Connecting research results, bridging communities, opening scholarship

April 15-16, 2015  |  Porto, Portugal

In a rapidly evolving world, academic and research institutions must think about becoming agents of change, with greater flexibility and responsiveness than ever before. Part of this change is a shift away from the notion that researchers simply conduct research and produce publications, but rather the research community itself must begin to take on responsibility for ensuring research outputs are widely and openly disseminated, properly curated, and preserved. In this sense, the institution becomes one node in a larger, interconnected network of content producers and stewards.

There are both challenges and opportunities inherent in this new environment. For instance, how do we create a seamless global research network in which all countries and researchers can participate? How can we evaluate research outputs based on their quality, and not on whether they are attached to a prestige publication? How can we manage increasingly large and complex data to support new modes of science and innovation? And how can we ensure that content is appropriately licensed, annotated and preserved to allow it to be re-used and integrated with other related content? Clearly, libraries and institutions must forge new partnerships, nurture new skills and competencies, and develop new organizational structures.

This conference, co-hosted by SPARC and COAR, will address some of the important challenges facing our libraries as we attempt to re-define our roles in an age of constant flux.

       OPENING KEYNOTE                      CLOSING KEYNOTE      

John Wilbanks                                              Dominique Babini
          Chief Commons Officer                             Coordinator of Open Access Projects
Sage Bionetworks                                                    CLACSO

Tuesday, April 14th - Preconference & Optional Programming

• 9:00am-10:30am: 'Breakfast Club'
• 10:30am: Coffee Break
• 11:00am-12:30pm: SPARC Member meeting
• 12:30pm: Lunch
• 1:30pm-3:00pm: SPARC & COAR Member Workshop

• 9:00am-10:30am: Welcome and Opening Keynote
  • Keynote Speaker: John Wilbanks -- Designing Open Research Systems
• 10:30am: Coffee Break
• 11:00am-12:30pm: Session #1: The International Open Science Policy Environment 
  • Lars Bjørnshauge, Director of European Library Relations, SPARC Europe
  • Marisa de Giusti, Professor, Universidad de La Plata
  • Jennifer Hansen, Manager, Information & Research Services, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
  • Jarkko Siren, Project Officer, European Commission
• 12:30pm: Lunch
• 1:30pm-3:00pm: Session #2: Organizational Models for Research Data Management Services
  • Gerald Beasley, Vice-Provost and Chief Librarian, University of Alberta
  • Liisi Lembinen, Acting Director of the Library, University of Tartu
  • Elisha Rufaro T. Chiware, Director of Libraries, Cape Peninsula University of Technology
• 3:00pm: Coffee Break
• 3:30pm-5:00pm: Session #3: Global Alignment and Collaboration
  • Johanna McEntyre, Director, Europe PubMed Central
  • Andrew Sallans, Partnerships, Collaborations, & Funding Manager, Center for Open Science
  • Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)
• 7:30pm: Conference Dinner

Thursday, April 16th

• 9:00am-10:30am: Session #4: Assessing Value 
  • William Nixon, Digital Library Development Manager, University of Glasgow
  • Stefanie Haustein, Post-doctoral Researcher, Canada Research Chair on the Transformations of Scholarly Communication, Université de Montréal
  • Nisia Trindade, Vice-President, Foundation Oswaldo Cruz
• 10:30am: Coffee Break
• 11:00am-12:30pm: Closing Keynote & Conference Closing
  • Keynote Speaker: Dominique Babini -- Repositories as Key Players in Non-Commercial Open Access - A Developing Region Perspective

Speaker bios can be found here.

More information on hotel options can be found here.

More information on Porto, Portgual and how to get there can be found here.

COAR and SPARC are incredibly thankful to the sponsors of this Conference --

It looks like the worst of the Ebola outbreak from the past few months might have been avoided if key research had been open access, rather than locked up.

Next Up for Agency Public Access Plans: NOAA
Heather Joseph, Executive Director, SPARC

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released its plan to create policies ensuring public access to articles and data resulting from its funded research, as required by the February 2013 White House directive.  The agency’s plan places a strong emphasis on building on its current technical infrastructure, as well as leveraging its well-established culture of data sharing.

NOAA Plan for Articles: Establish NOAA Institutional Repository
NOAA’s plan calls for the agency to establish an internal repository for its funded articles. The repository will be built using the “Stacks” technology created by and currently in use by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which will act as the systems provider for the repository.

