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Dear colleagues,

This is the 87th Helmholtz Open Science Newsletter brought to you by the Helmholtz Open Science Office in German and English language. With this newsletter, we provide you with a regular overview of the most important open science developments.

You can find the current newsletter and the newsletter archive on the Helmholtz Open Science Office website.

We appreciate you forwarding this newsletter to anyone interested.

For more information on the topic of open science: The internal mailing list os-pro-helmholtz “Helmholtz Open Science Professionals” supports members of the Helmholtz Association who are interested in open science topics, such as open access, open research data and open research software. In addition to information on current developments, practical discussions and information exchanges are facilitated. You can register for the mailing list here. (Please note: This list is only available for employees of the Helmholtz Association).

Obituary – Jutta Graf

1. open-access.network Informs Universities of Applied Sciences

2. Study on 15 years of open access in Germany

3. Open Access Monitor – New Interface

4. Open Access in the Joint Initiative Monitoring Report 2021

5. DFG Paper on "Data Tracking in Science" published

6. ORCID DE Project Develops Tool to Analyze the Dissemination of ORCID iD: The ORCID DE Monitor

7. Save the Date: Online Seminar on “ROR” | GRID Passes the Torch to ROR

8. Save the Date: 60th Online Seminar on “Preregistration”

9. Save the Date: Helmholtz Participation in CampusSource Conference and Award

10. Review: 59th Online Seminar on Research Data Management and new BMBF project for MOSAiC data

11. Updated Briefing on Good (Digital) Research Practice and Open Science

12. Updated metadata schema for the "Registry of Research Data Repositories" and other news from the project re3data COREF

13. Broad participation from Helmholtz in the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI)

14. Researchers at KIT publish open source software “EYCALC“

15. Amendment of Copyright Law: Extension of Exceptions for Education and Science

16. Second Open Data Law

17. Save the Date: DINI Annual Meeting 2021 on the Sustainability of Information Infrastructures

18. Save the Date: RDA DE Tagung 2022

19. France Adopts its Second National Strategy for Open Science

20. G7 Countries Emphasize the Importance of Open Science

21. On our own behalf: Helmholtz Open Science Office now also on LinkedIn

Recommended Reading

It is with great sadness that we were learned that Dr Jutta Graf (longtime head of ‘Scientific Information’ at DLR, previously site manager in DLR Oberpfaffenhofen) passed away unexpectedly on July 28, 2021.

Jutta Graf has been an active stakeholder in the field of open science in the Helmholtz Association since 2004. She was a member of the group that developed a roadmap for the implementation of the Berlin Declaration after it had been signed by the Helmholtz Association. With the declaration, open access as well as the topic of research data gained center stage for Helmholtz; in the years that followed, she focused on the management of research data. Since then, and through her longstanding commitment while chairing the open science working group, Jutta Graf has campaigned intensively for the promotion of open science in the Helmholtz Association.

We will miss her dearly and will keep her honorable memory in our thoughts.

The Helmholtz Open Science Office held a total of 16 regional events for scientists in the workshop series "Introduction to Open Access and Copyright", as part of the BMBF-funded open-access.network project and in collaboration with universities of applied sciences throughout Germany. Between September 2020 and May 2021, participants in these online workshops were able to deepen their knowledge of open access to scientific publications and copyright law and discuss use cases from their own practice. The management of the host universities also made use of the offer for advisory sessions on topics such as the introduction of an OA policy, the integration of OA into publication workflows, and the establishment of a fund for OA publication fees at the university.

Other information services offered by open-access.network include a help desk (see Newsletter 84) and a forum. The Helmholtz Open Science Office is involved in the project as a partner.

A valuable study on the development of Open Access has been conducted at Forschungszentrum Jülich in the period from 2005 to 2019. The work by Irene Barbers and Philipp Pollack looks at the publication output and its development in the area of open access in Germany based on the databases by Unpaywall and Dimensions. One result: "The open access share increases by about 20 percentage points in all federal states during the observation period. In 2005, it is between 20 % and 30 %, depending on the federal state, and rises to over 40 % in almost all states by 2019." The study has been developed in the SynOA project, which received funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). SynOA developed the Open Access Monitor Germany, which is now being operated and further expanded in the follow-up project OAM (see Newsletter 86).

