New draft REF2021 guidance was released for consultation on Monday morning. Buried half-way through this daunting 139 page document was an update to the REF Open Access policy.

This revised policy comes on the back of Research England’s report Monitoring sector progress towards compliance with funder open access policies which was released in June, and on which we have already commented.

From an Open Access perspective, additional flexibility for preprint servers has been added to the policy:

The funding bodies recognise that many researchers derive value from sharing early versions of papers using a pre-print service. Institutions may submit pre-prints as eligible outputs to REF 2021 (see Annex K). Only outputs which have been ‘accepted for publication’ (such as a journal article or conference contribution with an ISSN) are within scope of the REF 2021 open access policy. To take into account that the policy intent for ‘open access’ is met where a pre-print version is the same as the author accepted manuscript, we have introduced additional flexibility into the open access requirement: if the ‘accepted for publication’ text, or near final version, is available on the pre-print service, and the output upload date of the pre-print is prior to the date of output publication, this will be considered as compliant with the open access criteria (deposit, discovery, and access).

That’s a significant adjustment to previous advice and will be of considerable relief to many researchers who routinely publish their research in this way. Indeed, we have lobbied behind the scenes on this policy issue for more than three years.

But what does this actually mean and what should institutions and authors take from this?

Repositories, preprint servers – what’s the difference?

Firstly, this policy legitimises preprint servers (like arXiv, bioRxiv, SocArXiv and many more) and allows authors to use these systems without needing to worry about technical requirements.

This is in stark contrast to the way institutional and subject repositories are treated by the policy.  These repositories must meet all the requirements of the REF Open Access policy to be considered compliant, which is fine for most institutions because meeting the policy requirements is vital, but subject repositories are usually left in the lurch:

Individuals depositing their outputs in a subject repository are advised to ensure that their chosen repository meets the requirements set out at paragraphs 224 to 241 in this policy. REF 2021 guidance will not certify the repositories which fulfil policy requirements.

We’re still not sure if Europe PMC is compliant, for example.

Don’t just sit there!

However, just because preprint servers are okay, doesn’t mean that authors using preprint servers should assume they don’t need to do anything. There are two significant caveats to take note of:

1. the manuscript deposited in the preprint server must be the “‘accepted for publication’ text”; and
2. the manuscript must be uploaded prior to first publication.

Determining the deposit time is usually straightforward, so institutions will be able to monitor this aspect of the policy with some level of automation (especially for arXiv which is harvested by a range of publication systems).

However, the key challenge will be determining the manuscript version. We’ve previously described the work we do as manuscript detectives, so some level of checking with authors will still need to take place.

We are working internally at Cambridge on what our workflow will be to capture these outputs and we will be talking to our researchers on what they need to do or not once this is determined. We still encourage all of our researchers to upload manuscripts when accepted for publication until we indicate otherwise.

Regardless,

If there is one key recommendation we would make to all users of preprint repositories – annotate or label the records to clearly indicate the manuscript version (e.g. submitted, accepted, published).

It will help us, and you, in the long run.

Published 25 July 2018
Written by Dr Arthur Smith

The Office of Scholarly Communication provides information, advice and training on research data management.  So when faced with running a research project that involves a considerable amount of data, it is telling to see if we can practice what we preach.

This blog post is a short list of how we have approached managing data for analysis. Judging by our colleagues’ faces when we described some of the advice here, this is blindingly obvious to some people. But it was news to us, so we are sharing it in case it is helpful to others.

Organising and storing the data

As is good practice we have started with  a  Data Management Plan. Actually we ended up having to write two, one for the qualitative and one for the quantitative aspect of the project. 

We have also had to think through where the data is being stored and backed up. All of the collected data is currently being stored on a shared Cambridge University Google Drive where only invited users with a Cambridge University email address can view the data. This is because it can handle Level 2 confidential information and was accessible on and off campus. Some of the data is confidential and publishers have asked us to keep it private.

The data is also stored on a staff member’s laptop computer in her Documents folder (the laptop is password protected) that is backed up by the Library on a daily basis. There is a second storage place on the Office of Scholarly Communication’s (OSC) Shared Drive to ensure that there are two backups in two different locations.

One dataset has proven difficult to use as it is 48MB and Google Drive does not seem to be able to handle that file size well.

Each dataset was renamed with the file naming syntax that the OSC uses. This includes a three letter prefix at the beginning (e.g. RAW for raw data), a short description, then a version, and finally the date that the data was received. Underscores separate each section and there are no spaces. An example is MEM_JCSBlogData_V1_20180618.docx

To organise and summarise the metadata, we have created two spreadsheets. One is a logbook that records the name of the file, a description of the data, size of the file, if it is confidential, and what years it covers. The second spreadsheet records what information each dataset covered, i.e. Peer Review, Editing, Citing, APCs, and Usage. The spreadsheet also records correspondence with the publishers.

