95th Helmholtz Open Science Newsletter

1. Helmholtz anchors Open Science

The Helmholtz Assembly of Members adopted the Helmholtz Open Science Policy in September 2022. This policy stipulates that scholarly publications, research data, and research software be published openly. Open science thus becomes the standard for publication practices.

“Open science is part of our canon of values at Helmholtz. With our Open Science Policy, we formulate guiding principles, set goals and create a common framework for open science at our Research Centers under the motto Openness by Design,” said Otmar D. Wiestler, President of the Helmholtz Association, on the occasion of the publication of the policy.

The new policy takes up the “UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science” and is based on the EU Commission's open science funding policy in the current Horizon Europe research framework program. Many Helmholtz researchers are already familiar with these requirements. The Helmholtz Open Science Policy was presented during the international Open Access Week 2022.

2. Open Access share in Helmholtz continues to rise

The number of Open Access publications in Helmholtz continues to rise steadily: 76 % of the journal articles published from Helmholtz in the publication year 2020 are available Open Access. This means that the goal adopted in 2016 of an Open Access quota for Helmholtz of at least 70 % being available by the end of 2021 has clearly been achieved. The open access rate of the Helmholtz Centers is surveyed annually by the Helmholtz Open Science Office. The new Helmholtz Open Science Policy describes future targets in the area of Open Access.

4. The BMBF will fund open-access.network for another three years

The BMBF-funded joint project open-access.network, whose funding period ended on 30.11.2022, was already positively evaluated in the spring of 2022. Based on the results of this evaluation, the project partners Communication, Information, and Media Center of the University of Konstanz, the Open Access Office Berlin, the Bielefeld University Library, the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB), the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), and the Helmholtz Open Science Office applied for a second funding period of three years, starting on January 1, 2023. The Helmholtz Open Science Office is pleased to report that the BMBF responded positively to these applications.

5. open-access.network: Workshops on open access monographs continued

The series of online workshops on the topic of open access monographs organized by the Helmholtz Open Science Office as part of the BMBF-funded open-access.network project was continued in October 2022 with the workshop “Open-Access-Transformation der wissenschaftlichen Buchproduktion aus der Perspektive von Institutionen” (in German). The public event was aimed primarily at libraries, universities, and scientific institutions that want to advance the open access (OA) publishing of scholarly books. Around 60 participants discussed, among other things, requirements for the provision of publication services and the joint financing of OA books. The presentation slides of the workshop have been published in open access.

6. Recommendations for Transformative Journal Agreements published

As part of the Alliance of Science Organizations' “Digital Information” priority initiative, the “Recommendations for Transformative Journal Agreements with Providers of Publishing Service” have now been published.  

These formulated criteria will serve as a common, action-guiding framework for actors from all science organizations – that is, higher education institutions as well as non-university research institutions – for negotiations with providers of publishing services. The call for the greatest possible cost transparency and cost efficiency in the system as a whole forms the core of the actions of the science organizations in the context of their Open Access Strategy 2021–2025.

The criteria are organized into the following aspects: journal transformation, pricing, transparency, workflow, preprints, metadata and interfaces, statistics, tracking, and waivers.

7. DFG Project Transform2Open Launches

The DFG-funded project Transform2Open addresses the development of budgets, criteria, competencies, and related processes at research-performing organizations around the financial dimensions of the Open Access transformation. Transform2Open supports transformation activities at research institutions in Germany in the context of cost monitoring methods and the creation of overarching information budgets, developing international criteria for contracts with commercial publication service providers, optimizing and promoting transparency around the financial framework of the Open Access transformation as well as connected organizational structures and competence profiles.

The project’s goal is the successful interaction of various transformative efforts with, among others, Projekt DEAL, openCost, and other initiatives and projects in Germany and internationally. Partners of the Transform2Open project are the Central Library of Forschungszentrum Jülich, Potsdam University Library, and the Helmholtz Open Science Office. The project proposal has been published here: https://doi.org/10.48440/os.helmholtz.054 (in German).

8. Funding for eight additional consortia approved: National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) is now complete

The National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) aims to make valuable research data resources for the German science system accessible systematically and according to FAIR principles. The central organs of the NFDI are subject-oriented consortia that were selected in a procedure managed by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In November 2022, the Joint Science Conference (GWK) decided to fund the eight NFDI consortia proposed by the DFG in the third and final round of applications. We are pleased to report that seven of the eight selected consortia will be realized with Helmholtz participation.

