There is much to celebrate when it comes to recent developments in scholarly communication and research assessment. The scholarly communication landscape shows many promising initiatives, including a growing use of preprint services, open access repositories, and open peer review platforms, as well as an increasing interest in more equitable scholarly publishing models such as diamond open access and Subscribe to Open.
Open community resources are increasingly used to promote open research practices, and are themselves an open practice. They are a powerful way to create shared ownership of a resource and provide agency to add or change them. However, they also present new struggles around embedding them in institutional practice, which we experienced in our own work.
Do you think the FAIR principles for Research Software are working? The FAIR Principles for Research Software were published in March 2022 and described in a paper in October 2022.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of research, the importance of high-quality metadata and persistent identifiers (PIDs) cannot be overstated. PIDs and metadata are the connective tissue that binds together diverse research outputs, enabling discovery, accessibility, and reuse. Despite their critical role, the current model for metadata creation and enrichment is fraught with inefficiencies.
This post expands further on the assertion recently made by Danny Kingsley in her post on “Language co-option in the open space” that “words matter” when trying to have meaningful conversations about open access. Not only do words matter for creating common agreement, but words can also actively create biases, inform decision-making, and even thwart the visions of open publishing and infrastructure advocates most want to champion.
Access to cutting-edge research can spark innovation, drive progress, and shape our future. But what to do if the discoveries and scholarly work funded by our tax dollars are locked behind paywalls, accessible only to a privileged few? The U.S. government has been grappling with this question, and recent policy shifts aim to improve access to federally funded research.
Coming down from the recent FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI) and FORCE2024 conference at UCLA has allowed reflection on some of the recurring themes from the two events. One of these was the issue of language appropriation in the open scholarship space. In the process of attempting to write some of these issues up, it became clear that this requires something of a wander down history lane.
Academia is undergoing a rapid transformation characterized by exponential growth of scholarly outputs. This phenomenon, often termed the "firehose problem," presents significant challenges for researchers, publishers, funders, policymakers, and institutions alike.
Open data has been a topic widely discussed among researchers and research-supporting organizations over the last decade. Much progress has been made in data sharing, and we now have more datasets openly available than ever before.
Our community and tools rely on high-quality DOI metadata for building connections and obtaining efficiencies. However, the current model - where improvements to this metadata are limited to its creators or done within service-level silos - perpetuates a system of large-scale gaps, inefficiency, and disconnection. It doesn’t have to be this way.
I recently attended the FORCE2024 conference at UCLA. I'm a member of the board of directors of FORCE11, the parent organization for the conference, and the co-located FORCE11 Scholarly Communications Institute (FSCI), which I was not able to attend this year but have taught at in the past.