Assessing our data

At first glance, we were unsure whether we could do cross comparisons between publishers with the data that we had collected. Although most datasets were provided in Excel (with the exception of the Springer 2017 report on gold open access and eLife), they were formatted differently and covered different areas.

Dr Laurent Gatto, one of Cambridge’s Data Champions, very kindly agreed to meet with us and look over the data that we had collected so far. He suggested a number of ways that we could clean up the data so that we could do some cross comparison analysis. Somewhat to our surprise he was generally positive about the quality and analysability of the data that we had collected.

Cleaning up data for analysis

After an initial look at the data, Laurent gave us some excellent suggestions on managing and analysing the data. These are summarised below:

• Have a separate folder where the original datasets will be saved. These files will remain untouched.
• When doing any re-formatting, a new file will be created using the same naming convention, but updating the version. A record of any changes to the dataset will need to be recorded in a spreadsheet.
• Ensure that all of the headers are uniform across the different spreadsheets, to allow analysis across datasets. Each header must be the same down to the last lowercase letter and cannot include any spaces
• Dates must also be uniform using Year-Month-Day format
• Only the first row of a spreadsheet can include the header. Having more than one row with header information will cause problems when you are starting to code.
• Create a readme file where every header will be recorded with a short description.

Next steps

After speaking with Laurent we are more optimistic about the data that we have collected than we were before. We were concerned that there was not enough information to do analysis across publishers; however, we are more confident that this is not the case. As we start the analysis it will also give us a better understanding of what data is missing.

We will provide an update as we close in on our findings.

Published 26 June 2018
Written by Katie Hughes & Dr Danny Kingsley

It’s been reporting season for institutions in receipt of RCUK Open Access block grant awards, so we’ve been busy preparing data for both RCUK (now UKRI) and Jisc about how Cambridge has spent its funding allocation over the past 15 months (January 2017 – March 2018). In this blog post I’ll focus mainly on the Jisc Open Access article processing charge (APC) report as it includes both RCUK and COAF expenditure, which we’ve made available in Apollo (the RCUK report is available there too). We’ve had to make a few tweaks to the data to perform the analysis that follows, but that shouldn’t substantially affect the figures. Unless stated otherwise, all charges reported include VAT at 20%.

Headlines

Let’s start with a few headline numbers (Table 1). In the reporting period January 2017 – March 2018 the Open Access Team paid Open Access APCs totalling more than £2.8 million. By far the largest beneficiary of this funding was Elsevier, which received over £870,000 for RCUK and COAF funded research articles (that’s 31% of all our APC spend). In fact, Elsevier dominates the figures to such an extent that for this blog post I’ve split Cell Press titles to provide a little more insight.

Table 1. Headline figures between January 2017 and March 2018 for the RCUK and COAF Open Access block grants (https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.24288).

That £2.8 million paid for at least 1547 articles. I say ‘at least’ because (i) we haven’t recorded papers funded through the SCOAP3 partnership for which we paid just shy of £25,000; (ii) choosing a precise reporting date is difficult, especially for prepayment deals where invoicing is disconnected from the publishing process; and (iii) we are reporting from specific University cost centres, however, for operational reasons payments may have been taken from other sources making it difficult to ultimately reconcile in a neat report.

But assuming these problems are negligible then the mean APC was £1,840 (which is similar to previous years).

However, there is the complication of the Springer Compact which Cambridge funds through a combination of the RCUK and COAF block grants. If we only consider RCUK/COAF funded papers processed as part of the Springer Compact then the average APC is £1,036, significantly less than Springer’s APC list price of €2,200 +VAT (so it’s a good deal from an RCUK/COAF perspective). However, a majority of Springer Compact papers do not acknowledge RCUK or COAF, and under normal circumstances these papers would not be eligible for Open Access funding. Excluding these 221 ‘other’ Springer Compact papers from the calculations increases the overall mean APC to £2,147. This demonstrates, once again, how progressive the Springer Compact continues to be. We wrote last year about the value to us of the deal. The overall distribution of APCs paid to all publishers is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Distribution of all APCs paid to all publishers (including prepayments to OUP and Wiley). Springer Compact and Wiley credit articles are also shown for completeness.

Level playing field?

