68th Helmholtz Open Science Online Seminar

Program

The 68th Helmholtz Open Science Online Seminar took place on Thursday, February 8, 2024 from 2:00 - 3:00 pm (CET).

Bernhard Mittermaier, head of the Central Library of Forschungszentrum Jülich, spoke on science tracking. In recent years, scientists have become aware that large publishing houses track their usage behaviour [1] for hitherto not fully understood reasons. The fact that Elsevier calls itself „a global leader in information and analytics“ even before the term „publishing“ is used [2] might indicate one of the possible reasons.

The DEAL negotiations with Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer Nature in 2023, which resulted in national contracts with the three largest publishers for Germany [3] tried to reduce tracking and enhance data privacy. This talk explained the legal situation with regard to tracking and other privacy issues in the DEAL contracts and gave advice for scientists and librarians.

[1] see e.g., Cody Hanson: User Tracking on Academic Publisher Platforms. https://www.codyh.com/writing/tracking.html

[2] https://www.elsevier.com/about/this-is-elsevier

[3] https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements

There was room for questions and discussion after the presentation.

Our Speaker

Bernhard Mittermaier is a chemist by training and head of the Central Library of Forschungszentrum Jülich since 2008. His main areas of work are Open Access (e.g., Open Access Monitor Germany), bibliometrics (e.g., Competence Network Bibliometrics) and license negotiations (Helmholtz Consortium and DEAL).

Documentation

Slides

Mittermaier, B. (2024): Science Tracking. 

Permalink: https://gfzpublic.gfz-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_5025035

The slides have been published under CC BY 4.0 International licence.