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96th Helmholtz Open Science Newsletter

Issue of February 15, 2023

1. 2023: Year of Open Science

Last year, NASA already declared 2023 as the “Year of Open Science” and launched a variety of activities in the program “Transform to Open Science” (TOPS), which will be funded with 40 M. US-Dollar for the next five years. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has now also declared 2023 as a Year of Open Science under the motto “advancing open & equitable research”. In addition to NASA, a broad range of organizations including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Science Foundation are involved.

2. EU Science Ministries Discuss Open Science

In early February 2023, the EU science ministers discussed the development of Open Science within the framework of the Swedish EU Council Presidency. In the run-up to the meeting, two interesting briefing papers have been published. These papers deal with the topics of infrastructures for research data and Open Access. A press release summarizes the results.

3. European Commission publishes opinion paper on monitoring of Open Science

In December 2022, the position paper "EOSC Steering Board Expert Group on Monitoring Open Science" was published. The EOSC Steering Board, representing the member countries, is one of three bodies that together lead the development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC tripartite governance). It has been proposed to combine information from existing mechanisms to document the development of Open Science and the European Open Science Cloud. Technically, this is currently done via the EOSC Observatory.

The paper also lists possible indicators that should be used to map the commitment of the member and associated EU states from 2024 onwards. The existence of various policies is to be queried and thus to be used as an open science indicator. Indirectly, this request or indicator also concerns the publicly funded science organizations: "The following Open Science and EOSC-relevant policies are recommended to be deployed by 2024 by each Member State and Associated Country at national and institutional levels."

In this way, it has been proposed to accompany the progress towards the agreed Policy Action 1 in the context of the establishment of the European Research Area (ERA). Action 1 calls for "Enable the open sharing of knowledge and reuse of research outputs, including through the development of the EOSC".

4. Initiative for the Further Development of Research Assessment in Europe

Research evaluation, associated reputation systems, and resulting incentives or obstacles are relevant also for Open Science. In December 2022, the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) was established. Within this European framework, working groups will discuss aspects of the further advancement of research evaluation in the next few years. In the coming weeks, a decision will be made on the thematic structure of the first working groups and thus a clearer picture of the upcoming work focus will emerge. The underlying agreement has now been signed by over 450 institutions and organizations.

The LMU Open Science Center will hold an online symposium on the topic on March 13, 2023: Reforming Research Assessment: how to implement responsible procedures and move beyond impact factors and h-index?

5. DFG Project PID Network Germany Launched

On March 1, 2023 the project "PID Network Deutschland – Network for fostering persistent identifiers in science and culture", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and scheduled to run for 36 months, will start its work. The aim of the project is to establish a network of already existing and currently forming actors around the persistent identification of persons, organizations, publications, resources, and infrastructures in the field of digital communication in science and culture. The project aims to optimize the dissemination and networking of PID systems in Germany, and also to embed them into international infrastructures, such as knowledge graphs. The project’s findings will result in recommendations in a national PID roadmap for Germany. The project is thus ideally embedded in already existing efforts to promote persistent identifiers. National and international organizations and associations such as DFG, Coalition S, EOSC, NFDI, and RDA are important actors in this context. In addition, the project takes the community building, knowledge transfer, and technical optimization activities that were successfully established under the ORCID DE project (as reported in December 2022 (in German)), to a new level. The project proposal provides further insight into the goals of the project: https://doi.org/10.48440/os.helmholtz.059 (only in German).

Project partner institutions of PID Network Germany are DataCite, the German National Library, the Helmholtz Open Science Office, Bielefeld University Library, and the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB).

6. Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) Foster the Interlinking of Research Information and Scientific Data

For the enrichment and linking of research information, the increasing availability of persistent identifiers (PIDs) for different information objects is an important advancement. The extension and optimization of the functional scope of the respective research information systems for the use of PIDs – in particular of DataCite DOIs (for research data) and ORCID iDs (for their creators) – represent important building blocks in this context.

Currently, there are two developments to report on: As the DINI AG FIS informs, the DOI import of DataCite has now been developed for the DSpace 7 software and have been published on GitHub. The extension will be implemented in version 7.5 and will soon be available for DSpace / DSpace CRIS instances. In addition, Hamburg University of Technology reports (via “ORCID-DE-Dialog” mailing list) that through project funding from ORCID Inc. under the Global Participation Fund, effort will now be undertaken to improve the ORCID submission process for DSpace CRIS. This is done primarily for DSpace CRIS, but will also be adopted for general DSpace instances once the implementation is complete. Thus, the improvement will directly benefit all DSpace users worldwide, including those in the Fund Focus Group. The project is being coordinated and implemented by the Library of the TUHH.

7. Implementation of ROR ID and Integrated Authority File (GND) in RADAR

At the end of 2022, the metadata schema of the cross-disciplinary repository RADAR (Research Data Repository), which emerged from a DFG project (2013–2016) by FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure, the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München, the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry (IPB), and the Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC) of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and has since been operated and further developed by FIZ Karlsruhe since 2017, was updated. Additional standards data have been integrated via application programming interfaces (APIs): Via the ROR API the ROR ID (Research Organization Registry ID) has been implemented; this ensures that information on organizations or organizational affiliations of researchers always are unique, standardized, persistent, and machine-readable. Moreover, in the metadata field “keyword”, researchers can now also choose standard data records as an alternative to entering free text. More information about the new software release can be found here.

