Monitoring the West Nile virus outbreaks in Italy using open access data
Marco Mingione, Francesco Branda, Antonello Maruotti, Massimo Ciccozzi, Sandra Mazzoli
This paper introduces a comprehensive dataset on West Nile virus outbreaks that have occurred in Italy from September 2012 to November 2022. We have digitized bulletins published by the Italian National Institute of Health to demonstrate the potential utilization of this data for the research community. Our aim is to establish a centralized open access repository that facilitates analysis and monitoring of the disease. We have collected and curated data on the type of infected host, along with additional information whenever available, including the type of infection, age, and geographic details at different levels of spatial aggregation. By combining our data with other sources of information such as weather data, it becomes possible to assess potential relationships between West Nile virus outbreaks and environmental factors. We strongly believe in supporting public oversight of government epidemic management, and we emphasize that open data play a crucial role in generating reliable results by enabling greater transparency.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2023
- Research Article
Yale Open Data Access Project Reaches Milestone in Helping to Maximize the Use of Clinical Trial Data for Research
Christina Frank
The Yale Open Data Access (YODA) Project, a pioneering initiative to promote open science and facilitate sharing of clinical trial research data, has reached the milestone of supporting more than 100 publications. These research studies, which stretch across many medical fields, were only possible because of data shared through the YODA Project platform. Over the past decade, many research funders have started sharing data, including large pharmaceutical companies and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and these open science-enabled manuscripts demonstrate the value of this new era of clinical science.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2023
- Other
A large public dataset of annotated clinical MRIs and metadata of patients with acute stroke
Chin-Fu Liu, Richard Leigh, Brenda Johnson, Victor Urrutia, Johnny Hsu, Xin Xu, Xin Li, Susumu Mori, Argye E. Hillis, Andreia V. Faria
To extract meaningful and reproducible models of brain function from stroke images, for both clinical and research proposes, is a daunting task severely hindered by the great variability of lesion frequency and patterns. Large datasets are therefore imperative, as well as fully automated image post-processing tools to analyze them. The development of such tools, particularly with artificial intelligence, is highly dependent on the availability of large datasets to model training and testing. We present a public dataset of 2,888 multimodal clinical MRIs of patients with acute and early subacute stroke, with manual lesion segmentation, and metadata. The dataset provides high quality, large scale, human-supervised knowledge to feed artificial intelligence models and enable further development of tools to automate several tasks that currently rely on human labor, such as lesion segmentation, labeling, calculation of disease-relevant scores, and lesion-based studies relating function to frequency lesion maps.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2023
- Research Article
Marine scientists explore the future of open data science
Erin Malsbury
Around the world, there’s an increased interest in making research results more accessible to the public. The Biden-Harris administration, NASA, NOAA and several other US Government agencies declared 2023 the Year of Open Science. Alexa Fredston, an assistant professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Julia Stewart Lowndes, a marine data scientist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis of the University of California, Santa Barbara, both consider open science to be a vital part of their academic careers and a key way to make the field of marine science more transparent and inclusive. They recently published an article in the journal Annual Review of Marine Science about improving open data science practices within marine science.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2023
- Interview/Profile
Researchers Team Up to Build Open Geoscience Community through $1.6 Million National Science Foundation Project
Brian Rose believes there is a fundamental need for a more open approach to sharing both data and knowledge within the geosciences. Through a new three-year, $1.6 million multi-institutional project supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Rose, an associate professor in the University at Albany’s Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, along with research collaborators at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and 2i2c, plan to fill that need through the growth of an online, community resource. The funding supports phase two of “Project Pythia,” a collaborative effort to collect high-quality interactive learning tools for Python-based data analysis and visualization in the geosciences, all hosted on a freely available website. With new support, the research team aims to make Project Pythia a “go-to” educational resource for the geoscience community, helping tackle significant technical barriers around data access and analysis.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2023
- Other
Initial Evidence of Research Quality of Registered Reports Compared to the Traditional Publishing Model
Courtney K. Soderberg, Timothy M. Errington, Sarah R. Schiavone, Julia G. Bottesini, Felix Singleton Thorn, Simine Vazire, Kevin M Esterling, Brian A. Nosek
In Registered Reports (RRs), initial peer review and in-principle acceptance occurs before knowing the research outcomes. This combats publication bias and distinguishes planned and unplanned research. How RRs could improve the credibility of research findings is straightforward, but there is little empirical evidence. Also, there could be unintended costs such as reducing novelty. 353 researchers peer reviewed a pair of papers from 29 published RRs from psychology and neuroscience and 57 non-RR comparison papers. RRs outperformed comparison papers on all 19 criteria (mean difference=0.46; Scale range -4 to +4) with effects ranging from little improvement in novelty (0.13, 95% credible interval [-0.24, 0.49]) and creativity (0.22, [-0.14, 0.58]) to larger improvements in rigor of methodology (0.99, [0.62, 1.35]) and analysis (0.97, [0.60, 1.34]) and overall paper quality (0.66, [0.30, 1.02]). RRs could improve research quality while reducing publication bias and ultimately improve the credibility of the published literature.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2021
- Preprint
Fifteen years of Open Data Allows Advancements in Landsat Use and Research
Landsat Missions
On this day in 2008, the USGS announced their plan to ‘open’ the USGS EROS Landsat archives, making all Landsat data available to download at no charge, to all users worldwide. Fifteen years later, in the “Year of Open Science”, Landsat continues to lead how Earth Observation data is utilized, and how Landsat data is used to support science and research efforts.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2023
- Case Study
5 Ways Open Science is Transforming NASA Research and Protecting Our Planet
Amanda Moon Adams
In celebration of Earth Day, it’s important to recognize the role of open science in protecting our planet and advancing NASA’s research efforts. Through initiatives like NASA’s Transform to Open Science (TOPS), researchers can collaborate and share data, promoting transparency and scientific integrity. By sharing research findings and data publicly, NASA is enabling scientists and the public to develop new insights, tools, and strategies for protecting the environment. As we continue to face pressing environmental challenges, it is important to prioritize open science and work towards a more collaborative and inclusive approach to science for the benefit of all. Open science principles are being leveraged in a variety of NASA programs, including NeMO-Net, Landsat, and the SERVIR program, which are using artificial intelligence, satellite imagery, and machine learning to better understand and protect our planet’s ecosystems.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2023
- Other
Optimal design of water reuse networks in cities through decision support tool development and testing
Eusebi Calle, David Martínez, Gianluigi Buttiglieri, Lluís Corominas, Miquel Farreras, Joan Saló-Grau, Pere Vilà, Josep Pueyo-Ros, Joaquim Comas
Water scarcity and droughts are an increasing issue in many parts of the world. In the context of urban water systems, the transition to circularity may imply wastewater treatment and reuse. Planning and assessment of water reuse projects require decision-makers evaluating the cost and benefits of alternative scenarios. Manual or semi-automatic approaches are still common practice for planning both drinking and reclaimed water distribution networks. This work illustrates a decision support tool that, based on open data sources and graph theory coupled to greedy optimization algorithms, is able to automatically compute the optimal reclaimed water network for a given scenario. The tool provides not only the maximum amount of served reclaimed water per unit of invested cost, but also the length and diameters of the pipes required, the location and size of storage tanks, the population served, and the construction costs, i.e., everything under the same architecture.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2023
- Research Article
The IPDGC/GP2 Hackathon – an open science event for training in data science, genomics, and collaboration using Parkinson’s disease data
Hampton L. Leonard, Ruqaya Murtadha, Alejandro Martinez-Carrasco, et al.
