, need support, such as adapting to policy recommendations while sustainably maintaining the same editorial quality.

A recent landscape study by Mikael Laakso (Study of the Nordic SSH Journal Publishing Landscape: A Report for the Nordic Publications Committee for Humanities and Social Science Periodicals (NOP-HS), 2021) concluded that there are 325 active Nordic journals currently on the market, of which 6.5% operate with an APC. Almost half of the Nordic journals also accept contributions in languages other than English. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden have established national infrastructures for journal publishing alongside several institutional platforms. Norway does not rely on a national node but has created several institutional platforms for societies and editors who need a digital home for their journals. The study about Nordic journals concludes that many of them are supported only by temporary grants or in-kind contributions from institutions, which means that they will likely need more financial support to develop their practices or updates to live up to various OA policies. With the current scene as a backdrop, it is relevant for stakeholders to consider new ways of supporting. Offering fundamental support for a complete shift to OA means that support from various stakeholders is crucial in ensuring that these publishing outlets are following necessary policies and recommendations and remain relevant for researchers to read and publish with them.

This workshop explores the opportunities and challenges of community-driven and scholar-led open publishing to ensure that a Nordic Capacity Centre for Diamond Open Access provides relevant backing for its stakeholders.

Hidden in plain sight

2024-09-16T14:32:05+02:00

This keynote speech delves into the transformative power of open education, spotlighting the often overlooked contributions of practitioners who make open education a tangible reality. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources such as poetry, nature, and innovative educational practices, the speech emphasises the importance of community, collaboration, and adaptability in fostering a more equitable educational future. It explores the interconnectedness of all beings and the lessons we can learn from non-human entities, such as ants and fungi, to create resilient and sustainable educational practices. The speech also invites the audience to adopt a mindset of curiosity and openness, challenging traditional educational models and embracing the complexities of open education. Through reflective questioning, the keynote aims to inspire participants to consider how they can contribute to a global movement toward open, inclusive, and adaptable education.

Open Access Book Adoption in the Classroom: Sylla's Innovative Approach to Personalized Discovery

2024-08-14T17:49:45+02:00

Abstract:

The higher education landscape is experiencing a significant shift towards open and affordable learning resources, driven by technological advancements and economic pressures. The situation calls for solutions that make real impact, including repurposing and making better use of existing materials available online.

With nearly 100,000 open access (OA) books available through the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), there is an extensive pool of freely accessible scholarly materials. However, the integration of these resources into higher education curricula has not kept pace with their production, primarily due to discovery and adoption challenges faced by faculty.

This presentation introduces Sylla, an innovative technology solution designed to bridge the gap between OA book availability and classroom adoption. Developed in collaboration with universities and faculty members, Sylla leverages new technologies to create a personalized discovery experience tailored to specific syllabi and learning objectives.

We will demonstrate how Sylla addresses key barriers to OA book adoption in higher education:

Time Constraints: By analyzing course syllabi and providing a curated selection of the most relevant resources, Sylla significantly reduces the time faculty need to spend on resource discovery.
Quality Concerns: The system draws from trusted OA databases and provides detailed explanations of each resource's relevance to the syllabus, ensuring high-quality matches.
Contextual Fit: Sylla offers granular breakdowns of how recommended resources align with learning objectives and teaching topics, facilitating easier assessment and adoption.
Supply Limitations: By recontextualizing existing OA resources such as monographs and articles for teaching needs, Sylla expands the pool of suitable materials for diverse courses.

We will present results from recent pilots at Coventry University in the UK, where Sylla demonstrated significant success in promoting OA book adoption. At Coventry's School of Business and Law, 10 out of 16 faculty members committed to using OER in their upcoming term as their core course resource, resulting in 66% cost savings and thousands of students benefiting from OER-enabled courses.

The relevance of this work extends beyond cost savings. By facilitating easier discovery and adoption of OA books, Sylla empowers faculty to create more personalized and diverse learning experiences. It also supports the broader movement towards open scholarship and affordable learning, aligning with institutional goals to reduce student costs while maintaining educational quality.

Looking ahead, we'll discuss how Sylla and similar AI-driven platforms could transform course preparation, enabling more responsive and adaptable curricula. We'll also address the importance of balancing openness with sustainability, exploring models that support continued creation and maintenance of high-quality OA resources.

Community-led AI systems for scholarly communication

2024-08-16T16:28:18+02:00

For years, the academic discovery market has been dominated by a few proprietary systems. In the shadows of these giants, however, an alternative infrastructure has emerged, built on thousands of archives, repositories, and aggregators, and championed by libraries, non-profits, and open-source developers. Unlike commercial players, these systems make their (meta-)data openly available, driving innovation and fostering the development of diverse discovery tools.

As the scientific corpus continues its rapid growth, a new generation of discovery systems is emerging, based on new technologies such as AI, visualisation, and semantic networks. However, the increasing shift toward subscription-based AI tools introduces new paywalls and thus barriers to knowledge access.

This raises a critical question: How can we develop free, open alternatives aligned with Open Science principles?

