Registration and Networking

Welcome Notes

Initiatives of the AE-Barcelona Knowledge Hub on behalf of Open Science. The first five years (2013-2017)

The future of the Open Access initiative has been the subject of heated discussion among scientists, publishers, learned societies, librarians and even government funding agencies, since 2001. The main questions being debated are: (a) should all scientific literature be open access?, (b) if so, how should the costs of publishing be met?, and (c) who should cover these costs? In the European Union, most scientific research is funded by public institutions, either regional, national or through the EC research programmes, or through several agencies/actions, as ERC, COST, etc. At the same time, the majority of scientific articles authored by European researchers are published in journals for which individuals or institutions have to pay either subscription fees or pay for downloading individual articles. Traditionally, authors have been compelled to transfer their copyrights to the publisher, which becomes the sole owner of the published material. In fact, under the old concept of copyright, the publisher had exclusive and unlimited rights to reproduce and distribute the article, as well as translation rights. Were this rule to be strictly followed, most copies of articles that researchers keep in their computers or offices around the world would be “illegal”. We will discuss the position of many researchers members of the Academia Europaea on the Open Science initiatives. Founded in 1988, the Academia Europaea (AE) is an international, non-governmental, not-for-profit association of individual scientists and scholars from all disciplines, recognised by their peers as experts and leaders in their own subject areas. AE members are leading scientists and scholars who collectively promote research, learning and education. The AE recognises genuine international excellence and supports the culture of European research through dialogue and collaboration. AE membership now numbers well over 3500, including more than 75 Nobel laureates. The AE is pan-European, and its elected members are drawn from the whole European continent and also from non-European countries. The AE has currently 22 thematic sections

Sponsor 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.

‘Measure for Measure’: Moving to a Responsible Use of Metrics in the Age of Open Science

This paper looks at the eight pillars of Open Science as defined by the European Commission. It then targets one particular pillar – Altmetrics, or the Responsible Use of Metrics, using insights from 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. Having set the Responsible Use of Metrics in an Open Science Framework, the paper will analyse the findings of a survey on the use of bibliometrics carried out by HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) in 2017. The resulting analysis creates a baseline against which future activity can be judged. The paper then discusses one of the key LERU recommendations for the Responsible Use of Metrics, that every university should have a Bibliometrics Policy which takes into account the insights of Open Science. The presentation will use UCL (University College London) as an exemplar of a research-led university which has done this, identifying the benefits and challenges which a new approach to bibliometrics brings. The paper ends by suggesting a route that other universities can follow to deliver this form of change at an institutional level.

Coffee Break

Negotiating our way through the transition

Jisc Collections negotiates for digital content on behalf of the UK higher education sector, seeking the best possible pricing and licensing to save institutions time, money and effort. Since the 2012 Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, on ‘Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications’ (The Finch report) in the UK and the resultant policy change to support a transition to open access, Jisc Collections has been negotiating agreements to include offsetting arrangements in order to reduce the total cost of ownership (Lawson, 2015). In an attempt to move away from the publishers’ hybrid model, offset agreements are an attempt to link article publishing charges (APCs) with subscription charges. They look to increase the former while the latter reduces. Offset agreements seek to do this in a variety of ways, some reduce the APC charge, some allow unlimited OA publishing for a capped amount and others provide a refund or publishing credit. Offsetting is therefore advancement of the highly criticised hybrid model (Geschuhn & Stone, 2017). This presentation will present an overview of the offsetting arrangements in place in the UK and the impact of the UK OA mandates on negotiations. It will highlight some of the major challenges and successes of these new business models, for example, the SpringerCompact agreement, which came into effect in January 2016. It will discuss these offset deals in light of recent literature from other European countries, e.g. BIBSAM in Sweden, and the Universities UK ‘Monitoring the Transition to OA’ report published in December 2017. The paper will examine how far these agreements contribute towards a full transition to open access, discussing lessons learned and concluding with recommendations for consortia, libraries and publishers.

Sponsor Talk: From silos to connected research insights: opportunities and challenges for the scholarly community

The research landscape exists in silos, often split by proprietary tools and databases that do not meet the needs of the institutions they were created for. What if we could change that? In this session we’ll discuss how connected and more openly available data now can empower institutions to more easily gather the insights they need to inform the most effective development of their organization’s activities and look at how linking different sections of the scholarly ecosystem (including grants, publications, patents and data) would deliver powerful results that can then be integrated into existing systems and workflows through the use of APIs and other applications.

The action plan for Open Science of the universities of Catalonia

The CSUC is born on January 1st, 2014, as a conjunction between two consortia, CESCA (ICT infrastructures) and CBUC (library services). Recently, CSUC decided to create an area focused on Open Science. The OS area is to collaborate with universities to reduce the effort of adaptation to the Open Science requirements and to increase the visibility of the research done in Catalonia. The main activities of the Open Science action plan are 3: open metadata, open access, and open data. We also created the Portal of the Catalan Research and maintain cooperative repositories.

Building a radically open future

Open Science is accessible, collaborative, transparent, reproducible and re-useable. It is enabled by 21st Century technology but in some respects returns research to the values and principles of scholarship in the 19th Century when researchers actively and often publicly shared their experiments and findings. What has changed is the scale of the research endeavour, from local to global and from print to digital. A transformation to Open Science, in which both the quality and progress of research is enhanced, requires not just a shift in how researchers conduct and disseminate their work but also a sea-change in how publishers and other stakeholders evaluate, communicate and enable the discovery of that work. Open Science also requires an open infrastructure and a radical change in how publishers provide and sell services and tools to the research community so that ownership of articles, data and other outputs lies within the Academy. The challenge we face in achieving this is not the technology, which is already available, or the appropriate infrastructure, which is beginning to be put in place, but the culture and politics of research communication itself. And the greatest challenge is the primacy of the journal and published article and the perverse consequences of this: the legacy of a print distribution which has stifled workflows and business models, hyper-competition which hampers scientific progress and innovation and has blinded stakeholders – even researchers themselves – to the real value and impact of their research. I will discuss some of the building blocks of open infrastructure and a more radical approach to the services that publishers can provide as well as initiatives to change the cultural currency of incentives and rewards for researchers.

Lunch Break

Citizen Social Science: Two examples on how research can be collaborative, placed in public spaces and drive a social change

OpenSystems is a multidisciplinary group of the University of Barcelona that focuses on arts and public participation as core elements of the way of doing science. We work together with many actors and build tailored-made research collectives to address concerns and issues mostly grounded in urban contexts. Our methodology is based on community processes and we are committed to horizontal research through innovation and public engagement. Data science, complex systems science and social or socio-economic systems are our primary areas of expertise. We co-design collective and pop-up experiments to raise evidence to respond to societal challenges and to publicly discuss the results in a way which is valid for a wide range of actors. Our experimental setup is placed in the wild with situated, public and participatory experiments involving citizens at different levels. OpenSystems is fully committed with the emerging Citizen Science which includes amateurs and concerned citizens in research processes. Citizen science is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur scientists. We present two examples (within StemForYouth EU project and with Games x Mental Health project) on how from Universitat de Barcelona we are running these participatory research processes which include more dimensions than those assumed to be necessary for successful and high-quality research. http://www.ub.edu/opensystems/

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 its 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).

Presentations from Catalan institutions and final discussions

Nadja Gmelch, Open University of Catalonia: Open Science at the Open University of Catalonia– Francesca Arcara, Barcelona Supercomputing Center: Documentalistworking group: a bottom-up approach to Open Science opportunities– Anna Rovira, Polytechnic University of Catalonia: Focus on Open Science at Polytechnic University of Catlonia– Michaela Bertero, Centre for Genomic Regulation: Open Science and CRG: a branching tree in different directions

Closing Notes