Please find below our latest Open Research Newsletter: 

Issue: 5 | Monday, 22nd July, 2024

Hello everyone! 
we are now all in the summer season but that does not mean we went radio silent here at the Library. There are some interesting events we recommend you to register for. We are especially excited about the upcoming OpenFest 2024: Open Research @Sheffield, which we co-host with the University of Sheffield. More information can be found in the Hallam news section (just scroll down). We have also found an interesting podcast episode about the philosophy behind open research that you can tune into and many more articles on open access. We have also been invited to join University of Sheffield for an all-day workshop event with a particular focus on practices around openness and transparency as a part of mechanism for culture change. Dr Tanita Casci from University of Oxford has shared her views on the strategy for sustainable improvements in research culture. There was an interesting panel discussion around reproducible research. Andy Tattersall (University of Sheffield) had a presentation around open communication and how we can facilitate a productive exchange of knowledge outside the academy. We've have also heard more about epistemic pluralism and a culture of inclusion from Matthew Hanchard (iHuman Institute) and Preeti Raghunath (Sociological Studies), who were leading a panel speaker presentation. Now you can re-watch the recordings from that event. 

 

Your Library Research Support team 

 

News from Sheffield Hallam: 

Registration for OpenFest 2024 is now open!

Interested in improving academic research and exploring open research practices? Open research plays a key role in democratising knowledge and creating a productive, collaborative and responsible research culture. Sheffield’s OpenFest, co-delivered by Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Sheffield, provides an opportunity to explore issues around open research, share experiences and consider how open research can be applied in your discipline. Register for our OpenFest events. Full programme, abstracts and bios are all available on our webpages.

We look forward to seeing you in September! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

News around Open Research:

Diamond open access - Research Professional News published an article around the costs for publishing diamond open access, which refers to a model in which publishers do not charge fees to authors or readers. It sounds nearly idyllic! But who does pay the price?. Please read the full article linked above. 

 

Science v. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators – review - "The question for communicators is how to make essential scientific information accessible and relevant for public audiences, while also contending with – but without stoking – disinformation" asks Chris Featherman, who wrote this post for LSE blog. He reviews the original piece written by Emma Frances Bloomfield, which is addressed to science communicators. If you wish to read more about storytelling in science communication, public engagement and structural changes please visit LSE blog linked above. 

 

Making Research Data Publicly Accessible: Estimates of Institutional & Researcher Expenses - Open Research is not only about making your research transparent but also accessible! When we talk about open methods we also need to link back to open data. In 2016 Scientific Data published the FAIR principles, which advocate to make data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. The Association of Research Libraries has published an article on support for public access to research data requirements. 

 

Big changes in Open Access policies across the globe - There is a big shift coming in terms of open access in US. Current policies across the ocean permit a delay of up to a year but the administration of President Joe Biden has announced that US research agencies should make the outputs of state-funded research free to read upon publication. It does ring a bell. Japan also runs for open access. Earlier this year, Japan’s Council for Science, Technology and Innovation announced that from 2025, a proportion of new research funding will require immediate open access and data sharing. It is good to see how open research is still reshaping policies across the world. 

 

The REF consultation shows the need for a more plural perspective on OA Books - our next REF exercise is scheduled for 2029 and there are ongoing consultations regarding indicators for the upcoming submission. Earlier this year the OA policy has been extended and now applies also to monographs, book chapters and edited collections. We can already see where this is going. Lucy Barnes and Judith Fathallah wrote a blogpost for LSE about the perspective on OA book publishing and how would that work. 

 

 

Initiatives:

Philosophy behind Open Science – HPS at UniMelb Podcast is about contemporary research in the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science. End of May they've released a finale episode that addresses aspects of the philosophy behind open science. Professor Sabina Leonelli from the University of Exeter talks about open research as a reaction to the commercialization and commodification of academic research. She explains why we need standards to assure equity and why she sees openness as a relationship. She also gives her recommendations for robust and inclusive knowledge exchange. But that is not all so please use the link above to listen to the full interview. 