In this presentation, we discuss the participatory approach of Open Knowledge Maps (OKMaps) as a response to this challenge. OKMaps (https://openknowledgemaps.org) is a charitable non-profit organisation dedicated to dramatically increasing the visibility of scientific knowledge. To this end, we operate the world's largest AI-based search engine for research, enabling users to create visual overviews of research topics across all disciplines. These so-called knowledge maps provide an immediate overview of a topic, highlighting key sub-areas and linking them to relevant resources and concepts.

OKMaps draws from over 400 million outputs from its primary data providers, BASE and PubMed. To date, more than 3 million knowledge maps have been created by users from over 200 countries and territories.

OKMaps is a diamond open infrastructure: all of our services are free and open. We share our source code, content, and data under open licences, ensuring community ownership. Furthermore, we develop our services together with our community, who play a crucial role in governance and decision-making. Supporting members and the wider community determine two-thirds of our technical roadmap, with the goal of creating an inclusive and fair infrastructure that balances the needs of its stakeholders equitably.

A key outcome of this participatory approach is the development of institutional services, known as Custom Services. These enable institutions to enhance their discovery offerings with AI-based search components from OKMaps. Examples of integrations include a wide variety of library catalogues such as at ETH Zurich and the University of Eastern Finland, the EOSC platform GoTriple, and the Austrian Social Science Data Archive (AUSSDA).

In conclusion, this approach can create a win-win-win scenario for researchers, institutions, and the open infrastructure. However, a significant challenge remains: attracting enough supporting members to secure basic funding for maintenance and further development. We will conclude our presentation with strategies to address this challenge.

Navigating the Complexities of Supervisor-Student Co-Authorship

2024-07-24T22:26:08+02:00

Co-authorship is crucial in the development of research and career growth of scientists. However, the relationship between a scientific supervisor and a student (undergraduate, postgraduate) is often complicated by issues of fair distribution of authorship, which is critical for supporting diversity and inclusivity in the scientific community. So, it is important to discuss the ethical co-authorship between scientific supervisors and students in the context of fair co-authorship practices, taking into account both the basic principles of academic freedom and the formal academic requirements.

The purpose of this work is to characterize the current state of the problem using the experience of a leading higher education institution in Ukraine – the National Technical University of Ukraine «Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute», where, as part of promoting the development of scientific schools, co-authorship with students is incentivized by increasing points in the teaching rating compared to a single-authored article by a teacher. At the same time, we analyze additional difficulties faced by PhD candidates in preparing for the defense of their dissertation when their publications are co-authored. These requirements for dissertation approbation create a paradoxical situation where collaboration with a scientific supervisor can contribute to the development of a young scientist and complicate the process of defending their work.

The work covers ethical principles of co-authorship, based on international recommendations on academic freedom and integrity, and taking into account the specifics of the «supervisor-student» relationship. Particular attention is paid to achieving a balance between the mentoring role of the scientific supervisor, the importance of recognizing the student’s contribution, and compliance with formal requirements for dissertations, as well as cases of mixing the concepts of «scientific supervisor» and «co-author».

Practical recommendations are proposed for: 1) making the decision: whether a scientific supervisor should be a co-author with the student or not, 2) implementing ethical co-authorship practices, including clear definition of roles at the beginning of the project and regular discussions and recording of each participant’s contribution, taking into account the requirements of open science, 3) better distinguishing when a scientific supervisor becomes a co-author of the work and when they remain only a mentor. We consider how these recommendations can be adapted in the context of co-authorship incentive systems and requirements for dissertation defense.

In general, it is possible to argue that co-authorship between a scientific supervisor and a student, is not critically necessary for the development of a scientific school. It cannot be prohibited due to the norms of academic freedom; however, it does not require additional stimulation. Instead, when it occurs, new ethical challenges arise.

The Ethics of Ownership: Developing Guidelines on Data Ownership in Participatory Researchers

2024-08-16T11:29:54+02:00

Participatory Research, including Citizen Science and other forms of co-created research, have lately been exciting considerable interest; and rightly so. These new additions to the Open Science landscape address a number of institutional and funder concerns around, for example, the impact of scholarly research. Further, collaborations between academic and non-academic researchers have the potential to address many of the deeper concerns of Open Science professionals, around transparency and accessibility, for example. Recognising the importance of this and the need for institutional support, in 2023, the University of Edinburgh created the first library role dedicated to Participatory Research in the UK.

Growing interest and investment in Participatory Research has, inevitably, thrown up challenges for those of us working in Open Science. Among the more ethically and legally complex questions are those concerning intellectual property rights relating to research data. Ownership of research data may be relatively straightforward when the collaborators are professional researchers at recognised research institutions. When those collaborators are themselves the collectors and creators, sometimes the actual subjects, of the data, however, the situation becomes significantly more complicated. We no longer have one seemingly simple question – who owns the data – but rather a cluster of rather more difficult ones. What does ownership mean to non-professional and professional researchers and how does it play out in practice? What are the different motivations and expectations at work here? And how can all this be documented and implemented in a way that is fair to all the parties involved? The contracts commonly employed in ordinary academic collaborations are unlikely to be of use here, not least because legal and quasi-legal instruments tend less towards mitigating power differentials and more to enforcing them. They may also represent a barrier to vulnerable and marginalised communities, thereby discouraging the very involvement that is being sought.

