Kategoriarkiv: Öppen vetenskap

Some open science and scholarship initiatives at ÅAU

The value of open science lies in the fact that its core ideals match or even underscore fundamental values of scholarship, such as transparency, responsibility and openness. That is why it’s worth engaging with – at its very core, it is responsible research practice gone digital. Starting out as a set of researcher-led initiatives, it has now come to be cherished by research funders and ministries as well.

At ÅAU, numerous open science related initiatives or practices are going on. Individual researchers or groups practice open science by using open science workflow tools such as OSF.io, publishing openly or even reproducibly, and opening their data. Below I present some of the things my office at the ÅAU Library is involved with in some way.

Green open access publishing. ÅAU hosts fulltext versions of scholarly publications authored by its researchers in the research information system Artur, which functions as an open repository.  When you parallel publish your publication here (a peer reviewed version of it), it becomes available openly for anyone to read. The fulltext publication process is part of the process of validation of publication data which will be sent to the Ministry of Education and Culture, and based on which a share of the public funding granted to ÅAU is allocated. Much is going on in these regions as we speak – the services have been improved and enhanced greatly this year and the new, better platform AboCRIS is to replace the ancient but familiar Artur. With that, the visibility of parallel published papers in a range of international services will improve, and importing publication data will become much easier. Among other things.

Open access check. Are you thinking about whether to pay the fee or not, or which journal to choose? Or if it’s a serious open access journal or not? Contact us (openscience(a)abo.fi) and we will help you evaluate it.

Open access publication guide and APC-vouchers, credits and discounts.  We’ve compiled a guide to open access for those who would like to learn more or gain an overview of issues and possibilities. In this guide, we keep the updated list of APC-agreements which render 10-100% discounts for gold open access (full or hybrid) in thousands of journals, available to all ÅAU-affiliated researchers.

The APC-pool. It covers the fees for full open-access publishing for one publication per year per corresponding author – apply before submission. It’s basic principles were tested in a pilot pool autumn 2019, in which open access to 18 papers was funded.

The central idea behind the pool was that gold open access is not available to all researchers at ÅAU equally today, but only to those in fields where most journals do not charge APCs or for scholars who have access to project funding for APCs. A reminder: so-called hybrid journals are subscription journals in which gold open access is sold as an additional, optional service against an APC. This is an expensive road to open access which can often well be substituted by green open access, i.e. parallel publishing in a reliable open repository). This is why the pool funds full open access publications which do not charge subscription fees (i.e. ”double-dipping”), but only APCs. The pool will also fund books and chapters, and we are working on reasonable principles for these types of publications, so do apply to help us get our heads straight!

Open science education for all. Courses or information showers on open access and research data management are offered to researchers directly via the staff training services, but also on demand to departments or research groups. In the years to come, an increasing number of short courses will be arranged. And longer ones.

The open science coach program. In spring 2019, the first group of researchers in the coach program enrolled for a two-year journey.  Around 10 coaches are learning about all aspects of open science – how to do it, what’s behind it and so on. The coaches are your colleagues, there to assist you and help you find help. The coaches will also help us improve the support to researchers on open science issues. Would you like training to become a coach too? A new group will start in spring 2021 – keep your eyes on the staff newsletter. (A short set of slides on the coach program is found here.)

Research data management training. A very ambitions course, designed at University of Turku in 2018 was arranged in collaboration between UTU and ÅAU spring 2020. The course ”Basics of Research Data Management” 3 ECTS is open for both young and more experienced researchers and will run again in the spring  2021. In parallel, short courses on different themes relating to research data management will run for ÅAU staff, see Personnel training on the intranet. The point of rethinking the management of one’s data is manifold: research quality improvement, saving time and effort, avoidance of losing data, the possibility of preparing it for reuse in ways which have not been done before in many fields of research, but also acquiring the merits possible from making datasets findable and citable for others – or openly available, even. A guide on research data issues has been compiled to help researchers – a good place to get started.

Transparency of open access costs. The transition to an open access future should happen faster. We are now in a transition period since some years and the costs are in risk of escalating. Therefore, we need to make our costs for open access transparent to others than the publishers themselves. One way to do that is to keep track of APC payments and upload them to the open database OpenAPC. The work is in progress and we hope to be able to submit the 2019  information within a few months. Some of you will receive a survey questionnaire on your publications for this purpose. Please do give us a hand!

