Archives des mots-clés : open science

Data Driving Sustainability—the African Open Science Platform Project

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Authors : Ina Smith, Susan Veldsman

Exploitation of the digital revolution offers great potential for less affluent and least economically developed countries (LEDCs) and for the attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

However, LEDCs typically have poorly resourced national research systems. If they cannot participate in research based on big and open data, the gap could grow exponentially in coming years.

They will be unable to collect, store and share data, unable to participate in the global research enterprise, unable to contribute as full partners to global efforts on climate change, health care, and resource protection, and unable to fully benefit from such efforts, where global solutions will only be achieved if there is global participation.

Thus, both emerging and developed countries have a clear and direct interest in helping to fully mobilize LEDC science potential and thereby to contribute to achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The initiative described here (African Open Science Platform or AOSP) is directed towards minimising a divide between emerging and developed countries in what is arguably the most important current opportunity to enhance the power and efficiency of the scientific enterprise and its contribution to societal benefit.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01816711

Whose Infrastructure? Towards Inclusive and Collaborative Knowledge Infrastructures in Open Science

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Authors : Angela Okune, Rebecca Hillyer, Denisse Albornoz, Alejandro Posada, Leslie Chan

The current discourse around Open Science has tended to focus on the creation of new technological platforms and tools to facilitate sharing and reuse of a wide range of research outputs.

There is an assumption that once these new tools are in place, researchers—and at times, members of the general public—will be able to participate in the creation of scientific knowledge in more accessible and efficient ways.

While many of these new tools have indeed assisted in the ease of collaboration through online spaces and mechanisms, the narrowness of how infrastructure is imagined by open science practitioners tends to put the use of technology ahead of the issues that people are actually trying to solve and fails to acknowledge the systemic constraints that exist within and between some communities.

Drawing on an analytical framework grounded in Black feminist intersectionality (Noble 2016), this paper highlights the need for more inclusive knowledge infrastructures, particularly in the context of sustainable development. Three case studies from the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet), are outlined in order to illustrate the importance of moving beyond a definition of infrastructure as merely a technical or physical entity.

These cases, arising from research conducted in South Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean, demonstrate how more sustainable and nuanced forms of collaboration and participation may be enabled through broader understandings of knowledge infrastructures.

This paper further argues that leveraging the feminist concept of intersectionality when conceptualizing the development of knowledge infrastructures could be one way to move from narrow assumptions about standardized knowledge “users” towards more inclusive reimaginings of how knowledges can be produced and shared via networked technologies.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01816808

Framing Power: Tracing Key Discourses in Open Science Policies

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Authors : Denisse Albornoz, Maggie Huang, Issra Martin, Maria Mateus, Aicha Touré, Leslie Chan

Given that “Open Science” is becoming a popular policy object around the world, this study sought to identify key narratives about Open Science in policy, and critically examine the extent to which they are sustaining or strengthening multi-layered domination and inequality schemes that pre-exist in scientific knowledge production.

To do so, we conducted a content analysis of Open Science policies stemming from Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia and Africa to understand which narratives about Open Science policies are produced, reproduced and by whom; and in turn, whose interests may be neglected in this process.

We found that Open Science policies, mostly stemming from Europe, frame “openness” as a vehicle to promote technological change as part of an inevitable and necessary cultural shift to modernity in scientific production.

The global reach of these narratives, and the technologies, standards and models these narratives sustain, are dictating modes of working and collaborating among those who can access them, and creating new categories of exclusion that invalidate knowledge that cannot meet this criteria, putting historically marginalized researchers and publics at further disadvantage.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01816725

Quelles perspectives pour l’Open Access en sciences juridiques après la loi « République numérique » ?

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Auteur/Author : Lionel Maurel

L’Open Access constituait déjà une réalité dans le domaine des sciences juridiques, même si les pratiques des chercheurs pouvaient être moins avancées que dans d’autres disciplines.

La loi République numérique, adoptée en octobre 2016, introduit au bénéfice des chercheurs un nouveau droit au dépôt de leurs publications en archives ouvertes, qui peut contribuer à faire évoluer la situation dans le domaine juridique.

Mais elle poursuit également l’ouverture en Open Data des données juridiques, notamment en ce qui concerne la jurisprudence. Les sciences juridiques se trouvent donc dans la situation originale où leur objet-même sera bientôt quasi-intégralement en Libre accès, ce qui peut favoriser leur cheminement vers l’Open Science (Science Ouverte).

URL : Quelles perspectives pour l’Open Access en sciences juridiques après la loi « République numérique » ?

Alternative location : https://ojs.law.cornell.edu/index.php/joal/article/view/60

Five principles to navigate a bumpy golden road towards open access

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Authors : Matthijs van Otegem, Sofie Wennström, Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen

The publishing ecosystem of the future will be built on several models such as offsetting agreements as well as various open access publishing channels. The LIBER Open Access Working Group has issued five principles to support libraries in their efforts to negotiate offsetting deals as they move towards full open access to research information.

This article describes why the five principles were created and the underlying considerations and limitations encountered while working on them.

URL : Five principles to navigate a bumpy golden road towards open access

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.403

Open and inclusive collaboration in science: A framework

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Authors : Qian Dai, Eunjung Shin, Carthage Smith

Open science can be variously defined.  In some communities it is related principally to open access to scientific publications, for others it includes open access to research data and for others still it includes  opening  up  the  processes  of  academic  research  to  engage  all  interested  civil  society  stakeholders.

The  absence  of  a  common  understanding  of  what  is,  and  isn’t,  included  in  open  science  creates  confusion  in discussions  across  these  different  communities.  It  is  potentially  holding  back  efforts  to  develop  effective  policies for promoting open science at the international level.

This paper builds on the limited conceptual work that has been published to date and proposes a broad framework for open science. The framework is not  meant  to  be  prescriptive  but  should  help  different  communities  and  policy  makers  to  decide  on  their  own  priorities  within  the  open  science  space  and  to  better  visualise  how  these  priorities  link  to  different  stage of the scientific process and to different actors.

Such a framework can be useful also in considering how  best  to  incentivise  and  measure  various  aspects  of  open  science.  Digitalisation  is  fundamentally  changing  science  and  the  paper  lays  out  some  of  the  opportunities,  risks  and  major  policy  challenges  associated with these changes.

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/2dbff737-en

Openness as Tool for Acceleration and Measurement: Reflections on Problem Representations Underpinning Open Access and Open Science

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Author : Jutta Haider

Increasingly open access emerges as an issue that researchers, universities, and various infrastructure providers, such as libraries and academic publishers, have to relate to. Commonly policies requiring open access are framed as expanding access to information and hence as being part of a democratization of society and knowledge production processes.

However, there are also other aspects that are part of the way in which open access is commonly imagined in the various policy documents, declarations, and institutional demands that often go unnoticed.

This essay wants to foreground some of these issues by asking the overarching question: “What is the problem that open access is seen to solve represented to be?” The paper will discuss how demands to open up access to research align also with an administrative enclosure and managerial processes of control and evaluation.

It will show that while demands for free and open access to research publications – created or compiled in research processes funded by public money – are seen as contributing to the knowledge base for advancing society for a common good and in that sense framed as part of a liberating discourse, these demands are also expression of a shift of control of the science community to invisible research infrastructures and to an apparatus of administration as well as subscribing to an ideal of entrepreneurialism as well as continuing a problematic and much criticized understanding of Western science as universal.

URL : http://lup.lub.lu.se/record/070c067e-5675-455e-a4b2-81f82b6c75a7