Evidently, then, the question goes beyond legal rights, encompassing a range of important ethical issues around control, access, and re-use of data. Given the complexities of intellectual property rights in general and these issues in particular, the fact that the University of Edinburgh does not, as yet, have any definite guidelines for researchers and their collaborators will come as no surprise.

This presentation aims to lay the groundwork for those guidelines within the context of Open Science: firstly, by identifying and unpacking the ethical issues arising from different understandings of ownership; secondly, by proposing a theoretical foundation; thirdly by considering some practical options for addressing them.

Tales from the Engine Room: what's ahead for OA and what’s behind us

2024-08-15T18:05:51+02:00

This presentation looks at the history of Open Access from the perspective of experienced software engineers in the sector. Over almost 25 years, Richard has been involved in local, national and international efforts in all aspects of the development of repositories and the infrastructure services that support them. Steve came into this field bright-eyed from University a decade ago. It is about what we’ve actually seen be developed and become reality in that time, and how it connects to the goals and desires of the community. It asks what lessons we can learn from that time, and what that might tell us about the future of OA, and whether it is alive and well or under threat. What is the role that the repository has to play in the coming publishing paradigms which aim to improve global publishing equity (such as Diamond and Overlay Journals) and how can we as a community enable it.

Quality as a public good: The Diamond Open Access Standard (DOAS) and its role in the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance

2024-08-09T10:26:34+02:00

The Diamond OA Standard (DOAS) sets out a comprehensive standard for Diamond Open Access (OA) journal publishing. It defines a shared understanding of quality in terms of 7 core components first outlined in the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access (Ancion et al. 2022: 4), and revised and modified by the DIAMAS project’s team:

Funding;
2. Legal ownership, mission, and governance;
3. Open Science;
4. Editorial management, quality, and research integrity;
5. Technical service efficiency;
6. Visibility, communication, marketing, and impact;
7. Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (EDIB), multilingualism, and gender equity.

DOAS sets a course towards quality improvement that all Diamond OA journals can align on via the DOAS self assessment tool. Even more importantly, it evinces the notion that the quality of academic publishing is a public good that should be acknowledged, defended, and preserved. The quality of academic publishing is the responsibility of the entire academic community: authors, editors, reviewers, and readers, requiring vigilance and a critical stance from all participants in the publishing process.

DOAS was co-created in collaboration with the Diamond OA publishing community in Europe through an iterative participatory process. First, DIAMAS team members carried out an extensive analysis of 71 documents on quality standards and best practices in scholarly publishing, which revealed a global consensus on editorial quality. This analysis led to a first version of a quality standard for Diamond OA publishing, which was called EQSIP v1. This version was further refined via a gap analysis and feedback from eight focus groups involving 300 people from various European Diamond OA publishing communities, resulting in a second version, the Extensible Quality Standard in Institutional Publishing (EQSIP) v2.0 for Diamond Open Access. This version was then republished as DOAS, to underscore its relevance beyond the DIAMAS project outputs EQSIP 1.0 and 2.0.

As one of the main outcomes of the DIAMAS project, DOAS will soon be discussed at the global level in the context of the EC-funded ALMASI project, forging Diamond OA collaboration in Africa, Europe, and Latin America, as well as the Global Diamond Open Access Alliance announced by UNESCO on July 2024.

Human-Centric Open Science

2024-09-17T16:54:02+02:00

Open Science is often presented as a solution to the multiple problems afflicting contemporary scientific practices, ranging from lack of reproducibility to dubious review procedures, inefficient communications, and lack of transparency around methods and circumstances of research. Much of the debate around Open Science and how it should be implemented verges, however, on the natural sciences – and particularly physics and biomedicine – as a reference point and model for research practice. It is also typically assumed that Open Science is a force for good for both science and society, making it possible for those who have so far been marginalized or excluded from knowledge-making processes to participate and contribute. In this talk, I challenge these two assumptions. I critique the idea of openness as “sharing resources” and propose an alternative understanding of the ideas of openness and transparency, grounded on a more engaged model for fostering the quality and inclusivity of research processes and outcomes. I close by suggesting ways to value a much wider diversity of research settings and domains – including agricultural research, marine and environmental science, and the humanities, arts and social sciences – as key interlocutors and precious models for Open Science implementation.

The MOSAIC project: the challenge of sharing the results of unique research.

