Registration and Networking

Welcome Notes from Governance of Sapienza University of Rome

Opening Note

by Teodoro Valente, Deputy Rector for Research, Innovation and Technology Transfer, Sapienza University of Rome

‘Be the change that you wish to see in the world (Mahatma Ghandi)’: Universities and Cultural Change to deliver Open Science

This paper will be built on the LERU (League of European Research Universities) Advice Paper on Open Science, which was presented to the Competitiveness Council of the European Union in May 2018. The Council works in four major policy areas, including research and innovation, to enhance competitiveness and increase growth. The paper begins by identifying cultural change as the key element in delivering substantial and sustainable change in universities. Looking at the challenges and benefits of Open Science, the paper then describes a path for how to embed cultural change in academic institutions. The second part of the paper then looks at the eight pillars of Open Science as defined by the Commission and gives examples both of how substantial change has been achieved at a university level, and what the impact of those changes has been. The paper concludes by suggesting a model for how universities can assess whether a cultural change has taken hold to deliver substantial change.

Sponsored Talk: Current status of Open Access in Italy

A state of the art assessment of how is behaving Open Access in Italy, getting a deeper insight via Web of Science Core Collection and the new OA features developed in collaboration with ImpactStory. Looking at real and updated data, discover if and how Open Access is improving in Italy and in other European countries. Also find out how Open Access publications are performing in terms of impact, exploiting InCites capabilities.

How the new LIBER Strategy 2018-2022 supports Open Science

LIBER, Europe’s largest research library network, launched its new strategy in November 2017. Currently, research libraries face the 4th Industrial Revolution and LIBER strategy aims to support research libraries on their way to Open Science, TDM and artificial intelligence. The presentation will give insights into LIBER’s vision for 2022 and its strategy. It will detail the action plan with which LIBER is supporting libraries in the implementation of Open Science, supporting the change management, research integrity, the development of skills in staff and researchers and the new role research libraries can take in citizen science.

Coffee Break

Facing the Open Science challenges from a university perspective

When we talk about Open Science we talk about new ways of performing research and disseminating results. Many researchers are embracing this new way of doing research, sometimes fostered by funders, and universities must act. Open Science brings challenges and opportunities that must be evaluated from a university perspective in order to make changes in the way they provide services and infrastructures for researches. And, moreover, Open Science implies new ways of evaluating research, internally and externally. Universities must develop their own strategy for Open Science and an action plan to implement it. In this talk, I will introduce some ideas on how to develop it.

Sponsored Talk: Libraries and Research Assets – The Need for a New Approach

Many in the academia recognize the need for a better, more integrated approach for managing research assets throughout the research cycle – a systematic data management approach that would eliminate duplication of effort, reduce the burden on individual stakeholders, and – above all – would support the institutional goal of increasing the impact of research output. Academic libraries are often at the crossroads of increasing their involvement in supporting research output and improving research data management and are already providing a measure of centralized coherence in their support of academic research. In this session, we will discuss the potential role that libraries can play in driving this transition, by leveraging their expertise in data curation, resource management, and content dissemination, and the infrastructure needed for supporting these processes. We will aim to inspire a conversation around the need for a new, comprehensive approach to research data services. The session will also look at a possible solution via a new library–led initiative being launched (Ex Libris Esploro) that brings together a number of universities and Ex Libris in order to develop a new approach to increase visibility, impact and compliance of research outputs and data while serving the multiple stakeholders.

Time to wake up and smell the coffee!

While attention has shifted to the broader spectrum of Open Science, Open Access—one component of Open Science—has yet to be achieved on a large scale. Over the last 15 years, open access has been adopted as an underlying principle in a great number of national and international research and funding policies and has spawned new publishing platforms. These efforts have made some progress in increasing the amount of research outputs freely accessible, but they have come with significant additional cost to institutions and, perhaps more dangerously, they have not had an impact on the paywall system itself, which is as vigorous and prosperous as ever: the bulk of today’s scholarly journals continues to be locked behind the paywalls of a relatively small number of commercial publishers whose subscription prices increase year after year. Furthermore, while it is widely accepted that the money currently spent on subscriptions, globally, would be more than enough to support a transition to open access publishing, there is a second revenue stream flowing unmonitored and unchecked from research institutions to subscription publishers for open access publishing fees for their hybrid and pure gold open access journals. While we continue to develop and support new open access publishing initiatives, in order to have a transformative impact on the current paywall system, we must develop a strategy that also addresses the subscription system head-on!