Open science and collaboration are necessary to facilitate the advancement of Parkinson’s disease (PD) research. Hackathons are collaborative events that bring together people with different skill sets and backgrounds to generate resources and creative solutions to problems. These events can be used as training and networking opportunities, thus we coordinated a virtual 3-day hackathon event, during which 49 early-career scientists from 12 countries built tools and pipelines with a focus on PD. Resources were created with the goal of helping scientists accelerate their own research by having access to the necessary code and tools. Each team was allocated one of nine different projects, each with a different goal. These included developing post-genome-wide association studies (GWAS) analysis pipelines, downstream analysis of genetic variation pipelines, and various visualization tools. Hackathons are a valuable approach to inspire creative thinking, supplement training in data science, and foster collaborative scientific relationships, which are foundational practices for early-career researchers. The resources generated can be used to accelerate research on the genetics of PD.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2023
- Other
DataWorks! Prize Winners Announced
The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are championing a bold vision of data sharing and reuse. The DataWorks! Prize fuels this vision with an annual challenge that showcases the benefits of research data management while recognizing and rewarding teams whose research demonstrates the power of data sharing or reuse practices to advance scientific discovery and human health. 106 teams registered for the challenge to demonstrate their accomplishments. The 537 team members came from a wide variety of disciplines, including biochemistry, clinical research, genomics, immunology, molecular biology, neuroscience, and more. Prize winners may be found here.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2023
- Other
Heard on Campus: Combining machine learning and satellite images
Sam Sholtis
On Saturday, Feb. 4, Tamma Carleton, assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, presented the third lecture in the 29th Ashtekar Frontiers of Science lecture series. This year’s lecture series focuses on how researchers are using and sharing “big data” to address longstanding scientific questions and make important societal contributions. The series is titled “Exploring Open Science and Big Data.” In her talk, titled “Combining Satellite Imagery with Machine Learning to Address Global Challenges,” Carleton discussed how the combination of satellite imagery and machine learning has begun to transform our ability to map, monitor, and influence many global challenges, ranging from deforestation to poverty eradication to illicit activity. This emerging research area is data intensive and computationally demanding, making participation difficult for many researchers, governments, and nongovernmental organizations.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2023
- Popular Press
An open database on global coal and metal mine production
Simon Jasansky, Mirko Lieber, Stefan Giljum, Victor Maus
While the extraction of natural resources has been well documented and analysed at the national level, production trends at the level of individual mines are more difficult to uncover, mainly due to poor availability of mining data with sub-national detail. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by presenting an open database on global coal and metal mine production on the level of individual mines. It is based on manually gathered information from more than 1900 freely available reports of mining companies, where every data point is linked to its source document, ensuring full transparency. The database covers 1171 individual mines and reports mine-level production for 80 different materials in the period 2000–2021. Furthermore, also data on mining coordinates, ownership, mineral reserves, mining waste, transportation of mining products, as well as mineral processing capacities (smelters and mineral refineries) and production is included.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2023
- Research Article
Empowering Open Science With The NASA Science Discovery Engine (SDE)
Keith Cowing
In 2018, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) declared a long-term commitment to championing open science through their Strategy for Data Management and Computing, 2019 – 2024. The Open Source Science Initiative (OSSI) emerged from this strategic plan. One major recommendation from the scientific community was for the SMD to develop a capability to “support discovery and access to complex scientific data across [SMD] Divisions” that enables open science. Three years and close to 1,000,000 documents, datasets, and tools later, the Science Discovery Engine (SDE) has fulfilled this goal and is ready for launch.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2023
- Popular Press
The Linux Foundation announces the formation of the Overture Maps Foundation
Matt Collins
The development of accurate maps has always been crucial to our society, but it’s something that has regained its place in the public consciousness in recent years, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic in which accurate maps played, and continue to play, a big role in minimizing spread, as well as the emerging autonomous vehicle market. That said, it can be difficult to pull together data needed for maximally valuable mapping projects. To address this, the Linux Foundation announced in December the formation of the new Overture Maps Foundation, a “new collaborative effort to develop interoperable open map data as a shared asset that can strengthen mapping services worldwide.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2023
- Popular Press
GWAS Explorer: an open-source tool to explore, visualize, and access GWAS summary statistics in the PLCO Atlas
Mitchell J. Machiela et al.
The Prostate, Lung, Colorectal and Ovarian (PLCO) Cancer Screening Trial is a prospective cohort study of nearly 155,000 U.S. volunteers aged 55–74 at enrollment in 1993–2001. The PLCO Atlas Project is a large open source resource for multi-trait genome-wide association studies (GWAS), by genotyping participants with available DNA and genomic consent.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2023
- Research Article
Spurring Ocean Research with Open Data
Robin Donovan
Many regional and global databases hold ocean data, some of which are available to the public. Unfortunately, because data types are many and formatting standards do not always exist, even when data are openly available, not every researcher has the time, skill, or know-how to access them. HUB Ocean, a nonprofit in Norway, hopes to ease those barriers. They plan to work with data curators to help them structure their databases in the cloud. Meanwhile, the nonprofit’s scientists are compiling open data from around the world, partnering with businesses and scientists to create a freely available and, hopefully, easier-to-use repository, the Ocean Data Platform.