2024-07-12T12:59:47+02:00

One of the major challenges of many funded research projects is, of course, to validate and perpetuate an approach, methodologies and results, as well as trying to maintain this dynamic beyond the project itself. Some of the European funding for types of project such as those dedicated to "Centres of Vocational Excellence" requires participants to make all their results and deliverables freely available. MOSAIC (Mastering Job-Oriented Skillls in Arts and craft thanks to Centres of vocational excellence) is a European ERASMUS plus project involving seven countries and 15 main partners (universities, training centres and companies). The main aim of MOSAIC is to improve the quality of vocational training in the arts and crafts in order to meet the challenges posed by digital, environmental and socio-economic developments, by proposing to generate innovations from three angles: technical, educational and social. The complexity of MOSAIC is reflected in the very architecture of the project. By deciding to bring together seven countries - Armenia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Finland, France and Italy - and above all by anticipating a possible and relevant dialogue between very different partners: company directors, teachers, researchers, project managers, product designers, communication managers, technology advisers, craftsmen, designers and others, MOSAIC has banked on the possibility of fruitful collaboration, in scientific terms, between researchers and non-researchers. In this context, the question of disseminating the results of the research has taken on a new urgency. While publication in journals and participation in scientific events are obvious for researchers, they are much more complex and less obvious for non-researchers. It is in this sense that MOSAIC's main deliverable should be understood: a European Observatory of Art Professions, i.e. an online platform that will contain all the knowledge developed throughout the project in order to make all the data and deliverables produced during the project available to everyone. Conceived as part of a joint approach, this open-access structure, defined in its specifications as scalable, interactive and dynamic, has a strong desire to break away from a culture of silos where each player is in some way inward-looking. It should enable each of the project's partners to play their part in disseminating the results. It also has the ambition, through its structure, to continue to bring people together long after the end of the project.

Is open publishing really open to the public?

2024-08-15T14:02:12+02:00

Often journal articles and other common scholarly outputs are inaccessible or incomprehensible to readers who do not work in the field, even when made openly available. Exploring alternative mechanisms around science communication is an important issue in addressing equity and diversity issues in open research.

Routinely collected health and administrative data is used in research across the globe to address the critical health challenges of our age, including mental health crises, health inequalities and response to pandemics. Few members of the public know that their anonymised data is lawfully used in research. This makes it especially important that the outputs of such research communicate openly and accessibly about the work that is going on. Embedding participatory methods throughout projects can improve their legitimacy and impact. Using co-design to produce research outputs improves the diversity of patients and members of the public who can engage with the research in a meaningful way.

In this presentation, we will describe a participatory co-design method for producing communication materials about science which are accessible and transparent for a wide audience. We present a collaborative UK project between Brighton and Sussex Medical School, and Akrivia Health Ltd, a company which curates mental health data for NHS, academic and industry research purposes, in particular by developing clinically-informed AI to derive medically-relevant information from unstructured clinical notes.

Objective: Akrivia Health wanted to make patient facing information material about their data curation and research services, so that patients would know how their data were being used.

Method: We recruited six patient representatives across Southeast England, and held online and face-to-face sessions, working to achieve accessibility for participants with diverse needs. We hosted one session of information giving (online) and a day-long in-person session of deliberation and design, using the nominal group technique. Suggestions were generated about what information should be contained in the infographic, which graphics should be used, how it should be worded, and where the infographic should be publicised. Suggestions were grouped by facilitators, and then prioritised by participants. A mock-up infographic was created, and additional feedback offered. A later iteration of the infographic was sent to participants and email feedback received. Participants were paid £190 for their full participation and reimbursed for travel expenses.

Results and Conclusions: Workshops provided detailed design of the infographic in terms of the graphics, layout, quantity of words and content. There was high engagement from PPI members who mentioned they felt listened to and felt they had contributed to something concrete, particularly since they saw the infographic created in real time. The final infographic was very different to that which the Akrivia team had envisaged prior to the consultation. We learned: “what you think people want is often very different to what they do want”.

A Scalable methodological model for fostering open access: findings from participatory research with stakeholders in the Polish publishing ecosystem

2024-07-25T12:49:08+02:00

Two years ago, during the 17th Munin Conference, we presented the strategy for the Polish National Node for OPERAS (the poster can be found here). Our focus was on the publishing ecosystem – we aimed to recognise Polish publishers’ needs in the area of open access books and prototype useful tools and models to foster their transformation to open access. In the process, we diagnosed the biggest challenges on the way to the diamond model in book publishing and together with the stakeholders drafted solutions and started a collaborative effort to implement them in the future. In this contribution to the 19th Munin Conference, we will share our insights from this study, however, our focus will be on a scalable methodological model we applied rather than the outcome of the OPERAS-PL collaboration with publishers (for the project results see Wnuk et al. 2023 and Wnuk et al. 2024). The research results will be presented briefly to demonstrate the model’s accuracy, usability, and usefulness for the research objectives.

To understand the communities’ day-to-day practice, needs, and challenges we conducted a pilot study applying a participatory research approach (Bergold & Thomas 2012). The stakeholders were invited and encouraged to share their opinions and know-how in a series of research activities. The study implemented three methods: 1) survey, 2) semi-structured interviews, and 3) a design thinking workshop. Thanks to the survey, we identified stakeholders willing to collaborate and share their insights in open access publishing. We learned their publishing scope and models of funding open access. For the second phase, we selected stakeholders to share their opinions in an in-depth interview regarding their publishing practices. The third phase provided insight into publishers’ needs, expectations, and ways of thinking about possible solutions. The research activities were concluded with a collaborative effort to keep the working group (simply called OA Publishers – “Wydawnictwa OA” in Polish) and seek opportunities to implement some of the designed solutions. The study was based on the principles of transparency, diversity, and equity, however, it protected the participants’ rights to anonymity and secrecy of their business models.