Data Sharing in Human Genetic Research: A Two -Path Tale

In recent years there has been a growing consensus among scientific communities that the possibility to get access and reuse data may help scientific progress allowing better exploitation of information and optimized use of resources in a climate of scientific openness and transparency. This becomes even more important for those scientific fields whose findings and outputs can strongly impact our life and the way we think, such as human genetic research. This discipline has witnessed a constant and rapid development in the past decades and the consequent all increasing amount of genetic data produced, falling to both the so called small and big data categories, have found a wide range of applications in different scientific fields, like biomedicine, human evolution and forensics. Given these premises, understand how much, in which way and why researchers in this field share, or withhold, their data is fundamental for the identification of critical aspects and the development of strategies aimed at increasing their availability for the scientific community as a whole. To this end, we explored both small data (genetic) and big data (genomic) sharing practices in the above-mentioned fields through in-depth scrutiny of papers. Our results tell a two-path story. One path narrates two scientific communities: Paleogeneticists and Forensic scientists, who, due to the shared effort towards reproducibility and transparency of scientific practices, successfully embraced good data sharing practices, reaching around 97% and 86% of data sharing rates, respectively. The second path, on the contrary, tells us about the biomedical community for which data sharing is quite uncommon. In fact, data availability in this discipline ranges from 64% for small data to a poor 18% for big data (combined value for SNP chip and Next Generation Sequencing data), even though the availability of several digital infrastructures specifically designed to host and disseminate these types of data as well as mandatory data sharing policies implemented by publishers and funders. Potential conflicts with ethical and privacy issues and/or being a highly competitive field of research and having connections with industry may combine and make biomedical researchers less willing to share their data. In conclusion, we believe that to invert the trend and popularize good data sharing practices, research stakeholders must commit to set up tailored approaches for each research field taking Paleogenetics and Forensic science communities as an example. At the same time, we all must make an effort to increase awareness on the importance of robust a sustainable data sharing for scientific progress, especially among young researchers.

Lunch Break

The Role of Public-Private Partnership in Open Science

This presentation will look at how public and private organisations can work together and contribute to the changing culture of doing science. Open Science means better use of collective intelligence and micro-expertise groups throughout the entire spectrum of our society. It is a new way of doing science in which every single one of us has a stake. To make it happen, the organisations need to start handling this change and to design new collaborations, based on principles like honesty, hard work, transparency and politeness. Private organisations should not look for customers. Instead, they should be looking for communities to which they can contribute and with which they can build fair services and products. Focus On Open Science series is a good example of such a partnership. In it’s fourth year, this series takes us to Rome (17.05), Barcelona (20.06), Ljubljana (11.09) Gdansk (25.09), Belgrade (12.11), Budapest (15.11), Vienna (16.11), Dublin (29.11).

Sponsored Talk: FOLIO – library software and community

In this presentation, the platform-based open source software FOLIO will be introduced: its architecture, development goals and current status. But FOLIO is much more! It’s a community driven project. The institutions of hbz and VZG are part of this with their own FOLIO team and project in Germany of which an insight will be given.

Session’s Note: Luciano Saso, Deputy Rector for European University Networks, Sapienza University

