Category: EORI Bulletin

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:

• Of significance, the European Research Council has banned grant applicants from including journal metrics when applying for grants (here). This is a welcome step forward for research being considered based on quality rather than where it’s been published. Hopefully we’ll see more of this from other funders.
• Clinical trial data from many FDA-approved drugs are still not available (here); for 3/4 products, one or more relevant trial(s) are unavailable for independent inspection. Further, around 1/4 of these breached legal requirements. There are suggestions that the introduction of European-style legislation could help remedy this (here), and allow for relevant data to be accessible. 
• This systematic review and meta-analysis of attempts to improve the peer review process of biomedical research. It neatly synthesises the results of various interventions, and may give us an idea of how the peer review process may change for the better in the future. 

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:

• Here is a well laid out resources for finding information on almost all aspects of Open Science. It’s useful since it links to primers such as this one, which explains Open Peer Review in an easy to understand way, or this one on applying FAIR principles. 
• A call to action we can all get behind! This article argues that we shouldn’t review submissions for journals which effectively profit from restricting access to knowledge – which they’ve not paid to generate – behind a paywall. I personally refuse to review for any journals which isn’t acceptably open access, and I encourage everyone else to do the same! The argument resurfaces as a new route to Open Access, Quartz Open Access, is announced. Lots to consider.
• The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has launched a strategy to modernise repositories (here). Plans will be developed July-Sept 2021, and will help repositories to maximise the roles they can play. It’s announced as another tool has been announced (here) for assessing alignment of biomedical data repositories with open, FAIR, citation and trustworthy principles. Additionally, this work identifies some of the barriers to data sharing through repositories and other platforms. 

The best way to get more updates is to follow EOSI on Twitter. 

After a brief respite, EORI is back!

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:

• As a nice punchy start, if you’re interested in a guide to Open Science, two handbooks (here and here) contain a lot of information presented neatly about how to get cracking with Open Science & Open research practices. Considering that practicing Open Research can be a gateway to the ‘leadership table’ for ECRs, the guides can be seen as great resources to not only practice Open Science but move up the ladder because of it.
• We’ve previously mentioned the citation advantage on Open Access. Adding to this is this study which found an increase in news media mentions of Open Access. Overall, some studies report an advantage, others report no advantage, and there’s some suggestion that it might be field dependent. Thankfully, a group as conducted a systemic review to try and explore this (here). Though not conclusive, they bring together many of the studies conducted for us all to see. 
• In case you needed any further reasons, here’s an argument that Open research can help in the fight against climate change!

As we were off for a week, here are some quickfire mentions:

• This work touches on some rewards for supporting Open research practices.
• This work argues that empowering ECRs is one key to improving research quality. 
• Finally, this work uses Game Theory to reason that publishers will converge on an Open Access publishing strategy – good news to Open Science advocates everywhere!

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:

• Worryingly, but somewhat predictably, nonreplicable publications are cited more than replicable ones (here). Worse, the difference in citation rates do not change after the publication of the failure to replicate. If you’re using R, then thankfully there’s a tool/ package which has been recently developed, Easyreporting, to help reproducibility in code, but if you’re not then we need to find other ways. It’s worrying that this knowledge which is ontologically false continues to be cited and spread, like science’s equivalent of fake news. This comes as others have made a suggestion to the culture around citation: the right to refuse citations. It’s discussed as a potential reaction to being citied by predatory journals or by papers with questionable ethics/ methods etc., and they make some interesting points. 
• Following the news, mentioned in the last update, that Clarative Analytics had bought Proquest, there’s pushback and concern from the community (here). The drive towards a monopolistic control of these systems and data is spurring calls for regulation and oversight. Considering Times higher Education’s recent call for academics to become involved in the Open Access struggle, this could be a good place to start. It also comes as SAGE journals have announced that its offering Open Peer Review using Clarative’s Web of Science portal (here), which is simultaneously a great initiative to be implemented (of which EORI thoroughly approves) and also a monopoly-building action. Hopefully this will 
• Here’s a nice explainer behind preprints, and there’s an interesting new course dedicated to them (here). 2/3 of preprints go on to be published in journals (here), which could be suggestive of the amount of knowledge which never sees publication, or possibly of the issues which arise in 1/3 of work. Either way, accessing this data can be of great use. 

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:

• On a previous update, we’d mentioned Sci-hub, a website which gives access to research articles by cycling through IP addresses until it finds one which is permitted, and the FBI’s attempts to shut it down by accessing the founder’s data and Apple account. Thankfully, fans of the site are mobilising via Reddit to save the platform, by backing up its combined 77Tb of data – a rather large task. Even though Sci-hub’s website it still online, it’s been unable to add any more papers since this latest attack began, meaning that previous manuscripts can still be accessed with it – for now – but newer manuscripts cannot. Vice covers this here. Alexandra Elbakyan, the website’s founder, reasons that corporations are gatekeeping knowledge for profit, and that the public are the ‘real’ owners of that information. More developments will surely come! Also, if you want to get around the block that the UK’s internet suppliers have put on Sci-hub, there’s a guide here.
• Clarative have bought ProQuest for the hefty sum of $5.3 billion (here), which adds to their portfolio of bought companies in library services which shows no sign of halting expansion. Reaction to this could be generously described as mixed. It comes as they’ve introduced their new research metric, the Journal Citation Indicator (JCI), which aims to normalise research fields to citation and publication rates to a single journal-level metric. However, following the rise of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which effectively states that assessing research with single level metrics is inappropriate and instead research should be judged on its own merits, the scientific community are moving away from simplistic reductions of research to arbitrary numbers. Other well-intentioned single-value metrics developed for this, such as the H-index, are also inappropriate. At best, the JCI can be described as well-intentioned, but considering it’s a black-boxed calculation which has the potential to cause many more problems than it solves, it’s a wonder why anyone spent time developing it. Unless, of course, it’s intention is to financially benefit the company but not the scientific community, but with the narrative framing of its introduction by Clarative (here) could that possibly be the case? I’ll leave you to decide.
• After some long entries, here’s a short one: Dockstore is an open-source platform for publishing, sharing, and finding bioinformatics tools and workflows. More info here.