We will present the research methodology informed by participatory research in the format of an open workflow, consisting of research data such as survey questions, interview scenarios, and design thinking methods. The objective of the presentation will be to provide the audience with a ready-to-use tool to emulate and adjust to their potential needs. The methodology can be reused for similar initiatives which strive to recognise and facilitate scholarly communication practices in their communities. The main target audiences of the model are: applied social sciences research teams and NGOs. The presentation will contribute to the conference discussions with a proven methodology for engaging crucial stakeholders in developing solutions that will serve them.

DOAJ: Advancing open access by fostering journal diversity through collaboration

2024-08-13T12:19:04+02:00

Since its creation in 2003, the mission of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has been to increase the visibility of open-access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals, regardless of discipline, geography, or language.
Initially, the DOAJ used a simple suggestion form consisting of five blank fields. The index started with a little more than 300 titles. Twenty years later, the DOAJ has become a reference in the scholarly ecosystem with more than 20,000 journals indexed. Over these 20 years, the application form and our criteria have evolved significantly alongside the shift to digital and the heterogeneous adoption of open science by the community and academic practices.

But if Open Science itself has a heterogeneous adoption (due to technical complexity, lack of knowledge, lack of resources, and diversity of practices), how can we, the DOAJ, help foster diversity in our content? How has diversity evolved in our index? What is our approach?

Since the beginning, our focus has been to work with and for the community, implementing changes as needed, to co-evolve with publishing practices and the scholarly community. In 2022, we officially committed to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) and we collaborate with different organizations worldwide to discuss and develop principles that promote transparency and best practices in scholarly publishing. As the reputation of the DOAJ has evolved positively, so has our responsibility. That is why one of the core themes of our strategic goals for 2023-2025 is to advocate for equity and diversity in global access journal publishing.

In this presentation, we will outline our approach to fostering diversity in our content.
Where are we and what are we doing? We will cover different aspects, including the role of our worldwide team, the impact of our ambassador program, our academic and regional collaborations, and the diverse outputs and core texts we have produced to enhance diversity and equity.

Reshaping and a Makeover – Preparing Old Services for New Times

2024-08-16T12:04:48+02:00

Both nationally and internationally there is an increased focus on scholarly communication with community driven models, such as Diamond Open Access, being seen as more equitable than the present. The Norwegian document “Strategi for Norsk vitenskapelig publisering etter 2024”[1] also indicates that this is a way forward for Norway.

This paradigm shift in scholarly communication may lead to changes in the publishing infrastructure and publishing culture. As an established part of the publishing ecology in Europe and Norway, erih+ and the Norwegian Registry must adhere to these changes and prepare to meet the future.

Erih+, a European journal index for the SSH academic fields, is run and owned by the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills. To increase the relevance and visibility by the international community, erih+ is adjusting to European needs and policy. To make sure that the developments and efforts are spent correctly, erih+ became member of the research infrastructure OPERAS in early 2023. The involvement in this research infrastructure has made it possible for erih+ to reshape and restructure the service in line with the current discussed policies.

The actions erih+ is taking to meet the future are related to metadata, technology and cooperation with the community. The renewed erih+ is strengthening the ties to the community driven journals by making sure that they are supported, retrieved, shared and highlighted. This also include the Diamond journals which are in the centre of the many discussions concerning scholarly communication today.
This presentation will focus on how the new times demand new priorities, and how technology and close bonds to the larger community is perceived as the best way forward for erih+.

By focusing on technical innovations, improved metadata schema and an engagement in the European communities, erih+ will be a service equipped to meet the needs of the future.

[1] https://www.openscience.no/strategi-norsk-vitenskapelig-publisering-etter-2024

Advancing Open Access: A Case Study of Collaborative Models and Projects by Dutch University Presses

2024-08-14T16:11:36+02:00

"Advancing Open Access: A Case Study of Collaborative Models and Projects by Dutch University Presses"

In this presentation we will explore how Dutch University Presses (NUPs) have united to transform academic publishing through diamond open access. We'll dive into their collaborative efforts, innovative projects, and the creation of a joint catalogue, as part of a broader strategy to reshape the academic publishing landscape towards greater accessibility and inclusivity.

The collaboration between Dutch University Presses (NUPs), primarily diamond open access presses, began two years ago after recognizing the need for knowledge sharing and joint initiatives. Each university press within NUPs is founded on shared core principles: diamond open access, author-retained copyrights, journal title rights held by the editorial team, high scholarly quality, CC-BY licenses and diverse publication formats. Since 2022, regular thematic meetings have strengthened this partnership, aiming to enhance both collective and individual efforts. The goal is expand diamond publishing, challenging the traditional, commercial academic publishing model. This is not a utopia; we are witnessing similar initiatives emerging worldwide, confirming that a more accessible open science landscape is possible. The resources freed up can then flow back into research and education.

NUPs collaborate on developing and submitting joint projects to funding agencies, increasing approval chances and sharing the workload across institutions. Examples of current projects include:

Formal Collaboration Framework: Establishing a formal structure to facilitate collaboration among NUPs.
Semi-automatic XML Layout Techniques: This project aims to enhance journal publication quality and efficiency using semi-automatic XML layout techniques. It seeks to save time for editors and authors, reduce costs, improve output quality, and enhance accessibility, including audio options for the visually impaired. Additionally, it can facilitate the transition of editorial teams from commercial publishers to NUPs.
Joint Catalogue: This initiative by the six Dutch NUPs offers an online database of all diamond open access books and textbooks published by the NUPs.