In an ancient reindeer forest, one woman has found a way to slow climate change
Shira Rubin
Pauliina Feodoroff is allying with conservationists and institutions to raise awareness about deforestation in Finjish reindeer habitats, and is pushing to redefine these forests as falling under international jurisdiction, rather than national. She and her partners used open data from deforestation projections, as well as publicly available satellite images from NASA, the Sentinel space telescope and GPS-linked reindeer tracking collars, to start mapping to thwart deforestation. This data cartography activism later served as the basis for co-published reports with researchers at NASA, studies of Arctic ice loss in the Smithsonian and interactive atlases with the Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Center.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2022
- Popular Press
A new model for innovation? How Elizabeth and Aled Edwards are driving an open science revolution
Rahul Kalvapalle
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, scientists, corporations and governments around the world scrambled to share research data and ideas to advance the understanding of the disease and produce life-saving vaccines and therapies in record time. For many, it was a crash course in “open science” – the practice of freely sharing research information and, often, eschewing intellectual property protections on early-stage inventions for the sake of accelerating discovery. But for the University of Toronto’s Elizabeth and Aled Edwards, it was little more than a well-publicized example of an approach for which they’ve long been advocates (and an example Aled argued should have been extended by making access to COVID-19 vaccines more equitable globally). Over the course of their careers, the two researchers – who are married – have attracted numerous industry partners to open science initiatives in medicine (Aled) and engineering (Elizabeth), helping establish U of T as a hotbed of what could be described as a new model of innovation.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2022
- Popular Press
The New Open: A mind lab for open data design and social change
The New Open is a flagship project of the Department of Architecture at TU Delft, initiated and led by Georg Vrachliotis and the Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture Group to explore the role of open data for design and social change. We aim to address today’s and tomorrow’s most pressing concerns, from sustainable building materials and better design, to data literacy and data democracy, to curating the cohesive fabric of highly functioning, ecologically savvy, smart societies.
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- Arts & Humanities
- 2022
- Other
Open Access Research Outputs Receive More Diverse Citations
Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang, Cameron Neylon, Lucy Montgomery, Richard Hosking,James P. Diprose, Rebecca N. Handcock,Katie Wilson
By analysing large-scale bibliographic data from 2010 to 2019, we found a robust association between open access and increased diversity of citation sources by institutions, countries, subregions, regions, and fields of research, across outputs with both high and medium-low citation counts. Open access through disciplinary or institutional repositories showed a stronger effect than open access via publisher platforms. This study adds a new perspective to our understanding of how citations can be used to explore the effects of open access. It also provides new evidence at global scale of the benefits of open access as a mechanism for widening the use of research and increasing the diversity of the communities that benefit from it.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2022
- Research Article
neuromaps: structural and functional interpretation of brain maps
Ross D. Markello, Justine Y. Hansen, Zhen-Qi Liu, Vincent Bazinet, Golia Shafiei, Laura E. Suárez, Nadia Blostein, Jakob Seidlitz, Sylvain Baillet, Theodore D. Satterthwaite, M. Mallar Chakravarty, Armin Raznahan, Bratislav Misic
A team from The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) of McGill University has brought together more than forty existing brain maps in one place. The database, called neuromaps, will help scientists find correlations between patterns across different brain regions, spatial scales, modalities and brain functions. It provides a standardized space to view each map in comparison to each other, and assesses the statistical significance of these comparisons, to help researchers distinguish a meaningful correlation from a random pattern. The neuromaps database also helps standardize the code across maps, to improve reproducibility of results. The team has also made their data open access on github.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2022
- Research Article
FathomNet: A global image database for enabling artificial intelligence in the ocean
Kakani Katija, Eric Orenstein, Brian Schlining, Lonny Lundsten, Kevin Barnard, Giovanna Sainz, Oceane Boulais, Megan Cromwell, Erin Butler, Benjamin Woodward, Katherine L. C. Bell
The ocean is experiencing unprecedented rapid change, and visually monitoring marine biota at the spatiotemporal scales needed for responsible stewardship is a formidable task. As baselines are sought by the research community, the volume and rate of this required data collection rapidly outpaces our abilities to process and analyze them. Recent advances in machine learning enables fast, sophisticated analysis of visual data, but have had limited success in the ocean due to lack of data standardization, insufficient formatting, and demand for large, labeled datasets. To address this need, we built FathomNet, an open-source image database that standardizes and aggregates expertly curated labeled data. FathomNet has been seeded with existing iconic and non-iconic imagery of marine animals, underwater equipment, debris, and other concepts, and allows for future contributions from distributed data sources. We demonstrate how FathomNet data can be used to train and deploy models on other institutional video to reduce annotation effort, and enable automated tracking of underwater concepts when integrated with robotic vehicles. As FathomNet continues to grow and incorporate more labeled data from the community, we can accelerate the processing of visual data to achieve a healthy and sustainable global ocean.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2022
- Research Article
An Open MRI Dataset For Multiscale Neuroscience
Jessica Royer, Raúl Rodríguez-Cruces, Shahin Tavakol, Sara Larivière, Peer Herholz, Qiongling Li, Reinder Vos de Wael, Casey Paquola, Oualid Benkarim, Bo-yong Park, Alexander J. Lowe, Daniel Margulies, Jonathan Smallwood, Andrea Bernasconi, Neda Bernasconi, Birgit Frauscher, Boris C. Bernhardt
Multimodal neuroimaging grants a powerful window into the structure and function of the human brain at multiple scales. Recent methodological and conceptual advances have enabled investigations of the interplay between large-scale spatial trends (also referred to as gradients) in brain microstructure and connectivity, offering an integrative framework to study multiscale brain organization. Here, we share a multimodal MRI dataset for Microstructure-Informed Connectomics (MICA-MICs) acquired in 50 healthy adults (23 women; 29.54 ± 5.62 years) who underwent high-resolution T1-weighted MRI, myelin-sensitive quantitative T1 relaxometry, diffusion-weighted MRI, and resting-state functional MRI at 3 Tesla. In addition to raw anonymized MRI data, this release includes brain-wide connectomes derived from (i) resting-state functional imaging, (ii) diffusion tractography, (iii) microstructure covariance analysis, and (iv) geodesic cortical distance, gathered across multiple parcellation scales. Alongside, we share large-scale gradients estimated from each modality and parcellation scale. Our dataset will facilitate future research examining the coupling between brain microstructure, connectivity, and function. MICA-MICs is available on the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform data portal (https://portal.conp.ca) and the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/j532r/).