The NOAA plan calls for all agency-funded intramural and extramural researchers to deposit final, accepted manuscripts into the agency’s repository upon acceptance in a peer-reviewed journal. Unlike many of the other agencies that have released plans to date, NOAA will also require its investigators to submit technical reports, data reports, and technical memoranda into the repository as well – significantly increasing the scope of the materials covered by the agency’s policy.

NOAA will use the OSTP-suggested 12-month embargo period as its baseline. Like other agencies, it will provide stakeholders with a mechanism for petitioning the agency to change the embargo period. The plan indicates that requests must include evidence that outweighs the public benefit of having the embargo remain at one year. Given the interdisciplinary nature of its research, NOAA notes that it may also coordinate embargo period changes with other agencies or departments.

The CDC Stacks technology that NOAA will be utilizing currently relies on the NIH Manuscript Submission system for authors and journals to use to deposit articles, so presumably NOAA will adopt this submission module as well.  CDC Stacks requires articles to be deposited in PDF/A format, and the NOAA plan indicates that this will be its preferred format; it is unclear if additional formats, such as XML, will be supported.

The NOAA plan does not provide specific information on reuse rights for articles in its planned repository other than noting “ there is no automated system for downloading all publications in CDC Stacks, which limits unauthorized redistribution. Users can request a copy of the publications that can be freely redistributed based on the publication’s license.”  This would indicate that bulk downloading  - and ready machine analysis – will be extremely difficult to do. NOAA indicates that it will attempt to monitor compliance using existing channels, but also explicitly notes that they currently “lack automated mechanisms to confirm compliance by grantees,” and that if these systems can’t be developed expediently, “manual verification” will have to be used.

The NOAA plan also indicates that the agency is aware of publisher efforts, such as CHORUS, that may be used to provide access to the final version of articles, and underscores that its own internal repository will be used in any event to ensure accessibility and long-term preservation of final, accepted articles. It also makes reference to a willingness to work with the SHARE project, should it evolve into something that has the capacity to house final manuscripts of articles or datasets

NOAA Plan for Research Data: Building on a Strong Foundation
NOAA’s plan for providing public access to data builds on the agency’s existing strong foundation for data sharing. Currently, all intramural researchers are required to submit a Data Management Plan (DMP) outlining plans for managing, providing access to, and the long-term preservation of any research data generated by NOAA funded researchers.  Extramural researchers are required to submit a Data Sharing Plan covering plans for access only. These requirements will be adjusted to require all NOAA programs to consider whether researchers must submit full DMP’s when they apply for funding.

The NOAA plan is quite comprehensive in describing the definition of the data it covers  - defining scientific data in terms of the types and formats of environmental data it generates. It also is unique among plans released so far in the scope of coverage, calling for the policy to ultimately apply to “all future results, and to all past results from current programs.” NOAA further states that the policy will also apply to “all legacy data currently archived at one of the NOAA National Data Centers, ”  something no other agency has addressed to date.

The plan is also notable for the clear guidance it provides in terms of timing of data sharing. Currently, funded researchers are required to make data “visible and accessible” within two years. The new plan calls for this time frame to be shortened to just one year. It also indicates that data underlying the conclusions of peer-reviewed articles will most likely be required to be made available at the time of the article’s publication, in appropriate repositories (presumably to be designated by NOAA)

Out of all of the plans released to date, the NOAA plan provides the clearest guidance on linking publications and data, by citing specific datasets in the reference list of a publication. The agency will employ a strategy of assigning persistent digital identifiers (DOI’s) generated by the agency for NOAA-produced data sets, in order to enable them to be cited in journal articles and other documents. NOAA expects to issue complete guidance on the procedures and requirements for obtaining and using a NOAA DOI later this year.

Like many other agencies, NOAA’s plan for research data calls for the use of an agency Data Inventory. NOAA will build out its existing NOAA Data Catalog, to enable researchers to discover and connect data to scientific articles, other datasets, etc. The metadata describing the scientific data contained in the catalog will include, at a minimum, the common core metadata schema currently in use by the federal government.

The agency’s plan is also quite detailed in terms of outlined requirements for comprehensive metadata standards to be developed and used. NOAA has already developed a ‘Data Documentation Procedural Directive’ that requires data to use structured metadata based on specific ISO standards. The plan calls for additional training and tools for metadata creation and verification to be developed to support this function.