In our presentation we will elaborate on the joint catalogue as an example of collaboration. The catalogue will includes scientific (peer-reviewed) books, non-peer-reviewed/popular science books, textbooks, dissertations, and special publications, both published and forthcoming. The objectives are to enhance visibility, serve as a showcase, promote new releases, demonstrate collaborative efforts, increase recognition, and improve metadata management efficiency. Thoth, an open-source metadata management system, has emerged as a promising solution for the Joint Catalogue.

Margreet Nieborg, University of Groningen, 0000-0001-9034-2853

Margreet Nieborg is a project manager and head of the University of Groningen Press (UGP). The UGP is part of the University Library. Margreet is an educationalist and has led various projects within the University Library, including setting up the University Press in 2017. UGP is an example of a diamond open access university press that currently hosts journals, books, and textbooks.

Peter van Rees, University of Groningen, 0009-0004-4910-7359

Peter van Rees is an experienced IT application manager and metadata specialist in the field of academic libraries. His role in the University of Groningen Press (UGP) is to maintain and optimize the UGP data flow into and out of the library's infrastructure and beyond.

A Dialogue: Commercial and Anti-commercial Thinking in Diamond Open Access Publishing

2024-08-06T15:44:27+02:00

Michigan Publishing and The Open Library of Humanities are both diamond open access publishers who have pioneered university-led, non-commercial business models. Both organizations work with library partners worldwide to fund the cost of publishing articles and books in the humanities and social sciences, which are free for authors to publish and readers to access. This places equity at the heart of scholarly publishing and exists to offer a compelling alternative for those that want to return scholarship to community ownership. Our presentation explores the parallel ways in which our ventures have established non-commercial thinking at the heart of our organizational history, identity and value proposition as publishers.

However, wary of how the language around diamond open access can become dogmatic, this presentation seeks to challenge and shake up our identification with anti-commercialism by exploring and testing the different ways in which our not-for-profit organizations have, in practice and by necessity, nonetheless engaged in commercial thinking – specifically regarding the development of our technological platforms, Fulcrum and Janeway. This presentation therefore seeks to establish and perform a dialogue (taking inspiration from Dialogues, a 1977 book by Gilles Deleuze and his student Claire Parnet) around the balance between pragmatism and idealism, and to interrogate whether the way we speak about these two around Open Access is useful. We argue that creating flexibility in our thinking on this topic (avoiding the idea that business is always and inevitably a “dirty word”) has and will continue to be crucial for our sustainability as university-led publishers, if we are serious about providing a genuine alternative to the rampant commercial acquisition of grassroots community projects.

The Future is (Still) Open (and Growing)

2024-08-09T15:50:26+02:00

Using the Public Knowledge Project's extensive dataset, we will provide a global overview of the growth of the OA publishing community. Providing a high-level view of the often unseen growth of bibliodiversity of scholarly communications including the increase in multilingual publishing.

With time to consider the future and the continuity of PKP's decentralised community development and innovation and provide an update on the roadmap for the free and open source software (OJS, OMP, & OPS). In particular the development for the European Commission's Open Research Europe platform which will leave F1000 in 2026.

We will look at how this significant EU investment will directly benefit the European open community, including the development of the PRC (Publish, Review, Curate / open peer review / post-publication peer review) workflow and new open tools for the community. This will include a quick look at automated XML (JATS) typesetting and the Publication Facts Label which seek to help readers learn and easily assess an article and journal’s adherence to scholarly standards.

And, finally, a brief reflection on the key European collaborations with ORE, CRAFT-OA, DIAMAS, and national platforms (Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Albania, Sweden, etc.) and celebrating how collective decentralised open access is successfully growing across the world to the benefit of multilingualism, open science, bibliodiversity, and scholar-led publishing.

Research Data: A Public Good or a Private Asset?

2024-08-09T13:08:22+02:00

This article is concerned with the issue of how Research Performing Organizations (RPOs) can balance the market and non-market value of the research data they hold. Research data is often viewed as a public good as it is produced at least partly through public funds. As such, research data is expected to be made publicly available and in service of public interests. At the same time, research data has market value and can be viewed as a private asset. This is so because research data is a versatile resource that can be re-purposed for commercial ends. Research data can be an input upon which products or services are built, especially in light of emerging technologies that can automate the compilation and analysis of data with ease (see, for example, Stiglich et al., 2023). The discussion on research data as a public good or a private asset can be contentious. Many hold the view that publicly funded research - including data - should be open to, and for the benefit of, all. At the same time, others argue that there are different ways through which research can achieve its final objective of benefiting society, not least through commercial routes.

