Guest post by Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, COAR“The reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated” (to paraphrase Mark Twain)Last week COAR published a response to an article written by Richard Poynder on September 22, 2016. Although some of Richard Poynder’s comments definitely reflect the current reality, he made a number of other somewhat questionable assertions, in particular that institutional repositories (IRs) have failed.Poynder's comments reflect a creeping narrative enter...

As part of its mission to further Open Science and investigate how openness and transparency can improve scientific processes, OpenAIRE has been conducting a range of activities investigating the new models of peer review to literature and beyond that fall under the term "Open Peer Review" (OPR). OPR is an umbrella term for a variety of ways in which the traditional peer review process can be by modifed to make it more inclusive, transparent and/or accountable. Its main aspects are: open identit...

OpenAIRE, ScienceOpen and Digital-science (with their portfolio companies Figshare and Overleaf), have teamed up to organise an OpenCon ‘satellite’ event to be held in Berlin on the 24-26th November.This event will form one of the many international satellite events of the main OpenCon 2016 conference that will take place two weeks earlier in Washington, DC.OpenCon is the student and early career academic professional conference that focuses on Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data. It seek...

NOTE: OpenAIRE would like to know what you think about open peer review! Have your say here until 7th October! Tl;dr - "Post-publication peer review" (PPPR) has gained a lot of traction in recent years. As with much of peer review’s confusing lexicon, however, this term is ambiguous. This ambiguity stems from confusion over what constitutes “publication” in the digital age. PPPR conflates two distinct phenomena, which we would do better to treat separately, namely “open pre-review manuscripts” a...

F1000Research, an open access publisher operating an innovative model of post-publication peer review, was yesterday embroiled in controversy as it emerged that their criteria for accepting manuscripts for submission are based partly on the status of the author or their research institution, rather than simply upon the quality of the science itself.Chealsye Bowley, OA advocate and scholarly communications librarian, revealed on Twitter that she had had a paper rejected by F1000Research. Apparent...

A recent SPARC Innovator award winner, Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) was built around the principles of open research in scholarly communications. Traditionally, a research project ends up with just a few articles published in scholarly journals after many years of work. But why communicate just research articles at the end of a cycle?Research articles are just a small component of the research cycle. What about all the other project outputs - research ideas, grant proposals, methodologies, ...

A guest post by Dawn HibbertOpen Access Advocacy Librarian, University of StrathclydeEmbargo periods set by publishers continue to undermine, or at best, delay open access (access to scholarly research without having paid a subscription or cost to access).  Whist publishers have been quick to argue that without embargo periods libraries would no longer purchase subscriptions to their journals, and that it could potentially eat into profits due to the journals perceived “shelf life” this does not...

Rich Savage, CC BY 2.0 A group of young researchers, science administrators and librarians of the Open Access Network Austria (OANA), released the first version of The Vienna Principles: A Vision for Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century. The group under the leadership of Peter Kraker discussed the relationship between Open Access and Scholarly Communication intensely and with great passion. After more than a year of research, serious debate and analysis of pro and cons across the subject ...

As both Geoffrey Bilder and Martin Heidegger tell us, infrastructure is usually invisible and we only notice it when something goes wrong. This is profoundly problematic for scholarly communications, since infrastructure is also law – it shapes thoughts and actions. Luckily, moments of breakdown (like the SSRN sell-off) help illuminate problems with the system and call on us to change what is broken.[caption id="attachment_1000" align="alignleft" width="232"] CC BY-SA David Wright"Infrastructure...

Whether it’s citizens gathering data of species population movements, collecting meteorological or atmospheric data, classifying and mapping out their surroundings, translating or annotating texts, analyzing or visualizing data, or bringing their own perspective to the formulation of research questions, openness in Citizen Science (CS) is about more than accessibility or transparency: it means the participation and collaboration of citizens in the scientific process for the benefit of researcher...

Whether it’s citizens gathering data of species population movements, collecting meteorological or atmospheric data, classifying and mapping out their surroundings, translating or annotating texts, analyzing or visualizing data, or bringing their own perspective to the formulation of research questions, openness in Citizen Science (CS) is about more than accessibility or transparency: it means the participation and collaboration of citizens in the scientific process for the benefit of researcher...

On Tuesday 17th May, the scholarly communications community on Twitter erupted at the news that publishing giant Elsevier had acquired the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a pre-print and publishing community focusing on social sciences and law. The acquisition seems designed to continue Elsevier’s move away from a content-driven business strategy towards one oriented on services and the monetisation of data and analytics, building on their purchase of Mendeley. Elsevier’s press release s...

Open Access was in the spotlight during the PASTEUR4OA (Open Access Policy Alignment Strategies for European Union Research) Final Conference “Green Light for Open Access”. The Conference was an event officially associated with the Dutch EU Presidency and attracted some 150 experts from research funding and research performing organisations, publishers, and national policy makers across Europe. It also attracted significant attention on Twitter (#greenlight4oa) with more than 1500 tweets. PASTEU...

Prof. Francesco Mondada, Mobile robots architecture & design, Laboratoire de Systèmes Robotiques (LSRO), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL),  [caption id="attachment_896" align="alignright" width="178"] CC BY-SA 3.0 - Alain HerzogIn this extended guest post, Prof. Francesco Mondada describes a dilemma facing many researchers who use proprietary CAD software in their work but want to make their research results open: although education institutions, inclu...

In October 2015, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (MNiSW) in Poland issued a document that reflects the Polish response to the European Commission's recommendation of July 17, 2012, on access to and preservation of scientific information. The published document, entitled „Directions of the development of open access to research publications and research results in Poland”, has been prepared by an expert group that had been working under the auspices of the Mi...

Christoph Lange and  Sahar Vahdati, Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), University of Bonn We’re happy to announce that the OpenAIRE Linked Open Data (LOD) Services are now available as a beta version at http://beta.lod.openaire.eu/. OpenAIRE already makes its data freely available for re-use via APIs. In line with its commitment to openness, OpenAIRE has been busy mapping OpenAIRE’s data onto suitable standard vocabularies in order to make OpenAIRE’s data available as Linked Open Data.  This ...

Converting open access repositories into functional evaluation platforms Bringing back quality control to the scientific communitySupported by OpenAIRE, Open Scholar has coordinated the development of the first Open Peer Review Module (OPRM) for open access repositories.Find out more about the features this module can bring to your repository:Quality control through enhanced evaluation: Common open access repositories already offer different, mostly quantitative, metrics like the number of visit...

Converting open access repositories into functional evaluation platforms Bringing back quality control to the scientific communitySupported by OpenAIRE, Open Scholar has coordinated the development of the first Open Peer Review Module (OPRM) for open access repositories.Find out more about the features this module can bring to your repository:Quality control through enhanced evaluation: Common open access repositories already offer different, mostly quantitative, metrics like the number of visit...

 As part of OpenAIRE2020, OpenEdition, in association with the Couperin consortium and the environmental science journal VertigO, is carrying out experiments in the areas of open peer review and open commentary. Although the experiments are still ongoing, we are here able to share an update on progress, along with some preliminary findings.The journal chosen for the experiments, VertigO, is a popular environmental sciences journal that receives a large number of submissions. In addition to the h...

The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and scientific information provider Elsevier have reached an agreement in principle  that continues to provide academics at Dutch universities with access to all Elsevier journals and allows them to publish through gold OA in a selection of Elsevier journals at no additional cost to the corresponding author.  The Dutch universities aim to make 30% of their researchers’ publications Open Access (OA) by 2018. For the first ti...