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:

• Many people will know of Scihub, a website which gives access to research articles by cycling through IP addresses until it finds one which is permitted. The founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, is being chased up by the FBI as the American legal system is trying to have it shut it down (here). Amusingly, Sci-Hub may be beneficial to research as Indian research which is available on Sci-Hub garners more citations than work which is not (here). Considering this, and the morality of Open Access (here), researchers should be in favour of the website, yet journals and publishers are not. As a website that gives access to (usually publicly funded) research, it seems to occupy a legal grey zone of being morally right but legally wrong. Worth keeping an eye on developments.
• There’s an interesting question in the debate about predatory journals and conferences. Even if the journals/ conferences are predatory, the science held within the journals may still be perfectly sound, and the conferences may still yield genuine networking opportunities. Additionally, some publish in them as their articles may not be accepted elsewhere, meaning that without predatory journals/ conference that work & data may not be reported for some time, if at all. The question is, considering these (and cost aside), are predatory journals & conferences actually a bad thing? Influencing the answer, one group found that research in predatory journals are less statistically sound and data presentation worse (here). This finding runs against potential ‘benefits’ from predatory publishers. 
• Nice and quickly, Dr Rhodri Leng presented to the Riot Science Club recently about citation biases (here). Well worth watching!

EORI keeps an eye on changes in the fields of Open Research, FAIR data principles, and others, and directs any interested parties to important updates:

• This piece argues convincingly for Open Peer Review, where reviewer reports & interactions between the parties involved in the peer review process are published alongside the primary research output. It also misses some benefits of Open Peer Review such as providing a window for less experienced scientists to learn from and about the peer review process (important, as less-established scientists are among the best peer reviewers), and combat biases in reviewing (here and here). 
• https://oa.works/ has some really straight forward Open access tools to use. Good to play with!
• There are some interesting upcoming talks/ symposia on various aspects of Open Research, including Open Repositories,  Peer Review and Pre-prints, Open Scholarship week events, and critically analysing scientific reform etc. There are frequent talks on almost all areas of opens science, targeted at all levels ranging from the uninitiated to seasoned Open Research scholars. Additionally, many talks end up on Youtube, allowing anyone to access them any time (E.g. Edinburgh Reproducibility’s account). If you’re interested in any area of Open Science, just search it!

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:

• Wikipedia has launched a new project, Wikiexperiments. They want to collect & upload more videos of scientific experiments being conducted. For openness reasons this is a great idea, but there is also the potential for Wiki to extend this and act as a sort of Open repository for training videos etc. in the future. If this does end up happening, it could be a great thing for openness & reproducibility. Let’s keep an eye on it!
•  The International Science Council has established their steering group for their next phase of their project addressing Scientific Publishing (here). They will work on enabling efficient dissemination and use of scientific work as part of Open Science, and it’ll be interesting to see what they come out with. Some previous work & recommendations of the group here.
• Yet more work shows that publishing Open Access increases citations and altmetric numbers, this time in electrophysiology. Moreover, journals converting to Open Access increases citations & benefits the journals (here). These, combined with ethical reasons for scientists not to review for commercial journals (explored here), leave little justification for journals to not convert to Open Access publishing, though we may be biased on this conclusion…

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:

• Lots of Open Science workshops are coming up, such as this one which will present 3 tools to improve transparency in 1 hour, this one discussing more open ways of researcher assessment, or this longer one covering many topics. There are also a huge number of videos now uploaded to Youtube – just search and you’ll be able to find explainers on most things!
• Interestingly, it seems that simply advertising a manuscript as open access is enough to increase clicks through form social media (here). 
• Another call to be mindful when reading pre-prints, as they’re not all wonderful. This study looked specifically at Covid pre-prints & noted that few of them made it to publication. This might, of course, be due to hastiness of the manuscript, or even opportunists trying to use it to further their careers, but either way – consider pre-prints accordingly.

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:

• This interesting PhD thesis has been published online about predatory journals and where research should be published. I’ve not finished reading all of it, but from the work so far & the titles of the rest of the document it looks interesting!
• There’s green and gold open access publishing, and there’s also the lesser discussed – and best – diamond open access publishing. These are journals which are free to access & free to publish. Helpfully, this report delves into them in detail.
• Are you considering pre-printing one of your upcoming papers? Maybe you’ve heard of it, but you’re unsure about the process. This blog is nice & short, discussing their experience and the benefits they found to pre-printing. Worth a read.