Figure 2 and Table 2 give an in-depth breakdown of the APCs paid to publishers for which at least 10 APCs were paid. There are several interesting features to the data. Firstly, the sheer number and spread of APCs paid to Elsevier is immense. While many other publishers have clear pricing bands, Elsevier’s pricing structure exists in a continuum between £500 and £5,000. Elsevier’s mean APC is well above that of the all-publisher mean, though still within one standard deviation. The same cannot be said of Cell Press, which has a mean APC of £4,084 and is the only large publisher more than one standard deviation from the all-publisher mean invoice value. The bulk of their APCs are clustered just below £5000.

Nature Publishing Group’s (NPG) mean APC is somewhat distorted because the majority of APCs are for either Scientific Reports (£1,332) or Nature Communications (£3,780). These journals are also the two most popular with Cambridge authors at 65 and 50 papers respectively, roundly beating third placed Journal of the American Chemical Society which had 24 papers.

Price banding of APCs paid in Pounds Sterling can be seen in a number of other publishers, notably the Royal Society of Chemistry, BioMed Central and BMJ. It is also apparent in some publishers which charge in US Dollars, such as PLOS and the American Chemical Society (ACS), although currency fluctuations mean these APCs have a spread of Sterling values. A cluster of ACS invoices around £500 fall in to two categories (i) CC BY fees and (ii) invoices which had additional discounts applied by ACS (some authors get credits with ACS).

Figure 2. Individual and mean APCs paid to publishers. The mean APC value represents the total paid for these schemes per article processed. The all-publisher mean invoice with one standard deviation is shown for comparison. Standard deviations are not given for Springer Compact, Wiley (prepayment) or OUP (prepayment) because individual invoices are not processed in these cases. APC values for these deals are either based on the mean (Springer Compact) or the nominal APC value if we had been directly invoiced. Click the image to view a larger version.

Table 2. Total APC, membership and other publication fees paid to publishers.

*These charges are ACS membership fees, which we pay on behalf of authors because the ACS offers substantial APC discounts to its members.

Page and colour charges

Paling in comparison to APC expenditure, though still a significant sum given that other UK institutions receive less than £10,000 p.a. from RCUK, we supported additional publication costs (mostly page and colour fees) to the value of £111,000. Nearly 20% of this spend went to Cell Press titles with an average article costing £1,971. One has to wonder why publishers continue to charge these sort of publication fees. Fees of this nature are outdated and out of touch, and it is hard to see how they are anything but a cynical attempt at revenue raising.

It is especially galling though when page and colour fees are levied on top of already high APCs. The combined cost to publish a single article in Neuron was £7633.19. Table 3 lists the articles for which we paid over £5000 in either APCs or page and colour charges – I’d encourage you to read them if for no other reason than we get our money’s worth. Together these nine papers represent 1.9% of our total spend, yet only 0.7% of RCUK/COAF funded articles. Cell Press is particularly guilty in this case, making up the bulk of ultra-expensive papers. Indeed, because we don’t routinely pay page and colour charges, it seems highly likely that many page and colour fees will have been paid without our knowledge. We might reasonably assume, therefore, that there are many more ultra-expensive papers that have gone unnoticed in this analysis.

Table 3. Ultra-expensive papers which cost more than £5000 to publish.

*Normally we’d be charged in Pounds Sterling for Nature Communications articles, however, this invoice was received from an international co-author who was charged in US Dollars with an unfavourable exchange rate. At the time the usual charge for Nature Communications was £3150 +VAT. You can see just how much of an outlier this paper is in Figure 2.

The long view

If we look back on the past five years of RCUK expenditure (Table 4) it is clear that after a slow start, the annual expenditure rapidly increased, and now exceeds the annual allocation provided by RCUK. If no controls are placed on expenditure we might expect to overspend in 2018/19 by £400,000. Given the finite block grant, that is something we need to urgently mitigate.

Table 4. Cambridge’s historical RCUK block grant spend over the past five years, with a projection for 2018/19 if no controls are placed on expenditure (https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.23725).

Cambridge has operated a ‘15% rule’ for many years where, because roughly 15% of all publications are in fully OA journals, if block grant funding were to dip to this level the Open Access Team would not pay hybrid APCs so as to ensure authors publishing in fully OA journals would not be left to foot the bill. However, flipping between policies based on the variability of block grant funding causes considerable confusion amongst authors, so a consistent policy implemented with plenty of forewarning would be preferable. Our peers at Oxford and Manchester have already announced policies that restrict the payment of hybrid APCs, and we are considering similar models to rein in our spending. Watch this space.

Published 18 June 2018
Written by Dr Arthur Smith

The world of Open Access moves fast and it can be difficult to keep up. We run regular updates for our community here at Cambridge and following a recent webinar, figured a blog about it might be a good idea too. Strap yourselves in, this is a bumpy ride.