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2022
- Research Article
Real-world behavioral dataset from two fully remote smartphone-based randomized clinical trials for depression
Abhishek Pratap, Ava Homiar, Luke Waninger, Calvin Herd, Christine Suver, Joshua Volponi, Joaquin A. Anguera, Pat Areán
Most people with mental health disorders cannot receive timely and evidence-based care despite billions of dollars spent by healthcare systems. Researchers have been exploring using digital health technologies to measure behavior in real-world settings with mixed results. There is a need to create accessible and computable digital mental health datasets to advance inclusive and transparently validated research for creating robust real-world digital biomarkers of mental health. Here we share and describe one of the largest and most diverse real-world behavior datasets from over two thousand individuals across the US. The data were generated as part of the two NIMH-funded randomized clinical trials conducted to assess the effectiveness of delivering mental health care continuously remotely. The longitudinal dataset consists of self-assessment of mood, depression, anxiety, and passively gathered phone-based behavioral data streams in real-world settings. This dataset will provide a timely and long-term data resource to evaluate analytical approaches for developing digital behavioral markers and understand the effectiveness of mental health care delivered continuously and remotely.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2022
- Research Article
MIT Scientists Release Open-Source Photorealistic Simulator for Autonomous Driving
Rachel Gordon
Since they’ve proven to be productive test beds for safely trying out dangerous driving scenarios, hyper-realistic virtual worlds have been heralded as the best driving schools for autonomous vehicles (AVs). Tesla, Waymo, and other self-driving companies all rely heavily on data to enable expensive and proprietary photorealistic simulators, because testing and gathering nuanced I-almost-crashed data usually isn’t the easiest or most desirable to recreate. With this in mind, scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) created “VISTA 2.0,” a data-driven simulation engine where vehicles can learn to drive in the real world and recover from near-crash scenarios. What’s more, all of the code is being released open-source to the public.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2021
- Popular Press
Alexa and Siri, listen up! UVA collab is teaching machines to really hear us
Using recent breakthroughs in neuroscience as a model, UVA collaborative research has made it possible to convert existing AI neural networks into technology that can truly hear us, no matter at what pace we speak. The deep learning tool is called SITHCon, and by generalizing input, it can understand words spoken at different speeds than a network was trained on. “We’re going to publish and release all the code because we believe in open science,” University of Virginia cognitive scientist Per Sederberg said. “The hope is that companies will see this, get really excited and say they would like to fund our continuing work. We’ve tapped into a fundamental way the brain processes information, combining power and efficiency, and we’ve only scratched the surface of what these AI models can do.”
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2022
- Other
Data Sharing Initiative Could Improve Our Understanding and Help To Reduce Antimicrobial Resistance
Karen Steward
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a looming global threat, spurred on by years of widespread use and misuse of antibiotics, which has driven the evolution of hard-to-treat so-called “superbugs”. To develop better ways of using and managing the antimicrobials we have and to direct areas for the development of new therapeutics, scientists and analysts are looking for ways to improve our understanding of this gargantuan problem. But with the problem so widespread, many aspects to consider and many parties involved, effective data sharing is a real challenge. One organization aiming to help is the Vivli Center for Global Clinical Research Data, an independent, non-profit organization, acting as a neutral intermediary between data contributors, data users and the wider data sharing community. Their global data-sharing and analytics platform can be applied to a plethora of datasets in medicine, research and most recently AMR.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2022
- Interview/Profile
Open science and public trust in science: Results from two studies
Tom Rosman, Michael Bosnjak, Henning Silber, Joanna Koßmann,Tobias Heycke
In two studies, we examined whether open science practices, such as making materials, data, and code of a study openly accessible, positively affect public trust in science. Furthermore, we investigated whether the potential trust-damaging effects of research being funded privately (e.g. by a commercial enterprise) may be buffered by such practices. After preregistering six hypotheses, we conducted a survey study (Study 1; N = 504) and an experimental study (Study 2; N = 588) in two German general population samples. In both studies, we found evidence for the positive effects of open science practices on trust, though it should be noted that in Study 2, results were more inconsistent.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2022
- Research Article
The Role of Data in an Emerging Research Community: Environmental Health Research as an Exemplar
Danielle Pollock, An Yan, Michelle Parker, Suzie Allard
Open science data benefit society by facilitating convergence across domains that are examining the same scientific problem. While cross-disciplinary data sharing and reuse is essential to the research done by convergent communities, so far little is known about the role data play in how these communities interact. An understanding of the role of data in these collaborations can help us identify and meet the needs of emerging research communities which may predict the next challenges faced by science. This paper represents an exploratory study of one emerging community, the environmental health community, examining how environmental health research groups form, collaborate, and share data. Five key insights about the role of data in emerging research communities are identified and suggestions are made for further research.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2022
- Research Article
Investigating the citation advantage of author-pays charges model in computer science research: a case study of Elsevier and Springer
Tehmina Amjad, Mehwish Sabir, Azra Shamim, Masooma Amjad, Ali Daud
This study aims to compare the citation advantage of open access and toll access articles from four subfields of computer science. The results of the study highlight that open access articles have a higher citation advantage as compared to toll access articles across years and sub-domains.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2022
- Research Article
Who Uses Open Access Research? Evidence from the use of US National Academies Reports
Ameet Doshi, Diana Hicks, Matteo Zullo, Omar I. Asensio
A fundamental principle of open access is that publication technology enables the widest possible audience for research findings. However, the extent to which open research is used outside of academia is often underexplored. Drawing on a dataset covering over a million user comments about their use of US National Academies consensus study reports, this analysis suggests that taxpayer investments in open access to high-quality science do indeed pay dividends to society, broadly and at the local service level. The results also indicate a public motivated to improve their engagement with patients, students, clients, and fellow citizens, and seek out (and share) the best available evidence to solve problems at the coalface.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2022
- Other
The potential butterfly effect of preregistered peer-reviewed research
Privately depositing a study design with a repository helps researchers stay accountable to themselves, reducing the risk of behaviors like p-hacking, selective publication, or suppressing negative and null research outcomes. Researchers who choose to make their study designs public from the time of deposition help to avoid unnecessary repeated studies, unintentional complementary research, and scooping, freeing up their fellow researchers to pursue different lines of inquiry and improving efficiency in the field. When private repository study designs become public upon publication of a research article, their existence serves to bolster the final work, demonstrating integrity on the part of the authors, and supporting trust among readers. Finally, retaining a permanent methodological record documenting the data collection and analysis as it was actually planned and performed ensures future reproducibility as almost nothing else can.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2022
- Other
Bloomberg’s Role in Open Source Projects OpenStack and Ceph
Starr Campbell
For the last forty years, Bloomberg has solidified itself not only as a financial media company, but also an information and technology goliath that has grown to almost 20,000 global employees. In more recent years, Bloomberg has been an enthusiastic contributor to open source projects like OpenStack and Solr. “When we think about Open Source,” said Alyssa Wright from Bloomberg’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO), “it’s a fundamental and critical piece to almost everything we do in our digital infrastructure. The product innovation, processes and collaboration, as well as how we sustain our technology development and support our developers — both professionally and in our ecosystem.”