 

Knowledge for Public Health - Coproduction is an example of collaborative research. "Knowledge for Public Health is the NIHR National Institute for Health and Care Research-funded public health knowledge mobilisation team. KNOW-PH for short, the team aims to move research evidence generated by NIHR closer to local and national public health decision making." We are proud to say that Sheffield Hallam University is partnering in this collaborative initiative to help mobilise evidence into practice and policy what initially will benefit public health.

 

Towards machine-actionable research articles - LorentzFAIRConference has now published a short presentation on their YouTube channel to show you the steps on how to assure figures quality for accurate text mining by ChatGTP. Namely, you should use vector files where possible, demand and publish only high resolution images, minimize jpg compression, upscale PDFs from 2 to 5MB and provide original image as supplementary data.  Also, have you heard about nanopublications? Watch the full video, it's only 6 minutes long but quite informative. 

 

 

Upcoming events:

 

OpenFest 2024: Open Research @Sheffield	10th-12th September, 2024 Sheffield Hallam University and University of Sheffield full programme available on our webpages
Toronto ReproducibiliTea Summer 2024	1st August 2024, 3pm;  Harley Glassman To replicate or not to replicate: Is exact replication possible?
ReproducibiliTea Bochum / Ruhr University Bochum	20th August, 1pm – 2pm Sample Size Justification
OASPA Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing 2024	16th -18th September 2024

 

Please find below our latest Open Research Newsletter:

Issue: 4 | Monday, 27th May, 2024

Hello everyone! 

hope you had a nice bank holiday! It seems that the upcoming months will be filled with a wide range of open research-related sessions you can sign up for! The University of Edinburg, for example, will be hosting a hybrid conference to address actions toward a healthier, more vibrant research environment. In terms of OA, IET has now announced two new Open Access journals. Also, we wish to share with you some examples of ongoing projects that resonate with the principle of open research and found some interesting one that also demonstrates the power of AI tools. To read more, please scroll down to the News section. 

 

Your Library Research Support team 

News from Sheffield Hallam: 

As you already know we are currently working on the next OpenFest, which is an exciting opportunity for everybody to present case studies and share knowledge about open research. Together with the University of Sheffield, we will be hosting this event in September but the full programme should will be released soon. As for now, we know that one day will be scheduled for an online symposium around the openness of the research culture, and on the other two days we wish to meet in person for presentations, panel discussions and workshops. Thank you for all the submissions in response to the call for papers, which closed on 26th May. We will be promoting this event throughout the summer, and hope to see you there! If you wish to recall some of the previous talks from last year, please listen to the OpenFest2023 recordings. 

 

In addition, our Library Research Support team has now launched a new exciting initiative to help grow impact from our published research using plain language summaries. These are a very effective communication tools that help you reach a wider audience by summarizing your work in terms that are accessible to people outside of a specific academic circle. Writing these summaries can be difficult and time-consuming, but they really do help you communicate your work to as wide an audience as possible. To help save time writing those summaries in clear jargon-free language, we have partnered with Kudos to provide our researchers with AI-generated plain language summaries. These are currently being reviewed and edited by the authors before getting published. To maximise impact, we intend to upload the summaries into our repository, SHURA. In addition, Kudos will add the summaries to a special SHU showcase.  We always encourage authors to disseminate their plain language summaries widely in order to boost communication about their research findings. Everyone can add a plain language summary of their work to Elements. It is a great way to practice open research at the end stage of your research project.

 

Upcoming Sessions from the Library Research Support Team in June and July

Our Library Research Support team will be holding next set of sessions in June and July.  We are happy to announce that we have now added Open Research to the programme:

• Open Research (new!)
• Finding information
• Managing research data
• Reference management
• Getting published
• Being an Influential researcher
• Adding a finished thesis to SHURA

More details and booking links can be found on the Events page and Unihub.