To address this issue, we adopt Scheiner’s (2020) framework for dealing with opposing perspectives that carry an inherent tension between them. Scheiner proposes four strategies in this regard: (1) to treat the perspectives as lacking a common ground and contradictory, where one perspective is chosen over the other; (2) to treat the perspectives as in constant tension, preserving the paradoxes between them; (3) to treat the perspectives as independent and yet complementary, placing them in dialog with each other; and (4) to treat the perspectives as blending into each other, merging them into a synthesis. Of particular interest to this article are RPOs in the institute sector that operate under both market and non-market logics, which have implications for how they govern their research data. For instance, RPOs in the sector need to comply with mandates on open research data and, at the same time, protect commercially sensitive research data.

In the paper, we conceptually apply Scheiner’s framework to RPOs in the institute sector as an illustrative example, in order to gain insights into how these RPOs can move toward an integrated strategy to research data governance. From the discussions undertaken in the article, one of the main conclusions is that these RPOs may benefit from developing a research data governance model that acknowledges both the economic and societal values of research data.

Towards reusable qualitative data: lessons from the QualiFAIR project

2024-08-16T11:20:31+02:00

Qualitative and context-sensitive data are, as the term(s) suggest, contextual, here-and-now specific and often person-identifying. This raises a number of problems for reuse and multiple uses of these data and creates barriers to transparency and reproducibility of qualitative research. Specifically, sharing and reuse of qualitative data is largely limited due to privacy and copyright regulations. Multiple uses of some qualitative data are also limited because of data’s context-sensitivity – the unique, authentic here-and-now character tied to the specific research situation. Additionally, while in the recent years quantitative data has been made increasingly FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) across disciplines, data management and archiving procedures for qualitative data are still in their infancy. Finally, researchers and students who work with qualitative research are still not oriented towards data sharing and reuse and not trained to practice open qualitative research.

To tackle these issues, we have started a QualiFAIR project as a hub-node infrastructure at the University of Oslo in Norway. The project has focused on making qualitative and context-sensitive data more FAIR as well as on raising awareness about both the need for sharing and reuse of qualitative data as well as its possible limitations.

QualiFAIR has been organized into five thematic areas: 1) Ethics and privacy, 2) Copyright, 3) Data management, 4) Infrastructure and 5) Metadata. Each area had responsible groups that led the work in the hub. Working groups were assembled from academic, technical and administrative staff at the university, comprising of researchers, engineers, librarians and research administrators from a number of disciplines, including anthropology, political science, medicine, linguistics, psychology, music research, theology and education. In this way, QualiFAIR’s efforts have been truly interdisciplinary, and project’s outputs are to serve qualitative research community across fields and levels of expertise.

In this talk, we will present the project aims, structure and outputs from each thematic area, but also share main lessons learned in the process of helping to make qualitative data more FAIR that can be of use not only for qualitative researchers, but also open science community more broadly. Presented lessons will focus on five main areas: 1) Building a network of diverse actors involved with qualitative research across disciplines; 2) Developing skills in qualitative data sharing and reuse through seminars and workshops; 3) Creating routines, procedures and concrete instructions for making qualitative data more FAIR; 4) Involving researchers and their own projects as case studies for testing new solutions for qualitative data reuse, and 5) Working with stakeholders to move towards new policies and national solutions for qualitative data sharing and reuse. Based on the presented lessons from the project, we will indicate recommendations and future directions for the efforts focusing on making qualitative data more reusable.

Unveiling Attitudes Towards Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area

2024-08-02T15:41:17+02:00

Academic books remain crucial in scholarly production, particularly within the SSH. However, open-access policies have predominantly focused on journal articles, leaving monographs less regulated. The adoption of OA practices across universities, research institutions, and publishers has spurred efforts to evaluate their impact on research dissemination and visibility (Bryan & Ozcan, 2021; Robinson-Garcia et al., 2020; Vincent-Lamarre et al., 2016). Studies have examined how OA mandates influence publication rates (Azadbakht et al., 2023) and what incentives increase researchers' OA participation (Hadad et al., 2023; Koley & Lala, 2022; Terán & Dávila, 2023). Despite the focus on journals, OA books are gaining traction, presenting challenges for policy regulation and impact assessment (Laakso, 2022). The PALOMERA (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area; Grant agreement ID: 1010942701), a Horizon Europe project, aims to address the challenges behind implementing books in OA policies by analysing the policy landscape and then developing a harmonised set of recommendations for various stakeholders.

This paper analyses 42 interviews conducted with key stakeholders – researchers, librarians, publishers, research funding agencies, and policymakers across the ERA to understand their attitudes towards OA monographs and identify common trends. Based on analyses of the qualitative material, we can distinguish three major factors contributing to the attitudes toward open access monographs:

Policy gaps and publishing challenges. The absence of clear regulations for OA monographs does not inhibit their publication but introduces challenges in copyright, licensing, and technological infrastructure. While national OA policies are scarce, funder and institutional requirements often compensate, though they lack comprehensive reward systems to incentivise OA publishing.
Multilingualism and visibility. While promoting transparency, open science may inadvertently disadvantage non-English publications. Interviews suggest that OA monographs in local languages, like Bulgarian, face lower visibility compared to English-language works, highlighting a potential imbalance in internationalisation strategies and petrify the domination of English-language commercial publishers.
Prestige. OA books are still frequently viewed as less prestigious than traditional printed books. This perception is influenced by concerns that OA formats are still associated with vanity publishing and predatory practices. This stigma may stem from the fact that OA monographs are less common than journal articles and that it takes time for OA to build equivalent academic prestige.