Sweden draws the line

After a breakdown in negotiations, the Bibsam Consortium in Sweden cancelled the agreement with Elsevier on 16 May. It is anticipated that after 1 July 2018, Swedish universities will not have access to new articles in Elsevier’s journals. Articles published before this date will remain accessible.

In his blog, The circuitous road towards open access: Swedish universities to pull the plug on Elsevier, Ole Petter Ottersen  Rector of Karolinska Institute in Sweden noted: “Almost 600 years ago the development of the printing press led to dramatic changes in how knowledge was spread and communicated. This did not happen without opposition. Today digitalization opens for an equally dramatic and welcome change towards the democratization of knowledge. …  It’s time that knowledge becomes a public good.”

Europe no-deals

Sweden is following a growing European trend in relation to pulling out of publishing deals.

On 30th of March this year, the French national consortium representing 250 academic institutions, Couperin.org, cancelled subscriptions to SpringerNature journals. Despite expectations that the publisher would cut access, Springer is maintaining access to journals for French institutions while discussions continue.

Two weeks earlier on 12 March, the Dutch consortium VSNU announced that “Dutch universities and Royal Society of Chemistry Publishing (RSC) have been unable to reach a new agreement on access to scientific journals”. In anticipation of losing access to the material, the VSNU has advised that researchers use alternative ways to access materials including Unpaywall, Open Access button and requesting a copy from the author or from the library. At the end of the list ‘if all else fails’ they suggest using Sci-Hub, noting that “the use of Sci-Hub is considered as an illegal act”.

There were concerns that German researchers would lose access to Elsevier materials from January 2017 after negotiations broke down and subscriptions stopped being paid at the end of 2016.  But in January this year, Nature reported that German universities still had access to Elsevier journals as discussions continued.  It has been estimated that across the country, libraries are saving more than €10 million (£8.7 million) a year as a result of cancelling the subscriptions.

While not exactly ‘new news’ it is worth mentioning here that in October 2016, the French Law for a Digital Republic Act came into force, including Article 30, which is about Open Access and creates a legal right for authors to archive an OA copy, even if they have granted an exclusive right to publish.

Springer sinks

On May 9, Springer Nature was due to be listed on the German midcap index, offering 1.6 billion Euros in shares. However the day before, the float was cancelled due to ‘weak demand’.

An analysis of the prospectus recently published in the Times Higher Education has identified plans for Springer Nature to link the cost of Article Processing Charges for open access with a journal’s Impact Factor. This is interesting to say the least and indicates a move by large publishers to consolidate payments for open access into an effective new type of Big Deal. This approach also further cements the current flawed academic reward system despite Springer recently signing the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). The messages the academic/library community are being given are in stark contrast to the messages that were being sent to potential investors.

ResearchGate shenanigans

ResearchGate is an academic social networking site upon which researchers post copies of their works, often against copyright agreements they have signed with their publishers. In October last year, Elsevier and the American Chemical Society filed a lawsuit in Germany against ResearchGate, alleging copyright infringement on a mass scale. In November, ResearchGate restricted access to 1.7 million papers on their site. The court case began on 18 April in Germany with the intention to: “establish clarity on the legal responsibility of ResearchGate regarding copyright infringements”.

Not all publishers have agreed with this combative approach to ResearchGate. A day after the court case began, an agreement between Springer, Cambridge University Press, Theime and Research Gate was announced. The agreement is to work together on the sharing of articles on the scholarly collaboration platform “in a way that protects the rights of authors and publishers”.

All together now

The 1 April marked several important happenings in the open access space. The former Research Councils UK and Higher Education Council for England merged under the single banner of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), with the latter being rebranded as Research England. Apart from the intensely irritating breaking of every link to RCUK webpages, this is a very positive step. Even before starting operations, the organisation was flagging a review of open access, including questioning whether it would continue to support the payment of hybrid article processing charges.

The 1 April also marked the first time HEFCE/Research England was implementing the ‘three months from acceptance’ rule for compliance of works for the Research Excellence Framework (REF). This timeframe for depositing works and making them open access was in the original policy, but in the first two years of operation of the policy, HEFCE relented to pressure from institutions concerned they were not prepared and amended the policy to ‘three months from publication’. This has been a tricky balancing act for those working in institutions (such as the Office of Scholarly Communication), with many opting not to inform their research community of the extended time frame from 1 April 2016 because of concerns about confusion. It is a relief to have the policy operating as originally written.

Speaking of REF, in March 2017, HEFCE conducted a consultation on the REF. The initial outcomes were made available in September last year.  The guidance for the 2021REF is not far from being released for feedback, and signs are that there might be some movement on the question of the eligibility of arXiv as a repository. Those interested in this issue might find “ArXiv and the REF open access policy” by yours truly and Katie Shamash which presents the case that articles deposited to arXiv are, in general, compliant with the requirements of the HEFCE policy worth a read.