News around Open Research:

Generative AI: eight questions that researcher need to ask - Information Commissioner's Office has released an article on the implications of generative artificial intelligence and large language models in relation to the aspect of data protection. Despite the fact this was published last year it is worth re-visiting the page in order to ask yourself all those questions the author is listing. It will help you decide on your research data management plan and how to process data responsibly when using AI in research project. 

 

The Institution of Engineering and Technology announces new Open Access journal launches in 2024: 

1. Digital Twins and Applications  is a gold open access journal that aims to disseminate cutting-edge developments of digital twin systems spanning multiple disciplines to achieve better monitoring, simulation, prediction, optimization, and control. The journal publishes original research findings and latest perspectives from research projects relevant to digital twin technologies. This will include a variety of digital twin technologies and their applications.
2. Electrical Materials and Applications is a gold open access journal that aims to evaluate the development and applications of high-end electrical materials for power transmission and transformation equipment. It mainly focuses on electrical insulating materials, electrical magnetic materials, electrical conducting materials, electrical protective materials, electrical sensing materials and new energy storage materials. The journal will publish high-quality original research papers and review articles at the forefront of science and technology, and promote collaboration and the exchange of cutting-edge research in the field of electrical materials.

 

 

Initiatives:

Business models for knowledge sharing - Since September 2023, cOAlition S, in partnership with Jisc and PLOS, have been working with a multi-stakeholder working group to identify business models and arrangements that enable equitable participation in knowledge-sharing for the benefit of science and society. The primary objective is to explore business models that are not article and APC-based. Read more about the update on progress they are making. 

 

Barcelona Declaration - this initiative was prepared by a group of over 25 research information experts, representing organizations that carry out, fund, and evaluate research, as well as organizations that provide research information infrastructures. The group met in Barcelona in November 2023 in a workshop hosted by SIRIS Foundation. The preparation of the Declaration was coordinated by Bianca Kramer (Sesame Open Science), Cameron Neylon (Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative, Curtin University), and Ludo Waltman (Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University). The signatories of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information make the following commitments:

1. We will make openness the default for the research information we use and produce;

2. We will work with services and systems that support and enable open research information;

3. We will support the sustainability of infrastructures for open research information;

4. We will support collective action to accelerate the transition to openness of research information.

 

International community project - Resurrect an ancient library from the ashes of a volcano.

We encourage you to learn more about the ongoing project presenting you with the power of AI that helps make spectacular discoveries. The Vesuvius challenge is running since last year and is a great example of a combination of competition and community collaboration in an open and multidisciplinary way. As the project leaders describe it, it all started with a breakthrough, extracting more than four passages of never-before-seen text from inside an unopened (and unopenable!) carbonized scroll. They have proven techniques for virtually unrolling the papyrus scroll and recognizing the ink using machine learning. It wasn’t clear it was possible until they actually did it. But this was only the stage one. The next step is to scale these techniques up so that they can read entire scrolls, and to figure out an efficient scanning protocol to allow them to scan and read the 300 extant scrolls, mostly in Naples. Now two key technical problems need solving: segmentation at scale, and scanning at scale. Read more about their full Master Plan. 

 

 

Upcoming events:

 

