Tutorial 4: Evolving Open Solutions

The “evolving open” topic covers a lot of ground, much of which has been already discussed in previous tutorials. The following items are intended to fill in some of the gaps that haven’t been covered yet, particularly in science and medical research but also with regard to some of the initiatives being undertaken by your OSI colleagues (particularly in your own workgroup):

SHORT VIDEOS (about 47 minutes)

• Last year, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science hosted a panel discussion on the future of open science and publishing. Three OSI delegates (Ann Gabriel, Jeff Mackie-Mason, and Andrew Tein) spoke at this event (37 minutes total), describing a wide range of evolving efforts and solutions. Click on these delegate’s names to view their presentations. (BIDS: Dec 2015)
• Successfully confronting public health emergencies in the future will mean making biomedical research and data more available. Aside from the technical approaches being explored (see the “other projects” section, below), another approach is to try changing the culture of data sharing in research. In this 10-minute TED video by Pardis Sabeti, Dr. Sabeti speaks about her experiences on the front lines in Sierra Leone in 2015 fighting the Ebola epidemic. http://bit.ly/1T6TsfQ (TED: May 2015)

ARTICLES & REPORTS (to skim)

• OSI delegate Joyce Ogburn has authored a chapter in a forthcoming book about the future of scholarly publishing (Extending the Principles and Promise of Scholarly Communication Reform: A Chronicle and Future Glimpse) and has graciously agreed to share a preprint with the OSI audience. From the introduction, “This chapter reviews representative and influential documents and describes the principles and goals on which change has been based.” ly/21MdLzx  (Rowman & Littlefield: forthcoming)
• OSI delegate Mark Ware forwarded a link to everyone last week about a new report drawing on survey data from 40,000 respondents and detailing how readers discover content in scholarly publications and how these discovery patterns have changed over the last 10 years. http://sic.pub/discover (Simon Inger Consulting: 2015)
• Hybrid open access is growing but this approach is not without its critics. A report out this month by the Wellcome Trust (co-authored by OSI delegate Robert Kiley) notes that the quality of service and cost with hybrids does not compare favorably with fully open journals. Indeed, “Given the well documented problems associated with hybrid OA –  most notably around high prices and poor levels of service –  a number of research funders, including the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Norwegian Research Council, have deemed that that their funds cannot be used to support this type of OA publishing.” http://bit.ly/1MBPg0R (Wellcome Trust: Mar 2016)
• Fred Dylla (the emeritus executive director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics) has looked at the evolving impact of public access directives in the US. Click here for a video of one of his presentations on this topic (44 minutes), and here for the slideshow only (which can be skimmed faster).
• Are secret OA deals between publishers and libraries good for open access? With no pricing models and best practices to follow, some have suggested that more transparency would be healthy for the future of OA. Click here to read this recent Scholarly Kitchen article by David Crotty. (Scholarly Kitchen: Feb 16, 2016)
• Journal publishing is not diverse. In a recent study of 4 million peer-reviewed, scientific articles between 2008 and 2012, 70% of the authors were men. A lack of diversity in publishing—not only gender but geography and race—affects who gets published and even what we research. http://bit.ly/1SjVYgu (ACRL: 2016)

OPTIONAL: PROJECTS & WEBSITES (to quickly review)

• OSI2016 is pleased to welcome delegates from a wide variety of organizations who are leading at the cutting edge of research access. Please take time to review the websites of the delegates in your working group. Here are a few other sites that may be of interest (not picking favorites—there are many groups that should be in this list, including publishers and universities who are also heavily involved in pushing the OA envelope): OpenAire,  Chorus, the Center for Open Science,  edu, the Mozilla Science Lab, Kudos, the Coalition for Networked Information, Authorea, The Winnower, bepress, Research!America, the Social Science Research Network, and the Australian Open Access Support Group,
• BioXiv is a recently created open access preprint repository that biomedical researchers hope will someday develop into a tool as important to biomedical researchers as arXiv is to high energy physicists. ASAPbio is an unrelated organization— “a newly coined rallying cry of a cadre of biologists who say they want to speed science by making a key change in the way it is published.”  This recent New York Times story about ASAPbio captures the rationale behind this effort: http://nyti.ms/1QVpYjt . Click here to view a 4-minute video about preprint servers, and here to view an 82-second video about the bioXiv preprint server in particular.
• As noted in the video section above, successfully confronting public health emergencies in the future will mean making biomedical research and data more available. The ContentMine solution is one of several such approaches to this challenge.
• OA2020 aims to accelerate the transition to open access by flipping more subscription journals to open access. See the OA2020 website at http://oa2020.org/about/ for more information.
• The CAVD Dataspace is a research product developed by Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (and architected by OSI delegate Dave Colgin from Artefact) that for the first time combines HIV/AIDS research data from the past 20 years into a single, standardized, user-friendly portal that researchers are currently using to help identify gaps in the data and new research insights. Click here for more information.