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2022
- Case Study
The Power of Ten: Meet the 10 Winners of NASA’s 10th Annual Space Apps Challenge
2021 marked the tenth annual NASA International Space Apps Challenge, an international competition and hackathon for coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, technologists, and others in cities around the world, where teams engage the NASA’s free and open data to address real-world problems on Earth and in space.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2022
- Other
An innovative approach in monitoring oral cholera vaccination campaign: integration of a between-round survey
Jerôme Ateudjieu, Martin Ndinakie Yakum, André Pascal Goura, Maureen Tembei Ayok, Etienne Guenou, Corine Blondo Kangmo Sielinou, Frank Forex Kiadjieu, Marcellin Tsafack, Ingrid Marcelle Douanla Koutio, Ketina Hirma Tchio-Nighie, Hervé Tchokomeni, Paul Nyibio Ntsekendio, David A. Sack
An oral cholera vaccination campaign was organized in a health district of the Far North region of Cameroon and involved an innovative Monitoring and Evaluation approach. The aim of this project was to assess the feasibility and effect of using recommendations of a community-based immunization and communication coverage survey conducted after the first round of an OCV campaign on the coverage of the second-round of the campaign. Data were collected using Open Data Kit (ODK) forms in Smartphone, by eight teams of three surveyors, reviewed, validated and submitted online daily by the supervisor of each team.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2022
- Research Article
Canadian Brain Institute Opens Data Sharing on Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, More
Maxine Bookbinder
After a decade of methodical preparation, Canada’s Ontario Brain Institute‘s (OBI) neuroinformatics platform, Brain-CODE, launched its open data sharing feature for global brain disorder research. Brain-CODE, the data side of OBI, is a neuro-informatics platform designed to support data capture, sharing, storage, analysis, and release. It enables external researchers locally and globally to collaborate and build on OBI researchers’ existing data, explore causes of brain disorders, and find new therapies.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2022
- Popular Press
G6 Statement on Open Science
The growing momentum for Open Science is in line with our mission to foster research excellence and to accelerate the advancement of science. Open Science principles and approaches were developed from within the scientific community itself, out of genuine self-interest and to further develop key scientific principles – the transparency of research practises, reproducibility of results, and the sharing of knowledge. By opening up publications, data, processes, codes, methods and protocols, it also offers new ways for scientific practices.
The G6 network unites six large multidisciplinary Research Performing Organisations located in Europe, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, the Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft Deutscher Forschungszentren, the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft and the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. The G6 are committed to excellence in research and Open Science is definitely a good approach to foster excellent research. G6 institutions actively support the transition to Open Science. This transition requires a concerted effort to reform cultural and technological practices.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2021
- Other
NOAA Board Charts Weather Research Priorities for Next Decade
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Science Advisory Board has proposed 33 weather research priorities for the agency to address in the coming decade, which include increasing its computing power 100-fold and better understanding how social factors affect forecast dissemination and use. The report calls on NOAA as a whole to “embrace open science,” including, among other means, by creating “disaster-proof, operationally (24/7/365) supported, scalable data access portals,” and by funding a new consortium that would seek to “normalize open science” for the next generation of weather scientists.
See Resource
- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2021
- Popular Press
Why we are developing a patent-free COVID antiviral therapy
Alpha Lee, John Chodera, Frank von Delft
We believe there is a better, more equitable way of combating Covid-19 and any future pandemics: open science. Open science operates under the principle that any scientific result should be shared immediately, without restrictions on its use. Some say open science won’t work for drug development, because it removes the financial incentives: Without the promise of patent protections, they believe, no one will assume the costs and risks to discover and develop new drugs. We disagree. In March 2020, we started COVID Moonshot, which we believe is the first open-science effort to develop an antiviral drug. Now we are close to bringing an oral antiviral that’s effective against SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) to the clinic, with no patent protection. As soon as the drug is approved, any drug manufacturer around the world can manufacture and sell it without needing to license it, thus driving prices down.
See Resource
- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2021
- Perspective/Op-Ed
The Economic Impact of Open Data: Opportunities for value creation in Europe
Esther Huyer Email, Laura van Knippenberg
This report researches the value created by open data in Europe. The open data market size is estimated at €184 billion and forecast to reach between €199.51 and €334.21 billion in 2025. The report additionally considers how this market size is distributed along different sectors and how many people are employed due to open data. The efficiency gains from open data, such as potential lives saved, time saved, environmental benefits, and improvement of language services, as well as associated potential costs savings are explored and quantified where possible. Finally, the report also considers examples and insights from open data re-use in organizations.
See Resource
- Interdisciplinary
- 2020
- Report
Subscribe to Open: A practical approach for converting subscription journals to open access
Raym Crow, Richard Gallagher, Kamran Naim
OA business models must be sustainable over the long term, and article processing charge payments do not work for all; Subscribe to Open (S2O) is proposed, and being tested, as an alternative model. The S2O model motivates subscribers to participate through economic self-interest, without reliance on institutional altruism or collective behaviour.The S2O offer targets current subscribers, uses existing subscription systems, and recurs annually, allowing publishers to control risk and revert to conventional subscriptions if necessary. An Annual Reviews pilot is currently testing the S2O model with five journals.
See Resource
- Interdisciplinary
- 2019
- Research Article
An open-access database and analysis tool for perovskite solar cells based on the FAIR data principles
Jacobsson, T.J., Hultqvist, A., García-Fernández, A. et al.