London Data Week 2024	"We believe that everyone should have a seat at the table when it comes to data, and that is the guiding principle behind our core values: to be collaborative, open and inclusive. So, we invite you to be part of the conversation by joining us and our event partners at a London Data Week event. Registration and payment are managed by our event partners. Please review their individual privacy policies before booking."
Reproducibilitea Sheffield	ReproducibiliTea Journal Club returns 12th July 2024 for discussion of the paper Making social media research reproducible and Ric Campbell will give a brief overview and open discussion of the paper. Where : Room 410, Arts Tower, Sheffield When : 12:30-13:30 2024-07-12 Google Meet : https://meet.google.com/nio-aheq-gnc
Changing Research Culture - workshop event in Sheffield	9th July 2024, 10am-3pm Workroom 2, the Wave, University of Sheffield   In person, with online attendance available for keynote talks only in anticipation of REF2029’s heightened emphasis on People, Culture and Environment, ‘research culture’ is increasingly coming into scope as a focus of attention for UK institutions. But critical and reflective work is needed to avoid the term becoming, like ‘excellence’ itself, a floating signifier that obscures the genuine conditions, processes and limitations of academic practice. This one-day workshop will address this task with a particular focus on practices around openness and transparency. With reference to UKRIO’s component principles of research integrity, we will examine the degree to which open practices present a necessary condition of a culture of research integrity and inclusion and explore the extent to which embedding and facilitating open practices offers a significant mechanism of culture change.     Keynote speakers: Tanita Casci, Director, Research Strategy & Policy Unit, University of Oxford Stephen Curry, College Consul and Professor of Natural Science, Imperial College London, and Chair of the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) You can book your place now.
Science communication and research integrity	This is the latest in the series of regular free webinars from the UK Research Integrity Office on research integrity and related issues. Is research integrity relevant to science communication, aka scicomm, i.e., the communication of science beyond researchers? Our speakers will discuss how scicomm should consider the rigour of the original research and its publication process, including any peer review, and how the principles of publication ethics may apply to scicomm, e.g., accuracy, transparency, and declaration of interests. You can register via Eventbrite.
Planning and delivery of credible neuroscience research -  primarily aimed at PhD and PostDoc researchers	Do you want to improve your skills in Open Science? Want to learn how to maximise the credibility and impact of your research? Come and be part of the British Neuroscience Association's one-day hands-on training course on how to deliver open neuroscience research. This workshop aims to bring together a group of neuroscience researchers at PhD or postdoc level for a training workshop to learn how they should plan to ensure their projects are as reproducible as possible, and how they can deliver this by making their research data and code open. Registration is open now.
Advancing Research Data Management and Open Science in Austria	The event will be virtually hosted by the Graz University of Technology, in Austria. The aim of this event is to present the work done in Austria on the national level and also learn about European developments and results of EOSC-related projects such as FAIR-Impact. The event will debate around metadata and semantic interoperability, as well as FAIR-enabling repositories and Austrian National Open Science Policies. Register now!
Open Publishing Fest 2024	Open Publishing Fest is a decentralized public event that brings together communities supporting open source software, open content, and open publishing models. Held during two weeks in June this year, Open Publishing Fest will feature discussions, demos, and performances that showcase our paths toward a more open world. Open Publishing Fest celebrates communities developing open creative, scholarly, technological, and civic publishing projects. It's an opportunity to connect people and showcase the revolution in publishing occurring around the world and across sectors and industries. The fest is built on collaboration and distributed participation, with sessions hosted by individuals and organizations around the world in various formats such as panel discussions, fireside chats, demonstrations, workshops, and performances. We invite you to join us by proposing a session. You have the freedom to choose your topic, participants, timezone, time, technology, and language. Proposals will be considered on a rolling basis up to and throughout the fest. To propose an event for inclusion, please use the proposal form. Don't forget to use the #OpenPublish tag when tweeting about the fest!
FAIR Coffee lecture at Maastricht University	For this session of the FAIR Coffee lecture, on May 29 2024 at 2pm, the organisers have invited Dr. Peter Prinsen. He is the head of Clinical Data Science at the Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Organisation (IKNL) where he focuses on applying the FAIR principles to data in the Netherlands Cancer Registry. He will give a presentation entitled “Making the Netherlands Cancer Registry more FAIR”. More information can be found in the abstract.
PIDfest at National Library of Technology, Prague, Czech Republic	The goal of this event is to bring together PID advocates, users, and leaders from around the world to solve real world infrastructure challenges that will accelerate research and innovation. Attendees can expect energetic discussions focussed on solving real world challenges in delivering research infrastructure. Registration is now open.
Edinburgh Open Research Conference 2024	In this year's Open Research Conference we are addressing the big challenge: culture change. It is not simply enough to facilitate open access and FAIR Data. We also need to embed best open research practice within our institutions, we need to make them standard practice. But how can we go about achieving this? Join us for a discussion on these topics where we will consider the role of next generation metrics, education, training and skills development in this process. We will also look to other contexts in which positive shifts in culture are actively taking place: EDI, Health and Wellbeing and research integrity. What can we learn from these contexts, and how can we collaborate to make a more equitable and open research environment?More details are available on the Eventbrite pages. You can join this event in-person or online.

