Digital ubiquity has disrupted the traditional university model. The internet has shifted the balance of a tension between control and disorder in knowledge production, with many of the opportunities the web brings leading directly to many of the challenges we now need to address. Lucy Montgomery and Cameron Neylon advocate for the idea of universities as Open Knowledge Institutions, which […]
Category: open science
Not all academics are comfortable with the idea of open peer review
There are many arguments in favour of open peer review, from anticipated improvements to the speed and quality of reviews brought about by the greater accountability, through to the likely reduction in unfair or illogical decisions because of the system’s transparency. Despite this, not all academics are comfortable with open peer review and remain fearful of their comments and views […]
Research data should be available long-term…but who is going to pay?
There is now a broad consensus that sharing and preserving data makes research more efficient, reproducible and potentially innovative. As such, most funding bodies now require research data to be stored, preserved, and made available long-term. But who is going to pay for this to happen? Marta Teperek and Alastair Dunning outline how the costs of long-term data preservation are […]
How small open access monograph presses can make the most of an increasingly rich data landscape
Until relatively recently the ability to exploit new data for open access books was restricted to large publishers or content aggregators with the resources to invest in its collection, management, and analysis. However, Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon, Alkim Ozaygen and Tama Leaver describe how barriers to engaging with data are falling, with open access monograph publishers now having growing access […]
Open science is all very well but how do you make it FAIR in practice?
Open science is about increasing the reuse of research, and making sure that publicly funded research is accessible to all. Key to achieving this is adhering to FAIR principles: ensuring the findings and data behind research results are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. Rachel Bruce and Bas Cordewener share findings from a recent report which takes stock of how far […]
A variety of strategies and funding approaches are required to accelerate the transition to open access. But in all, authors are key
More than two decades of work towards liberating scholarly publishing from paywalled constraints has left many within the scholarly community exploring ways to accelerate the transition to open access. Not all institutions or author communities will agree upon which strategies or funding approaches to undertake, and nor do they need to. But whichever strategy is pursued, having university faculty lead […]
An idea to promote research integrity: adding badges to papers where the authors fought against the results being suppressed or sanitised
Just as some journals support open science by adding badges to those research papers for which the authors have shared the data, Adrian Barnett suggests journals might similarly recognise those authors who uphold research integrity by publishing their results despite attempts at suppression or sanitisation. To do so would require evidence of the attempted suppression but ultimately draw attention to […]
Funder open access platforms – a welcome innovation?
Funding organisations commissioning their own open access publishing platforms is a relatively recent development in the OA environment, with the European Commission following the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation in financing such an initiative. But in what ways, for better or worse, do these new platforms disrupt or complement the scholarly communications landscape? Tony Ross-Hellauer, Birgit Schmidt and Bianca […]
Making research evaluation processes in Europe more transparent
Researchers repeatedly cite career advancement as a key incentive for their practices and behaviours. This is critical to understanding the pace of change in scholarly communications, as those researchers inclined to innovate or experiment with new forms of research outputs, methodologies, or communication styles risk being penalised by the evaluation system used by many research institutions that are slow to […]
Mind the skills gap: creating a data access and reuse competency framework for government departments and organisations
Having access to the vital data collected by government departments can make a huge difference to the work of researchers in universities and charities. But for these researchers to actually access and be able to reuse this data is an often painstaking process that can take months or even longer. Richard Welpton suggests this process might be made quicker and […]