The Open Access Monitor Germany – OAM (funded by the BMBF), operated by the Central Library of Forschungszentrum Jülich, has been available for use by academic institutions and all interested parties since 2019 (see Newsletter 72). As a freely accessible tool, the OAM provides a representation of the publication volume and costs of German academic institutions in scientific journals and thus supports institutions in promoting the Open Access transformation. The interface of the OAM has now been redesigned and offers significant improvements in functionality, performance and usability. For feedback and questions, please contact our colleagues at info@open-access-monitor.de.

The 2021 Monitoring Report (in German) of the Joint Science Conference (GWK) on the Joint Initiative for Research and Innovation, which has just been published, provides information on – among other aspects – activities of the science organizations to implement open access (OA) to scientific publications. For the Helmholtz Association, page 13 of the report states on the recording of the OA share in accordance with the Open Access Policy of the Helmholtz Association:

“The Helmholtz Association has also continuously increased its OA share during the pact period to most recently 60 %, based on the publication year 2018, thus meeting the target of 60 % set by the Open Access Policy of the Helmholtz Association.”

The Committee on Academic Libraries and Information Systems (AWBI) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) published an information paper on "Data tracking in research" on June 18, 2021. The paper focuses on the "aggregation and use or sale of usage data by scientific publishers." According to its conclusion, data tracking could fundamentally contradict scientific freedom and informational self-determination, endanger scientists, and hinder the freedom of competition in the field of information supply. Therefore, the paper encourages a deeper engagement with the topic and a broad discourse within all levels of science.

At the 109th Bibliothekartag, the DFG-funded project ORCID DE – within which the Helmholtz Open Science Office is also involved – firstly presented the ORCID DE Monitor. The ORCID DE Monitor is a tool for analyzing the use of ORCID iDs in the scientific publication landscape. With the development of the ORCID DE Monitor, the project responds to the increasing demand for analyses of the dissemination of ORCID iDs in the field of digital scholarly communication.

The ORCID DE Monitor is available via https://monitor.orcid-de.org/en. The user interface and analysis functionalities will be further enhanced and optimized during the project progress. More information is available in the blog post via http://orcid-de.org (in German only).

The ORCID DE project will organize an online seminar on "Research Organization Registry (ROR): Benefits and Advantages of an open Organization ID," on August 18, 2021, from 10:00 am to 11:00 pm. The event will focus on ROR ID, an open and community-driven identifier for academic organizations. With the discontinuation of GRID (Global Research Identifier Database) at the end of the year, whose data ROR has mirrored since its start in 2019, the importance of ROR as the core identifier for scientific organizations is increasing. 

All interested parties are cordially invited to join the upcoming free ROR online seminar. Please register in advance. The online seminar will be held in German. For more information, see the blog post on the ORCID DE project website (in Germany only).

The 60th Helmholtz Open Science Online Seminar will take place on Tuesday, September 21, 2021 from 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm. In this seminar, Prof. Dr. med. Ulrich Dirnagl will present on the topic of “Preregistration: The Panacea for Trustworthy and Useful Science?”. Ulrich Dirnagl is Professor of Clinical Neuroscience and serves as Director of the Department of Experimental Neurology at Charité Berlin. Since 2017 he is also the founding director of the QUEST Center for Responsible Biomedical Research at the Berlin Institute of Health. The one-hour online seminar will be held in English and will be conducted via the video conferencing tool Zoom. The seminar will not be recorded.

To participate in the event (free of charge), please register here in advance. Further information can be found on the event's website.

On September 16, 2021, the fall meeting of the CampusSource e. V. funding association will take place. The main language of the conference is German. At the conference, the Helmholtz Open Science Office will give a presentation on "Good scientific practice and open science publishing: What scientists should pay attention to". Our colleagues from KIT will introduce the tool "Softwipe" (we reported on the tool in Newsletter 86).

More information and the preliminary program can be found here (only in German). To register for the free online conference, click here.