Funding for the consortia in the third round will begin in March 2023:

• Base4NFDI - Basic services for the NFDI

• FAIRagro - FAIR Data Infrastructure for Agrosystems

• NFDI4BIOIMAGE - National research data infrastructure for microscopy and bioimage analysis

• NFDI4Energy - National Research Data Infrastructure for Interdisciplinary Energy System Research

• NFDI4Immuno - National Research Data Infrastructure for Immunology

• NFDI4Objects - Research Data Infrastructure for the Material Remains of Human History

• NFDIxCS - National Research Data Infrastructure for and with Computer Science

• NFDI4Memory - The Consortium for the Historically Oriented Humanities (without Helmholtz participation)

Together with those selected in the previous two rounds, the NFDI now counts a total of 27 consortia, 22 of them with Helmholtz participation.

9. Documentation on the re3data COREF workshop on quality management in research data repositories published

Data quality assurance is a fundamental issue for repositories that seek to ensure trust in their services. On October 5, 2022, this topic was addressed in a workshop, hosted by the project re3data COREF, in cooperation with CoreTrustSeal. The objective of the workshop was to approach the topic of data quality management from several viewpoints. In the first part of the workshop, results from a comprehensive survey on data quality assurance at research data repositories that was conducted in the project re3data COREF were presented, followed by reflections on quality management from the perspective of the certification organization CoreTrustSeal. In the second part, repositories from different research fields shared their approaches to data quality assurance.

The recordings and presentation slides are now linked in a post on the re3data COREF blog. The findings of the survey on the status quo of data quality assurance practices at research data repositories have been published in the Data Science Journal: Kindling, M., & Strecker, D. (2022). Data Quality Assurance at Research Data Repositories. Data Science Journal, 21(1), 18. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-018  

10. ORCID DE 2 project successfully completed

On November 30, 2022, the ORCID DE 2 project came to a successful end. The project was funded in two funding phases (2016 to 2019 and 2020 to 2022) by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and initiated by the German Initiative for Network Information (DINI). ORCID plays a central role at the level of national standards, such as the DINI Certificate and the Core Data Set for Research (KDSF), but also at the local level in German academic institutions. The relevance and usefulness of Persistent Identifiers for the permanently reliable identification of the resources, the actors and their research products, that are linked to research processes is particularly made visible by ORCID. What was achieved in the project and what happens after the project is completed is described in this blogpost (in German).

11. Retrospective: Helmholtz Open Science Fora

The Helmholtz Open Science Office organized three forums in October and November 2022 to promote collegial exchange on open science-related topics within Helmholtz:

• On October 12, 2022, a meeting of members of EOSC Task Forces in Helmholtz and other interested colleagues was held with two guest speakers from the EOSC Secretariat. The meeting was co-hosted together with the Helmholtz Brussels Office.

• To share best practices and strengthen the research data community within Helmholtz, the Helmholtz Open Science Office organized a second Practice Forum on Research Data Management on October 20, 2022.

• On November 24, 2022, the Helmholtz Forum Research Software hosted another information event on current developments related to scientific software in Helmholtz.

Detailed reports will be published shortly via the event websites.

12. Retrospective: 65th Helmholtz Open Science Online Seminar on Open Research Information

The 65th Helmholtz Open Science Online Seminar took place on Oktober 21, 2022. The slides and a recording of the event are available. The online seminar was presented by Prof. Dr Ludo Waltman, Professor of Quantitative Science Studies and deputy director at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at Leiden University. Ludo Waltman explained why openness of research information is a crucial prerequisite for more responsible approaches to research assessment. He discussed various initiatives promoting openness of research information, both in the Netherlands and globally, with a special focus on the metadata of scientific publications. He also presented how organizations can support these initiatives and participate in them.

