Registration and networking

Opening Notes

Insights into European Research Funder Open Policies and Practices: A Snapshot

This presentation will describe the results of a research study called the RIF Project that gleans insights into the various patterns of rewards and incentives being employed by European research funders to encourage open access to publications and research data and openness in research assessment for the research they fund. Funders across Europe are using scholarly communications to increase the impact of their grant results, thereby incentivizing researchers to share their research more openly. More than 60 funders responded to a survey that was conducted in early Spring 2019 coming from key international funding bodies, national funding agencies, major charities and foundations, and national academies and from over 25 countries. The study is being led by SPARC Europe in consultation with Science Europe, ALLEA and the EFC. The survey is the first of its kind, also to include academies, foundations and charities in Europe. What kinds of policy choices have funders made to influence how grantees increase open access to their research results with as few restrictions as possible? How can funders contribute to changing the research evaluation system by exploring ways to evaluate the intrinsic value of research beyond the impact factor for example; promoting, and considering a wider range of types of research when evaluating grants. What internal evaluation processes come with that? Can funders stimulate grantees to disseminate a wide range of research more broadly, also for re-use, and encourage its discoverability? How are funders contributing to the investment in open, be it through financing open access journal articles and other material, and supporting infrastructure? The presentation will provide answers to these questions by sharing some of the survey’s high level results, firstly reporting on types of Open Access and Open Science policies amongst a range of funders to frame the other incentives. We will then go into how funders are currently funding Open Access publications, as well as Open Access and research data development, services or infrastructure. Furthermore, we will outline what grant evaluation criteria are used when evaluating the research funders fund or wish to fund and for indications for innovation in this process, e.g. asking how far they endorse initiatives such as the Leiden Manifesto or DORA and where Open Science is and is not included in that process. The project will end by delving into areas of the study that inform on certain principles of Plan S. This research will help raise awareness of the range of opportunities to funders with Open Science to help them and their grantees increase access, visibility and impact of their research results on health, industry and society. For libraries, more rewards and incentives amongst funders in Europe clearly endorses the Open Science work we have been leading on for many years. More development in this area also promises to have positive consequences on helping libraries achieve more open access to research results as seen with the REF in the UK or with Horizon 2020. Note that Plan S, established in Sept 2018, is a key engine for funders to provide more immediate OA to research. Plan S can go hand in hand with studies like the RIF Project that can contribute to showing trends, gaps and good practices to inform and motivate more funders to embrace Open Science in policy and practice on various levels. We hope to tell you how.

The Internet for Social Machines

We are in a transition phase of science, where machines (mainly computers) have become our major research assistants. Humans and computers increasingly work together as ‘social machines’ to makes sense of complex natural phenomena. However, computers need a very different input as compared to people and the way we adapt the communication and reuse of our research results is adopting to this new situation only at glacial speed. Still, the 15 FAIR Principles, published in 2016, dealing with machine actionable data and services, have found unusually rapid uptake among a broad spectrum of stakeholders, from research scientists who create and reuse data, to publishers who distribute data, to science funders who track impact of data. Barend will describe the FAIR Principles and show examples of how they have been implemented. He will also present a set of core FAIR Metrics that can help gauge the level of FAIRness of any digital resource. Of particular interest is how additional FAIR Metrics can (and should) be defined to address community-specific data structures and analytic requirements. This discussion, and these examples will be presented in the context of the International GO FAIR Initiative. GO FAIR is a voluntary community of stakeholders devoted to implementation solutions of an emerging Internet of FAIR Data and Services.

Leading the Change to Open Science in European Universities

This paper will take the LERU Roadmap for Open Science as a blueprint for introducing Open Science principles and practices into universities. UCL (University College London) is in the top 10 of global research-led universities. It is also the third oldest university in England. Using UCL as a case study, this paper will look at the 8 pillars of Open Science, as defined by the European Commission, and examine progress in introducing Open Science principles and practice at a university level. The paper will identify the benefits and challenges of the approach, and highlight what remains to be done. The paper will end by examining the LERU statement on the Leadership needed for Open Science to succeed.

Coffee Break

International Collaboration Boosting Open Science

Open Science is being implemented in many countries in Europe. Research is global and also the development of policies, infrastructures, sharing of best practices etc. must happen in international collaboration. Various platforms and organisations -Open Science Policy Platform, Liber, LERU, OA2020 initiative and licensing consortia to mention a few- support the transition towards Open Science. Finland aims to be a leading country in Open Science. The development of the basic building blocks was started already in 2010 in a national initiative. In 2018 the responsibility of national coordination of Open Science was given to the Federation of Learned Societies in accordance with the recommendations of the Open Science Policy Platform. The presentation will discuss European and national level policies and give some practical examples of implementing Plan S principles.

Open Science Policies in Poland

Plan S is an initiative for Open Access publishing that was launched in September 2018. The plan is supported by cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders. One of the signatories of PlanS and members of the consortium is the Polish National Science Center, which in its financed projects successively introduces a policy of openness to scientific publications and research data. Also in 2015, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education issued the document "Directions of development of open access to publications and research results in Poland", recommending to scientific institutions and universities to implement institutional open access policies. The presentation will present the historical outline of the introduction of open access policy in Poland and the current state of its implementation.

Putting the Library at the Heart of Research

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 will 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 increasing their involvement in supporting research output and improving research data management, and in many institutions are already bringing coherence to the way that these are managed. 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 Knowledge Maps - Discovery for an Open Science

Getting an overview of a research field and being able to identify a set of relevant findings pertaining to one’s information need are prerequisites for research, evidence-based practice and self-directed learning alike. Yet, the tools for exploring and discovering scientific content are often lacking. With traditional, list-based search engines, users have to examine articles and their relationships by hand, which is a time-consuming process. Open Knowledge Maps is an attempt to transform discovery of scientific knowledge by providing an open, community-driven non-profit system that leverages the digital open science ecosystem. Instead of lists, we propose to use knowledge maps for discovery. Knowledge maps provide an instant overview of a field by showing the main areas of the field at a glance, and papers related to each area. This makes it possible to easily identify useful, pertinent information. On our website https://openknowledgemaps.org, users can currently create a knowledge map for a topic of their choice based on more than 150 million scientific outputs. With this service, we have created a lot of enthusiasm in the community. Our user base has quickly grown: since our launch in May 2016, we have recorded over half a million visits to the site and more than 120,000 maps have been created. Open Knowledge Maps has become an international collaboration with team members, advisors and partners from variety of fields, including research, librarianship, design, software development, citizen science, and the open knowledge and open science movement.

Lunch Break

Discussion Panel

Closing Notes