EORI keeps an eye on changes in the fields of Open Science, FAIR data principles, and others, and directs any interested parties to important updates:
- Open Research Europe, the European Commission’s Open Research platform stemming from Horizon 2020 funding, is now accepting submissions. Thankfully, it’s not going to ask to be given an impact factor, and will be a peer reviewed platform for data & papers – all of which will be assigned a CC BY 4.0 license (which is good). Interestingly, they will publish before an open peer review process takes place, making it a hybrid of a pre-print and a repository platform for papers. Very interesting, and would be great to see the platform expanded for projects outwith Horizon 2020! For more European Open Science initiatives, the European Open Science Cloud looks interesting.
- The University of Maastricht, Netherlands, is currently in their Open Science week! They’ve got a useful website here which contains a lot of very useful information, written in a way which is easy to engage with. I’m looking forward to Edinburgh’s first Open Science week!
- The calculation behind the impact factor is changing as early as June (more here) – sort of. Simply, it’ll change the publication date to the date of online (as opposed to print) publication. This has some obvious advantages, but one clear disadvantage is that Claritive doesn’t have publication data for half of the journals it indexes. This is also expected to cause uneven inflation of impact factor across journals (some up to a 250% increase in their impact factor!). We all know that impact factor is not a proxy for quality of an individual paper published within – maybe this switch will make that clearer for others to see.
Edinburgh Open Research Initiative 