 

 

Please find below our latest Open Research Newsletter: 

Issue: 3 | Tuesday, 19th March, 2024

Hello everyone! 

our spring edition of the Open Research Newsletter here at Sheffield Hallam is now ready. One of the exciting events from last February is the Open Research Week 2024. We are happy to share the recordings from Loughborough University, De Montfort University and University of Leicester. If you haven't had the chance to join any of those sessions, please go to the link above to learn more about Connecting Education, Research Cultures, Open Data, and more on Connecting and engaging with communities.  We have also attended sessions hosted by LJMU, Edge Hill University, University of Liverpool, and the University of Essex. To re-watch sessions around citizen science, open journals, the UK Reproducibility Network, and other open research related talks please go here. 

We have also found some interesting articles and events around Open Research that we've linked out below, so please scroll down to read more.

Your Library Research Support team 

News from Sheffield Hallam: 

We are now moving beyond traditional metrics-based CVs in order to shift away from quantity towards the quality. What does it mean? In January we launched a professional activities module on Elements that allows you to evidence your skills and experience in terms of generation of new ideas/tools/methodologies or knowledge; development of others and maintenance of effective working relationships; wider research and innovation community and broader research/innovation- users and audiences and towards wider societal benefit. A module on the University's Elements system can be used to develop and store evidence for Narrative CVs. We have linked guidance and a recorded training session on that. Also, our Researcher Development team has created a dedicated SharePoint page. Finally, to read more about the general idea of narrative CVs please go to the UKRI webpages.

News around Open Research:

AI and web metrics: Have we reached the limits of altmetrics? To answer that question, please read the full article on Research information platform.

 

IOP Publishing joins OA Switchboard: how to make it easier for institutions to manage OA agreements? By setting up a central information hub that enables AO output monitor process. Please read more about the improved visibility of published OA research.

 

AI to give you an idea for your next research project – Craig Nicholson wrote an interesting article on responsible use of AI in the context of recent World Economic Forum in Davos and the stand Ursula von der Leyen took when highlighting the importance of AI and R&D.

Initiatives:

Transforming research for an Open Science world - which means being more collaborative across countries, making research more impactful, discoverable, and open.

 

Have you ever heard about “Team Science”? Please read more about the report on recommendations on how to shape a more supportive research culture.

 

Springer Nature is now developing a new peer review platform. The initiative has been named as "a key investment from the company in the future of publishing". The plan is to link the existing technology with new AI tools to boost the quality of published research. To read all details about this project, please read the full article liked above.

 

DORA announces a new career assessment tool. To get familiar with the new RRA (responsible research assessment) tool please visit their webpages.

 

A promise for a greater research impact for Sage OA authors has been made. ResearchGate and Sage expand Journal Home partnership with the aim to expand accessibility and readership for more journals. 

 

Upcoming events:

Foundations of Peer Reviewing course
There are five funded places available on the new Open Access Publishing Association (OAPA) Foundations of Peer Reviewing Course that starts in April. The course is 'discipline agnostic' and would be of benefit to both early- and mid-career researchers. Please check out the details and submit your expression of interest by Monday 18 March. 

 

The Open Research Champions meeting is scheduled for 30th April - to find out more about our Open Research Champions Network and how to join please visit our webpages.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please see below the spring programme for the Open Research Conversations at University of Sheffield: 

Open source hardware for reproducibility, equity and progress. Book your place.

Wednesday 10 April 2024, 12-1pm

Open source hardware - the designs for which are publicly available and can be reproduced by anyone - can offer powerful benefits, democratising research and making methodologies accessible regardless of a researcher’s institutional context.

In this session, two researchers from the University of Sheffield explore their own relationship to open source hardware, including the factors behind their adoption of open source, key considerations regarding how and where to make hardware specifications available, documentation, licensing decisions, and more. Our speakers will explore the far-reaching benefits of an open source approach to hardware development and open a discussion about potential support needs for researchers considering this route.