In addition, the campusSOURCE Award 2022 will be announced at the conference. The prize will be awarded by the campusSource e. V. in cooperation with de-RSE e.V. and the Helmholtz Open Science Office in 2022.

On the occasion of the 59th Helmholtz Open Science Online Seminar, Prof. Dr. Frank Oliver Glöckner, Head of Data at the AWI Computing and Data Center, spoke about research data management in the context of biodiversity and the MOSAiC project. About 100 interested people from the Helmholtz Association and other institutions attended. The slides of the talk can be downloaded here and the corresponding factsheet can be found here (available under CC BY 4.0 International). For more information, please see the event page.

It was also recently announced that the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding the development of a series of analytical tools by the Alfred Wegener Institute, DKRZ Hamburg and DLR Jena under the title "M-VRE: The MOSAiC – Virtual Research Environment", that will initially allow researchers, and subsequently also the general public, to access and work with the Arctic data online. Thus, the Arctic data will be made universally accessible. Click here for the press release.

The briefing “Good (Digital) Research Practice and Open Science” has been updated: https://doi.org/10.48440/os.helmholtz.027 (in German only).

Background: The “Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice“ published by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) have been in effect since August 1, 2019. Open science aspects are important for many of these guidelines (see Newsletter 83). The Helmholtz Open Science Briefing highlights the relevance of open science for the implementation of the guidelines at the Helmholtz Centers and offers practical recommendations. For further information also this talk at the 109th Bibliothekartag: “Gute wissenschaftliche Praxis und Open Science: Zur Rolle der Bibliotheken im DFG-Kodex“ (i.e., good research practice and open science: on the role of libraries in the DFG code; slides in German only).

The online portal "Research Integrity", offered by the DFG, is now also available in English: wissenschaftliche-integritaet.de/en.

The international service re3data, which the Helmholtz Open Science Office has been involved in since 2012, provides descriptions of research data repositories based on a detailed metadata schema. The registry improves the visibility of repositories and helps users find suitable repositories for storing and searching research data. As of August 2021, a new version 3.1 of the metadata schema has been released by the re3data COREF project.

Automatic access to repository descriptions in re3data is provided via the web interface or via API. As part of re3data COREF, two exemplary templates have been developed that outline uses of the re3data API. These can be downloaded via a GitHub repository.

On July 13, 2021, the re3data team participated in the FAIRsFAIR webinar "Using registries to improve the visibility of your repository service", which was specifically aimed at research data repository operators. The slides and a recording of the seminar are available on the event website.

The re3data COREF project was also represented with a presentation at the 109th German Librarians' Day.

In July 2021, the Joint Science Conference (GWK) announced its funding decision on applications for consortia in the second round of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). With this initiative, the federal and state governments are pursuing the goal of systematically opening up research data resources for the German science system in accordance with FAIR principles so that they can be made more accessible to third parties. The NFDI will be established as a network of consortia over a period of three years; the process has begun in 2020 and comprises three successive funding phases. On May 12, 2021, the third and final call for funding for consortia in the NFDI was published.

In May 2021, the Helmholtz Open Science Office hosted an internal forum around the topic "Helmholtz in the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI)". The report is available for download.

As of today, 15 of a total of 19 approved NFDI consortia in the first and second rounds involve 18 different Helmholtz Centers:

• DAPHNE4NFDI (participation from Helmholtz: DESY, FZJ, HZB, HZDR, HEREON, KIT)

• DataPLANT (participation from Helmholtz: FZJ)

• FAIRmat (participation from Helmholtz: FZJ, HZB, HZDR, KIT)

• GHGA (participation from Helmholtz: CISPA, DKFZ, DZNE, HMGU, HZI)

• NFDI4BioDiversity (participation from Helmholtz: AWI, UFZ)

• NFDI4Cat (participation from Helmholtz: KIT)

• NFDI4Chem (participation from Helmholtz: KIT, UFZ)

• NFDI4DataScience (participation from Helmholtz: AWI)

• NFDI4Earth (participation from Helmholtz: AWI, DLR, FZJ, GEOMAR, GFZ, HEREON, KIT, UFZ)

• NFDI4Health (participation from Helmholtz: MDC)

