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The Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) celebrated International Open Access Week 2017 (23-27 October) with a series of blog posts, events and announcements.
The OSC kicked off the week in style by, in the words of The Guardian, 'breaking the internet' with the announcement that Prof. Stephen Hawking has granted the University of Cambridge permission to make his thesis freely available and Open Access in Apollo. The most regularly requested University of Cambridge doctoral thesis has long been Prof. Hawking’s ‘Properties of expanding universes’, published in 1966, and the OSC are thrilled that this seminal work is now available freely and openly to anyone in the world. You can download Prof. Hawking’s thesis here: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.11283
If you didn't have a chance to attend any of the OSC's exciting programme of events find out more, access recordings and more on the OSC Open Access Week 2017 webpage.
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On 25 October, the conference ‘Better Science Through Data’, organised jointly by the Wellcome Trust and Springer Nature, was held in London. Marta Teperek, Data Stewardship Coordinator at TU Delft, and Jez Cope, Research Data Manager at the University of Sheffield and one of the keynote speakers, both provided excellent reports on the various presentations and lightning talks.
A common theme of the conference for Marta Teperek was that the goal of creating FAIR research requires good data management from the outset. The four keynote speakers covered topics from the pressures of patenting, barriers to reproducible research, the conflicts of protecting participants and striving for openness, and how libraries are working to support Open Research.
Both Marta Teperek and Jez Cope provide their own highlights, in particular of the 13 lightning talks which served as the core of the day’s programme. Read their blogs on the TU Delft Open Working blog and on Jez Cope's personal blog.
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The Center for Open Science (COS) and EarthArXiv have launched a new, free, open access and open source earth sciences preprint service, called EarthArXiv. EarthArXiv is built on the Open Science Framework (OSF), COS’s flagship platform which enables researchers to design and manage their project workflow, DOIs, collaboration and data storage. One of the significant benefits to this community platform is fast and regular feedback on improvements that could be made, or aspects that are particularly useful. This is the fifteenth community preprint service built on the OSF.
Find out more about COS and the OSF at cos.io and osf.io, and find out more about EarthArXiv on their website.
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The EU Commission has announced that it will invest €2 billion in open science and €600 million in the European Open Science Cloud in 2018-2020. Notably in the announcement, a change is openly made from promoting Open Science via publishing research results in scientific publications to sharing research and knowledge much earlier in the research process.
Find out more in the EU Commission press release.
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Research published in Research Ideas and Outcomes has found that Mandatory Data Management Plans are likely counter-productive in supporting change in researchers. The pilot project, funded by the International Development Research Center of Canada, worked with seven existing projects to examine the implementation of data management and sharing requirements. During the course of this research it was found that the shift from changing behaviour to changing culture has wide ranging implications for policy design and implementation. Additionally, the requirement for a Data Management Plan at grant submission when not further utilised in the research process was found to be most likely counter-productive with regards to encouraging culture change for researchers.
Find out more and read the article in Research Ideas and Outcomes.
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Research carried out by Diego Chavarro, Ismael Rafols and Puag Tang and published on SSRN questions whether inclusion of a journal in the Web of Science (WoS) is an indicator of quality.
The researchers examined the probability of a journal to be covered by WoS according to universalistic criteria (editorial standards and scientific impact) and particularistic criteria (country, language and discipline), and found that universalistic criteria could not be used to predict a journals inclusion in WoS.
Chavarro et al. found that the ‘Norwegian model’ may serve as a useful format for those looking to explicitly not use WoS for national research evaluation, which attempts coverage of all peer-reviewed literature beyond commercial databases and to compare across disciplines.
Read the study on SSRN.
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Hindawi’s CEO, Paul Peters, explores the proprietary solutions for Open Science infrastructure (and their inherent problems), with an interesting alternative proposal. The question of whether commercial providers should have a role in developing open scholarly infrastructure is a difficult one with no simple answers. Peters identifies a number of issues with these providers’ proprietary solutions.
For example, the metadata, which comprises the infrastructure of scholarly communication (e.g. reference lists, funding information), is supplied chiefly by proprietary sources (some more problematic than others!). Peters suggests that a model in which commercial providers contribute to developing an open infrastructure without ownership or dependencies is possible, although it would not be easy.
Find out more on the Hindawi blog.