David Polson is a Senior University Teacher in Mechanical Design with an interest in designs which can be built and controlled using emerging technologies including 3D printing, microcontrollers, low-cost sensors and low-energy communications. Harry Wright, a Research Associate in the Department of Chemistry, was awarded the University’s Open Research Prize 2023 for his development of FoamPi, a free and open source low-cost alternative for measuring polyurethane foam reactions.

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Evaluating (Open) Research: Capturing open practices in research evaluation. Book your place. 

Wednesday 15th May 2024, 12-1pm

In anticipation of REF 2029’s increased emphasis on research culture, many UK institutions are reflecting on how open research activities might best be captured in articulations of research quality. 2023 also saw the tenth anniversary of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), which sought a change in approach regarding criteria for research evaluation.

This Open Research Conversation will explore the ways institutions and the sector as a whole can, and should be, capturing open research activities in research evaluation and ensuring credit is appropriately distributed. Speakers will include Lizzie Gadd, Head of Research and Innovation Culture and Assessment at Loughborough University, Chair of the International Network of Research Management Societies (INORMS) Research Evaluation Group and Vice-Chair of the Coalition on Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA); Simon Hettrick, Professor at the University of Southampton, Deputy Director of the Software Sustainability Institute and Chair of the Hidden REF Committee; and Robert Darby, Research Data Manager at the University of Reading and founder of the UKRN’s Open and Responsible Research Reward and Recognition project (OR4), part of the Research England-funded Open Research Programme.

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Diamond open access: The future of academic publishing? Book your place. 

Wednesday 12th June 2024, 12-1pm

Diamond open access is a model of open access publishing in which academic outputs such as articles or books are free both to read and to publish. This contrasts with the more prevalent Gold open access model, where publications are free to read but authors wishing to make their publications open incur an article or book processing charge, which can be a costly barrier to those whose institutions or funders are unable to pay.

This Open Research Conversation will explore the rationale behind and benefits of Diamond open access, the infrastructure and community support required to achieve it, key challenges in the growth and upscaling of Diamond OA initiatives, and more. We’ll hear from the following speakers:

Samuel Moore is Scholarly Communications Specialist at Cambridge University Library and a researcher in information studies. He has written and spoken extensively on all aspects of open access, including Diamond OA, and is an organiser of the Radical Open Access Collective. 

Antonios Ktenidis and Kirsty Liddiard (School of Education, University of Sheffield) are managing editors for the interdisciplinary Diamond open access Journal of Disability Studies in Education, within the field of Critical Disability Studies.

Caroline Mackay is the Licensing Manager at Jisc, with involvement in Jisc’s support for Diamond OA publishing initiatives.

Issue: 2 | Tuesday, 16th January, 2024

Open Research Newsletter in 2024 

We hope you had a good start into the New Year. We welcome you back with some interesting news around open research. There are plenty of initiatives related to open research practices. Please have a look through our reading selection from various information platforms and scroll down to learn more about events our university is taking part in! 

Your Library Research Support team 

News from Sheffield Hallam: 

New Open Access policy at SHU:

We have now introduced an updated right retention policy at SHU. The new SHU Research Publications and Copyright Policy (Open Access policy) was initially introduced on the 15th October 202. From the 1st January 2024, authors will additionally be able to retain their rights over the peer-reviewed manuscript of a chapter in an edited collection such as a book. 

Sheffield Hallam University in "OR4" project:

This week, the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) launched a large-scale national collaboration to create a community of practice and case studies to participate in the ‘OR4’ project, part of the UKRN Open Research Programme. OR4 is a major collaborative initiative to reform how open research is recognised and rewarded in recruitment, promotion and appraisal practices. 43 UK academic research institutions, including Sheffield Hallam, participate in the initiative – 14 as case studies and 29 in a wider community of practice. Working together, we hope to reform the way we recruit, promote and appraise our research staff, prioritizing openness and transparency in research. The project runs until August 2026 and aims to provide freely available tools to institutional leaders incentivizing recognition and reward for open research practices, measure institutional improvement in implementing responsible research assessment recognising open research and foster a community involved in implementing research assessment reforms.

