Open Science

Open Access/Science

Open Access, or Open Science is the movement to make scientific research (including publications, data, physical samples, and software) free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment to all levels of society, amateur or professional. Open science is transparent and accessible knowledge that is shared and developed through collaborative networks.

Open Science encompasses practices such as publishing open research, campaigning for open access, encouraging scientists to practice open-notebook science, broader dissemination and engagement in science and generally making it easier to publish, access and communicate scientific knowledge.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) – first in 2013 and now in 2022 – have affirmed the importance of public access to the outputs from federally funded research. It is worth noting that the 2022 memo moves the official OSTP stance more towards an open access posture (e.g., removal of the 12 month embargo period for papers). In accordance with the memorandum, OSTP recommends that federal agencies, to the extent consistent with applicable law:

Update their public access policies as soon as possible, and no later than December 31st, 2025, to make publications and their supporting data resulting from federally funded research publicly accessible without an embargo on their free and public release;
Establish transparent procedures that ensure scientific and research integrity is maintained in public access policies; and,
Coordinate with OSTP to ensure equitable delivery of federally funded research results and data.

Levels of Open Access

The main types or levels of open access (OA) are:

Diamond: Articles published with no fees to neither reader nor author.
Gold: Articles published directly in an OA journal and immediately, openly available via the publisher’s website.
Green: Articles published in traditional journals but then self-archived by the author in a repository or OA archive.
Hybrid: Traditional subscription journals that offer an OA option if authors pay a (typically hefty) publishing fee, known as an article processing charge (APC).
Bronze: Articles published in traditional journals but made freely available at the discretion of the publisher without a formal license, meaning no guarantee of reuse or permanency.

Categories denoting various levels of access and reuse continue to evolve and come in and out of use. Other types you might see include: Libre, Gratis, Delayed, Black.

Where can you publish research?

A preprint is a full draft research paper that is shared publicly before it has been peer reviewed. Most preprints are given a digital object identifier (DOI) so they can be cited in other research papers. Preprints achieve many of the goals of journal publishing, but within a much shorter time frame.

Some publications allow publishing of the finished work for free or at a cost, ideally this cost should be built into the grant from the start. You can publish in several ways:

You can self-archive your articles on your faculty or project website.
You can self-archive your articles or book chapters in UVM ScholarWorks
You can self-archive by submitting your article to a disciplinary repository. Examples of disciplinary repositories include ArXiv, bioRxiv, PubMed Central, Social Science Research Network

Here is a research guide to help you: https://researchguides.uvm.edu/scholarlymetrics/OA

You can also search journals and get an understanding of their costs and policies here https://doaj.org/

Where can you publish code from research?

The most common places to publish code is on platforms like GitHub, or GitLab (UVM has an official GitLab account which you sign into with you netID).

If your code is stored in GitHub, you can archive your repository and get a permanent citable DOI by archiving in either Zenodo or Figshare. These are data repositories that allow management of all kinds of data, and are both free for researchers to use. Zenodo and Figshare can also be used to store research data.

MIT has a great guide here.

A GIT primer is here.

Making your software citable both gains credit for your work, and improves reproducibility of research that relies on the software. There are a variety of ways to make your software citable:

Publishing your software in a software journal provides a citation with a persistent identifier, and provides peer review.
Publishing your software in a major general replication archive provides a citation with a persistent identifier, and usually allows you to publish citable new versions of the software as you choose.
If you publish software in Github, you can create a citable archived version whenever you choose, through Zenodo.
If you publish software in a channel that does not directly support citation, you can include a citation file in the software itself.

Where can you publish data from research?

The UVM Library has some great resource to help publish research data, go here to learn more

UVM Scholarworks

Our institutional repository, UVM ScholarWorks, collects, preserves, and shares the scholarly and creative works of University of Vermont faculty, staff, students, and collaborators.

UVM faculty and students can deposit scholarly work that can be made available free of charge to other scholars through Google Scholar and other sources. This is Green OA and a cost-effective alternative to Hybrid OA article processing charges.

