Tag Archives: open access

Horizon 2020 and open access

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The first calls for Horizon 2020, EU’s framework for research and innovation, has opened. These calls have deadline during 2014. EU has a Participant Portal where you can find a lot of information about current calls.

The interesting part for me is what is written about publishing research financed by Horizon 2020.  General Model Grant Agreement can be found among all the documents. It has a clausul 29.2 Open Access to scientific publications. It states that the beneficiary must grant open access (free online access to all users) to all peer reviewed scientific publications which can be related to the results from research financed by Horizon 2020. At the same time the reseacher must aim to make research data needed to validate results presented in the publication open access. It will be interesting and chanllenging to start thinking about how and to what extent it would be possible to make research data freely available.

So researchers must deposit a peer reviewed final version manuscript accepted for publication or a published version of the publication in an institutional repository as soon as possible and at the latest on publication. Even bibliographic metadata must be open access. The interesting part is that the prefered way to open access is through institutional repositories instead of publishing in an open access journal. In other words they do not want to steer directly where researchers publish but are doing it indirectly instad since it must be open access on publication. Many publishers use embargo periods; i.e. a publication can be made open access e.g. 6 months after publishing.

Read the 29.2 Open Access to scientific publications in detail:

The beneficiary must ensure open access (free of charge,  online access for any user) to all peer-reviewed scientific publications relating to its results.

In particular, it must:

(a) as soon as possible and at the latest on publication, deposit a machine-readable electronic copy of the published version or final peer-reviewed manuscript accepted for publication in a repository for scientific publications;

Moreover, the beneficiary must aim to deposit at the same time the research data needed to validate the results presented in the deposited scientific publications.

(b) ensure open access to the deposited publication — via the repository — at the latest:

(i) on publication, if an electronic version is available for free via the publisher,

or

(ii) within six months of publication (twelve months for publications in the social sciences and humanities) in any other case.

(c) ensure open access — via the repository — to the bibliographic metadata that identify the deposited publication.

The bibliographic metadata must be in a standard format and must include all of the following:

– the terms [“European Union (EU)” and “Horizon 2020”][“Euratom” and Euratom research and training programme 2014-2018″];
– the name of the action, acronym and grant number;
– the publication date, and length of embargo period if applicable, and
– a persistent identifier.

H2020 Model Grant Agreement: Mono-beneficiary General MGA: December 2013, p. 59.

Pieta Eklund

Short announcements

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Tips to read this summer: Peter Suber’s book Open Access is now available for everyone online. The book is about Open Access, what it is and what it isn’t. Suber also describes advantages with open access for author. The books is an easy read, not very long or complicated. You can find the book in following formats: ePUB, Mobi, PDF, HTML.

Thomson Reuters publishes every year a report on the scientific landscape with the help of citation analysis. The report The Hottest Scientific Researchers and Research includes publications published during 2012. In 2012 eight of the 21 “hottest” researchers were in the area of genomics, large scale study in the the structre and funktions of genes. We have a Swedish researcher on the list; Lars Wallentin from Uppsala University. It is very clear that Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science is very oriented towards natural science: the most cited papers were published in New England Journal of Medicine, Nature och Physics Letters B and the hottest areas of research were areas such as biomedicine, physics etc.

HathiTrust is establishing a partnership with DPLA, Digital Public Library of America to increase the use of HathiTrust’s big collection of digital open access content. DPLA is a portal to open access material hosted by libraries, archives and museums around USA. With this partnership the DPLA content will double in size.

The publisher Emerald, publishing mostly within social sciences,is not working for dissemination for research results. They have introduces a 24 month embargo period for green (archving in an institutional repository like BADA) open access. This means that unviersities and research funders who mandates open access can make the research open access only after 24 months after publishing. Shorter time may be accepted if the researcher contacts the publisher themselves. Many are critical to this decision.

DOAJ, Directory of Open Access Journals, is a portal to open access journals within all scientific areas, has announces that they have developed new criteria for the selection process of oa journals. DOAJ wants with these new criteria guarantee the quality of the oa journals they accept into their catalogue. The criteria can be commented until 15 of July. At the same time DOAJ is launching a  “DOAJ Seal of Approval” for oa-journals.

