research benefits – OpenCitations blog

Community, governance, and shared goals: these are the key concepts that you would have heard discussed, had you listened in on September 21 at the Open Science Fair 2021 to the sessions entitled “ScholeXplorer and OpenCitations as the new frontier of open citation indexing” and “The perils of being invisible. Collective funding models for Open Science infrastructure”, in which OpenCitations’ director Silvio Peroni discussed with other expert speakers the various goals and challenges of Open Science Infrastructures.

Open Science Fair is an initiative of OpenAIRE, co-organized by the following key international initiatives in the area of Open Science: COAR, EIFL, Force11, LA Referencia, LIBER, OPERAS, Sparc and Sparc Europe. A biannual event, it brings together “perspectives from different actors” and “suggests ways in which communities can work together to produce roadmaps for the implementation of Open Science”. The 2021 online event saw the participation of distinguished speakers in keynote talks, roundtable discussions, workshops and training sessions. At OpenCitations, we are grateful and proud to have been invited to participate in this collaborative and inspiring virtual fair.

The Lightning Talk “ScholeXplorer and OpenCitations as the new frontier of open citation indexing” was a presentation by Silvio Peroni, co-authored with Paolo Manghi (OpenAire), Alessia Bardi (CNR-ISTI), and Sandro La Bruzzo (CNR-ISTI), describing two of the 14 open data services included in the MONITOR portfolio of the OpenAIRE-Nexus project that are used to monitor Open Science, research impact and open citations – the domains of interest of the two services presented. ScholeXplorer provides access under a CC-BY license to a huge set of links between datasets and scholarly publications, while OpenCitations, as an open infrastructure for open bibliographic metadata and citations, grants access to more than 1.18 billion DOI-to-DOI citation links, released with a CC0 public domain waiver. Both services also provide tools that allow users to query their data, with the common final goal of providing open links between scholarly resources and making them available within the OpenAire Research Graph.

As Silvio Peroni recalled, last July this article by Ian Hutchins:

B. Ian Hutchins; A tipping point for open citation data. Quantitative Science Studies 2021; 2 (2): 433–437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_c_00138

celebrated passing the threshold of one billion open citations within public-domain databases in February 2021. However, the evanescence of “missing” or untraceable scholarly data, discussed in this post, can affect Open Science Infrastructures (OSI) as a whole, as highlighted during the Workshop “The perils of being invisible. Collective funding models for Open Science infrastructure”.

This workshop involved Agata Morka and Vanessa Proudman from SCOSS, and representatives of the three Open Science Infrastructures involved in the Second SCOSS Funding Cycle, namely Silvio Peroni (OpenCitations), Niels Stern (DOAB/OAPEN), and James MacGregor (PKP). The starting topic of the Workshop, in which the funder perspective was provided Jean-Francois Lutz (University of Lorraine), was the paradox: although the scholarly community increasingly relies on Open Science Infrastructures, it seems very difficult to get them “to realize that there are some operational and development costs related to their existence”. In this discouraging environment, SCOSS plays a crucial role in promoting such services to potential supporters. The most recent SCOSS annual survey, presented by Jon Treadway (Great North Wood Consulting) during the workshop and involving 217 institutions from across the world, helps us understand the impact and external perception of SCOSS on a global scale. It revealed a correspondence between the geographical areas in which SCOSS is best known and the locations of the major supporters, which perhaps should not surprise us. More importantly, it found that, in addition to interoperability and global significance, community governance was one of the most important aspects of the infrastructures that institutions chose to invest in. In particular, the chance to be directly involved in governance was found to act as a great incentive for university libraries to invest in external infrastructures. Community governance is a core aspect of the Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures and, as underlined in this blog post, OpenCitations is working hard to achieve full compliance.

Obstacles to offering support were found to include administrative barriers, although these could be reduced if individual supporters joined consortia. Overall, however, such administration hurdles were minor issues. More significantly, some institutions were unable to pledge funds in the short term, and there was seen to be a need to raise awareness of the necessity of generating cultural change around the issue of community support. As Vanessa Proudman underlined, it is crucial to create dialogue with institutions and libraries, in order to foster the understanding that supporting Open Science Infrastructures could be beneficial for both students and researchers, and a realization that the minimum annual contribution requested by SCOSS from any one libraryto support such an infrastructure was less than a single article processing charge (APC), trivial in comparison with the huge annual institutional subscriptions for access to journals and citation indexes.

In a separate SCOSS interview, Marin Dacos (Open Science Advisor to the Director-General for Research and Innovation at the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation) defined Open Science Infrastructures as “a common good of the scholarly community”, distinctly different from the services of commercial publishers. An essential value of an Open Scholarly Infrastructure is its community engagement and, from this perspective, the community funding approach promoted by SCOSS is the most efficient. As Silvio Peroni said, “What after SCOSS? SCOSS helps in creating a community around the service, and this community remains even after the three-year period of SCOSS promotion is over”.

