100th Helmholtz Open Science Newsletter

Special thanks, therefore, to our more than 2000 subscribers and to all who have contributed to previous issues. We are pleased that you have joined us on our journey to promote open scientific practices. Thank you for your continued support and please enjoy reading this anniversary issue! Feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone who may be interested.

With best regards

Your Helmholtz Open Science Office

1. DEAL Agreement Signed with Elsevier

The DEAL consortium, represented by MPDL Services gGmbH (MPDLS), which is run by German scientific organizations, and the publication service provider Elsevier have signed a "Publish and Read" agreement. This agreement aims to promote Open Access in Germany.

It is an opt-in agreement and institutions are currently being invited to participate with a target date to the agreement coming into force in 2024. Authors at participating institutions can publish in Elsevier journals with immediate Open Access, funded by an institution-based per-article fee. In addition, these institutions receive discounts on OA publications and read-only access to almost all Elsevier journals on ScienceDirect. Institutions are currently being invited to participate in order to launch the program.

2. International Open Access Week 2023 and Global Summit on Diamond Open Access

This year's International Open Access Week will take place from October 23 to 29, 2023. Guided by the theme "Community over Commercialization", numerous national and international events will be held on the topic of openness in science. This year's theme is based on the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, which calls, among other things, for the prevention of “inequitable extraction of profit from publicly funded scientific activities“ and for the support of “non-commercial publishing models and collaborative publishing models with no article processing charges”.

Fittingly, the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access will be held in Toluca, Mexico, from October 23 to 27, 2023. Diamond Open Access can be one of the vehicles on the way to community-driven publishing, as International Open Access Week calls for with its motto. The Summit aims to foster dialogue between editors, organizations, experts, and stakeholders from the global South and North, and to implement collective measures of open science that emphasize equity, sustainability, quality, and usability.

4. New edition of the BMBF guide "Copyright in Science”

Copyright is both highly valued and perceived as a burden by authors in science. The appreciation is based on the recognition of the authors' achievements, which is manifested in this right. The burden results from the restrictions on use that the intellectual property rights impose and from the complexity of the regulations, which make them difficult to understand.

For this reason, in 2019, the BMBF, together with the German Library Association, had published the brochure "Copyright in Science. An overview for research, teaching and libraries" (only in German). In August 2023, this brochure was published as a completely revised new edition. With the revision, the two chapters ‘Copyright in Teaching and in Research’ have been supplemented by the chapter ‘Copyright in Publications’. Both publications can be downloaded and reused free of charge, under the license CC BY-SA.

6. RDA-DE Conference to be held again in 2024 at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam

Next year's RDA-DE conference will be held again in person at the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences on February 20 and 21 – after it had taken place online in previous years due to the pandemic. As in previous years, the Research Data Alliance Deutschland e.V. is cooperating with the Helmholtz Open Science Office to organize the event. This cooperation complements the strong commitment from Helmholtz in the globally active Research Data Alliance. Due to popular demand, the next edition will be able to accommodate approximately 300 people (instead of 200). The preliminary program and registration will be released in December 2023.

7. Data Stewardship: New Career Field in the Research World

Recently, the term data stewardship has become more common, especially in job announcements. In the course of this development, a new job description of data steward has emerged: Data stewards support researchers in sustainable research data management. They contribute to the research data cycle with the establishment of best practices and workflows, as well as data curation and quality assurance activities. The range of tasks is diverse and defined differently in scientific or governmental institutions. Open science as well as the FAIR principles for research data management play an essential role in the work of the Data Stewards.

The DataStew project published recommendations for data stewardship at academic research institutions in February 2023. Within its framework, various concepts in the research landscape were examined and recommendations for action for policy and practice were derived. This work was also the impetus for the event Data Stewardship goes Germany in September at the SLUB Open Science Lab in Dresden. In the course of the workshop, various questions were discussed, including the tasks of data stewards, the importance of data stewardship, and possible implementation strategies. In addition, the relevance of subject-specific knowledge as well as the required skills for data stewards were addressed. In a contribution, the Helmholtz Open Science Office presented a current overview of data stewardship in the Helmholtz community.

9. DFG Presents Guidelines for Dealing with AI Technologies

AI technologies, such as ChatGPT, are significantly changing the entire scientific work process and are already being used in a variety of ways. Consequently, the DFG Executive Committee is formulating concrete guidelines for scientists to disclose whether and to what extent they have used generative models, and for what purpose – both when publishing their results and when submitting funding proposals to the DFG. Further information can be found here.

10. Documentation on Helmholtz Open Science Fora published

The Helmholtz Brussels Office and the Helmholtz Open Science Office organize regular online meetings to provide information about the activities related to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and in particular about the work in the Task Forces of the EOSC community. In the last meeting, Christoph Lange, Fraunhofer representative in the EU project Data Spaces' Support Centre and coordinator of the BMBF/NFDI project FAIR Data Spaces, presented the interaction of EOSC, NFDI, European Data Spaces, and GAIA-X. Ari Asmi, Director of the RDA Association, used the example of the TIGER project to explain the cooperation between RDA and EOSC. The brochure "EOSC Task Forces and EOSC related Projects - April2023" documents these two presentations.