Once deposited, ScholarWorks offers excellent download metrics for authors including date and geographic location of download and (if pertinent) the institution where the article was downloaded. Results can be viewed in map, table, or graph format.

The more places you can be discovered by your peers and the public, the more attention your research is likely to get. UVM’s Meredith Niles conducted a study that analyzed how the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is currently used in review, promotion, and tenure at institutions in North America and recently published her findings on the open-source site eLife. Niles concluded that 40 percent of research-intensive institutions and 18 percent of master’s institutions in North America explicitly mention the “impact factor” or very closely related terms in their reappointment promotion tenure documents. And of those 40 percent that mention the “impact factor” of the journal, 63 percent of them specifically associate that metric with quality.

Talks about Open Science

Places to Find Research

Links

Center for Open Science COS https://www.cos.io/ – Our mission is to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research. These are core values of scholarship and practicing them is presumed to increase the efficiency of acquiring knowledge. For COS to achieve our mission, we must drive change in the culture and incentives that drive researchers’ behavior, the infrastructure that supports their research, and the business models that dominate scholarly communication. This culture change requires simultaneous movement by funders, institutions, researchers, and service providers across national and disciplinary boundaries. Despite this, the vision is achievable because openness, integrity, and reproducibility are shared values, the technological capacity is available, and alternative sustainable business models exist. COS’s philosophy and motivation is summarized in its strategic plan and in scholarly articles outlining a vision of scientific utopia for research communication and research practices.
Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) https://sfdora.org/ – The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) recognizes the need to improve the ways in which researchers and the outputs of scholarly research are evaluated. The idea to write the declaration was developed in 2012 during at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco. It has become a worldwide initiative covering all scholarly disciplines and all key stakeholders including funders, publishers, professional societies, institutions, and researchers. We encourage all individuals and organizations who are interested in developing and promoting best practice in the assessment of researchers and scholarly research to sign DORA.
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) https://sparcopen.org/ – SPARC is a non-profit advocacy organization that supports systems for research and education that are open by default and equitable by design. We believe everyone should be able to access and contribute to the knowledge that shapes our world. As a catalyst for action, our pragmatic agenda focuses on driving policy change, supporting member action, and cultivating communities that advance our vision of knowledge as a public good. From the local to the global level, SPARC works to address the ways in which our knowledge systems exclude people due to racism, colonialism, and other legacies of injustice.
Open Access Directory (OAD) http://oad.simmons.edu/ – The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD makes it easier for everyone to discover them, use them for reference, and update them. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about OA. To see what we have, browse the table of contents below, browse the table of categories, or use the search box in near the upper right corner. To help the cause, just register and start editing. If you have any questions, see our FAQs or drop us a line. OAD is a wiki and we count on our users to keep these lists accurate, comprehensive, and up to date. Our goal is for the OA community itself to maintain the lists with little intervention from the editors or editorial board. We welcome your contributions to the lists, ideas for new lists, and comments to help us improve. Please contact us or use the discussion tabs on individual pages. The OAD is hosted by the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University and supervised by an independent editorial board.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) https://doaj.org/ – DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. Today, this independent index contains almost 17 500 peer-reviewed, open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. Open access journals from all countries and in all languages are accepted for indexing. DOAJ is financially supported by many libraries, publishers and other like-minded organisations. Supporting DOAJ demonstrates a firm commitment to open access and the infrastructure that supports it. DOAJ is a co-author to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing that provide the basis of the DOAJ basic criteria for inclusion.
Frontiers https://www.frontiersin.org/ Frontiers is the 3rd most-cited and 6th largest research publisher and open science platform. Our research journals are community-driven and peer-reviewed by editorial boards of over 202,000 top researchers. Featuring pioneering technology, artificial intelligence, and rigorous quality standards, our research articles have been viewed more than 1.9 billion times, reflecting the power of open research.
Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/ – Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.
Sherpa Romeo https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ – Sherpa Romeo is an online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis