Registration and Networking

Welcome Notes

by Sally Smith, Director of Research, Dublin City University

Open Science – Current policies, practices and open issues in Europe

The LERU Roadmap for Open Science presents a model for how universities and research institutes can engage with the principles of Open Science. The paper will give an overview of the 8 pillars of Open Science which the Roadmap addresses, based on the definition of Open Science offered by the European Commission’s Open Science Policy Platform. The speaker will then concentrate on three of the eight pillars, describing current work in each of these areas in UCL (University College London). For the Future of Scholarly Publishing, the speaker will look at the possible impact of Plan S on current models for scholarly publishing and also describe the new open journal publishing platform being launched by UCL Press in January 2019. The paper will also look at the readiness of universities to participate in the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud), being launched in Vienna on 23 November 2018. The third area the paper will look at is the challenging area of Bibliometrics and how/if Open Science principles can change prevailing practice. The paper will then offer some tentative thoughts on the ability of European universities to embrace Open Science principles.

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 organisation’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.

Research Libraries Powering Sustainable Knowledge in the Digital Age: LIBER strategy 2018-2022 in action

LIBER new strategy 2018-2022 aims to support research libraries in powering sustainable knowledge in the Digital Age. LIBER is currently progressing in the implementation of this strategy. The presentation will show on which kind of questions LIBER Working Groups and Steering Committees are working, what results are already or will soon be available, which new questions arise from this work. Last but not least, the presentation will show what can and should be done by every research library to advance Open Science in Europe.

Coffee Break

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.

Open Access to Publications and to Data: What’s Next?

Prevailing open science challenges between policy beliefs and operations

In the past few years, the open access debate evolved into a wider policy belief about open science. It was not only a shift to a larger framework that includes data and quality assessment, but also a shift towards the involvement of politics. Early adopters from universities successfully serve as ambassadors and brokers to EU policymakers. FAIR principles are key to EU open science policy and the infrastructural cloud focus. Inevitably divergence between policymakers and researchers occurs with a resulting gap. A majority of researchers does not share FAIR policy beliefs or is not even familiar with the acronym. I will highlight some challenges and best practices derived from my various positions and experience with political, institutional and individual research representatives. The biggest challenge may be bridging the gap between political policy beliefs on the one hand and institutional open science strategies on the other hand.

Lunch Break

Citizen Science and Research Libraries: the prospect of a long term relationship

This presentation will highlight important new opportunities for libraries by analysing the roles they could potentially play in citizen science projects. Citizen science is one of the eight pillars of open science identified by the Open Science Policy Platform, a high-level EC Working Group. Several of these roles will be illustrated by recent case studies. This presentation thus will present a snapshot of what libraries have so far achieved in this sphere and the challenges and opportunities which remain.

Driving a national approach to Open Science

Panel Discussion

Closing Notes