Wellcome Trust consultation

Not to be left out, the Wellcome Trust is coming to the end of its consultation on its open access policy. Wellcome Trust has, along with the National Institutes of Health, led the world in the implementation of open access requirements in 2005. This is the first wide scale review of the policy and the report from the review will be released by the end of 2018.

Questions being asked of funders, publishers and institutions have focused on the hybrid question. There has also been discussion of the merits or otherwise of the Wellcome Trust centralising the negotiation with publishers and managing the block grants centrally. Some respondents have made their responses public already, such as SCONUL.

Responsible metrics?

As we blogged about recently, a considerable amount of open access activity is tied into reproducibility issues in research. Universities UK is involved in a Forum for Responsible Research Metrics in conjunction with HEFCE to address these questions. At an event in February this year: ‘The turning tide: A new culture of responsible metrics for research’ researchers spoke about the impact of metrics on their careers and health. Spoiler alert: it is not good.

The first half of last year saw a spate of organisations signing the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) including Nature (April 2017), Imperial College London  and Birkbeck University of London (both in Feb 2017). However, University College London gets the prize, having signed up in 2015. In February 2018 all seven UK research councils signed up to DORA.

Early this year DORA revamped its steering committee. In addition funders (ASCB, Cancer Research UK, the European Molecular Biology Organization and Wellcome Trust) and publishers (the Company of Biologists, eLife, F1000, Hindawi and PLOS) invested in DORA to allow the hiring of a full-time community manager.

Data monetisation

There has been an increase in the offerings by publishers to manage data. Mendeley (owned by Elsevier) has long been in this space, but in 2018 Mendeley Data announced a ‘comprehensive research data platform for institutions‘ and ‘superior data management for researchers‘. Note that under the ‘Data Linking’ heading it only offers to link “datasets in repositories with research articles on ScienceDirect”, which suggests limited value of the ‘service’.

Elsevier is experimenting with ways to monetise freely available data. Datasearch allows people to: “Search for research data across domains and types, from many domain-specific, cross-domain and institutional data repositories”. The FAQs list the repositories that are indexed, including Cambridge’s very own Apollo. Because our metadata is available under a CC0 license there is nothing we can do. The FAQs also state: “At the moment, DataSearch is not a commercial product.” There is no guarantee of course that this will remain the status quo.

But Elsevier is not the only company moving into this space. Since 22 March, Springer Nature have been offering ‘Research Data Support‘ which for £265 + VAT will deposit up to 50GB of data into figshare – a commercial repository owned by Digital Science, which shares a parent company with Springer Nature. The companies insist they are entirely separate organisations.

Ecosystem takeover

If this is all starting to sound a little incestuous, then you are on the right track. As I am arguing in an upcoming Group Editorial for the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication:

There has been a redirection of business strategy by some academic publishing companies to develop portfolios that address the entire research process. Rather than adjusting workflows and internal processes, several companies are moving away from publishing into scholarly infrastructure: the tools and services that underpin the scholarly research life cycle, many of which are geared toward data analytics. This has been effected through an aggressive acquisition program in the case of Elsevier, and through the development of new products in the case of Digital Science. In both cases, the individual products across the portfolio retain their own distinctive branding.

Possibly the most dramatic way to illustrate the extent of the situation is a graphic showing where Elsevier-owned products sit throughout the research lifecycle, appearing in Rent Seeking and Financialization strategies of the Academic Publishing Industry – Publishers are increasingly in control of scholarly infrastructure and why we should care- A Case Study of Elsevier.

This situation requires vigilance. Infrastructure is the next big battleground.

Stay up to date

Remember, the Office of Scholarly Communication tries to make our work as accessible as possible to all. In addition to this blog we have a sister blog called Open Research:  Adventures from the frontline.

We publish two monthly newsletters – KaleidOSCope is focused on scholarly communication more broadly and the Research Data Newsletter keeps people up to date on data issues and opportunities.

Many of our presentations are filmed and uploaded to our YouTube channel – and there is a list of our recordings of past events including all the presentations from our TDM Symposium, our Open Access Week ‘getting published’ events and Engaging Researchers in Good Data Management.

Our presentations are freely available from Apollo, as are the slides from our training sessions. Our Twitter feeds are very popular, Cambridge Open Access @CamOpenAccess and Cambridge Research Data Management @CamOpenData.

You have no excuse!