Lightning Talks and Discussions

Open Access Policies and Italian Universities Chair: Luciano Saso 1) Benedetta Alosi, Messina University: Making a virtue of necessity: University Library System & Research, a strategic partnership. Abstract: The presentation will briefly illustrate the “reverse” approach we used to adopt the Open Access Policy. The constructive collaboration between the University Library System and the Research Office put in place to respond to the needs of the National Research Assessment Exercise resulted in an effective strategy to pave the path to the adoption and the implementation of the OA policy. 2) Paola Galimberti, Milano University: Open Science in practice: the case of the University of Milan. Abstract: It is a challenge (It takes time and resources) to make openness a common practice for the research workflow (research production, validation, dissemination, evaluation) in a multidisciplinary University. It is very difficult in a national context that does not provide policies and rewards for open scholarships. The University of Milan established its strategy in open science years ago and reoriented it according to European developments. This talk will present the results of actions undertaken. 3) Elena Giglia, Torino University: From Open Access to Open Science: a demanding transition. Abstract: Starting with a short overview of the OA policy adopted by the University of Turin, the author discusses facilities and barriers to OS both at national and international levels. 4) Marisol Occioni, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice: Fostering Open Science in Italy: the role of IOSSG. Abstract: IOSSG is an informal, not-for-profit Italian working group of experts with different skills from different areas (research support, ICT, digital libraries, Open Science, legal, communication) promoting the culture of Open Science, with a special focus on EOSC. IOSSG started up in 2016 and it aims to bring about and support changes that accelerate the transition to more effective Open Science and Open Innovation: in order to pursue this goal, IOSSG is producing DMps, policy models on research data, guidelines, education materials etc, adopts a bottom-up approach and shares its deliverables in Open Access with the Italian Research community. 5) Ilaria Fava, Göttingen State and University Library: What is the EOSC and how do research libraries fit into the picture. Abstract: The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is a recent initiative of the European Commission that aims at changing the way researchers do research in their daily work. Research libraries play an essential role in promoting the EOSC underlying principles and in filling in the blanks when it comes to the skills researchers need to fully exploit all the opportunities offered by the EOSC. 6) Daniela Luzi, National Research Council, Institute for Research on Population and Social Policies: The OpenUP project. Abstract: The primary objectives of the European project OpenUp -Opening up new channels for Scholarly review, dissemination, and assessment – are to: Identify ground-breaking mechanisms, processes and tools for peer-review for all types of research results (e.g. publications, data, software), Explore innovative dissemination mechanisms with an outreach aim towards business and industry, education, and society as a whole, and Analyse a set of novel indicators that assess the impact of research results and correlate them to channels of dissemination. An overview of the project together with some preliminary results in the three OpenUp pillars: peer-review, innovative dissemination and altmetrics will be presented. Moreover, our experience in the development of a pilot study on data sharing in the Social sciences will be shortly outlined. – More info on the project: http://openup-h2020.eu/ – “OpenUp in a nutshell”, video available at: https://www.openuphub.eu/community/blog/item/openup-in- a-nutshell?category_id=3 – Resources and references on peer-review, innovative dissemination and altmetrics are available on the OpenUp Hub: https://www.openuphub.eu/ 7) Emma Lazzeri, Institute of Information Science and Technologies: OpenAIRE and RDA: the Italian side of the story. Abstract: OpenAIRE Advance and RDA Europe 4.0 projects are presented showing their activities in the Italian Landscape: OpenAIRE Italian National Open Access Desks and RDA Italian Node. OpenAIRE-Advance continues the mission of OpenAIRE to support the Open Access/Open Data mandates in Europe. By sustaining the current successful infrastructure, comprised of a human network and robust technical services, it consolidates its achievements while working to shift the momentum among its communities to Open Science, aiming to be a trusted e-Infrastructurewithin the realms of the European Open Science Cloud. In this next phase, OpenAIRE- Advance strives to empower its National Open Access Desks (NOADs) so they become a pivotal part within their own national data infrastructures, positioning OA and open science onto national agendas. The capacity building activities bring together experts on topical task groups in thematic areas (open policies, RDM, legal issues, TDM), promoting a train the trainer approach, strengthening and expanding the pan-European Helpdesk with support and training toolkits, training resources and workshops. It examines key elements of scholarly communication, i.e., co-operative OA publishing and next-generation repositories, to develop essential building blocks of the scholarly commons. On the technical level OpenAIRE-Advance focuses on the operation and maintenance of the OpenAIRE technical TRL8/9 services, and radically improves the OpenAIRE services on offer by a) optimizing their performance and scalability, b) refining their functionality based on end-user feedback, c) repackaging them into products, taking a professional marketing approach with well-defined KPIs, d) consolidating the range of services/products into a common e-Infra catalogue to enable a wider uptake. RDA Europe 4.0 designs Europe’s contribution to the implementation of an effective governance model and strategy in RDA global while ensuring that RDA delivers on locally relevant issues. RDA Europe 4.0 focuses on the need for open and interoperable sharing of research data & on the need to build social, technical and cross-disciplinary links to enable such sharing on a global scale. It strives to do this with its community-driven and bottom-up approach launched since 2012. In fact, RDA Europe 4.0 directly builds on the current RDA Europe effort, by efficiently bringing in the organisations that implemented RDA Europe since 2012. The scope of RDA Europe 4.0 is to become the centrepiece for an EU Open Science Strategy through a consolidated European network of National Nodes, bringing forward an RDA legacy in Europe, providing skilled, voluntary resources from the EU investment to address DSM issues, by means also of an open cascading grant process. The ambitious, 27-month project is implemented by 5 beneficiaries (Trust-IT Services, Gottingen State University Library, the Digital Repository of Ireland at the Royal Irish Academy, the Digital Curation Centre and the RDA Foundation), skillfully supported by 9 National Nodes (with Italy represented by CNR) which carry out specific operational activities & act as national champions for their respective region. One of the specific goals of RDA Europe 4.0 is to complete a capillary European network by on-boarding additional 13 nodes by project end.

Closing Notes