Bianca Kramer has been scholarly communication/open science librarian at Utrecht University Library for 15 years, and recently moved to an independent consulting/research analyst role as Sesame Open Science, with a focus on open science, open metadata and open infrastructure.

In 2021 the UNESCO agreed on their Recommendation on Open Science, a consensus document of 193 countries highlighting values such as equity in open research, alongside principles of sustainability. Improving sustainability is critical from a social, economic, and ecological perspective given the global climate crisis.

Data Processing and production: Jamie Diprose Cross-posted from the COKI blog. There is a lot of lip service paid to the idea of diversity in scholarly publishing and often diversity of language is used as an example. The Helsinki Initiative is one example of an explicit call for multilingualism and the Jussieu Call for bibliodiversity, while it does not explicitly mention language, is an implicit criticism of anglo-centric publishing.

Several weeks ago, Cameron Neylon kicked off a good idea to list a few articles he was keen to read and tell us why. Based on 'open tabs' in their browser, approximately every month one person will share their reading wishlists so we can curate some of the 'must-read' posts of the moment. Each author concludes by tagging the next;

Inspired by a conversation on Twitter, Upstream is publishing a new blog series. Each month (ish) one person will post their reading wishlists based on the browser tabs they have open. We'll learn the articles they're most keen to read - and why. Somewhat of a reading 'guilt list', each author will conclude by tagging another person to share theirs, helping to curate the must-read content of the moment in our space.

In the Open Scientist Handbook, I argue that open science supports anti-rivalrous science collaborations where most metrics are of little, or of negative value. I would like to share some of these arguments here.

Worldwide, governments have started to ease or end the Covid-19 restrictions, signaling the beginning of the end of a pandemic which, according to the WHO, infected over 400 million people and caused 5.8 million deaths, not to speak of the devastating disruptions it caused to public and economic life.

Researchers spend a lot of time doing peer review, and by a lot we are talking about over 100 million hours per year (estimate for 2020 by Aczel et al.). It is a complex and time consuming process that is often presented as a pillar to science dissemination, because of its function to scrutinize research papers to check whether they contain any flaws, oversights, or they meet certain criteria for novelty or advance, before the article appears in

This post is the last in a four-part series by Jennifer Gibson. The first post, on the shape and impact of research communication is available here. Reactions from readers are very welcome. Please use the commenting function.

Scholarly publishing at times seems to want to hold on to some outdated processes. At the top of my list is the dreaded RFP (Request for Proposals) process. In the scholarly comms world, consultants send these out on behalf of publishers that are seeking solutions or services. My career involves designing and building publishing technology and so I have been on the receiving end of many RFPs for developing new platforms.

This post is the third in a four-part series by Jennifer Gibson. The first post, on the shape and impact of research communication is available here. Reactions from readers are very welcome. Please use the commenting function. Before I dive into this part of the discussion, I’d like to credit Damian Pattinson and Stuart King at eLife, with whom I worked to develop the three first tenets below in 2020 and 2021, as eLife's core values.