Large datasets are now ubiquitous as technology enables higher-throughput experiments, but rarely can a research field truly benefit from the research data generated due to inconsistent formatting, undocumented storage or improper dissemination. Here we extract all the meaningful device data from peer-reviewed papers on metal-halide perovskite solar cells published so far and make them available in a database. We collect data from over 42,400 photovoltaic devices with up to 100 parameters per device. We then develop open-source and accessible procedures to analyse the data, providing examples of insights that can be gleaned from the analysis of a large dataset. The database, graphics and analysis tools are made available to the community and will continue to evolve as an open-source initiative. This approach of extensively capturing the progress of an entire field, including sorting, interactive exploration and graphical representation of the data, will be applicable to many fields in materials science, engineering and biosciences.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2021
- Research Article
More readers in more places: the benefits of open access for scholarly books
Cameron Neylon, Alkim Ozaygen, Lucy Montgomery, Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang, Ros Pyne, Mithu Lucraft, Christina Emery
Open access to scholarly contents has grown substantially in recent years. This includes the number of books published open access online. However, there is limited study on how usage patterns (via downloads, citations and web visibility) of these books may differ from their closed counterparts. Such information is not only important for book publishers, but also for researchers in disciplines where books are the norm. This article reports on findings from comparing samples of books published by Springer Nature to shed light on differences in usage patterns across open access and closed books. The study includes a selection of 281 open access books and a sample of 3,653 closed books (drawn from 21,059 closed books using stratified random sampling). The books are stratified by combinations of book type, discipline and year of publication to enable likewise comparisons within each stratum and to maximize statistical power of the sample. The results show higher geographic diversity of usage, higher numbers of downloads and more citations for open access books across all strata. Importantly, open access books have increased access and usage for traditionally underserved populations.
See Resource
- Interdisciplinary
- 2021
- Research Article
All the research that’s fit to print: Open access and the news media
Teresa Schultz
The goal of the open access (OA) movement is to help everyone access scholarly research, not just those who can afford to. However, most studies looking at whether OA has met this goal have focused on whether other scholars are making use of OA research. Few have considered how the broader public, including the news media, uses OA research. I sought to answer whether the news media mentions OA articles more or less than paywalled articles by looking at articles published from 2010 through 2018 in journals across all four quartiles of the Journal Impact Factor using data obtained through Altmetric.com and Web of Science. Gold, green and hybrid OA articles all had a positive correlation with the number of news mentions received. News mentions for OA articles did see a dip in 2018, although they remained higher than those for paywalled articles.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2021
- Research Article
An overview of the National COVID-19 Chest Imaging Database: data quality and cohort analysis
Dominic Cushnan, Oscar Bennett, Rosalind Berka, Ottavia Bertolli, Ashwin Chopra, Samie Dorgham, Alberto Favaro, Tara Ganepola, Mark Halling-Brown, Gergely Imreh, Joseph Jacob, Emily Jefferson, François Lemarchand, Daniel Schofield, Jeremy C Wyatt, NCCID Collaborative
The NCCID is a growing, open resource that provides researchers with a large, high-quality database that can be leveraged both to support the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and as a test bed for building clinically viable medical imaging models.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2021
- Research Article
The past, present and future of Registered Reports
Christopher Chambers, Loukia Tzavella
Registered Reports are a form of empirical publication in which study proposals are peer reviewed and pre-accepted before research is undertaken. By deciding which articles are published based on the question, theory and methods, Registered Reports offer a remedy for a range of reporting and publication biases. Here, we reflect on the history, progress and future prospects of the Registered Reports initiative and offer practical guidance for authors, reviewers and editors. Are Registered Reports working as intended to reduce bias and improve reliability? Although the initiative is too young to answer this question with confidence, metascientific investigations are beginning to reveal signs of bias control, study quality, computational reproducibility and citation influence.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2021
- Review Article
Open-Source Science: The NASA Earth Science Perspective
Kevin Murphy
A system based on open science aims to make the scientific process as transparent (or open) as possible by making all elements of a claimed discovery readily accessible, which enables results to be repeated and validated. Open-source science is a foundational objective of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) and SMD’s Earth Science Data Systems (ESDS) Program. Along with the wide dissemination and use of openly available Earth-observing data, the SMD promotes and facilitates the full and open sharing of all metadata (information that describes data), documentation, models, images, and research results achieved using these data and makes available the source code used to generate, manipulate, and analyze the data. The SMD and ESDS vision is to use open-source science principles to expand participation in the scientific process, improve reproducibility, and accelerate scientific discovery
See Resource
- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2021
- Perspective/Op-Ed
The Swiss data cube, analysis ready data archive using earth observations of Switzerland
Bruno Chatenoux, Jean-Philippe Richard, David Small, Claudia Roeoesli, Vladimir Wingate, Charlotte Poussin, Denisa Rodila, Pascal Peduzzi, Charlotte Steinmeier, Christian Ginzler, Achileas Psomas, Michael E. Schaepman, Gregory Giuliani
Since the opening of Earth Observation (EO) archives (USGS/NASA Landsat and EC/ESA Sentinels), large collections of EO data are freely available, offering scientists new possibilities to better understand and quantify environmental changes. Fully exploiting these satellite EO data will require new approaches for their acquisition, management, distribution, and analysis. Given rapid environmental changes and the emergence of big data, innovative solutions are needed to support policy frameworks and related actions toward sustainable development. Here we present the Swiss Data Cube (SDC), unleashing the information power of Big Earth Data for monitoring the environment, providing Analysis Ready Data over the geographic extent of Switzerland since 1984, which is updated on a daily basis. Based on a cloud-computing platform allowing to access, visualize and analyse optical (Sentinel-2; Landsat 5, 7, 8) and radar (Sentinel-1) imagery, the SDC minimizes the time and knowledge required for environmental analyses, by offering consistent calibrated and spatially co-registered satellite observations. SDC derived analysis ready data supports generation of environmental information, allowing to inform a variety of environmental policies with unprecedented timeliness and quality.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2021
- Research Article
Accelerating Communication between Scientists
Valerie Pavilonis
“When you’re in medical research, your work is focused on helping people,” said Krumholz. “And if it can help people, then time matters, because you’re trying to create progress. If your work is languishing within the peer-review process, which can take years, then it’s by definition slowing down scientific effort.”
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- Other
Why we are developing a patent-free Covid antiviral therapy
Alpha Lee, John Chodera
During global health crises such as pandemics, drug discovery should be publicly funded and open, with no research secrets locked away. In March 2020, we started COVID Moonshot, which we believe is the first open-science effort to develop an antiviral drug. Now we are close to bringing an oral antiviral that’s effective against SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) to the clinic, with no patent protection. As soon as the drug is approved, any drug manufacturer around the world can manufacture and sell it without needing to license it, thus driving prices down.
