Big deals et open access: quelle stratégie numérique pour les bibliothèques universitaires ?

Auteur/Author : Isabelle Bizos

Le marché mondial de l’édition scientifique tend à se concentrer et à se développer sous la forme de monopoles anticoncurrentiels. Les coûts d’acquisitions des ressources électroniques s’envolent et les bibliothèques universitaires ne peuvent plus durablement soutenir ces augmentations exponentielles.

Fondé sur le fonctionnement de la recherche et en particulier sur le système d’évaluation des productions scientifiques, l’écosystème de l’information scientifique et technique est pris dans un cercle vicieux.

La révolution de la science ouverte et l’évolution des cadres législatifs des états bousculent les modèles économiques et deviennent un espoir pour faciliter la diffusion de l’information avec cependant des risques avérés aussi bien financiers qu’en matière de signalement et de conservation.

Les bibliothèques universitaires s’organisent et s’évaluent pour faire face aux défis de la diffusion de la documentation électronique. Elles sont au coeur des stratégies numériques des établissements de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche.

URL : Big deals et open access: quelle stratégie numérique pour les bibliothèques universitaires ?

Original location : https://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notices/69602-big-deals-et-open-access-quelle-strategie-numerique-pour-les-bibliotheques-universitaires

 

Open Science and Its Enemies: Challenges for a Sustainable Science–Society Social Contract

Author : Venni V. Krishna

Science as a social institution has evolved as the most powerful, highly influential, and sought out institution after the conflicts between science and religion following Galileo. Knowledge as a public good, scientific peer review of science, the prominence of open publications, and the emphasis on professional recognition and scientific autonomy have been the hallmark of science in the past three centuries.

According to this scientific spirit, the scientific social system and society formed a unique social contract. This social contract drew considerable institutional and state legitimacy for the openness and public good of science in the service of state and society, all through the post-war period.

Openness and public good of science are recognized and legitimized by the scientific community and science agencies at the global level. This paradigm of open science, in varying forms and manifestations, contributed to the progress of systematic knowledge at the service of humankind over the last three centuries.

Entering the third decade of the 21st century, the social contract between science and society is undergoing major changes. In fact, the whole paradigm of open science and its social contract is being challenged by various “enemies” or adversaries such as (a) market-based privatized commercial science, (b) industry 4.0 advanced technologies, and (c) a “new iron curtain” on the free flow of science data and information.

What is at stake? Are there major changes? Is the very social institution of science transforming? What impact will this have on our contemporary and future sustainable society? These are some important issues that will be addressed in this article.

URL : Open Science and Its Enemies: Challenges for a Sustainable Science–Society Social Contract

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/joitmc6030061

Low availability of code in ecology: A call for urgent action

Authors : Antica Culina, Ilona van den Berg, Simon Evans, Alfredo Sánchez-Tójar

Access to analytical code is essential for transparent and reproducible research. We review the state of code availability in ecology using a random sample of 346 nonmolecular articles published between 2015 and 2019 under mandatory or encouraged code-sharing policies.

Our results call for urgent action to increase code availability: only 27% of eligible articles were accompanied by code. In contrast, data were available for 79% of eligible articles, highlighting that code availability is an important limiting factor for computational reproducibility in ecology.

Although the percentage of ecological journals with mandatory or encouraged code-sharing policies has increased considerably, from 15% in 2015 to 75% in 2020, our results show that code-sharing policies are not adhered to by most authors.

We hope these results will encourage journals, institutions, funding agencies, and researchers to address this alarming situation.

URL : Low availability of code in ecology: A call for urgent action

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000763

Transparency and open science principles in reporting guidelines in sleep research and chronobiology journals

Authors : Manuel Spitschan, Marlene H. Schmidt, Christine Blume

Background

“Open science” is an umbrella term describing various aspects of transparent and open science practices. The adoption of practices at different levels of the scientific process (e.g., individual researchers, laboratories, institutions) has been rapidly changing the scientific research landscape in the past years, but their uptake differs from discipline to discipline.

Here, we asked to what extent journals in the field of sleep research and chronobiology encourage or even require following transparent and open science principles in their author guidelines.

Methods

We scored the author guidelines of a comprehensive set of 28 sleep and chronobiology journals, including the major outlets in the field, using the standardised Transparency and Openness (TOP) Factor.