Published 4 June 2018
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley

Research integrity is the current discussion topic at many levels in the research sector. This week, the Council of the European Union will adopt conclusions on the European Open Science Cloud, including the Open Science agenda. To complement this, the League of European Research Universities (LERU) released its advice paper Open Science and its role in universities: A roadmap for cultural change, which discusses the  cultural change that is needed for universities – and other stakeholders – to embrace it.

This is hot on the heels of two events I spoke at last week. The first was “Towards cultural change in data management – data stewardship in practice” held at TU Delft in the Netherlands, and the second was Nurturing a Culture of Responsible Research in the Era of Open Science, coordinated by LERU and held at Geneva University’s Campus Biotech. Both events were attended by a mix of policy makers, researchers, librarians and administrators.

The slides and accompanying tweets for my TU Delft talk: The ‘end of the expert’: why science needs to be above criticism and the slides from my LERU talk: Institutional Framework and Responsibilities: Facing Open Science’s challenges and assuring quality of research are available.

My talks focused on questions of research integrity – that in this period of ‘post-truth’, where “Britain has had enough of experts” and a US lawyer “alone will decide what is and isn’t acceptable science” – science is very much under attack.

In this environment it is important that research remains above criticism, and that opens up the question of reproducibility of research. The late Professor Stephen Hawking noted “When public figures abuse scientific argument, citing some studies but suppressing others, to justify policies that they want to implement for other reasons, it debases scientific culture”.

We have been here before

This harks back to observations made by sociologist Robert K Merton in a 1942 essay “The Normative Structure of Science” who noted “Incipient and actual attacks upon the integrity of science” stating that “An institution under attack must re-examine its foundations, restate its objectives, seek out its rationale”. Now, 72 years later, the world is once again in a similar position.

Discussion of a ‘reproducibility crisis’ has been circulating for some years now. In 2016, Nature published the results of a survey of researchers asking about this issue, where 90% of the respondents said there was a ‘significant’ or ‘slight’ crisis. The study also asked whether people had been able to replicate results (others’ or their own) and whether they had published their inability to replicate the work.

Reproducibility studies – where specific studies are chosen and attempts were made to reproduce the results – support the argument that published research is not always repeatable. A reproducibility study of 100 psychology experimental and correlational studies showed a substantial decline in the replication effects: 97% of the original studies had significant results (p < .05), but only 36% of replications had significant results.

This issue is significant enough for governments and large bodies to take notice. A UK enquiry into Research Integrity that was halted for a few months last year during the general election has been revived. In December 2017, the US National Academies of Science established a committee on Reproducibility and Replicability in Science.

However, an opinion piece published in March in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science put forward an alternative view, asking “Is science really facing a reproducibility crisis, and do we need it to?”. The piece tracks the recent increase in the frequency of use of the ‘crisis narrative’ in published research. It then asks how common fabricated, false, biased, and irreproducible findings are. The conclusion is there has not been a measurable increase, and that “Instead of inviting greater respect for and investment in research, [the crisis narrative] risks discrediting the value of evidence and feeding antiscientific agendas.”

Either way, this is a narrative that is experiencing a high level of interest currently.

Open Research to the rescue?

One of the proposed solutions to this issue is to increase transparency in the research process – opening up research so that each step of the research process is itself a research output that is citable and can be recognised. The term ‘Open Research’ or ‘Open Science’ (in Europe, meaning all types of research) or ‘Open Scholarship’ has many definitions. A small example includes from FOSTER science, also Wikipedia article on Open Science and in the Open innovation, open science, open to the world report.

Indeed, there are so many different definitions of Open Research/Science that now there is an attempt to define the definitions. One list attempting to collect the declarations and position statements on Open Research from around the world has over 90 entries. However, common to the majority of them is they are effectively based on Robert Merton’s 1942 work. The Mertonian norms of science are:

• Universalism
• Communalism
• Disinterestedness
• Organised scepticism

An example of how Open Research is being put forward as a solution is in the recent National Academies of Science report: “The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science” which recommends: “Researchers should make their data available for public inspection after publication of their results”.

The European Commission Open Science Monitor has three core principles: Open Scholarly Communications, Open Access publications and Open Data. But this is easier said than done. While making underlying data available has been a requirement of some publishers and funders for some years now. Open Data is becoming less contentious, but other aspects of ‘openness’ are still new concepts to the majority of the research community.

There are plenty of actions individual researchers can do to make their work more open. Bianca Kramer and Jeroen Bosman have published 17 open science practices throughout the whole research workflow, including examples of tools that can help, as part of their 101 Innovations project.

As we have noted for some time at the Office of Scholarly Communication, making data and other non-traditional research outputs available is difficult. This requires training of our research community in how to research openly from the beginning of their research activity, rather than asking them to be open as an afterthought.

