OSI News, February 2018 edition

[Glenn Hampson]

BEHIND THE SCENES OSI’s listserv conversations have dipped for now as we pivot from talking about issues to figuring out how to fix them. But behind the scenes, action continues. Lots of off-list conversations have been taking place regarding potential partnerships, meeting sites and agendas, OSI topics and more. Most of this information is getting posted to Slack; some is just preliminary for now. The summit group will debate how to manage this pivot going forward, with the goal of ensuring continued broad transparency and involvement. Stay tuned!     SUMMIT MEETING About 20 members of OSI’s summit group will meet at American University from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. on March 13th and 9 a.m.-1 p.m. on the 14th. If you’re a summit member and haven’t confirmed your attendance yet, please email me this week---otherwise you may need to make your own hotel and transportation arrangements. Guests will stay at the Glover Park Kimpton and shuttle between the hotel and campus. The summit group has been talking online and via conference calls to 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. RSCOMM.NET Can you write an article for the RSComm website? This group has a wealth of expertise and has already written extensively on a wide variety of topics of interest---every topic in research and scholarly communication is welcome. If you’re interested, just sign up on the RSComm editorial calendar (category, subject, when you’ll be done, etc.): http://bit.ly/2AMQoUm. Thank you! OPEN DATA Scholarly communications is not a static landscape and even our best laid plans will need to be reevaluated as we move along. A case in point is open data. We haven’t focused much on this yet in OSI, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that open access may become an afterthought left in the wake of the open data movement---that the real focus amongst researchers, publishers, funders, industry, and governments is on opening data. The written summary of this data---the journal article---is still critical, of course, but the movement to improve access to these summaries is moving along a different path and at a different pace than the movement to improve access to underlying data. OSI is uniquely situated to help bridge the gap between these two distinct efforts. The “OS” in OSI stands for “open scholarship”---not just journals, but data as well. Many of our members are key players in the both movements. And many of the issues we’ve wrestled with in OSI bridge both worlds, including the need for better standards, curation, researcher engagement and incentives, reproducibility and discoverability, metrics, mandates, sustainability, business models, ethics and more. Can/should OSI consider helping foster some of these connections---both people and issues? MEETING AGENDAS As OSI begins focusing on how to design and deploy the scholcomm reform recommendations put forward by OSI2016 and OSI2017 delegates, regional meetings can take on a new role, serving not just as information-gathering sessions but policymaking events where partners discuss tangible reform proposals. In order to focus these events, different regional meetings can focus on different policies. For instance, the Brazil meeting might focus on discoverability---how to improve the visibility of research, particularly from Latin America. What barriers currently exist and what can we do together to lower these? The China meeting might focus on journal standards. What voluntary industry standards should exist to ensure journal quality is maintained across the globe? What voluntary measures should academia take to push back strongly against journal fraud? What other regional meetings should we consider for 2018 and beyond? The summit group will take up the matter of meeting agendas at its mid-March meeting and report recommendations to the full group in late March.     LISTSERV SUMMARY The hottest topic on the OSI listserv in January was a discussion of how fast open is advancing, or not. A recent report from Science-Metrix (http://bit.ly/2nLy71B) makes the case that over 50% of journal articles being published (even more in some countries and fields) are now open. But what do we really mean by “open”? This big number is true only if “open” includes public access materials. By the BOAI definition of open (free, immediate, and no reuse restrictions), “open” journal articles are still relatively scarce, comprising about 15 percent of all published articles. Why does this matter? Because different actors and advocacy efforts in this space are pushing for different end goals---we need to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. OSI delegates have invented (and proposed using) a DARTS framework (discoverability, accessibility, reusability, transparency, and sustainability) to describe the open spectrum instead of referring to “open” as some discrete state (especially considering no one agrees what that state means). Provocative statements underpinned the rest of OSI’s conversations. On February 1, Rick Anderson presented a session at Texas State University on “Research Publishing Strategies: Options, Opportunities, and Obstacles.” One of the topics Rick covered was “can open access publishing hurt my career?” Yes, says Rick: There are people out there who ignorantly believe that OA journals are, by definition, of low quality, and if the opinions of those people matter to your career (for instance if they are your department chair or a potential employer), then publishing in an OA venue could be a problem. Some OA journals are fraudulent. Deliberately publishing in these not only can, but probably should, hurt your career. (Unfortunately, the fact that fraudulent OA journals have a tendency to aggressively market their OA status only contributes to the misperception that OA=low-quality.) One of the many things we need more of in the scholcomm space is open and candid discussion of these issues, especially for the benefit of early-career authors who may need help understanding the complex landscape of scholarly publishing. This session sounds to me like a step in the right direction. Provocative topic number two was Danny Kingsley’s panel discussion from 2015 that tried to answer the question “Can society afford open access?” (http://bit.ly/2BeCs4P). “I argued no,” said Danny.  “The way the UK is going about it is incredibly expensive and has just thrown a whole extra amount of cash into the system without effecting any real change.” Topic #3 was the Barbie vs. Bratz copyright dispute (http://bit.ly/2EGSkLG), which Bryan Alexander best summarized as “a Rorschach test for copyright views.”

The Science Communication Institute (SCI) is a US-based 501(c)3 nonprofit charity dedicated to improving the communication that happens inside science. For more information about SCI please visit www.nationalscience.org. The Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) is a global effort managed by SCI with broad support from sponsors, host universities and volunteers. For more information about OSI please visit www.osinitiative.org.