The dataset and analysis contribute to the ongoing struggle to base open science discourse on solid and empirical findings to advocate for comprehensive policies for scholarly content. The conclusion will address incorporating this work into building successful OS strategies for social sciences and humanities in the framework of SCIROS (Strategic Collaboration for Interdisciplinary Research on Open Science in the SSH) project.

Shaping the Future of Open Access Books: Recommendations for Open Access Book Policies

2024-08-16T10:13:12+02:00

Books continue to play an important role in scientific communication, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Unfortunately, open access in academic communication in the journal sector has progressed much further than in the area of books. The PALOMERA project investigates the reasons for this asymmetrical development and develops open access book policy recommendations for shaping the transformation towards an open access book system and bringing a strong and stable foundation and commitment to this important sector.

This presentation will show which information sources were evaluated in the PALOMERA project, which methods were used to analyse over 500 policy documents from more than 30 countries, and, in particular, which recommendations for the design of open access book policies were finally deduced from our data. The centrepiece of the presentation are the policy recommendations for the development for open access books. They were developed from the data collected in the project (already existent policies, interviews, surveys and contextual documents) and address the relevant stakeholders in the field: research funding organisations, research performing organisations, infrastructure providers and libraries, policy makers and publishers. The last part of the presentation is dedicated to a critical assessment of future developments in the book market and ends with questions on the implementation of measures for more open access books.

Different paths to retaining rights in Europe

2024-08-01T15:27:12+02:00

The lack of legal certainty surrounding intellectual property rights is one of the few remaining obstacles to the adoption of Open Science in the European Research Area. In particular, the legal aspects of sharing and reusing copyrighted scholarly works .

The proposed will delve into the findings from Project Retain, examining the ongoing development and implementation of rights retention in different legal, political, organisational and economical settings across Europe.

Led by SPARC Europe and part of the KR21 programme. The first phase of the project developed an overview of current approaches to author rights retention and open licensing resulting in a report published in June 2023. Interim results were shared at the Munin Conference 2022.

Our research draws on case studies from 10 European countries, highlighting varied approaches to rights retention and open licensing. We will highlight the dynamic interplay between legal systems, institutional practices, and stakeholders, and in particular, we will cover:

Variations in policies across jurisdictions and their relationship with laws, especially laws that are enacting secondary publishing rights,
The interplay between institutional policies, organisational settings, publisher relations, and legal frameworks,
Collaborative initiatives between institutions and different groups of stakeholders,
Systems and procedures put in place to support and monitor the uptake of policies,
Evolution of institutional policies and their impact on authors and scholarly communication.

We will conclude with a discussion of the value of case studies of this type, how to make them as vibrant as possible and more easily digestible and accessible to a wider group of potential agents.

The Impact of Open Science – what do we really know?

2024-08-16T17:51:26+02:00

Introduction
Open Science (OS) is increasingly mainstream, with wide adoption of practices like Open Access and FAIR data. While systems and data sources for monitoring the uptake of these practices are now relatively mature, research to establish real-world, long-term impacts is largely scattered and patchy.

In this talk, I (on behalf of the PathOS project team) will present work to scope and synthesise current evidence of:

Academic impact: E.g., OS contributions to research efficiency, quality, collaboration, and equity.
Societal impact: E.g., effects on policy, governance, education, climate, public trust, and health.
Economic impact: E.g., influence on industry productivity, innovation, and cost efficiency.

We used the PRISMA-SCR methodology (Tricco et al. 2018) to systematically scope literature from 2000-2022. Starting from a total of more than 30,000 initially retrieved records, the study team identified, selected, analysed, and synthesised peer-reviewed literature from academic databases and further “grey literature”/preprints from the Web.

Full results for two studies (academic and societal impact) are already available online (Cole et al. 2024; Klebel et al. 2024). The third, on economic impact, is in preparation and will soon be made available as a preprint and submitted for journal publication.

Results
415 studies demonstrated academic impact, 196 societal impact, and 70 economic impact. Most academic studies focus on Open Access, showing increased citation rates but raising equity concerns due to the article processing charge (APC) model. Citizen Science improves data collection and education but has varying levels of data quality. Open/FAIR data leads to reuse benefits and better reproducibility. Societal impact studies highlight Citizen Science’s role in education, climate awareness, and policy engagement, though Open Access’s societal impact remains limited. Economic studies suggest theoretical benefits like cost savings and innovation, but empirical data is scarce.

Discussion and conclusion
This talk will detail and reflect upon the these findings, including the uneven distribution of research on OS impacts, difficulties in assessing OS impact and establishing causality, the tendency for research to focus on areas where data is evenly available rather than where evidence is most needed, prior focus on uptake rather than impact, and the implications of all this for our understanding OS impact. Finally we will look ahead to PathOS’ future work on OS impact indicators, methods for cost-benefit analysis, and specific case-study investigations to deepen our understanding of OS’s influence on research efficiency, quality, equity, societal engagement, policy-making, and economic outcomes.