If you are using Twitter and interested of statistics maybe Twitter Web Analytics could be of interest? The analytics you can get now is timeline activity or followers. You can even get statistics for individual tweets. How can you activiate analytics? Read the instructions.

Pieta Eklund

Swedish Research Council adjusts its demands for open access

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Since January 2010 the Swedish Research Council has demanded open access publishing. This demand means that projects finances by the Council must be made freely available online either by self-archiving[1] in an institutional repository or publishing in an open access journal. Projects which have received funding before january 2010 are excluded although the Council encourages everyone to publish open access. These demand applies to scientific articles and conference reports, not monographs or bok chapters. There are plans to apply open access demands on books aswell.

New the Council has adjusted its resolution.

1) The researchers receiving funds from 2017 are to publish with so called CC-BY-licens. This makes it possible to reuse and build on previous research data but even text and data mining.

2) According to the new demands results must be made freely available directly after publishing or no later than six months after publishing in an freely availbale database.  Researchers receiving funding from Educational sciences or Humanities and social sciences have twelve months after publishing to make research freely available. At University of Borås BADA is used. This adjustment is a way to hamonize the Councils demandst to EU Commission’s new research programme Horizon 2020 where open access publishing will be the norm.

3) If the publisher’s standard agreement does not allow aelf-archiving you can always use an author addendum, a legal instrument which modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your publication. The Council will allow for expceptions to the rule but only to extend embargo period to 12 respectively 24 months. THe researcher must show documentation of which efforts were made to fullfil the Council’s demand.

4) From 2015 the Council will only accept open access publications when reporting research activities from projects funded entirely or partly by the Council.

Pieta Eklund

[1] Self-archving means that when a publication is registered in an instituional repository a fulltext file is attached. A question that often arises is which version one should deposit. Unfortunately there is no easy answer to this question. You can visit SHERPA/RoMEO where you can find information about publisher’s copyright policies and self-archiving, you can read the publishing agreement you signed before publishing research results and you can always contact your library for help.

Short news about research and publishing

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A lot of things has happened in research and publishing world. Here is a short summary of some of them.

All research funders are facing the same challenges such as assessing the quality and potential of research applications they receive. This is one of the reasons why a meeting on the subject was organized. During the Global Summit on Merit Review leaders for research financers from more than 50 countries met to discuss how evaluation according to peer review should be done. They were able to agree on six principles and take the first steps toward a global understanding on assessment of research applications. These principles are on expert assessment, transparency, impartiality, appropriateness, confidentiality and integrity and ethical considerations. Next meeting will be held in Berlin 2013 and the topics then will be open access and research ethics. Read the principles they agreed upon: Statement of Principles for Scientific Merit Review.

In the begining of april representatives from different parts of the university and research world met for a workshop organized by Luleå University of Technology and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond to discuss how to manage research data. They agreed that national policy and guidelines are needed for all universities and other concerned parties. They also agreed on that an infrastructure should be developed for research data. Universities are responsible to archive research data but an accepted model and system for archiving this material is missing. A report was published from the workshop (in Swedish).

Representatives from the University visited Brussels during the spring to learn more about EU Horizon 20/20, an EU project for research and innovation and how the university could receive a part of the €80 billion budget. What is good news is that they support open access (either green or gold) and see it as the standard way of publishing. Neelie Kroes, vice president for EU commission responsible for digital agenda has said in connection to Horizon 20/20: ”First, when research is funded by the EU, we will require open access to the results. Whether by ”green” or ”gold” routes.” Read Neelie Kroes speach here.

At the same time as there is lobbying process going on to lobby White house to work for open access, especially for the research paid by taxpayers a federal court has ruled against the publishers and given Georgia State University right in all but five accounts. The teachers at the University had distributed material under copyright protection electronically to their students. The university means that this case “highlights the importance of fair use in providing academic faculty a cost-effective, legal way to spread important knowledge to their students.” So the use of copyright law varies a lot and the publishers are now saying they “hope that this decision will start us down a path where librarians, teachers, and publishers can work together to chart a course through this evolving landscape.” Chronicle of Higer Education has written about the court’s decision.

First published in Biblioteksbloggen 2012-06-12

By: Pieta Eklund