In addition, in May 2023, the Helmholtz Open Science Office organized a forum on “Research Evaluation, Reputation Systems, and Openness”. The event presented insights into diverse efforts regarding research assessment strategies. The documentation is now available.

Furthermore, we provide a Presentation Blueprint on the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA).

In June 2023 the Helmholtz Open Science Office organized its third NFDI-forum. Multiple Centers demonstrated their engagement in different NFDI consortia. The report is is accessible here.

11. Retrospective: Conference on Research Data Infrastructure (CoRDI)

From September 12 to 14, 2023, the first Conference on Research Data Infrastructure (CoRDI) took place on the South Campus of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and attracted almost 700 participants. The broad interest in the conference illustrates the high importance that the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) now holds within the German research data community and beyond. In addition to many other participants from Helmholtz, the Helmholtz Open Science Office was also represented with a presentation on the research data landscape in the Association, as well as with a presentation on the projects PID Network Germany and PID4NFDI. The Extended Abstracts to the contributions have been published in the Proceedings of CoRDI. Information on the involvement of the Helmholtz Centers in the NFDI is documented on the website of the Helmholtz Open Science Office.

12. Retrospective: Open Access Days 2023

This year's Open Access Days (OA days) took place from September 27 to 29, 2023 in Berlin. The Helmholtz Association was again widely represented with diverse contributions.

In the run-up to the conference, a satellite conference on “Wissenschaftsgeleitetes Open-Access-Publizieren“ (in German) took place, organized by a team around Heinz Pampel (Helmholtz Open Science Office / Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin); a preparatory paper “Thesen zur Zukunft des wissenschaftsgeleiteten Open-Access-Publizierens” (in German) had already been published.

At the OA days, colleagues from our project PID Network Germany held the workshop “PID-Superpower ‘Metadaten’. Entwicklung von Metadaten-User-Stories für Open-Access-Publikationen”. Our project Transform2Open contributed a presentation on “Budgets, Kriterien und Kompetenzen – die finanziellen Dimensionen der Open-Access-Transformation gestalten” and a workshop on “Erste Schritte für ein Referenzmodell für das Informationsbudget”.

In addition, the Helmholtz Open Science Office was represented with several posters in the poster session:

• PID Network Deutschland – Vision einer vernetzten und offenen Wissenschaftslandschaft

• Kartierung und Beschreibung der Open-Access-Dienste in Deutschland

• Making scholarly blogs permanently accessible

• Kostentransparenz und Informationsbudget: Projekte, Initiativen und Infrastrukturen, die die finanzielle Dimension der OA-Transformation in den Blick nehmen

This year, the Helmholtz Open Science Office was again involved in the program committee of the Open Access Days.

The following Open Access Days will take place in Cologne from September 10 to 12, 2024.

Recommended Reading

Borrego, Á. (2023). Article processing charges for open access journal publishing: A review. Learned Publishing, 36(3), 359-378. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1558)

Borycz, J., Olendorf, R., Specht, A., Grant, B., Crowston, K., Tenopir, C., Allard, S., Rice, N. M., Hu, R., & Sandusky, R. J. (2023). Perceived benefits of open data are improving but scientists still lack resources, skills, and rewards. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01831-7

Champieux, R., Solomonides, A., Conte, M., Rojevsky, S., Phuong, J., Dorr, D. A., Zampino, E., Wilcox, A., Carson, M. B., & Holmes, K. (2023). Ten simple rules for organizations to support research data sharing. PLOS Computational Biology, 19(6), e1011136. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011136

Frick, C., Blümm, M., Randall, N., Küçük, B., & Bailey, D. (2023). A reality check on research reproducibility in Open Science students’ projects. API Magazin, 4(2). https://doi.org/10.15460/apimagazin.2023.4.2.144

Labastida i Juan, I., Melinščak Zlodi, I., Proudman, V., & Treadway, J. (2023). Opening knowledge: retaining rights  and open licensing in Europe. SPARC Europe. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8084051

Martin, L., & Neufend, M. (2023). Zukunftsmusik oder State of the Art – Experimentelle Formate für Bücher? Bericht zur Erhebung. open-access.network Report. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7990568

Mittermaier, B. (2023). DEAL: Wo stehen wir nach 10 Jahren? (Teil 2). b.i.t. online, 26(3), 217–225. https://b-i-t-online.de/heft/2023-03-fachbeitrag-mittermaier.pdf

Taubert, N., Sterzik, L., & Bruns, A. (2023). Mapping the German diamond open access journal landscape. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.13080

Wrzesinski, M. (Hrsg.) (2023). Wissenschaftsgeleitetes Publizieren. Sechs Handreichungen mit Praxistipps und Perspektiven. Alexander von Humboldt Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8169418

Yee, M., Surkis, A., Lamb, I., & Contaxis, N. (2023). The NYU Data Catalog: a modular, flexible infrastructure for data discovery. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocad125

Ziemann, M., Poulain, P., & Bora, A. (2023). The five pillars of computational reproducibility: Bioinformatics and beyond. OSF Preprints. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/4pd9n