As an agency, NOAA has long maintained a set of comprehensive National Data Centers, which ensure long-term preservation of multiple formats of digital data. These Centers will continue to be maintained, and will play an increasingly important role as additional data sets are identified by the agency as requiring long term preservation. NOAA also participates in public-private collaborations (such as the Open Geospatial Consortium), that are designed to develop and promote interoperability standards, and the agency will also continue to place a premium on this important work.

And finally, NOAA joins the majority of the other U.S. agencies in noting that the Department will explore the development of a “research data commons” along with other departments and agencies, for storage, discoverability, and reuse of data with a particular focus on making the data underlying peer-reviewed scientific publications resulting from federally funded scientific research available for free at the time of publication.

Today 11 organizations representing the next generation of scholars, researchers, and academic professionals announced OpenCon 2015: Empowering the Next Generation to Advance Open Access, Open Education and Open Data. Slated for November 14-16 in Brussels, Belgium, the event will bring together students and early career academic professionals from across the world to learn about the issues, develop critical skills, and return home ready to catalyze action toward a more open system for sharing the world’s information — from scholarly and scientific research, to educational materials, to digital data.

NIST Releases Public Access Plan: Agency will Partner with NIH to use PMC Platform
Heather Joseph, Executive Director, SPARC

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has released its plan for policies ensuring public access to articles and data resulting from its funded research, as required by the February 2013 White House directive, laying out a strong framework for a comprehensive approach to ensure access and productive reuse of NIST-funded research outputs.

NIST Plan for Articles: Partner with NIH’s PubMed Central

NIST’s plan calls for the agency to partner with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to use PubMed Central (PMC) as the repository for articles.  The plan indicated that NIST selected this option in order to “leverage the well-established search, archival, and dissemination features of PMC.”

All NIST-funded researchers will be required to deposit their final peer-reviewed manuscripts into PMC upon acceptance in a peer-reviewed journal and make them available to the public with no longer than a 12-month embargo period. NIST will also accept final published articles where allowed and will follow the NIH’s current format requirements. As with the other agencies, NIST will provide stakeholders with a mechanism for petitioning the agency to “shorten or extend the allowable embargo period.” NIST envisions that this process would take place through a public petition process run through the Federal Register.

NIST notes that it will also follow the NIH’s current rules on reuse rights for articles in the PMC database, putting the onus on authors to ensure that they have secured sufficient rights to deposit articles, and limiting reuse rights to the bulk of the PMC collection to only those currently allowed under Fair Use.

The plan notes that bulk downloading can be facilitated, however, the PMC Open Archives Initiative (OAI) service and the PMC File Transfer Protocol (FTP) service are the only services that may be used for automated downloading. Additionally, only a subset of the total PMC content (the PMC Open Access Subset - articles that are distributed under a Creative Commons or similar license) can be downloaded.

NIST will take a staged approach to publications. It will start in 2015 with a pilot, including the NIST Journal of Research and the Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data, to establish metadata and publication transfer protocols to PMC. In year two, deposit of all NIST-intramural articles will be operational, and in year three, extramural publications funded wholly or in part by NIST will be deposited. NIST indicates that this evolutionary plan provides a system to monitor compliance with the new policy over time, using data from PubMed Central and other sources.

NIST Plan for Research Data: Three-Part Strategy

NIST’s plan for providing public access to data consists of three components: requiring data management plans (DMPs), creating an Enterprise Data Inventory (EDI), and establishing a Common Access Platform providing a public access infrastructure.

The first component, calling for all investigators requesting funding to submit a Data Management Plan (DMP) outlining plans for managing and providing access to research data, or else provide a rationale as to why their research can not be made available, puts NIST in line with all other agencies who are using DMP’s to effectively set the default mode for NIST-generated research data to “open.”

At a minimum, NIST calls for data management plans (DMPs) to contain a summary of activities that generate data, a summary of the data types generated by the identified activities, a plan for storage and preservation of the data, and a plan describing whether and how data generated will be reviewed and made available to the public.

The second component of NIST’s plan for research data calls for the development of an Enterprise Data Inventory (EDI), which will be a catalog of the datasets that are generated via NIST-sponsored research. The goal of the EDI will be to enable researchers to discover and connect data to scientific articles, other datasets, etc. The metadata describing the scientific data contained in the catalog will include, at a minimum, the common core metadata schema currently in use by the federal government.

The final component, the Common Access Platform (CAP), creates production-level infrastructure populated with persistent identifiers and metadata for all publicly available NIST data. CAP is expected to provide for data interoperability within NIST and potentially with other federal agencies.

Unlike many other agencies and departments, the NIST plan does not include any language indicating that NIST intends to require that any data directly related to a NIST-funded research publication be made freely publicly accessible on the day of the article’s publication.

Finally, NIST joins the majority of the other U.S. agencies in noting that the Department will explore the development of a “research data commons” along with other departments and agencies, for storage, discoverability, and reuse of data with a particular focus on making the data underlying peer reviewed scientific publications resulting from federally funded scientific research available for free at the time of publication.

Promising public access legislation FASTR (Fair Access to Science & Technology Research Act) has been re-introduced by a bipartisan coalition in Congress.

Last week, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released its plan to establish policies to ensure public access to articles and data resulting from its funded research, as required by the February 2013 White House directive.  The plan calls for researchers to deposit final accepted manuscripts (or published articles) into the Department of Energy’s “PAGES” repository – a dark archive – with public access to be provided via links to publisher’s websites.  All articles will be made available to the public no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Notably, the NSF plan will extend to papers published in “juried conference proceedings,” as well as peer-reviewed journals, and the agency notes it intends to eventually include other types of NSF-supported grey literature and educational materials under the final policy.

The timing of deposit for articles is not yet specified, though many other agencies are using the date of acceptance in a journal as the trigger event for deposit. The NSF plan is calling for researchers to deposit articles in PDF/A format, but does not indicate if other structured markup formats (such as XML) required by many of the other agencies, will also be supported.

The NSF plan doesn’t elaborate on reuse rights for articles. However, since access to the majority of NSF-funded articles will be provided through proprietary publisher web sites, they will be subject to whatever copyright and related license terms are imposed by individual publishers. No indication of how the kinds of productive reuse (computation, text and data mining etc.) set out by the White House Directive will be facilitated by this arrangement.

The NSF plan specifically notes that the distributed nature of access across a wide number of publisher websites makes bulk downloading (a prerequisite for effective computation and mining) “inherently difficult.” The plan points out that investigators will be allowed to “follow the links to full-text and build a collection appropriate for analysis subject to the rights associated with the content,” in essence, continuing the status quo.

NSF indicates that it will provide a mechanism for stakeholders to petition the agency to change the required embargo period. Specifically, the plan notes that any such petitions should present “factually and statistically-based evidence that a change will more effectively promote the quality and sustainability of scholarly publications, while meeting the objectives of public access.”

NSF funded investigators will eventually be required to ensure that they report successful deposit of articles and juried conference reports as a part of the agencies annual and final grant reporting process., and compliance will be monitored by “Cognizant Program Officers.”

In terms of ensuring access to NSF-funded research data, the agency was an early leader in requiring investigators requesting funding to submit a Data Management Plan (DMP) outlining their plans for managing and providing access to research data, or else to provide a rationale why their research can not or need not be made available. The new NSF plan calls for this requirement to remain in place and does not outline any immediate significant changes to the current requirements – although it does indicate that the agency will continue to explore ways to refine and improve this process.

The NSF plan lays out an incremental approach. The agency indicates that a mechanism to support voluntary deposit of articles will be in place by the end of 2015, and that they expect to implement a mandatory system sometime in 2016.

The plan also indicates that the NSF is aware of other potential partners and solutions for ensuring effective public access, and may pursue future arrangements with them, initiating discussions “as early as FY16…”

While the NSF plan is clearly still a work in progress, the agency notes that an additional, 60-day opportunity for public comment will be presented to the community via the Federal Register – most likely in April.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) today released a long-anticipated policy that will require its grantees to make their peer-reviewed research papers freely available within 12 months of publication in a journal. The agency is not creating its own public archive of full-text papers, but instead will send those searching for papers to publishers’ own websites.

The Wikimedia Foundation is committed to making knowledge of all forms freely available to the world. Beginning today, our new Open Access Policy will ensure that all research work produced with support from the Wikimedia Foundation will be openly available...

A bipartisan coalition of Senate and House members, including Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., on Wednesday introduced the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act, a bill to improve public access to federally funded research.