• NFDI4Ing (participation from Helmholtz: FZJ, DLR, KIT)

• NFDI4Microbiota (participation from Helmholtz: DLR, FZJ, GFZ, HMGU, HZI, KIT, MDC, UFZ)

• NFDI-MatWerk (participation from Helmholtz: FZJ, HEREON, KIT)

• PUNCH4NFDI (participation from Helmholtz: DESY, DLR, FZJ, GSI, HZDR, KIT)

• Text+ (participation from Helmholtz: FZJ)

In addition, Helmholtz is involved in three GAIA-X lighthouse projects that aim to advance the development of data-driven business models, AI-based services, and the establishment of European data spaces. The 16 winning consortia of the GAIA-X funding competition hosted by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology were announced at the end of June 2021.

Open source is emerging as the standard for software from the scientific community. This is how Researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have published the free and open source software EYCALC (Energy Yield Calculator): This software allows for the precise calculation of the energy yield of perovskite tandem solar cells. The simulation software is suitable for all conventional, but above all for the first time for new types of solar cell architectures with a high level of complexity. As an open source tool, EYCALC is available to all users; the software is available on GitHub (GPLv3 licensed). Further information on the project can be found here.

The German Copyright Act contains a number of so-called exceptions that permit the use of copyrighted works for education and research purposes subject to certain conditions. The validity of these permissions was limited until the end of February 2023 in the last amendment to the Copyright Act in 2017.

In order to transpose the European Digital Single Market Directive (2019/790) into German law, the law has now been amended again. The complete removal of the copyright barriers for education and science applicable in Germany, which was threatened due to the time limit, would have violated the new EU directive. The German legislator therefore had to at least partially repeal the current time limit. The Alliance of Science Organizations advocated a complete deletion of the time limit without replacement. This position prevailed, i.e., the time limit was deleted without replacement. The deleted time limit had been combined with a request to the BMJV for an evaluation of the effect of barriers to education and science. This procedure is currently being carried out.

For many years, there has been a struggle in Germany over the design of the copyright restrictions for education and science. The German legislator reacted to the existing contradictions of interests by formulating increasingly complicated provisions on exceptions, which were no longer in line with the requirement of legal clarity. Within the framework of the last amendment of copyright law in 2017, the legislator dared to make a new start. The restrictions for education and science were combined in subsection 4 – "Legally permitted uses for education, science and institutions" – and fundamentally reformulated and made much more comprehensible. At the same time, the period of validity of this new subsection is limited until the end of February 2023.

In 2003, the European legislator for the first time passed a directive (2003-98) that obligated the member states to make public administration information easily and inexpensively accessible, especially for the use by companies. In Germany, this directive was implemented in 2006 with the Information Reuse Act (Informationsweiterverwendungsgesetz). The European directive was amended in 2013 and 2019. Both amendments expanded the scope of the directive. The 2019 directive included research data for the first time. This most recent directive to promote the accessibility of information at public bodies has now been transposed into German law by the German legislature with the "Act to Amend the E-Government Act and to Introduce the Act for the Use of Public Sector Data." In Germany, this legal regulation on making research data accessible does not affect universities and non-university research institutions; however, it does affect e.g., departmental research institutions.

The 22nd annual conference of the German Initiative for Network Information (DINI) will take place from October 5-6, 2021. This year's annual conference will focus on the challenges surrounding the sustainable operation of information infrastructures for research, teaching, and knowledge transfer. The Helmholtz Open Science Office is involved by contributing to DeepGreen and ORCID DE. The annual meeting will be accompanied by a poster exhibition. The call for posters ends on September 1, 2021.

The RDA DE Conference 2022 will take place from February 21 to 25, 2022, once more as an online event. The Helmholtz Open Science Office is thrilled to host the conference again next year together with RDA Deutschland e.V. Information on the event will be published on the event’s website in due time.

On July 6, 2021, Frédérique Vidal – the French Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation – presented the second "Plan national pour la science ouverte", which will cover the period from 2021 to 2024 and continues and extends France's first National Plan for Open Science 2018-2021. The new plan is closely aligned with the European Union's open science activities and promises to triple the budget for open science from 5 million to 15 million euros per year. In addition to open access and open research data, the scope is now extended to the field of open research software. A national research data platform "Recherche Data Gouv" will also be established. France has set itself the goal of achieving an open access quota of 100 % for all research publications by 2030.

