Towards an open science publishing platform
Authors : Vitek Tracz, Rebecca Lawrence
The way science and research is done is rapidly becoming more open and collaborative. The traditional way of publishing new findings in journals is becoming increasingly outdated and no longer serves the needs of much of science.
Whilst preprints can bring significant benefits of removing delay and selection, they do not go far enough if simply implemented alongside the existing journal system. We propose that we need a new approach, an Open Science Platform, that takes the benefits of preprints but adds formal, invited, and transparent post-publication peer review.
This bypasses the problems of the current journal system and, in doing so, moves the evaluation of research and researchers away from the journal-based Impact Factor and towards a fairer system of article-based qualitative and quantitative indicators.
In the long term, it should be irrelevant where a researcher publishes their findings. What is important is that research is shared and made available without delay within a framework that encourages quality standards and requires all players in the research community to work as collaborators.
Open Source Database and Website to Provide Free and Open Access to Inactive U.S. Patents in the Public Domain
Authors : Yuenyong Nilsiam, Joshua M. Pearce
Although theoretically the patent system is meant to bolster innovation, the current United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is cumbersome and involves a significant time investment to locate inactive patents less than 20 years old.
This article reports on the development of an open source database to find these public domain ideas. First, a search strategy is explained. Then the operation and use of free and open source software are detailed to meet the needs of open hardware innovators.
Finally, a case study is presented to demonstrate the utility of the approach with 3-D printing. The results showed how the Free Inactive Patent Search enables users to search using plain language text to find public domain concepts and then provides a hyperlinked list of ideas that takes users to the USPTO database for the patent for more information.
All of the source code to operate the search and the website are open source themselves and provided in the public domain for free. In the case study on 3-D printing the time to identify public domain patents was cut by a factor of more than 1500.
This tool has the potential for accelerating the development of open hardware technologies to create high value for the public.
Effect of Government Data Openness on a Knowledge-Based Economy
Authors : Jae-Nam Lee, Juyeon Ham, Byounggu Choi
Many governments have recently begun to adopt the concept of open innovation. However, studies on the openness of government data and its effect on the global competitiveness have not received much attention.
Therefore, this study aims to investigate the effects of government data openness on a knowledge-based economy at the government level. The proposed model was analyzed using secondary data collected from three different reports.
The findings indicate that government data openness positively affects the formation of knowledge bases in a country and that the level of knowledge base of a country positively affects the global competitiveness of a country.
URL : Effect of Government Data Openness on a Knowledge-Based Economy
Open Post Publication Peer Review: An Innovation in Scientific Communication
Authors : Peiling Wang, Manasa Rath, Michael Deike, Wu Qiang
This research observes the emerging open peer review journals. In scientific publishing, transparency in peer review is a growing topic of interest for online journals. The traditional blind refereeing process has been criticized for lacking transparency.
Although the idea of open peer review (OPR) has been explored since 1980s, it is only in this decade that OPR journals are born. Towards a more open publishing model, the peer review process–once accessible only to the editors and referees—is now available to public.
The published article and its review history are being integrated into one entity; readers can submit or post comments to extend the peer process. This preliminary study observed four pioneer OPR journals representing pre-publication OPR and post-publication OPR.
Data collection focuses on publication’s lifecycle from its submission to peer approval. Preliminary results include comparisons of the level of openness and nature of interactions during refereeing process.
Free articles and Accounting for the timing effect
Authors : Nursyeha Binte Yahaya, Tay Chee Hsien Aaron
Various studies have attempted to assess the amount of free full text available on the web and recent work have suggested that we are close to the 50% mark for freely available articles (Archambault et al. 2013; Björk et al. 2010; Jamali and Nabavi 2015).
Our paper contributes to the literature by taking into account the timing issue by studying when the papers were made free. We sampled citations made by researchers who published in 2015 (based on records in the Singapore Management University Institution repository), checked the number of cited papers that were free at the time of the study and then attempted to “carbon date” the freely available papers to determine when they were first made available.
This allows us to estimate the length of time the free cited article was made available before the citing paper was published. We find that in our sample of cited papers in Economics, the median freely available cited paper (oldest variant) was made available 7-8 years before the citing paper was published.
Of these papers found free via Google Scholar, the majority 67% (n=47) was made available via University websites (not including Institutional repositories) and 32.8% (n=23) were final published versions.
Scientific data science and the case for Open Access
Author : Gopal P. Sarma
“Open access” has become a central theme of journal reform in academic publishing. In this article, I examine the consequences of an important technological loophole in which publishers can claim to be adhering to the principles of open access by releasing articles in proprietary or “locked” formats that cannot be processed by automated tools, whereby even simple copy and pasting of text is disabled.
These restrictions will prevent the development of an important infrastructural element of a modern research enterprise, namely, scientific data science, or the use of data analytic techniques to conduct meta-analyses and investigations into the scientific corpus.
I give a brief history of the open access movement, discuss novel journalistic practices, and an overview of data-driven investigation of the scientific corpus. I argue that particularly in an era where the veracity of many research studies has been called into question, scientific data science should be one of the key motivations for open access publishing.
The enormous benefits of unrestricted access to the research literature should prompt scholars from all disciplines to reject publishing models whereby articles are released in proprietary formats or are otherwise restricted from being processed by automated tools as part of a data science pipeline.