Fee Waivers for Open Access Journals

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Open access journals which charge article processing charges (APCs) sometimes offer fee waivers to authors who cannot afford to pay them. This article measures the extent of this practice among the largest toll access and open access publishers by gathering stated fee waiver policies from publishers’ websites. A majority (68.8%) were found to offer fee waivers and sometimes they are only available to authors from low- and middle-income countries. This has implications for the ability of authors without funding to publish in journals from these publishers.

URL : Fee Waivers for Open Access Journals

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/publications3030155

Sharing Research Data and Intellectual Property Law: A Primer

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Sharing research data by depositing it in connection with a published article or otherwise making data publicly available sometimes raises intellectual property questions in the minds of depositing researchers, their employers, their funders, and other researchers who seek to reuse research data. In this context or in the drafting of data management plans, common questions are (1) what are the legal rights in data; (2) who has these rights; and (3) how does one with these rights use them to share data in a way that permits or encourages productive downstream uses? Leaving to the side privacy and national security laws that regulate sharing certain types of data, this Perspective explains how to work through the general intellectual property and contractual issues for all research data.

URL : Sharing Research Data and Intellectual Property Law: A Primer

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002235

Open Access and Discovery Tools: How do Primo Libraries Manage Green Open Access Collections?

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The Open Access (OA) movement gains more and more momentum with an increasing number of institutions and funders adopting OA mandates for publicly funded research. Consequently, an increasing amount of research output becomes freely available, either from institutional, multi-institutional or thematic repositories or from traditional or newly established journals.

Currently, there are more than 2,700 Open Access repositories (Green Open Access) of all kinds listed on OpenDOAR. Scholarly OA repositories contain lots of treasures including rare or otherwise unpublished materials and articles that scholars self-archive, often as part of their institution’s mandate. But it can be hard to discover this material unless users know exactly where to look.

Since the very beginning, libraries have played a major role in supporting the OA movement. Next to all services they can provide to support the deposit of research output in the repositories, they can make Open Access materials widely discoverable by their patrons through general search engines (Google, Bing…), specialized search engines (like Google Scholar) and library discovery tools, thus expanding their collection to include materials that they would not necessarily pay for.

In this paper, we intend to focus on two aspects regarding Open Access and Primo discovery tool.

In early 2013, Ex Libris Group started to add institutional repositories to Primo Central Index (PCI), their mega-aggregation of hundreds of millions of scholarly e-resources (journal articles, e-books, reviews, dissertations, legal documents, reports…). After two years, it may be interesting to take stock of the current situation of PCI regarding Open Access repositories. This paper will analyze their progressive integration into PCI, the numbers of references, the resource types, the countries of origin…

On basis of a survey to carry out among the Primo community, the paper will also focus on how libraries using Primo discovery tool integrate Green Open Access contents in their catalog. Two major ways are possible for them. Firstly, they can directly harvest, index and manage any repository ‒their own or any from another institution‒ in their Primo and display those free contents next to the more traditional library collections. Secondly, if they are Primo Central Index subscribers, they can quickly and easily activate any, if not all, of the Open Access repositories contained PCI, making thus the contents of those directly discoverable to their end users.

This paper shows what way is preferred by libraries, if they harvest or not their own repository (even if it is included in PCI) and suggests efforts that Ex Libris could take to improve the visibility and discoverability of OA materials included in the “Institutional Repositories” section of PCI.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/2268/185329

Dataverse 4.0: Defining Data Publishing

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 The research community needs reliable, standard ways to make the data produced by scientific research available to the community, while getting credit as data authors. As a result, a new form of scholarly publication is emerging: data publishing. Data pubishing – or making data long-term accessible, reusable and citable – is more involved than simply providing a link to a data file or posting the data to the researchers web site.

In this paper, we define what is needed for proper data publishing and describe how the open-source Dataverse software helps define, enable and enhance data publishing for all.

URL : http://scholar.harvard.edu/mercecrosas/publications/dataverse-4-defining-data-publishing

Best Practices for Ethical Sharing of Individual-Level Health Research Data From Low- and Middle-Income Settings

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Sharing individual-level data from clinical and public health research is increasingly being seen as a core requirement for effective and efficient biomedical research. This article discusses the results of a systematic review and multisite qualitative study of key stakeholders’ perspectives on best practices in ethical data sharing in low- and middle-income settings.

Our research suggests that for data sharing to be effective and sustainable, multiple social and ethical requirements need to be met. An effective model of data sharing will be one in which considered judgments will need to be made about how best to achieve scientific progress, minimize risks of harm, promote fairness and reciprocity, and build and sustain trust.

URL : Best Practices for Ethical Sharing of Individual-Level Health Research Data From Low- and Middle-Income Settings

Alternative location : http://m.jre.sagepub.com/content/10/3/302

Developing Ethical Practices for Public Health Research Data Sharing in South Africa : The Views and Experiences From a Diverse Sample of Research Stakeholders

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The abundance of South African clinical and public health research data has the potential to unlock important and valuable future advances in biomedical science. Amid increasing calls for more effective sharing of individual-level data, commitment to promote access to research data is evident within South Africa’s public research sector, but national guidance and regulation are absent.

This qualitative study examined the perceptions, experiences and concerns of 32 research stakeholders about data-sharing practices. There was consensus about the utility of data sharing in publicly funded health research. However, disparate views emerged about the possible harms and benefits of sharing data and how these should be weighed. The relative dearth of policies governing data-sharing practices needs to be addressed and a framework of support developed that incentivizes data-sharing practices for researchers that are both ethical and effective.

URL : Developing Ethical Practices for Public Health Research Data Sharing in South Africa

Alternative location : http://m.jre.sagepub.com/content/10/3/290

Perceived Benefits, Harms, and Views About How to Share Data Responsibly : A Qualitative Study of Experiences With and Attitudes Toward Data Sharing Among Research Staff and Community Representatives in Thailand

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The Thailand Major Overseas Programme coordinates large multi-center studies in tropical medicine and generates vast amounts of data. As the data sharing movement gains momentum, we wanted to understand attitudes and experiences of relevant stakeholders about what constitutes good data sharing practice. We conducted 15 interviews and three focus groups discussions involving 25 participants and found that they generally saw data sharing as something positive.

Data sharing was viewed as a means to contribute to scientific progress and lead to better quality analysis, better use of resources, greater accountability, and more outputs. However, there were also important reservations including potential harms to research participants, their communities, and the researchers themselves. Given these concerns, several areas for discussion were identified: data standardization, appropriate consent models, and governance.

URL : Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics-2015-Cheah-278-89

Alternative location : http://m.jre.sagepub.com/content/10/3/278