8. DFG-Project Transform2Open launched in January 2023

The DFG-funded project "Transform2Open" has begun its work in January 2023. 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 organizes dialogue forums and develops actions of recommendation for strategies, concepts, and measures for shaping the Open Access transformation at universities and non-university research institutions. The project ensures the successful interaction of various transformative efforts with the project open-access.network and the Focus Group on Information Budget, the project openCost, as well as Projekt DEAL, and other initiatives and projects in Germany and internationally. Project partners of the Transform2Open project are the Central Library of Forschungszentrum Jülich, Potsdam University Library, and the Helmholtz Open Science Office.

Further information can be found on the project website. For questions and suggestions, the team can be reached at info.transform2open@listserv.dfn.de. The project is also present on Mastodon and Twitter.

9. open-access.network: FAQ list provides answers

The BMBF-funded project open-access.network has now published an FAQ list in English and German on its website. Sorted by topic, the list includes the most frequently asked questions about open access that are put to the project's help desk – and the respective answers. For individual OA questions, the helpdesk can be reached around the clock via email, and twice a week by telephone. The Helmholtz Open Science Office is involved in open-access.network as a project partner.

10. Recommender Systems: How Do I Find the Right Open Access Journal for My Publication?

Scientists who want to publish their research results in open access are often faced with the question of how to find a suitable journal for their manuscript. A number of online tools have recently been created to help with this search, taking into account criteria such as open access, scientific discipline, thematic fit, and the amount of any publication fees.

This is accomplished, for example, by oa.finder, which was created as part of the BMBF-funded open-access.network project. Another tool, which enables a semantic search in title and abstract for journals with similar publications, was developed in the B!SON project and presented at the end of January 2023. Based on a similar principle, for publications from the biomedical field, the tool Jot presents the results sorted by fit in a graph (more info).

11. SCOAP³ establishes open access book program

The SCOAP³ consortium has now announced that, in addition to open access journal articles, the conversion of new specialist books from closed to open access will in future be funded under the new SCOAP³ for Books initiative. The decision was made after a successful two-year pilot phase in which established textbooks and monographs in the field of high-energy physics have been "bought out" and placed under Creative Commons licenses. In the course of this process, SCOAP³ entered into a partnership with OAPEN, a publishing platform for open-access books, which now supports SCOAP³ for books through providing hosting, analysis, and long-term archiving services. Scientists and students from around the world can already access more than 60 open access books through the OAPEN Library SCOAP³ Collection. More book titles from the pilot project will be added in the coming months. The books are also freely accessible via the websites of the respective publishers.

12. DataCite partners with Wellcome Trust and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to build an Open Global Data Citation Corpus

DataCite has announced plans to build a global open data citation corpus in collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, funded by the Wellcome Trust. The Open Global Data Citation Corpus will collect and store references for research datasets from a variety of sources. The aggregated references are freely usable under a CC0 license and can be used for diverse purposes, including making research outputs more visible or more accurately determining scientific impact. The project launched on February 1, 2023. All interested parties were invited to attend a virtual launch event on February 13, 2023 and join the conversation between DataCite, Wellcome Trust, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, EMBL-EBI, COKI, OpenAIRE, and OpenCitations. A documentation of the event will be published in a timely manner.

13. Retrospective: Helmholtz Open Science Fora: Reports published

To share best practices and strengthen the research data community within Helmholtz, the Helmholtz Open Science Office organized a second Helmholtz Open Science Practice Forum on Research Data Management on October 20, 2022 with over 100 participants of Helmholtz. The documentation is now available.

On November 24, 2022, the Helmholtz Research Software Forum organized a third information event on current developments related to scientific software in Helmholtz. The documentation is now published, too.

14. Retrospective: 66th Online Seminar: Policy for Open Science

The 66th Helmholtz Open Science Online Seminar “Policy for Open Science“ took place on January 17, 2023 and was dedicated to the topics of the creation, design, and implementation of Open Science Policies. In September 2022, the Helmholtz Association adopted its Open Science Policy. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also approved a Policy for Open Science in September 2022. These policies take up the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and relate to the EU Commission's open science funding policy in the current Horizon Europe research framework program. The online seminar opened with a welcoming speech by Lutz Möller, Deputy Secretary General of the German Commission for UNESCO. Contributions from CERN and the Helmholtz Open Science Office shed light on the aforementioned Open Science policies. The slides and a recording of the event have been published (CC BY 4.0 International respectively) via the event website.

