ERC withdraws as a supporter of cOAlition S
The ERC Scientific Council has decided to withdraw as a supporter of cOAlition S, mainly due to concerns about the needs of young researchers and equity among countries and research communities.
cOAlition S' rebuttal indicates that they remain firm in refusing to support hybrid journals that do not commit to transformative agreements.
Making the most of COVID-19 preprints
Europe PMC is indexing COVID-19 related preprints and underlying data to help researchers discover, access and mine potentially lives-saving research.
Apollo's 2000th dataset
Cambridge researchers continue to share their data through our repository, Apollo. This month we received the 2000th dataset, supporting “Impact of health warning labels on snack selection: an online experimental study”. That data came from a Wellcome Trust funded collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol and it is a shining example of reproducible research in action (preregistration, sharing of consent forms, code, protocols, data and more). Overall, Apollo datasets have been downloaded over 58 000 times in the first half of 2020.
Government paper calling for more open research
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy policy paper, 'UK Research and Development Roadmap' explicitly addresses the potential of open research practices in its call to revitalise our whole system of science, research and innovation. Aiming to minimise bureaucracy in the public funding system, the roadmap looks to 'mandate open publication and strongly incentivise open data sharing where appropriate'. It also aims to ensure that 'more modern research outputs are recognised and rewarded.' The paper calls for us to be honest about where we need to improve, such as where the “focus on publishing results in ‘top’ journals may be narrowing the research process.
Academics call for better access to health data
Almost 400 academics from across the UK - including one of our Data Champions - signed an open letter calling for improved access to health and other administrative data for research. The authors of the letter, published in the British Medical Journal this month, made several recommendations for how this could be done, citing lessons learnt during the Covid-19 pandemic. ADR UK (Administrative Data Research UK) responded to the letter with a message of solidarity.
Leiden rankings released
The Leiden Rankings were released this month, giving us some of the best Open Access monitoring across countries. The most recent dataset only covers 2015-2018, but we can clearly see just how common Open Access is in the UK compared to the rest of the world.
Jisc survey on persistent identifiers
Jisc launched a survey about institutions' awareness, use, and experience of PIDs, and their thoughts about whether and how they could be adopted more widely in the UK.
The findings of the survey will help inform work being carried out by Jisc to support the UK’s compliance with Plan S, specifically in terms of the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) in the research ecosystem.
PLOS survey on Open Research challenges
PLOS have launched a survey for support staff at institutions (including librarians and research data managers), and representatives of funding agencies to find out about problems that funders and institutions may have in understanding researchers’ open research practices, and to understand how well existing solutions help solve these problems.
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