13. Retrospective: EOSC-Symposium – Open Science is the new normal

The EOSC Symposium 2022, which took place in Prague from November 14 to 17, 2022, could also have been held under the motto "Open Science is the new normal". The EOSC was very clearly placed as a European policy framework for open science and positioned within the development of the European Research Area (ERA). The first ERA Action in the Council Conclusions of November 2021 "Enable the open sharing of knowledge and the re-use of research outputs, including through the development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)" serves as an orientation. The European Research Data Landscape Study Report was also presented at the symposium. The report shows, for example, that the proportion of scientists who store and publish their data in repositories is still very low. One of the recommendations is therefore to intensify the use of re3data.

14. Retrospective: TEACH 2.0 "Open Up!"

The TEACH conference was held again on November 9, 2022 under the motto "Open Up!". The event was jointly organized by the Helmholtz Open Science Office, Helmholtz Federated IT Services (HIFIS), Helmholtz Information & Data Science Academy (HiDA), Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration Platform (HMC), and Forschungszentrum Jülich. A wide variety of areas of personal and professional development were thus discussed and developed with the speakers and participants from training coordination, personnel development, and research. In the keynote talk, Luca Mollenhauer (DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Human Development and Educational Information) looked at "Open Educational Resources - Recent Developments and Future Promises"; further contributions were dedicated to topics including AI, GitHub, Mental Health, Blended Learning, as well as various other learning methods. The slides and posters of the event have been published.

15. RDA Germany Conference 2023

Next year, the RDA Germany Conference will take place from February 13 to 17, 2023, again as an online event. As in the last years, the RDA-DE e.V. again organizes the conference together with the Helmholtz Open Science Office and the University of Göttingen. The preliminary program of the conference is now available online. Participation is free of charge. The Helmholtz Open Science Office is responsible for the two sessions Enabling reproducibility in (data) science and Persistent Identifier for FAIR research data.

16. Love Data Week 2023 in Germany

The Love Data Week is an international campaign around the topic of research data. In 2023, the week will take place under the motto "Data: Agent of Change" from February 13-17, parallel to the RDA Germany Conference. Through broad participation in the Love Data Week, the RDM initiatives in Germany would like to generate more attention for the topic of research data management. All related events happening during the week can be entered in a public list. By adding events to the list, they will be included in the program at forschungsdaten.info and and thereby made publicly accessible. The Helmholtz Open Science Office will also participate with an event on reproducibility in (data) science. Further information will follow shortly.

Recommended Reading

Barker, M., Chue Hong, N. P., Katz, D. S., Lamprecht, A.-L., Martinez-Ortiz, C., Psomopoulos, F., Harrow, J., Castro, L. J., Gruenpeter, M., Martinez, P. A., & Honeyman, T. (2022). Introducing the FAIR Principles for research software. Scientific Data, 9(1), 622. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01710-x

DINI AG Forschungsinformationssysteme. (2022). Management von Forschungsinformationen in Hochschulen und Forschungseinrichtungen. https://doi.org/10.18452/25440

European Commission. Directorate General for Research and Innovation., Visionary Analytics., DANS., DCC., & EFIS. (2022). European Research Data Landscape: Final report. Publications Office. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/3648

Fyfe, A., Moxham, N., McDougall-Waters, J., & Røstvik, C. M. (2022). A history of scientific journals. Publishing at the Royal Society, 1665-2015. UCL Press. https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/187262

Herb, U. & Pampel, H. (2023). E 10 Open Access. In R. Kuhlen, D. Lewandowski, W. Semar & C. Womser-Hacker (Ed.), Grundlagen der Informationswissenschaft (pp. 715-726). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Saur. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110769043-061

Johnson, R. (2022). Operationalising Open Research Europe as a collective publishing enterprise. European Commission - Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. https://doi.org/10.2777/061886

Kindling, M., & Strecker, D. (2022). Data quality assurance at research data repositories. Data Science Journal, 21(1), 18. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-018

Mittermaier, B. (2022). Das Informationsbudget: Konzept und Werkstattbericht. o-bib - das offene Bibliotheksjournal, 9(4), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.5282/o-bib/5864

Stockhause, M., & Lautenschlager, M. (2022). Twenty-five years of the IPCC Data Distribution Centre at the DKRZ and the Reference Data Archive for CMIP data. Geoscientific Model Development, 15(15), 6047–6058. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-15-6047-2022

Sun, G., Friedrich, T., Gregory, K., & Mathiak, B. (2022). Are we building the data discovery infrastructure researchers want? Comparing perspectives of support specialists and researchers. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2209.14655