The draft guidance […] provides information for Wellcome-funded organisations on how to implement the core principles of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).
We want to hear your comments and feedback on this guidance, before we publish an updated and final version in spring 2020. Fill in our short survey (opens in a new tab) by 17:00 GMT, 24 February 2020.
“In this document we set forth guidelines that the University of California (UC) applies when evaluating systemwide transformative agreements with publishers. Transformative agreements are those that substantially shift payments for subscriptions (reading) into payments for open access (publishing). By intention and design, most such agreements are transitional and thus these guidelines are intended to be used during the years of transition to full open access.
Transformative agreements — and behavior by publishing partners — should exhibit these characteristics for an agreement to be recommended for adoption at UC.
UC’s goal of overall expenditure reduction for its journals portfolio provides important context for these guidelines. Within that overall goal, our assessment of publication value along with the degree of conformity to the guidelines in this document may warrant some variation in the level of expenditure UC is willing to make for any particular agreement. Given the goal of overall expenditure reduction, total expenditure in a given agreement will be a more important consideration for larger (more expensive) deals.
These guidelines are derived from the principles set forth by key UC stakeholder groups engaged in shaping our open access efforts. Many of those principles were presented in documents listed in Sources, below….”
“The crisis of reproducibility in science is well known. The combination of ‘publish or perish’ incentives, secrecy around data and the drive for novelty at all costs can result in fragile advances and lots of wasted time and money. Even in data science, when a paper is published there is generally no way for an outsider to verify its results, because the data from which the findings were derived are not available for scrutiny. Such science cannot be built upon very easily: siloed science is slow science.
That’s one of the reasons funders and publishers are beginning to require that publications include access to the underlying data and analysis code. It’s clear that this new era of data science needs a new cultural and practical approach, one which embraces openness and collaboration more than ever before. To this end, a group of Turing researchers have created The Turing Way – an evolving online “handbook” on how to conduct world-leading, reproducible research in data science and artificial intelligence….”
“UNESCO believes that universal access to high-quality education is key to the building of peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue. In 2015, the framework for action for the Sustainable Development Goal focused on education (SDG 4) was adopted with a vision to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.’ …
These guidelines for policy-makers and other stakeholders lay out steps to review, analyse, develop, implement and measure a context-relevant OER policy. They guide but do not determine what governments and involved actors should do in a specific set of circumstances. Instead, they provide a comprehensive framework for governments and institutions to set out their vision and the scope of their policy, then develop a policy masterplan and launch it….”
“The crisis of reproducibility in science is well known. The combination of ‘publish or perish’ incentives, secrecy around data and the drive for novelty at all costs can result in fragile advances and lots of wasted time and money. Even in data science, when a paper is published there is generally no way for an outsider to verify its results, because the data from which the findings were derived are not available for scrutiny. Such science cannot be built upon very easily: siloed science is slow science.
That’s one of the reasons funders and publishers are beginning to require that publications include access to the underlying data and analysis code. It’s clear that this new era of data science needs a new cultural and practical approach, one which embraces openness and collaboration more than ever before. To this end, a group of Turing researchers have created The Turing Way – an evolving online “handbook” on how to conduct world-leading, reproducible research in data science and artificial intelligence….”
Abstract: There is an increasing focus on the part of academic institutions, funding agencies, and publishers, if not researchers themselves, on preservation and sharing of research data. Motivations for sharing include research integrity, replicability, and reuse. One of the barriers to publishing data is the extra work involved in preparing data for publication once a journal article and its supporting information have been completed. In this work, a method is described to generate both human and machine-readable supporting information directly from the primary instrumental data files and to generate the metadata to ensure it is published in accordance with findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) guidelines. Using this approach, both the human readable supporting information and the primary (raw) data can be submitted simultaneously with little extra effort. Although traditionally the data package would be sent to a journal publisher for publication alongside the article, the data package could also be published independently in an institutional FAIR data repository. Workflows are described that store the data packages and generate metadata appropriate for such a repository. The methods both to generate and to publish the data packages have been implemented for NMR data, but the concept is extensible to other types of spectroscopic data as well.
“Welcome to the OpenAIRE Guidelines. The intention of this is to provide a public space to share OpenAIREs work on interoperability and to engage with the community. The OpenAIRE Guidelines helps repository managers expose publications, datasets and CRIS metadata via the OAI-PMH protocol in order to integrate with OpenAIRE infrastructure.
OpenAIRE Guidelines have been released for publication repositories, data archives, CRIS systems, software repositories and repositories of other research products respectively: …”
“To bring some order to this wealth of information, we suggest several rules of thumb:
Encourage the use of persistent identifiers or PIDs (for example, DOIs for datasets, ORCIDs for authors, RRIDs for reagents – more information here)
Engage with journal editors, learned societies and other domain leaders to benchmark where a specific subject or community is comfortable in terms of encouraging, expecting or mandating open data practices. You could use the RDA policy framework as the outline for the conversation.
It is preferable to upload data to a repository, and include a link within a research article, rather than hosting via a supplementary material facility.
Sometimes data do need to be kept closed, but this doesn’t need to be the default situation. Ask the researcher/author why should it be closed rather than why should it be open.
Have some information (metadata) in front of any paywall to point to where underlying data can be found. See the following examples: …”
Abstract: Open peer review (OPR) is moving into the mainstream, but it is often poorly understood and surveys of researcher attitudes show important barriers to implementation. As more journals move to implement and experiment with the myriad of innovations covered by this term, there is a clear need for best practice guidelines to guide implementation. This brief article aims to address this knowledge gap, reporting work based on an interactive stakeholder workshop to create best-practice guidelines for editors and journals who wish to transition to OPR. Although the advice is aimed mainly at editors and publishers of scientific journals, since this is the area in which OPR is at its most mature, many of the principles may also be applicable for the implementation of OPR in other areas (e.g., books, conference submissions).
“One key objective of University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) is to coordinate and offer educational resources related to scholarly publishing. On the OSC website, authors can find guides to copyright, open access (OA), research impact, peer review, and more. In real life, OSC members are also “out in the field” at our respective libraries and university presses, offering consultations and support for UC scholars and authors on a multitude of publishing issues.
Over the past two years, we have engaged in an increasing number of discussions with journal editors interested in transitioning their journals to open access. We have also learned a few lessons in the process–particularly regarding the specific issues that any OA-aspiring journal must address, e.g., choosing publishing platforms, funding models, copyright and licensing policies, and communications strategies.
Given OSC’s mission to make educational materials about publishing more widely available, we are excited to have distilled these recent experiences into a practical toolkit aimed at supporting journal editors and publishers and the organizations or libraries that work with them. This toolkit, which you can find on our new OSC page Transitioning Journals to OA, includes a variety of resources for those interested in the OA transitioning process…”