This instrument rates the extent to which journals encourage or require following various aspects of open science, including data citation, data transparency, analysis code transparency, materials transparency, design and analysis guidelines, study pre-registration, analysis plan pre-registration, replication, registered reports, and the use of open science badges.

Results

Across the 28 journals, we find low values on the TOP Factor (median [25th, 75th percentile] 2.5 [1, 3], min. 0, max. 9, out of a total possible score of 28) in sleep research and chronobiology journals.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest an opportunity for sleep research and chronobiology journals to further support the recent developments in transparent and open science by implementing transparency and openness principles in their guidelines and making adherence to them mandatory.

URL : Transparency and open science principles in reporting guidelines in sleep research and chronobiology journals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.16111.1

Open Access uptake by universities worldwide

Authors : Nicolas Robinson-Garcia​, Rodrigo Costas, Thed N. van Leeuwen

The implementation of policies promoting the adoption of an open science (OS) culture must be accompanied by indicators that allow monitoring the uptake of such policies and their potential effects on research publishing and sharing practices.

This study presents indicators of open access (OA) at the institutional level for universities worldwide. By combining data from Web of Science, Unpaywall and the Leiden Ranking disambiguation of institutions, we track OA coverage of universities’ output for 963 institutions.

This paper presents the methodological challenges, conceptual discrepancies and limitations and discusses further steps needed to move forward the discussion on fostering OA and OS practices and policies.

URL : Open Access uptake by universities worldwide

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.9410

 

Open peer review: promoting transparency in open science

Authors : Dietmar Wolfram, Peiling Wang, Adam Hembree, Hyoungjoo Park

Open peer review (OPR), where review reports and reviewers’ identities are published alongside the articles, represents one of the last aspects of the open science movement to be widely embraced, although its adoption has been growing since the turn of the century.

This study provides the first comprehensive investigation of OPR adoption, its early adopters and the implementation approaches used. Current bibliographic databases do not systematically index OPR journals, nor do the OPR journals clearly state their policies on open identities and open reports.

Using various methods, we identified 617 OPR journals that published at least one article with open identities or open reports as of 2019 and analyzed their wide-ranging implementations to derive emerging OPR practices.

The findings suggest that: (1) there has been a steady growth in OPR adoption since 2001, when 38 journals initially adopted OPR, with more rapid growth since 2017; (2) OPR adoption is most prevalent in medical and scientific disciplines (79.9%); (3) five publishers are responsible for 81% of the identified OPR journals; (4) early adopter publishers have implemented OPR in different ways, resulting in different levels of transparency.

Across the variations in OPR implementations, two important factors define the degree of transparency: open identities and open reports. Open identities may include reviewer names and affiliation as well as credentials; open reports may include timestamped review histories consisting of referee reports and author rebuttals or a letter from the editor integrating reviewers’ comments.

When and where open reports can be accessed are also important factors indicating the OPR transparency level. Publishers of optional OPR journals should add metric data in their annual status reports.

URL : Open peer review: promoting transparency in open science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03488-4

University journals. Consolidating institutional repositories in a digital, free, open access publication platform for all scholarly output

Authors : Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer, Eva Méndez Rodríguez, Jeroen Sondervan, Frans J. Oort

Funders increasingly mandate researchers to publish their scientific articles in open access and to retain their copyright. Universities all over the world have set up institutional repositories and use repositories for the preservation and dissemination of academic production of their institutions, including scientific articles, reports, datasets, and other research outputs.

However, in general, authors do not find institutional repositories very attractive and accessible as an open access publication platform since repositories and open access are not part of the rewarding system.

We expect that researchers are more likely to publish and deposit their scientific papers in a repository, once they have the appearance, recognition and dissemination of a scientific journal.

That is why we took the initiative to set up a repository based journal ‘University Journals’ in which universities collaborate. The paper will explain the University Journals project and how the involved universities want to facilitate a valuable alternative publication platform that complies with Plan S principles and enables publication and dissemination of all research outcomes.

By establishing University Journals as a publication platform, university libraries are instrumental (and crucial) in achieving the ambitions of Open Science, and universities gain control over the publication process.

URL : University journals. Consolidating institutional repositories in a digital, free, open access publication platform for all scholarly output

DOI : http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10323