Open licenses. We need to learn to use Creative Commons licenses, to protect our rights as authors online (to powerpoint presentations, images, graphics, diagrams, research papers, blogposts…) and to ensure that our works can travel across the internet and be reused as widely as possible without being held back by unclear communication of reuse rights! Creative commons licenses are a system for informing users of your works what they are allowed and not allowed to do with it. We need to start using licenses (for free, and it only takes a few taps on the keyboard to license) to help our work spread. A good start is that there is a new version of the ÅAU powerpoint presentation template containing a cc-license statement on the intranet.

Open science support for research funding applications. Do you need to plan the sharing of data and publications and perhaps opening up your scholarly practices? There is assistance here for you. Also for the DMP.

FAIR/electronic lab notebook pilot spring 2020. Researchers from a few labs (chem & biosciences) are participating in the pilot of using OneNote (Microsoft 365) as electronic lab book. Peer support is a central feature in this pilot – some have used it long and we use Teams as a support channel. Progressing towards more transparency in lab science requires electronic lab notebooks, but what works the best? The pilot will be concluded with a session on how to describe and deposit lab note books in Fairdata.fi to make them citable datasets. We are delayed due to the Corona pandemic, so if you are interested, do join in.

What do you have cooking? Get in touch!

The ÅAU Champion of Open Access competition: A win-win situation!

The ÅAU Champion of Open Access competition was a success. Five teams, representing all faculties, participated and the open access numbers of all teams were great.

Picking out the champions turned out to be a hard nut to crack. The top OA percentage between the teams for all reported publications 2017-18 was 86 %, scored by the Pedagogical leadership team headed by Prof. Michael Uljens (FPV). The other teams were not far behind: Historia, headed by Laura Hollsten, got 77%, Human Rights hit 74%, and the other History-Department affiliated team KoKo (Kommunicerande Konsumption) with Johanna Wassholm as the team leader scored 73% while Anna Sundberg’s 3PK (wood and paper chemistry, chemical engineering) came in last, but not least with 61%. (These numbers are based on reported instances, which means that in the case of co-authoring, the publication will count many times if co-authors are included in the team – or in another team for that matter.)

Anna Sundelin 2019

Photo: Anna Sundelin 2019 CC-BY 4.0

So much for the open access percentage. The total (absolute) number of open access publications in each team varied greatly, with Team KoKo on top with 68 open access publications, followed by Human Rights with 47, then History 46, 3PK with 34 and Pedagogical leadership with 21. Furthermore, the composition of the team varied, not only the number of members (6-8) but also career levels, which may correlate with authorship intensity. The collected number for all teams is great: 216!

More importantly, challenges to openness vary greatly between fields of research. The 3PK team members mainly co-author and papers often have 8-12 authors. In this set-up, parallel publishing is no piece of cake for those who are not the corresponding authors: getting your hands on the final draft, the version you are most likely to be allowed to parallel publish, a long  time after submission is not always easy. The main option would be gold open access (open access provided by the publisher), which in this field as a rule is pricey and would require a thousand or two Euros for fees for each paper. Also, the field of chemistry is in a special position – one of the most important publishers (American Chemical Society) is less open than many central publishers in other fields (see Björk et al 2018), with lacking transparency regarding sharing policies. Not only is it sometimes difficult to find clear information on the policies, but at least some of the journals require the author to go through contacting procedures to get permission to parallel publish. This might have cost the 3PK team some points since the validators (who check the publication reporting information and the rights issues) have to delete uploaded fulltexts if it seems that they might infringe on copyright agreements.

In history and pedagogy again, gold open access options without fees exist, however some as delayed open access only, a model of gold open access which doesn’t count in the ministry’s crediting system, which is applied in the research database Artur. In these fields, it is not uncommon for publishers of research literature to have no policy at all. Some of them, when asked about their policies during the validation process, came up with policies which raised the scores for both teams of historians.

The total number of publications varied greatly between teams. Some are likely to wear out their keyboards every second year – Team KoKo (8 members) had published altogether 99 papers within two years. And one of the team members had no reported publications whatsoever! A score of 82% open access on peer-reviewed publications (which will render extra funding 1,2 times in 2021) and 64 % on non-peer reviewed publications is impressive. Both Team KoKo and the Human Rights team included columnists, a fact which skyrockets the number of publications. However, parallel publishing policies or permissions or information about them is not always easy to obtain for this kind of publication, an obstacle faced in particular in these fields of research, where some publishing venues are aimed at a broader audience rather than the research community.

The Human Rights team had altogether 66 publications, 17 peer reviewed, 39 others, of which 33 were Elina Pirjatanniemi’s columns. Historia reported altogether 60 publications, out of which 35 were peer reviewed. 3PK had reported 56 publications, all peer reviewed, and Pedagogical leadership 27, out of which 21 were peer reviewed.

