OSI News, January 2018 edition
Glenn Hampson
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WELCOME TO 2018! OSI has big plans for this year! The summit group will meet in March to finalize OSI’s 2018-19 action plans (see details below), the culture of communication reform effort will begin to gain traction with the launch of the rscomm website, and international meetings will take place in Brazil and China (with specific goals to be announced soon). In the meantime, we’ll continue pushing forward on several other fronts, including pursuing the projects and issues listed on our Slack channels, submitting proposals for several high-profile study and funding opportunities, and more. Thank you all for your guidance, involvement and support these past two years and good luck to everyone in the coming year!
The OSI summit group will meet at American University on March 13 and 14. If you’re a summit group member and plan on attending, please email me to confirm (gham...@nationalscience.org) and also let me know if you’ll need travel/lodging support. We have a limited budget at the moment but hopefully this will improve in the coming weeks. Tentatively, we’ll use the Omni Shoreham as our home base and arrange a shuttle bus between the hotel and campus. Between now and March, the summit group will firm up the details of what they’re going to work on---including but not limited to debating/approving OSI’s 2018-19 action plan, outlining the agenda of our upcoming meetings in Brazil and China, and evolving OSI’s governance structure. More specifics will be provided by next week so you can start making your travel arrangements. Work on the new rscomm website ground to a halt over the winter break, unfortunately. The anticipated launch date is now March 1st at the earliest, depending on whether we can develop enough content in time. If you have time/interest in writing an article, please note it here on the RSComm editorial calendar (category, subject, when you’ll be done, etc.): http://bit.ly/2AMQoUm. In addition to solid content, we need more money to finish building this site, as well as volunteer editors, and advertisers. If you’re interested in helping with any of this, let me know if you haven’t already (gham...@nationalscience.org). If you’re interested in tracking the progress of this effort, tune into our Slack channel at #cultureofcomm. Thank you! FUNDRAISING Remember all those fundraising appeals you received last month from every charity on the face of the earth? Well, here’s a pitch for the start of your year instead! Please consider putting OSI on your funding radar. Encourage your institutions to become regular donors, members, or event sponsors---every level and type of support is important. Please see the “support” page on the OSI website for details and links: http://osinitiative.org/support. More funding for OSI means being able to run studies, develop prototypes, hire staff to manage spin-off projects, hold more meetings, etc., all of which means more action on your recommendations, more visibility for scholcomm reform, and in turn, more funding to sustain this important work.
LISTSERV SUMMARY December has traditionally been a quiet month for OSI. This year, in early December the group discussed the US Federal Trade Commission’s ruling against OMICS---specifically whether this ruling highlighted a need/opportunity for OSI to help develop clearer international standards for what is and isn’t scholarly publishing. OSI also discussed the role of anecdotes in moving open science forward. Jeff Murray summed it up best when he said that while anecdotes shouldn’t drive policy, they do play an important role in giving voice to constituencies that lack representation. By mid-month, the hot topic was Ivan Oransky’s article on how the junk science getting published in predatory journals is posing a threat to science. Would raising awareness about this issue help? Is some other approach possible (like credentialing journals, banning tenure points for articles published in predatory journals, etc.)? The last significant conversation of the month/year had to do with the CDC’s forbidden word list and what the real significance of this list might be (i.e., whether this list was yet another sign of the Trump Administration’s anti-science attitude, or whether “spin” is a normal and necessary part of the congressional budgeting process).
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The Science Communication Institute (SCI) is a US-based 501(c)3 nonprofit charity (click here for GuideStar listing) dedicated to improving the communication that happens inside science. For more information about SCI please visit www.nationalscience.org. The Open Scholarship Initiative is a global effort being managed by SCI with broad support from sponsors, host universities and volunteers. For more information about OSI please visit www.osinitiative.org. Contributions made to OSI pass through SCI with no overhead charges—100% of contributions go directly to OSI.
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