Maybe, by fostering this growing global network of institutions and services committed to promoting a more open research, Open Scholarly Infrastrucutres can find an answer to the question “How can we not be invisible?” and achieve not just ‘sustainable’ but sustained funding from the academic community.

David writes: Dr Heinrich Hartman is a new colleague of mine, who, having been working in the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University, has just returned to Germany to start a new job in a leading semantic web research group, that of Steffan Staab at the Institute for Web Science and Technologies, University of Koblenz-Landau. What follows are our thoughts about research openness, that relates to our decision, described in the next blog post, to merge our bibliographic citation projects.

The following text is jointly authored by David Shotton (david.shotton@zoo.ox.ac.uk) and Heinrich Hartmann (hartmann@uni-koblenz.de)

Transparency is essential for trust and credibility in the research community, and true openness brings great opportunities for academia. The internet facilitates the free flow of information and knowledge, and permits new forms of communication both for researchers and for the general public. Already, today’s children can listen freely on the internet to university courses taught by world-leading scientists, and everybody has the best encyclopaedia ever written (Wikipedia) at their fingertips. These are real game changers. Opening up the research literature is the next logical step.

Open publishing

We believe that the current academic publishing model – whereby researchers give their content to commercial publishers and then buy it back from them at enormous cost by means of journal subscription fees – has become absurd, since it is no longer helping the researcher to distribute his or her findings, but rather prevents the work from being widely read, by hiding it behind subscription pay walls. Would it not be much better to let this information flow freely, accessible to everybody who wants to read it!

Of course, such a vision of openness for academic publishing raises issues of finance and quality control – who will pay for open access publishing, and how can we ensure that scientific rigor accompanies open publication. While the internet enables dissemination of information at a fraction of the cost of traditional print publication, publishing clearly involves more than electronic dissemination. It is for this reason that we, with others, are presently planning a high level conference on modern scientific communication, entitled Rigor and Openness in 21st Century Science, to be held in Oxford next spring.

However, new publication funding models are being developed, particularly in the United Kingdom, where Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust are insisting that papers reporting research results obtained as a result of their research funding should be published under an open Creative Commons CC-By attribution licence when an article processing charge (APC) is levied, so that the works are freely available for text mining and re-use [1]. What is significant is that they are backing their words with funding to enable it. Cameron Neylon has recently written a commentary in Nature about the importance of this [2].

Furthermore, peer review is being carefully examined by several forward-looking publishers to determine how well open alternatives to the present system of confidential review actually work.

The role of social media in science

Much academic research is done in relative isolation, because topics have become so specialized that there may be only a few experts in the whole world who really understand each particular research problem. These experts may be located on different continents, and may not know about one another – a situation that is particularly true for Ph.D. students and other young researchers, who may not yet be familiar with the literature in their field, and who may have formed few personal relationships with colleagues in other institutions through attendance at research conferences. New forms of academic social media can play a role here, to catalyse interactions between geographically separated academics, and many experiments in this area are being conducted.

Academic social media can also play an important role in filtering the wealth of new articles published every day, and in alerting people to the small fraction of these that are most relevant to them. Typically, junior researchers rely on recommendations from friends and colleagues about which articles are worth reading, but if academic social media can be used to broaden this recommendation network, they will provide a significant service.

Fears and benefits of openness

Of course researchers, particularly early in their careers, are cautious about sharing their discoveries too early or too widely, for fear they may get ‘scooped’, since they naturally and quite properly wish to obtain credit for their own work by being the first to publish it. However, what is often missed by people of this mind-set is that working openly with other people can have benefits too. It can be a lot more fun, can lead to more sustainable motivation, can result in incredibly rapid collaborative progress, and hence can often lead to better results. An essential pre-requisite for this is the willingness to share one’s ideas and making contact with like-mined people. An example of a researcher who practices openness in his day-to-day research is Georgio Gilestro, Lecturer in Systems Neurobiology with the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, who publishes his research group’s Open Lab Book online.

Our personal experience, not at least in the joint Open Citations and Related Work developments described in the next blog post, is that you gain more than you loose by being open!

Reference

[1] Wellcome Trust announcement: Open access: CC-BY licence required for all articles which incur an open access publication fee – FAQ. Available from http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/documents/web_document/WTVM055715.pdf.

[2] Cameron Neylon (2012). Science publishing: Open access must enable open use. Nature 492: 348–349. doi:10.1038/492348a.

Tag: research benefits

About engagement and evanescence: OpenCitations at the Open Science Fair 2021