Open science round-up: June 2022

Big stories in open science

1. The American Institute of Physics (AIP) publishing expands partnership with CLOCKSS digital archive for preserving its library of eBooks. The agreement builds upon AIP Publishing’s existing partnership with CLOCKSS, through which the publisher’s array of journals are digitally preserved.
2. The Arab States region was buzzing with events on International Archives Day. In celebration of the day, the Arab Heritage Centre (AHC) at the Sharjah Institute for Heritage held a symposium titled “You are the Archive“. The Saudi National Centre for Archives and Records organized an international symposium on national archives in Islamic countries, based on the theme, “National Archives in the Islamic Countries: Distinguished Experiences and Future Directions.” It focussed on unifying efforts to strengthen joint action, exchange experiences and technical cooperation in archives, and develop capabilities of archives in the Islamic countries.
3. Political guidance on international cooperation in Open Science: EU ministers responsible for research adopted three sets of conclusions establishing political guidelines on international cooperation in the field of research and innovation, on promotion of open science policies and on implementation of European missions. The Council proposed joint action throughout the European Research Area in the reform of research assessment systems, developing capacities for academic publishing and scientific communication, and promoting multilingualism to raise the profile of EU research results. They aim to make research careers more attractive, to facilitate scientific exchanges and to bring science and society closer together.
4. OpenAIRE CEO receives the 2022 Medal of Honour: Natalia Manola, Chief Executive Officer of OpenAIRE, a European not-for-profit organization working towards open scholarly communication received the medal of honour of the Vietsch Foundation. The medal is awarded annually to people who have made a contribution of lasting value to the research and development of advanced Internet technology aiming to support science, research and higher education.
5. International Data Week 2022, took place in Seoul, Republic of Korea, with SciDataCon – the international conference for scrutiny and discussion of the frontier issues of data in research – held virtually from 20-23 June 2022. Core themes of data science and data stewardship, open science, and FAIR data and services were discussed. SciDataCon was organized by the two data bodies of the ISC: CODATA the Committee on Data (CODATA) and the World Data System (WDS) International Programme Office.
6. More needs to be done to popularize preprints in Japan. In March 2022 the Japan Science and Technology Agency launched a preprint server called Jxiv, to call attention to research produced in the country and to house preprints of scholarly articles in English or Japanese on topics ranging from history to linguistics and business. However, according to a Nature article, Japanese researchers rarely post their work to preprint servers and in three months less than 40 preprints have been uploaded. Efforts need to be taken to address the issue of low preprint activity among scientists in a nation that produces among the highest global research output.
7. Octopus – A novel publishing model launched. Octopus Publishing Community Interest Company (CIC) has launched its open research platform, Octopus, which aims to enable fast, free and fair publishing of research that is open to all, focussing on the intrinsic quality of research. Octopus aims to provide a primary research record for publishing and research as it happens, so that the research community can record full details of ideas, methods, data and analyses, and for these to be peer reviewed and assessed for quality. It will allow faster sharing of results with credit given to individual work at all stages of research including peer review. Researchers are invited to join the Octopus user community and the conversations. To find out more about thinking behind Octopus, read our 2019 interview with its creator, Alex Freeman.
8. Digitizing plant specimens for open research: With the intention of sharing specimens for research, the Australian National Herbarium in Canberra is taking images of nearly a million plant specimens. The full digital collection of the Australian National Herbarium will be made available through the Atlas of Living Australia, including for the general public. This also aims to help inform bushfire recovery and biosecurity.
9. Hindawi Launches New Journal Reports Open access publisher Hindawi has launched new journal reports which showcase a wide range of publishing metrics, from submission through peer review and discovery. By sharing information on median peer review time and the number of reviews per article, in addition to traditional metrics such as citations and article views, Hindawi aims to help researchers make better-informed decisions in choosing where to publish.
10. British Heart Foundation (BHF) embeds DORA principles in research funding and evaluation practices. As a signatory to the San Francisco Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA), The BHF has formalised guidelines for good practice in expert review and will make examples of their review forms available on their website. They aim to make processes more inclusive and transparent while nurturing open research environments for good science and research integrity.
11. Looking forward to a pan-European publishing platform. About 15 European research funders have expressed their interest in considering launching a joint open access academic publishing platform that would use the backers’ combined funding and communication powers to significantly bolster the publicly supported European publishing infrastructure.

Open Science Events and Opportunities:

• Springer Nature, figshare and Digital Science, invite researchers to participate in the State of Open Data survey 2022, which aims to understand global experiences and attitudes towards data handling and sharing, challenges faced, and impact on workload and resources. Deadline: 18 July 2022.
• Submissions are invited for the 17th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing to be held during 29 Nov–1 Dec 2022.  The Munin Conference is an annual event on scholarly communication, primarily revolving around open access, open data and other aspects of open science. The conference will be both digital and on-site at the Arctic University of Norway. Deadline for abstract submission: 22 August 2022.
• Open Research Funders Group, a partnership of philanthropic organizations committed to the open sharing of research outputs, has launched a call to action for interested parties across the research ecosystem to engage, convene, and collaborate in service of better research output tracking. They solicit community feedback on improving research output tracking from interested parties across the research ecosystem through a survey. Deadline: 14 July 2022.
• ScienceOpen has announced the upcoming “Road to Open Meta conference” on 12 September 2022. It will aim to define the existing challenges of metadata communication and provide a forum to discuss and present solutions on how to overcome possible problem areas.

Our top ten open science reads from June:

• How Science Itself Fuels a Culture of Misinformation (4 June)
• How does open science ‘democratise’ and ‘collectivise’ research? (5 June)
• Building Stronger Chains Together: Keeping Preprints Connected to the Scholarly Record (7 June)
• ‘Foul play’ among protective scholars; how to increase rigor; science and a ‘culture of misinformation’ (6 June)
• Does Open Access Really Increase Impact? A Large-Scale Randomized Analysis (15 June)
• EU stance on open access a ‘missed opportunity’ (13 June)
• Is Open Access Worth the Cost? (1 June 2022)
• Language Diversity in Scholarly Publishing (21 June)
• Let the Metadata Wars Begin (22 June)
• Copies, rights, and the existential digital threat to libraries (24 June)

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This was the second edition of a new regular feature on open science, looking back at big news stories, events and opportunities and stories generating debate in the open science world. Would you like to receive this as an email newsletter? Do you have any other comments? We’re keen to hear your feedback below.

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