OpenAIRE can form the basis for a truly public European Open Access Platform

In a previous Impact Blog post, Benedikt Fecher and colleagues envisioned a European Open Access Platform, an innovative public information infrastructure that would integrate publishing and dissemination into the research lifecycle, rather than having it outsourced. Tony Ross-Hellauer describes how OpenAIRE is working to make this vision a reality, and how it can contribute further to create a participatory, federated open access platform

Open peer review: bringing transparency, accountability, and inclusivity to the peer review process

Open peer review is moving into the mainstream, but it is often poorly understood and surveys of researcher attitudes show important barriers to implementation. Tony Ross-Hellauer provides an overview of work conducted as part of an OpenAIRE2020 project to offer clarity on OPR, and issues an open call to publishers and researchers interested in OPR to come together to share data and scientifically explore the efficacy of OPR systems as part of an Open Peer Review Assessment Framework

Journal flipping or a public open access infrastructure? What kind of open access future do we want?

Open access debates are increasingly focused on “how” rather than “why”. Tony Ross-Hellauer and Benedikt Fecher present two possible scenarios for an open access future, consider the relative merits and viability of each, and invite your input to the discussion

Tautology, antithesis, rallying cry, or business model? "Open science" is open to interpretation

The term "open science" is often deployed in the scholarly discourse without much thought about its meaning and use. Benedikt Fecher and Tony Ross-Hellauer unpack the term and find it to be understood in a variety of ways; as a new framework for what has always been expected of science, as a political slogan to motivate change, as a business model to market scientific output in the digital era, and as a rhetorical contrast of ideas

OpenAIRE: eInfrastructure for Open Science

Workshop held on the 27th of Abril at CSIC Royal Botanic Garden in Madrid (RJB-CSIC).N

Open science- who is left behind?

Open Access initiatives promise to extend access to scholarly conversations. However, the dominant model of Article Processing Charges, whilst lowering financial barriers for readers, has merely erected a new paywall at the other end of the pipeline, blocking access to publication for less-privileged authors. In this post, Tony Ross-Hellauer, Angela Fessl, and Thomas Klebel, ask ... Continue

Pubfair: A Framework for Sustainable, Distributed, Open Science Publishing Services

Over the last thirty years, digitally-networked technologies have disrupted traditional media, turning business models on their head and changing the conditions for the creation, packaging and distribution of content. Yet, scholarly communication still looks remarkably as it did in the pre-digital age. The primary unit of dissemination remains the research article (or book in some disciplines), and today’s articles still bear a remarkable resemblance to those that populated the pages of Oldenburg’s Philosophical Transactions 350 years ago. In an age of such disruptive innovation, it is striking how little digital technologies have impacted scholarly publishing; and this is also somewhat ironic, since the Web was developed by scientists for research purposes. Pubfair is a conceptual model for a modular open source publishing framework which builds upon a distributed network of repositories to enable the dissemination and quality-control of a range of research outputs including publications, data, and more. Pubfair aims to introduce significant innovation into scholarly publishing. It enables different stakeholders (funders, institutions, scholarly societies, individuals scientists) to access a suite of functionalities to create their own dissemination channels, with built in open review and transparent processes. The model minimizes publishing costs while maintaining academic standards by connecting communities with iterative publishing services linked to their preferred repository. Such a publishing environment has the capacity to transform the scholarly communication system, making it more research-centric, dissemination-oriented and open to and supportive of innovation, while also collectively managed by the scholarly community

Funder open access platforms - a welcome innovation?

Funding organisations commissioning their own open access publishing platforms is a relatively recent development in the OA environment, with the European Commission following the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation in financing such an initiative. But in what ways, for better or worse, do these new platforms disrupt or complement the scholarly communications landscape? Tony Ross-Hellauer, Birgit Schmidt and Bianca Kramer examine the ethical, organisational, and economic strengths and weaknesses of funder OA platforms to scope the opportunities and threats they present in the transition to OA. While they may help to increase OA uptake, control costs, and lower the administrative burden on researchers, possible unintended consequences include conflicts of interest, difficulties of scale, or potential vendor lock-in

Reproducibility in Machine Learning-Driven Research

Research is facing a reproducibility crisis, in which the results and findings of many studies are difficult or even impossible to reproduce. This is also the case in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) research. Often, this is the case due to unpublished data and/or source-code, and due to sensitivity to ML training conditions. Although different solutions to address this issue are discussed in the research community such as using ML platforms, the level of reproducibility in ML-driven research is not increasing substantially. Therefore, in this mini survey, we review the literature on reproducibility in ML-driven research with three main aims: (i) reflect on the current situation of ML reproducibility in various research fields, (ii) identify reproducibility issues and barriers that exist in these research fields applying ML, and (iii) identify potential drivers such as tools, practices, and interventions that support ML reproducibility. With this, we hope to contribute to decisions on the viability of different solutions for supporting ML reproducibility.Comment: This research is supported by the Horizon Europe project TIER2 under grant agreement No 10109481

Value dissonance in research(er) assessment: individual and perceived institutional priorities in review, promotion, and tenure

There are currently broad moves to reform research assessment, especially to better incentivize open and responsible research and avoid problematic use of inappropriate quantitative indicators. This study adds to the evidence base for such decision-making by investigating researcher perceptions of current processes of research assessment in institutional review, promotion, and tenure processes. Analysis of an international survey of 198 respondents reveals a disjunct between personal beliefs and perceived institutional priorities (‘value dissonance’), with practices of open and responsible research, as well as ‘research citizenship’ comparatively poorly valued by institutions at present. Our findings hence support current moves to reform research assessment. But we also add crucial nuance to the debate by discussing the relative weighting of open and responsible practices and suggesting that fostering research citizenship activities like collegiality and mentorship may be an important way to rebalance criteria towards environments, which better foster quality, openness, and responsibility