News around Open Research:

“Be ready for UKRI’s new open access policy” - Anna Hughes, scholarly communications and engagement officer from Jisc shares her advice on how to prepare your work for the new UKRI OA policy that applies to long-form publications from 1 January 2024.  

 

“Harmony of Minds: The Tale of Open Science and the Healing of Progressville” - OPUS project has now published a story tale on Open Science as an alternative and quite creative way to explain the main principle behind the concept of open research.  

 

"The Power of Social Media in Making Science and Research Accessible to All” - OPUS team is explaining why the engagement with social media is crucial to make Open Science more powerful.  

 

“What does it mean to do generous research?” - in her recent article published on LSE platform Rachelle Chadwick writes about the open receptivity and points out the value of generosity to critical thinking and research.  

 

"Preprints, conspiracy theories and the need for platform governance” - LSE has published an article on how scientists are engaging with preprints on social media platforms.  

Also, in response to the above article we recommend to get familiar with our SHU guidance on preprints.

Initiatives:

Mandatory open access to all publicly funded scientific knowledge by 2030 - The Frontiers Research Foundation has launched an Open Science Charter, calling upon governments, research institutions and funders, the scientific community, and citizens everywhere to support the OA initiative.  

 

The launch of new OA journal for a sustainable future:  

IOP Publishing (IOPP) is launching Sustainability Science and Technology, an interdisciplinary, open access journal dedicated to advancing sustainability through research in science, technology, and engineering.  

 

New feature in Octopus: Make changes to your existing publications 

Octopus is designed to allow researchers to publish early, and get open, constructive, quality-focused feedback from the community. The new reversioning feature allows authors to make use of that feedback by publishing new versions of their work.  

 

Upcoming events:

 

The Open Research Champions meeting is scheduled for 24th January - to find out more about our Open Research Champions Network and how to join please visit our webpages.

 

Open Research Conversations in Sheffield - Spring 2024 programme:

The University of Sheffield has just announced their Spring programme of Open Research Conversations - lunchtime online sessions which take place monthly and are open to all. Each focuses on a specific aspect of open research and features talks from 2-3 speakers followed by questions and discussion.  

 

Editorial mass resignations: Collective action towards open research - register via Eventbrite: 

In this Open Research Conversation, University of Sheffield has invited key participants in growing mode of collective action: Johan Rooryck, now of Plan S, was editor-in-chief at the hybrid Elsevier journal Lingua before resigning to establish the OA alternative Glossa. Judith Green edited and co-edited Critical Public Health between 2010-2023 before a mass resignation to found a new journal on an open source platform; Chris Chambers was among the editorial team at Neuroimage who resigned in protest against publisher profiteering in April 2023. From different disciplinary contexts, these scholars share their overlapping experiences of the pursuit of equity, openness and academic freedom in publishing, examining the potential of collective action and open access alternatives to provide a corrective to publishing oligopolies.  

 

Open Science Days 2024 in Berlin:  

The Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) is hosting Open Science Days 2024. The conference will be held as a hybrid meeting, with the attendance part again taking place at the Harnack House in Berlin. The conference language will be English. The participation fee is 100€ for on-site attendance and 40€ for digital attendance.  

 

Open Research Week 2024 in UK: 

Loughborough University, De Montfort University and the University of Leicester have joined together to celebrate Open Research Week 2024. A series of online talks promotes the practice of openly sharing and re-using research-related materials, for both education and research. Included are a range of disciplines, research life-cycle stages and experiences.

University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University, Edge Hill University, and the University of Essex will also be celebrating and promoting open research for researchers and colleagues who support open research. Whilst some sessions are UK-focused, others will be of interest to colleagues around the world. This year’s Open Research Week programme includes sessions on citizen science, research culture and open research in Europe.