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Writing on the Scholarly Kitchen, Roger C. Schonfeld discusses the competition (or lack thereof) to support researcher workflows between Elsevier and its competitors (Clarivate, Digital Science, Center for Open Science), and looks into the complicated business reality of who owns what. Holtzbrinck https://www.holtzbrinck.com/ owns Digital Science, but also owns more than 50% of Springer Nature. What does the future hold for Digital Science?
Peer behind the curtain on the Scholarly Kitchen blog.
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Date and location TBC
The Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) at the University of Cambridge is seeking expressions of interest for a hands-on course on preparation, deposition and use of (microscopy) imagine data into the Open Microscopy Environment Platform (OME).
Please let the OSC Research Data Management Team know if you would be interested in such a course by emailing info@data.cam.ac.uk. If enough interest is shown by the end of November the team will schedule a workshop for the new year. Researchers with imaging data ready for sharing/publication would be able to bring and work on their own data, learn how to annotate and prepare them for uploading for OME.
Find out more on the Call for Interest.
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16 November, 9am - 5pm
University of Cambridge
OpenCon 2017 is the student and early career academic professional conference on Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data being held in Berlin 11-13 Nov 2017. The OpenCon 2017 Cambridge satellite event on 16 Nov 2017 will bring together students, early career academic professionals and open advocates from around Cambridge.
This year's OpenConCam theme is ‘Open for everyone’, aiming to support and build the open community in Cambridge. The program will include international speakers, as well as focus group discussion and crowdsourcing solutions.
You can follow the main OpenCon event held in Berlin on #OpenCon, and you can join the discussion around the Cambridge satellite event at #OpenConCam2017 and @OpenConCam.
Find out more on the OpenCon Cambridge website.
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Thursday 23 November
Vienna
The Research Data Alliance - RDA Europe are holding a one-day Workshop in Vienna, a collaboration between RDA Europe, the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of Technology.
Against the backdrop of the European Open Science Cloud and other European data initiatives, the topics of FAIR data, data policies, data management plans and KPIs will be discussed by a mix of national and international experts.
Take part in discussions covering the newly established EOSC, the development of national research infrastructure initiatives (“Use Case Austria”) as well as international research infrastructures.
Register via the Workshop event page.
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Tuesday 5 December, 11am - 1pm
Tea Room, Gurdon Institute, Cambridge
David Carr and Robert Kiley from the Wellcome Trust are coming to Cambridge to talk with researchers about the Trust’s policy on data, software and materials management and sharing, which was released in July 2017. They will give short talks about the extended requirements for sharing all research outputs and an update on how their policy on open research has been working. Afterwards, attendees will have the opportunity to ask the representatives any questions they might have.
Find out more and register via the University of Cambridge Training website.
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Tuesday 12 December, 3 - 4pm
The UK Data Service would like to invite ESRC funded researchers (and future researchers!) to sign up for an online webinar, where the presenter, Anca Vlad, will ‘walk’ attendees through the process of submitting a data collection into the ReShare repository. Vlad will then answer any questions attendees may have about ReShare and depositing data with them.
Find out more and register online via the UK Data Service website.
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TU Delft are advertising for 5 part-time Data Stewards to join their team. The Data Stewards’ main task is to advise researchers on data management throughout the research lifecycle, assisting in planning the collection, management, and publication of data in research projects. The Data Stewards also develop and run training events tailored to researchers’ needs and inspire researchers to participate.
Each position is part-time, but it is possible to combine posts, which can result in a full-time appointment.
Find out more and apply via the TU Delft website by Sunday 19 November.
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The University of Bath are seeking a candidate to join the Research Data Service within the University of Bath Library. The Research Data Librarian is responsible for delivering a comprehensive programme of guidance materials, workshops, and online training resources to support researchers throughout the University with their research data management needs. The post-holder will also use their experience and initiative to develop customised support for data management planning and will engage directly with the process of dataset publication.
Find out more and apply by Sunday 12 November via the University of Bath website.
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The UCL research software development group are seeking a Senior Research Software Developer with a focus on Data Science and machine learning to join their team. The appointee will take the lead in the delivery of expertise in coding for data analysis, computational statistics, machine learning, and big data engineering to the UCL research community. They will collaborate with research colleagues from across UCL to maximize insight from the wealth of data generated across all disciplines, applying expertise in a wide range of statistical, mathematical and computational methods.
Find out more and apply by Thursday 23 November via the UCL website.
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