Similar efforts are underway in the Slovak Republic, where a National Strategy for Open Science 2021-2028 has been adopted in June 2021 (available in English from September 2021). In Switzerland, a national open research data strategy has been adopted in July 2021, complementing Switzerland’s existing national open access strategy and the associated action plan. In line with the German government's overarching data strategy, a five-year open data strategy has been adopted in Germany at the beginning of July 2021, enhancing the focus on public administrative data.

The science ministries of the G7 countries addressed the topic of open science in July 2021. The "G7 Research Compact" states: “As our nations and communities start to recover from the pandemic and build resilience for future shocks, we will continue to work with our research and business communities to remove barriers to the open and rapid sharing of knowledge, data and tools, to the greatest extent possible, recognising the importance of research security in particular in cutting-edge fields, and to promote open science and increase open, safe and transparent dissemination of science to citizens, and to strive to minimise technology-related risk."

This general commitment to open science is supported by two actions that address the aspects of (1) open research data and (2) research assessment. On research assessment, the statement declares: “Explore incentives, including enhancements to research assessment that foster recognition and reward collaboration across all disciplines and topics to drive a culture of rapid sharing of knowledge, data, software, code and other research resources. Investigate how open science practices help achieve increasingly robust, reliable and impactful research outcomes“.

The OS Office supports the Helmholtz Association in shaping the cultural change towards open science: The OS Office promotes the dialogue on open science in the present newsletter, on Twitter, via our further services and now also on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/helmholtz-open-science-office

Association of American Universities (AAU) & Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU). (2021). Guide to accelerate public access to research data. https://www.aau.edu/accelerating-public-access-research-data

Besançon, L., Peiffer-Smadja, N., Segalas, C., Jiang, H., Masuzzo, P., Smout, C., Billy, E., Deforet, M., & Leyrat, C. (2021). Open science saves lives: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 21(1), 117. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-021-01304-y

Berkman, P. A., Brase, J., Hartshorn, R., Hodson, S., Hugo, W., Leonelli, S., Mons, B., Pergl, H., & Pfeiffenberger, H. (2020). Open Science for a Global Transformation: CODATA coordinated submission to the UNESCO Open Science Consultation. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3935461

Bosman, J., Jonge, H. de, Kramer, B., & Sondervan, J. (2021). Advancing open access in the Netherlands after 2020: from quantity to quality. Insights, 34(1), 16. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.545 

Jahn, N., Matthias, L., & Laakso, M. (2021). Toward transparency of hybrid open access through publisher-provided metadata: An article-level study of Elsevier. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24549

Leimüller, G., Benke, S., & Gerbl, B. (2021). Openness in internationaler ­Wissen­schafts-­und ­Innovationspolitik. Was Deutschland lernen kann. ınnOscı / Forum für offene Innovationskultur. https://innosci.de/wp-content/uploads/210617_innOsci_Studie_Openness_international.pdf

Momeni, F., Mayr, P., Fraser, N., & Peters, I. (2021). What happens when a journal converts to open access? A bibliometric analysis. Scientometrics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03972-5

Wachtler, T., Bauer, P., Denker, M., Grün, S., Hanke, M., Klein, J., Oeltze-Jafra, S., Ritter, P., Rotter, S., Scherberger, H., Stein, A., & Witte, O. W. (2021). NFDI-Neuro: building a community for neuroscience research data management in Germany. Neuroforum, 27(1), 3–15. https://doi.org/10.1515/nf-2020-0036

The Helmholtz Open Science Newsletter is published by the Helmholtz Open Science Office.

Editorial staff: Roland Bertelmann, Dr. Christoph Bruch, Lea Maria Ferguson, Dr. Reinhard Messerschmidt, Dr. Heinz Pampel, Antonia C. Schrader, Dr. Paul Schultze-Motel, and Nina Weisweiler.

Contact: open-science@helmholtz.de

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