However, Pedagogical leadership also provided us with a juicy example of when open access really makes sense: Professor Uljens’s and Rose M. Ylimäki’s co-edited anthology Bridging Educational Leadership, Curriculum Theory and Didaktik, which was published gold open access with Springer in 2017 has achieved over 80000 downloads in less than two years! The single chapters were downloaded 800-6000 times within the first 1,5 years (April 2018 – See current metrics here.) It is a crucial feature of open access that the threshold for access is low and this is of course the key to the citation advantage of open access (see Piwowar et al 2018). Professor Uljens sends his best regards, that open access sometimes really works!

Most teams have celebrated with cake already – congratulations, well done!

The 100% Open Access Champions

The competition also included an individual heat, which didn’t require enrollment. ICT Service’s Niklas Grönblom extracted the numbers from the Artur database and the result was that for reported publications 2017-18, altogether some 300 affiliated researchers scored a 100% Open Access count! Out of these, 93 researchers had reported two or more publications. These champions have been contacted over e-mail, and invited to our hall of fame (below). Congratulations to all of you too! (If you are a 100% OA champion, and have not been contacted over e-mail – please do let us know!)


What we learnt from this exercise was something that we knew, however not in this precious detail – that publication-wise, different fields of science live in different worlds – at least to some extent. And this means that different kinds of support and different advice is needed in different parts of the organization.

The open science team will be happy to visit your department if you invite us, to hear more and help you cope with – and increase! – open access publishing in your spectrum. If you have ideas as to how we could help you publish more in open access, do let us know (openscience (a) abo.fi).

The open access competition 2018 was arranged by staff at ÅAB, the open science team and the Planning unit together, with great support from the ICT-service. Thank you, and keep your eyes on the staff newsletter for more challenges!

Yrsa Neuman (the open science project manager)
ORCID iD iconhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-9323-0694


NEW 2019 guides to open access publishing for researchers at ÅAU :
libguides.abo.fi/openaccess_eng /på svenska: libguides.abo.fi/openaccess

Sources

Björk , A , Paavola , J-M , Ropponen , T , Laakso , M & Lahti , L 2018. Opening academic publishing – Development and application of systematic evaluation criteria . Open Science and Research Initiative https://helda.helsinki.fi/dhanken/handle/123456789/195700

Piwowar H, Priem J, Larivière V, Alperin JP, Matthias L, Norlander B, Farley A, West J, Haustein S. 2018. The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ 6:e4375 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.4375

 

Wall of Fame: 100% Open Access at ÅAU 2017-2018

Adnan Ashraf Information Technologies
Anna, Törnroos Environmental and Marine Biology / The Sea
Anna-Stina Hägglund Faculty of Arts, Psychology and Theology
Camilla, Hambro Musikvetenskap, FHPT
Carina Saarela Dpt of Psychology
Christer Glader FNT/Matematik och Statistik
Elina Pirjatanniemi Institute for Human Rights
Emil Kaukonen History
Hilda Ruokolainen Information Studies
Jalal Khademi Social science, peace and developmental psychology
Janne Elo FPV, Allmän pedagogik
Jarl-Thure Eriksson Emeritus Chancellor
Jenny Lindholm Statskunskap med masskommunikation
Johan Ehrstedt History
Karin Sandell Nordisk folkloristik
Katarina Frostell Institute for Human Rights
Klas Backholm Statskunskap med masskommunikation
Kristian Nybom FNT/Informationsteknologi
Käthe Dahlström Bioscience
Marek Budzynski Cell Biology Subject, Faculty of Science and Engineering
Maria Hofman-Bergholm FPV
Marie-Sofie Lundström Konstvetenskap
Marika Sjöqvist Cellbiologi
Mia Heikkilä Fakulteten för pedagogik och välfärdsstudier
Michel Rouleau-Dick Institute for Human Rights
Naima Akhtar Malik Developmental Psychology
Naima Akhtar Malik Developmental psychology
Owen Ndoromo Developmental Psychology
Patrik Hettula History
Peter Ehrström Adult Education
Pia, Vuorio Faculty of Arts
Robin Lybeck Sociology (FSE)
Saija Merke finska språk
Sonja Hagelstam Nordisk etnologi
Staffan Dahlström Physics
Suvi Manner
Thomas Nyman Psychology
Viljam Engström FSE/Folkrätt/IMR

… and 55 more (awaiting online publishing consent).