See Resource
- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2021
- Perspective/Op-Ed
A sustainable strategy for Open Streets in (post)pandemic cities
Daniel Rhoads, Albert Solé-Ribalta, Marta C. González & Javier Borge-Holthoefer
A research team from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the University of California, Berkeley in the US has developed a method to help municipalities provide more space for pedestrians. Their work relies on open geographic information system (GIS) data
See Resource
- Interdisciplinary
- 2021
- Research Article
CORONA Project Demonstrates Value of Sharing Knowledge to Save Lives
On Friday, March 13, 2020, much of the United States shut down with COVID-19 restrictions. Three days later, Dr. David Fajgenbaum launched an effort to track and publicly share what drugs were being tried to combat the disease. The CORONA (Covid-19 Registry of Off-label & New Agents) Project has been a valued resource ever since, keeping an inventory – in real time – of the now more than 500 treatments that have been administered to COVID-19 patients. Fajgenbaum led a team that has reviewed thousands of journal articles to identify the drugs, determine which are most promising at various stages, and make it all available through an open-source data repository.
See Resource
- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2021
- Case Study
Africa’s first digital map of its land reveals a surprising fact about its trees
Seth Onyango
As Africa registered a significant first, becoming the first continent in the world to complete its digital land-use data, new revelations emerged about its trees outside of key forests in Africa. There are more trees in Africa than initially thought, with the latest study showing there are about 7 billion trees on the continent, not counting the continent’s major woodlands like the Congo rainforest. This is according to a recent study by the Food and Agriculture Organisation. The open data initiative that covered the period between 2018 and 2020, disclosed more forests and arable lands than were previously detected. The African Union Commission (AUC) revealed that the continent is the first to complete the collection of accurate, comprehensive, and harmonized digital land use and land-use change data under the Africa Open DEAL initiative. DEAL stands for Data for the Environment, Agriculture, and Land Initiative.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2021
- Popular Press
The relationship between bioRxiv preprints, citations and altmetrics
Nicholas Fraser, Fakhri Momeni, Philipp Mayr, Isabella Peters
A potential motivation for scientists to deposit their scientific work as preprints is to enhance its citation or social impact. In this study we assessed the citation and altmetric advantage of bioRxiv, a preprint server for the biological sciences. We retrieved metadata of all bioRxiv preprints deposited between November 2013 and December 2017, and matched them to articles that were subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals. Citation data from Scopus and altmetric data from Altmetric.com were used to compare citation and online sharing behavior of bioRxiv preprints, their related journal articles, and nondeposited articles published in the same journals. We found that bioRxiv-deposited journal articles had sizably higher citation and altmetric counts compared to nondeposited articles.
See Resource
- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2020
- Research Article
Altmetric Scores, Citations, and Publication of Studies Posted as Preprints
Stylianos Serghiou, John P. A. Ioannidis
As preprints in medicine are debated, data on how preprints are used, cited, and published are needed. We evaluated views and downloads and Altmetric scores and citations of preprints and their publications. We also assessed whether Altmetric scores and citations of published articles correlated with prior preprint posting. Articles with a preprint received higher Altmetric scores and more citations than articles without a preprint.
See Resource
- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2018
- Research Article
Same data, different conclusions: Radical dispersion in empirical results when independent analysts operationalize and test the same hypothesis
Martin Schweinsberg
New research seeks to understand what drives decisions in data analyses and the process through which academics test a hypothesis by comparing the analyses of different researchers who tested the same hypotheses on the same dataset. The findings stress the importance of open data, which is publicly available, systematic robustness checks in academic research, and as much transparency as possible regarding both analytic paths taken and not taken, in order to ensure research is as accurate as possible.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2021
- Research Article
Stanford researchers champion open and reproducible science
Taylor Kubota
Open science is a broad goal that includes making data, data analysis, scientific processes and published results easier to access, understand and reproduce. It’s an appealing concept but, in practice, open science is difficult and, often, the costs seem to exceed the benefits. Recognizing both the shortfalls and the promise of open science, Stanford University’s Center for Open and REproducible Science (CORES) – which is part of Stanford Data Science – hopes to make the practice of open science easier, more accessible and more rewarding.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2021
- Other
Mitigating Illusory Results through Preregistration in Education
Hunter Gehlbach, Carly D. Robinson
Like performance-enhancing drugs inflating apparent athletic achievements, several common social science practices contribute to the production of illusory results. In this article, we examine the processes that lead to illusory findings and describe their consequences. We borrow from an approach used increasingly by other disciplines—the norm of preregistering studies. Specifically, we examine how this practice of publicly posting documentation of one’s prespecified hypotheses and other key decisions of a study prior to study implementation or data analysis could improve scientific integrity within education. In an attempt to develop initial guidelines to facilitate preregistrations in education, we discuss the types of studies that ought to be preregistered and the logistics of how educational researchers might execute preregistrations. We conclude with ideas for how researchers, reviewers, and the field of education more broadly might speed the adoption of this new norm.
See Resource
- Social & Behavioral Sciences
- 2017
- Perspective/Op-Ed
Understanding the Arctic
Erin McLean
The Arctic Data Center broadly engages the Arctic research community, and will contribute to the important dialogue surrounding Indigenous data sovereignty, increasing appropriate adoption of open research and data archiving in various social science disciplines, and maintaining and promoting the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics) principles.
See Resource
- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2021
- Popular Press
Report of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response: making COVID-19 the last pandemic
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Helen Clark
In May, 2020, with COVID-19 affecting just about every country on the planet, the World Health Assembly requested the WHO Director-General to initiate an independent, impartial, and comprehensive review of the international health response to the pandemic. The panel has produced a definitive account to date of what happened, why it happened, and how it could be prevented from happening again. The panel’s report also highlights strengths on which to build. Open data and open science collaboration were central to alert and response.
See Resource
- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2021
- Perspective/Op-Ed
Dr. Jan Veldink Receives 2021 Sheila Essey Award
The ALS Association, in partnership with the American Brain Foundation and the American Academy of Neurology, has awarded the 2021 Sheila Essey Award for ALS research to Jan Veldink, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Human Neurogenetics at the University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands. The award recognizes significant research contributions in the search for the cause, prevention of and cure for ALS. “Dr. Veldink’s leadership for the worldwide Project MinE initiative has yielded important genetic discoveries and has played a key role in unlocking the genetic mysteries of ALS. His commitment to open science has helped expand global collaboration and data mining to speed up the pace of new discoveries and expand our knowledge of genotype-phenotype correlations,” said Dr. Kuldip Dave, vice president of research at The ALS Association.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2021
- Other
First Citizen Science Awards Winners
Mia Thompson
Citizen science seeks to empower citizens around the world who are not necessarily scholars to collaborate with knowledge and research. Since 2019, Vida Silvestre ArgentiNat has been running the iNaturalist Node for Argentina, a social network that allows uploading notes through images, to identify and record wild animals, plants and fungi, in order to identify and obtain information about them while at the same time providing open data that helps researchers understand Better global biodiversity. It is one of the largest citizen science platforms in the world, with over 3.7 million registered users and over 62 million notes.