The institutional imperative

For all of the government enquiries, the funder requirements and the changing publisher processes, at some stage, research institutions need to be part of the process to implement change. In 2012, the Royal Society Science Policy Centre report Science as an open enterprise noted “Universities and research institutes should play a major role in supporting an open data culture”. In a 2016 paper in Royal Society Open Science titled The natural selection of bad science argued: “Improving the quality of research requires change at the institutional level”.

But institutions are slow to act, and reluctant to step outside the global esteem and reward systems that scaffold the research community. In 2017, a Harvard professor in a Nature column Faculty promotion must assess reproducibility referred to “The spectre of irreproducible research haunts the biomedical community”, and argued that “one group that must step up is that to which I belong: academic leadership”.

So are institutions meeting this challenge?

European moves towards Open Research

Well, some are. TU Delft is on the record for leading in this area  – their TU Delft Strategic Framework has implications for Open Science. Even more impressive is Utrecht University which “aims to operate at the forefront of Open Science” according to the University Strategic Plan 2016-2020.

Both universities, of course, are based in The Netherlands, which held the presidency of the European Union during the first half of 2016 with an agenda that included “Europe as an innovator and job creator”, achievable through “better alignment between academia and business through open access and better use of data”. This approach has clearly had deep impacts across the country.

Open Research in the UK

We are behind the curve in the Open Research space in the UK, but there are some moves in this direction.

The University of Reading has recently closed their consultation on their vision statement on Open Research. Discussion with the coordinators of this consultation underlined the  the question of language in this area. Because many of the terms used in scholarly communication are vernacular, interpretation of them varies (‘publish’ anyone?)

There is considerable confusion amongst the research community over questions of openness, even beyond the language question. It is very common for researchers to throw accusations against open access that reflect problems with the whole scholarly communication system, as I argued in 2015 with my research colleague Mary Anne Kennan in “Open access: the whipping boy for problems in scholarly publication“.

Cambridge is working towards a position statement on Open Research. When preparing for the accompanying consultation we are currently running at Cambridge, we considered the ‘Open Typology’ that was proposed by Sheila Corrall and Stephen Pinfield in their 2014 paper, “Coherence of ‘Open’ Initiatives in Higher Education and Research: Framing a Policy Agenda”. This breaks the areas of ‘open’ into three categories: Open Content, Open Systems and Open Development. Given the primary focus, at least initially, is a way of considering the overarching approach behind the Open Access and Research Data Management policy frameworks, the Cambridge consultation is focusing on Open Content and Systems. Open Development may come later but the conversations are not yet mature enough to include them at this stage.

The consultation is still underway, and to date attracting a strong response. The outcomes will be written up and shared after analysis.

However, while decidedly a step in the right direction, a position statement is only the beginning, as we have seen already over the past couple of years. The implementation is where the hard work begins. Change is slow in this space.

Published 31 May 2018
Written by Dr Danny Kingsley

Post script

I have spoken and written about the Open Research question at length. If you are interested, my keynote to the 2017 Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing – Is the tail wagging the dog? Perversity in academic rewards is available on video, as is my keynote to the Munin Open Access Conference in 2016 Reward, reproducibility and recognition in research – the case for going Open.

I have also written a series of blogs on the argument for Open Research:

• The case for Open Research: solutions?– 2 August 2016
• The case for Open Research: does peer review work?– 19 July 2016
• The case for Open Research: reproducibility, retractions & retrospective hypotheses– 14 July 2016
• The case for Open Research: the authorship problem– 12 July 2016
• The case for Open Research: the mis-measurement problem – 11 July 2016

There are also a couple of blogs about the Open Agenda at Cambridge:

• Perspectives on the Open future – 27 March 2018
• Could Open Research benefit Cambridge University researchers? – 3 August 2016

The annual CILIP Copyright Conference is a highlight in a busy conference season for those in the information profession with a responsibility for this area. Held in London on April 5^th, this event brought together colleagues from across the UK and further afield to discuss the latest developments in copyright and intellectual property and how we move forward from our current position. I was lucky enough to be able to attend this year in order to find out about recent changes and feed this back to the Cambridge (and wider) library community.

There were many excellent presentations but in the interests of brevity, I’m going to highlight my top three themes from the conference:

• Copyright education
• Open data and copyright
• The UK Scholarly Communication Licence(UK-SCL)

Copyright education

Educating both library users and staff in copyright can be a challenge, something I was pleased to see acknowledged at the conference. From my own experience teaching in this area I think this is down to a mixture of complicated terminology and a narrow perception of what copyright actually deals with.

When I’ve talked to library staff about copyright in the past it has often been at cross purposes – I’m usually looking at helping to support researchers in the use of third party material in their thesis or signing copyright transfer agreements whereas most staff are focused on what can be uploaded to the VLE or how much of a text can be legally copied.

