Open science round-up: July 2022

Big stories in open science:

• SPARC Europe Project to Reform Rights Retention and Open Licensing Policies
  SPARC Europe will be taking up a new project sponsored under the Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) programme to strengthen access to knowledge through libraries and archives. It aims to strengthen rights to knowledge through changes in legislation and practices across Europe and is aligned to the SPARC Europe strategy
• ASAPbio launches Publish Your Reviews initiative
  This initiative aims to encourage researchers who perform peer review for a journal to publish their review alongside the preprint version of the article under review. Researchers can publish their review on platforms such as PREreview, Qeios, ScienceOpen and link them to the preprint versions of the articles under review. This would allow reviewers to provide rich contextual information to preprints.
• Internet Archive seeks to end a radical lawsuit that aims to criminalize library lending
  A motion for summary judgment was filed in a New York District Court explaining that Internet Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program is lawful fair use according to American Copyright law. This was in relation to the federal lawsuit filed by four major publishing companies – Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley and Penguin Random House claiming that lending out secured digital version of books owned by libraries violates their copyrights. The publishers demand a new right to control how libraries lend books. Internet Archive aims to advance American copyright law by preserving traditional library lending in the digital world and furthering public access to knowledge for creation of creative and scholarly works.
• Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey reveals interest towards Open Access Models.
  Results of the eighth cycle of the Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey reveal that the majority of faculty members in the US are interested in open access publication models. However, traditional scholarly incentives continue to motivate their publication preferences. Faculty place more importance on journals having no processing fees over journals with free content. Younger faculty are more open to an open access publication and see libraries as key in financially supporting open access infrastructure.
• GigaScience celebrates a decade in scientific publishing
  On 12 July the first biological and biomedical “data” journal, GigaScience, completed its first decade in open scientific publishing.  They celebrated their 10th anniversary by assessing their milestones using the UNESCO recommendations on Open Science as a map. Their sister journal, GigaByte, has been shortlisted as a finalist for the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers Awards 2022 for Innovation in Publishing.
• Indian University Launches Open Access Gateway
  India’s Uttaranchal University (UU) launched a Gateway that gives all its faculty members the opportunity to publish their research as open access articles using an F1000 publishing model. This gateway will help increase the number of quality open access research outputs across multi-disciplinary research portfolios and various science, medical, technology and social science fields.
• DORA’s SPACE Rubric Gift
  The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) has launched a SPACE workshop kit in English and Spanish to assist those seeking to share the SPACE rubric with their communities. The SPACE (Standards for scholarship; Process mechanics and policies; Accountability; Culture within institutions; Evaluation and iterative feedback) rubric tool was designed to help academic institutions support the implementation of fair and responsible academic career assessment practices.
• Open Science Cooperation between the Arab States and Latin America
  The Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN) and Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks (RedCLARA) signed a cooperation agreement, with the support of EU co-funded AfricaConnect3 project. ASREN will adopt and contribute to LA Referencia open-source discovery software, towards developing a regional platform for harvesting, validation, enrichment and publication of metadata of scientific production in the Arab region. The focus areas of the partnership include cooperation in Open Science and supporting Earth Observation activities.
• BigScience Blooms large with their open multilingual model
  The BigScience research workshop released their 176B Parameter AI BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Model (BLOOM), an autoregressive language model trained on data from 46 natural languages and 13 programming languages and is the largest publicly available open multilingual model. The BigScience workshop began in May 2021, with over 1,000 researchers from over 60 countries and 250 institutions collaborating to build a large, multilingual deep-learning model on the 28 petaflops Jean Zay (IDRIS) supercomputer located near Paris, France.
• NACOSTI – A major driver for ORCID adoption in Kenya
  Kenya’s National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation (NACOSTI) has developed an integration that enables the collection of researchers’ ORCID iDs and imports them into their Research Information and Management System (RIMS) portal. This allows researchers to benefit from the name disambiguation that ORCID provides, and encourages further adoption of ORCID by other researchers and institutions. NACOSTI has been helping researchers obtain government licenses to conduct research, along with registration and accreditation of research institutions in Kenya.

Open Science Events and Opportunities:

• OPERAS AISBL– the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area is seeking to recruit an Open Science Project Officer. Closing date for applications 15 August 2022.
• Open Science in South Asia Conference 2022 – The DST – Centre for Policy Research at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, is organizing the Open Science South Asian Network (OSSAN) Conference from 5-8 September 2022 in hybrid mode. The Call for abstracts closes on 16 August 2022.
• The first German Open Science Festival will take place in Hanover from August 30-31, 2022. Registrations open.
• Netherlands National Open Science Festival with the theme- Meet/Share/Inspire/Care, will take place at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam on 01 September 2022. Register here
• The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), is organizing the 25th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Novi Sad, Serbia from 7-9 September 2022. The conference theme is “FAIRness of ETDs and its implications”. 
• The Open Work in Academia Summit will be held from 7-9 September in New York. The event is hosted by Rochester Institute of Technology’s open source programs office Open@RIT. Registration is limited to 100 people. To register for the summit, go to the Open Work in Academia Summit website.
• Science Europe is organizing a hybrid Conference on Open Science on 18 and 19 October 2022. Register here.

Our top ten open science reads from June:

1. The challenge of measuring scholarly communication
2. The Political Economy of Academic Publications  
3. Open Science practices that improve reproducibility & support trust in science
4. Why traditional startups struggle to disrupt the academic publishing industry.
5. A Community Response to the UNESCO global call for best practices in investing in open science infrastructures
6. Crossref as a source of open bibliographic metadata
7. The Cornerstone Of Modern Science Is Broken, Some Say. Here’s How We Can Fix It
8. How Will Open Access Research Help Tackle Future Pandemics?
9. Preprints as a driver of open science: opportunities for Southeast Asia
10. Despite promising developments, African researchers are still disadvantaged in publication

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