15. Retrospective: vBIB22 “Open Science & Knowledge Transfer”

As part of the vBIB22 conference our colleague Lea Maria Ferguson offered a brainstorming session entitled “Open Science & Knowledge Transfer: Public Libraries as Science Blind Spot or Opportunity?“ (in German) on December 08, 2022. The premise for this session was that the opportunities offered by public libraries as communicators of scientific knowledge transfer to society have so far been underestimated by the scientific community. Around 30 people participated in the brainstorming session, most of whom working in academic and public libraries and being actively involved in the fields of open science and knowledge transfer. In particular, possibilities for supporting knowledge transfer from libraries were presented, e.g., in the context of organizing makerspaces; hosting technical platforms such as blogs, wikis or etherpads as collaboration possibilities; organizing hackathons for citizen science, science slams, or student labs. The documentation of vBIB22 will be made available via the #vBIB22 section on the BIB OPUS server; the slides of the talk can be found here.

16. Checklists for Successful Open Science Practices

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has published compact yet comprehensive checklists for the path to open science for individual researchers and scientific working groups. These checklists are instructive not only for the geosciences!

17. Best Practice Example from a University: Open Science Spotlight

With the Open Science Spotlight (OSS), the University of Konstanz launched a new section of its online magazine in February, in an English and a German edition. The OSS presents open access publications, free data, software, and open educational resources published by researchers and teachers at the university.

18. On our own behalf: Helmholtz Open Science Office also on Mastodon

The Helmholtz Open Science Office is now also represented on Mastodon under the handle @HelmholtzOpenScienceOffice@helmholtz.social. We are looking forward to a lively exchange with new and familiar people. Follow us!

Background: Mastodon is a microblogging platform. It has received a lot of attention as an open source alternative to Twitter after Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, especially from individuals and institutions working in science and culture. The main difference between the two platforms is that Twitter is centrally controlled by a single company, while Mastodon is decentralized. This means that individuals or organizations can set up a server (a so-called instance) and host users on it. More information and updates on this topic are available in the "Fediverse and Science" themed cast series launched by TIB (in German).

Save the Dates

Recommended Reading

Bertelmann, R., Buys, M., Kett, J., Pampel, H., Pieper, D., Scholze, F., Sens, I., Burger, F., Dreyer, B., Glagla-Dietz, S., Hagemann-Wilholt, S., Hartmann, S., Schrader, A., Schirrwagen, J., Summann, F., & Vierkant, P. (2023). PID Network Deutschland. Netzwerk für die Förderung von persistenten Identifikatoren in Wissenschaft und Kultur. Helmholtz Open Science Office. https://doi.org/10.48440/OS.HELMHOLTZ.059

Castro, P. de, Herb, U., Rothfritz, L., & Schöpfel, J. (2023). Persistent identifiers for research instruments and facilities: An emerging PID domain in need of coordination. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7330372

Cobey, K. D., Haustein, S., Brehaut, J., Dirnagl, U., Franzen, D. L., Hemkens, L. G., Presseau, J., Riedel, N., Strech, D., Alperin, J. P., Costas, R., Sena, E. S., Leeuwen, T. van, Ardern, C. L., Bacellar, I. O. L., Camack, N., Correa, M. B., Buccione, R., Cenci, M. S., … Moher, D. (2023). Community consensus on core open science practices to monitor in biomedicine. PLOS Biology, 21(1), e3001949. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001949

Ertl, H., & Rödel, B. (Eds.). (2022). Offene Zusammenhänge. Open Access in der Berufsbildungsforschung. Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung. https://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0035-1031-5

Gomes, D. G. E., Pottier, P., Crystal-Ornelas, R., Hudgins, E. J., Foroughirad, V., Sánchez-Reyes, L. L., Turba, R., Martinez, P. A., Moreau, D., Bertram, M. G., Smout, C. A., & Gaynor, K. M. (2022). Why don’t we share data and code? Perceived barriers and benefits to public archiving practices. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 289(1987), 20221113. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.1113

Heise, V., Holman, C., Lo, H., Lyras, E. M., Adkins, M. C., Aquino, M. R. J., Bougioukas, K. I., Bray, K. O., Gajos, M., Guo, X., Hartling, C., Huerta-Gutierrez, R., Jindrová, M., Kenney, J. P. M., Kępińska, A. P., Kneller, L., Lopez-Rodriguez, E., Mühlensiepen, F., Richards, A., … Weissgerber, T. L. (2023). Ten simple rules for implementing open and reproducible research practices after attending a training course. PLOS Computational Biology, 19(1), e1010750. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010750

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

Schrader, A. C., Arend, D., Bach, J., Elger, K., Göller, S., Hagemann-Wilholt, S., Krahl, R., Lange, M., Linke, D., Mayer, D., Mutschke, P., Reimer, L., Scheidgen, M., Selzer, M., and Wieder, P. (2023). Workshop on PIDs within NFDI (Version 1). Internal Workshop on PIDs within NFDI, Online. Zenodo. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7635905

Strecker, D. (2022). Dataset Retrieval: Informationsverhalten von Datensuchenden und das Ökosystem von Data-Retrieval-Systemen. LIBREAS. Library Ideas, 42. https://libreas.eu/ausgabe42/strecker/

Vierkant, P., Schrader, A., & Pampel, H. 2022. Organization IDs in Germany—Results of an Assessment of the Status Quo in 2020. Data Science Journal, 19: XX, pp. 1–23. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-019

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