Copyright is a multi-faceted concept with a great deal of intersections so it can be hard to know where to start without overwhelming people. Luckily several of the presentations focused on the issue of copyright education.

Copyright is complicated and is often seen as a barrier to helping students and researchers to achieve their goals. When teaching about it we need to turn these perceptions around and promote copyright as a help rather than a hindrance.  One way of doing this is to reframe the message that we are sharing with our user communities. There is no one size fits all message when it comes to copyright and we need to invest the time to make sure that we are tailoring the message to different audiences – for example what a researcher will need to know about copyright is different from what administrators need to know.

Debbie McDonnell from the British Council highlighted an innovative approach in her presentation on Managing Copyright in an International Organisation Working in the Educational and Cultural Sectors. When she began her role she conducted a training survey to better understand the needs of her users. In response to their need for basic information she created several short videos in order to explain key concepts in the context of her service, helping members of staff to understand why copyright is important to them in their roles. As McDonnell rightly points out staff awareness is the biggest barrier to a successful copyright service. We cannot expect staff to manage copyright well if they are not fully informed about the need for it.

This message was echoed by Alex Fenlon from the University of Birmingham who talked about A Day in the Life of a Copyright/Licensing Expert. The University is about to open a new overseas campus which has raised a variety of copyright issues relating to the licensing of material. Fenlon encouraged us not to view copyright as a barrier to teaching and research activity and to pass this message on to our users. When asked if we can do something say yes and then use copyright exemptions and other rules to explore how to make this happen.

Open data and copyright

Keynote Josie Fraser, Senior Technology Advisor in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, encouraged us not to think of data as the new oil – a metaphor I’ve come across before. Even though both data and oil need to be extracted, both create new industries and have an impact on wider society, and both power their respective industries. there are differences between them. While oil is a finite resource, data is effectively infinitely durable and reusable. That said, both can lead to powerful oligopolies emerging which dominate the landscape, something we have seen in recent times with companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook.

The economy of data was something also highlighted by Carol Tullo, a consultant at Naomi Korn Copyright and Compliance,  in her talk on Organisational Governance of Information Assets which made the point that data is treated like a currency in today’s society. Companies are already wanting to see information about us in order to build up a picture of our habits and in the future our data may well be how we pay to use services. We can already see examples of this when use public Wi-Fi where there is usually an option to log in with various social media accounts. Many people see this as an easy option as they don’t have to create a new account for something they are only going to use for a short time but how much of our data are we giving away by using this method? The issue of third party access to our data is something which has been in the press a lot recently and serves as a timely reminder of what we could be giving away.

The resulting discussion around the potential conflict between open data and copyright was an interesting one from a scholarly communication perspective. Researchers are actively encouraged to share both their data and their finished papers as widely as possible but are often wary of letting others ‘steal’ their ideas. For many, copyright is seen as a protection mechanism but are they missing the point? Fraser argued that the time we spend locking down data could be better spent making sure it was shared openly. Data is created to be used and “open data and content can be freely used, modified and shared by anyone for any purpose”. Large companies are gathering their own data and are less likely to be interested in the outputs of researchers but the smaller companies and start-ups could find this really valuable and use it to build something new. Using open licenses on data and other materials can help to encourage this innovation and protect the rights of the creator at the same time.

UK-SCL

The final main theme of the day concerned the UK Scholarly Communication Licence which featured in a number of talks. Chris Banks from Imperial College London highlighted the currently confusing policy landscape (referencing our own work in this area). The UK-SCL aims to make the process of open access and the licensing of work more straightforward for all by offering a default license to authors which allows them to retain copyright whilst at the same time allowing the institution to make the author accepted manuscript available via a CC-BY-NC 4.0 license. This means that with a single action the author can publish with their journal of choice, retain more rights to their own work, use it in their teaching, meet the requirements of funders and REF and minimise overall reliance on hybrid Open Access. Quite an achievement!

There has been a positive response from the community and the next steps include working with research funders to see how this can be taken forward. One point that Banks did highlight was that discussions around the UK-SCL had resulted in a lightning rod effect by attracting attention to the wider conversation around Open Access. This can only be a positive as we work to engage more people in these important discussions.

The day also provided plenty of practical tips on rights clearance, dealing with moving images and the potential impact of Brexit. For more information on these, my full (live) notes from the conference can be found here and presentations from all sessions can be found on the CILIP website.

Published 8 May 2018
Written by Claire Sewell

*Note – an amendment to this blog post was made at 17.12 on 8 May to better reflect the emphasis of Josie Fraser’s talk as per her comment below.