 

Issue:1 | Monday, 20th November, 2023

Launch of the Open Research Newsletter

Starting with the November edition and with a planned release every other month we are launching our Open Research Newsletter with the aim to create a digital space for essential information and the latest updates around discussions and developments in the open research landscape.

The Library Research Support team

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News around Open Research 

 

The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science is the first international standard setting instrument on open science. UNESCO now has developed a toolkit to help organisations to implement the recommendations. The organisation will be adding more resources to the toolkit soon. Please read more about the UNESCO Open Science toolkit.

Here is the article on how DORA is expanding its social media presence.

‘Scholarly communication needs to change. But how?’ 

“cOAlition S – an international consortium of research funding and performing organisations, committed to making full and immediate Open Access a reality – is seeking input from the global research community on a proposal to establish a community-based scholarly communication system, fit for open science in the 21st century.”

Here are the links to: full proposal from cOAlition S and cOAlition S survey.

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Recent conversations on Open Research 

 

“Researchers shouldn’t have to fear going public” - the latest article in ResearchProfessional News highlights the importance of open discussions in the research community.

“The open science movement is changing how we think about and practise science” says Louise Bezuidenhout and Hugh Shanahan in their article Open science is more open in some places than others published on ResearchProfessional News platform.

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News from Sheffield Hallam

 

‘How is our Open Access policy making research more accessible to the public?’

In October last year, we approved a new Open Access policy which allows academic staff and research students at Sheffield Hallam to retain key rights over their scholarly papers published in journals and conference proceedings. Under the policy, all journal and conference papers can be shared under a liberal re-use licence (CC BY) immediately from the day of publication, rather than after a delay stipulated by the journal. To achieve this, authors need to include the following declaration in their submission: “For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.” Since its launch, the policy has been well received.

Publishers have, on the whole, been happy to comply and we know that initial fears from some authors for editorial rejections and non-cooperative co-authors have not materialised. A very healthy three quarters of all journal and conference papers (!) published by Sheffield Hallam authors were made available to the public via Open Access immediately upon publication under a liberal re-use licence (CC BY).

Other universities are now following our lead by implementing rights retention policies, including King’s College, Lancaster, Leeds, Manchester, Oxford, Swansea and Sheffield.

This excellent result supports our vision to be the world's leading applied University and the Library teams' goal to advance open research.

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Upcoming events: 

 

SheffieldR : November Meetup 20th Nov 2023, The power of interactive data visualization

A showcase of innovative R-Shiny projects. Details: We'll dive into two innovative R-Shiny projects. The first project introduces the fascinating world of mapping to investigate the dynamics of segregation among neighbouring regions, a concept we fondly refer to as "social frontiers." In the second project, we explore economic sectors with a focus on aiding South Yorkshire's mayoral authority in their strategic growth planning endeavours. 

Sheffield ReproducibiliTea Journal Club - December session:

Abstract : Failures to replicate evidence of new discoveries have forced scientists to ask whether this unreliability is due to suboptimal implementation of methods or whether presumptively optimal methods are not, in fact, optimal. This paper reports an investigation by four coordinated laboratories of the prospective replicability of 16 novel experimental findings using rigour-enhancing practices: confirmatory tests, large sample sizes, preregistration and methodological transparency. In contrast to past systematic replication efforts that reported replication rates averaging 50%, replication attempts here produced the expected effects with significance testing (P < 0.05) in 86% of attempts, slightly exceeding the maximum expected replicability based on observed effect sizes and sample sizes. When one lab attempted to replicate an effect discovered by another lab, the effect size in the replications was 97% that in the original study. This high replication rate justifies confidence in rigour-enhancing methods to increase the replicability of new discoveries.

Neil Shephard (Research Software Engineer at University of Sheffield) will give a brief summary of the article and will open discussion by highlighting some of the points he thought were good/bad about the paper.

This time slot sits between sandwiched between Open Research Conversation x Lunchbytes : Making research software more visible and reusable - Open Source Software and FAIR4RS and the Annual Open Research Lecture.