See Resource
- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- Popular Press
Covid-19, open science, and the CVD-COVID-UK initiative
Joseph Ross
The covid-19 pandemic has irrevocably changed the global scientific enterprise. But thankfully, the changes have been positive. Researchers began to work collectively and more collaboratively, embracing open science. Preprint platforms grew exponentially, as scientists sought to rapidly disseminate research findings. Trialists established multisite collaborative platform studies, working together to rapidly test new and established treatments. And population and public health researchers, in collaboration with national and regional health system leadership, launched “big data” observational research initiatives to better understand the prognosis and outcomes associated with covid-19. Some of these initiatives, such as the CVD-COVID-UK consortium, are now even making data available for other investigators to use for their own research.
See Resource
- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2021
- Perspective/Op-Ed
Leveraging Open Science to Accelerate Research
Kushal T. Kadakia, Adam L. Beckman, Joseph S. Ross, Harlan M. Krumholz
We believe that policymakers should incorporate open-science principles into research policies and programs to optimize the return on federal investment in clinical research, which could have benefits beyond the pandemic. The idea of embracing open science represents a vision for research conduct that promotes standard processes for sharing protocols and registering studies, reporting and disseminating results, and sharing data, biospecimens, and code. The advancement of science — an intrinsically iterative process — is contingent on reporting practices that enable data to be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable to permit independent scrutiny, replication, and follow-on investigations.
See Resource
- Interdisciplinary
- 2021
- Perspective/Op-Ed
The citation advantage of linking publications to research data
Giovanni Colavizza, Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Isla Staden, Kirstie Whitaker, Barbara McGillivray
Efforts to make research results open and reproducible are increasingly reflected by journal policies encouraging or mandating authors to provide data availability statements. As a consequence of this, there has been a strong uptake of data availability statements in recent literature. Nevertheless, it is still unclear what proportion of these statements actually contain well-formed links to data, for example via a URL or permanent identifier, and if there is an added value in providing such links. We consider 531, 889 journal articles published by PLOS and BMC, develop an automatic system for labelling their data availability statements according to four categories based on their content and the type of data availability they display, and finally analyze the citation advantage of different statement categories via regression. We find that, following mandated publisher policies, data availability statements become very common. In 2018 93.7% of 21,793 PLOS articles and 88.2% of 31,956 BMC articles had data availability statements. Data availability statements containing a link to data in a repository—rather than being available on request or included as supporting information files—are a fraction of the total. In 2017 and 2018, 20.8% of PLOS publications and 12.2% of BMC publications provided DAS containing a link to data in a repository. We also find an association between articles that include statements that link to data in a repository and up to 25.36% (± 1.07%) higher citation impact on average, using a citation prediction model. We discuss the potential implications of these results for authors (researchers) and journal publishers who make the effort of sharing their data in repositories. All our data and code are made available in order to reproduce and extend our results.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2020
- Research Article
Open Scientist Handbook
Bruce Caron
The Open Scientist Handbook is designed to give any scientist on the planet the knowhow and tools to become an effect open science culture change agent at your job, in your professional organizations and collegial associations, and in your personal life. “Open science”—what people after 2030 will call “science”— refactors 20th Century science cultures to restore those practices, motivations, virtues, rigor, and joys that have long been the incentives for smart, creative individuals like you to challenge the universe’s unknowns as a scientist, instead of devising clever derivative financial devices for Wall Street (which you totally could have done).
See Resource
- Interdisciplinary
- 2021
- Book
Climate data presents a $2 billion opportunity in Africa alone. Here’s why
Nicolò Andreula, Anne-Marie Engtoft Larsen
Data is a currency of its own in the modern world, so if only a few people can extract, refine and store it, then it will end up widening existing inequality gaps. This is why “data democratisation” has become essential, especially in emerging economies. While the space sector has always leveraged open data, its value has not been tapped by most economies or societies. In this context, the role of satellite imagery could become increasingly important to find innovative solutions to current problems such as pandemics, famines, or climate change. Digital Earth Africa, a unique program launched in February 2019 uses the Open Data Cube and Amazon Web Services to make global satellite imagery more accessible and proves how data can bridge key social and economic inequalities in the twenty-first century.
See Resource
- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2021
- Perspective/Op-Ed
Imagining a Transformed Scientific Publication Landscape
PLOS
Open Science is not a finish line, but rather a means to an end. An underlying goal behind the movement towards Open Science is to conduct and publish more reliable and thoroughly reported research. Increasing the transparency, reusability and connectivity of scientific outputs is a common desire shared among publishers and researchers, but progress can seem slow and implementation far from widespread. Akin to how scientific understanding is often achieved through incremental progress, system-wide changes toward Open Science will only be achieved through earnest collaboration among funders, institutions, publishers and researchers. Looking at both pragmatic solutions and the underlying ideals, we imagine changes to scientific publishing in the context of four fundamental functions that publishers should provide: dissemination, verification, recognition and community building.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2021
- Perspective/Op-Ed
Tracking the effects of glacial melting at the top of the world
Sean Fleming
Microsoft’s AI for Good Research Lab, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), the University of Wisconsin, and the Quebec AI Institute (Mila) are collaborating to understand the extent of glacial melting in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, its effects and what can be done to minimize its impact. To do this, the team needs data. And lots of it. More importantly, that data needs to be shared and used by many researchers and institutions – it needs to be open. To facilitate data collection and sharing, the team is drawing in open data from a variety of sources so that it can be worked on collaboratively.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2021
- Case Study
We Must Tear Down the Barriers That Impede Scientific Progress
Michael M. Crow, Greg Tananbaum
In this Scientific American op-ed, the authors make the case that this singular moment in time – COVID-19, the attendant economic fallout, and the long overdue racial justice reckoning – represents a great opportunity to reorient toward open science. They provide actionable guidance to universities and funders, and they highlight the many examples of funders, schools, and societies tangibly implementing open strategies.
See Resource
- Interdisciplinary
- 2020
- Perspective/Op-Ed
How open science creates new knowledge
Russell T. Warne
During the 2010s, I gradually adopted open science practices. With each study I started, I began to take more and more steps to make my research transparent. I started uploading my data, documenting analysis procedures, pre-registering my work, and taking other steps to ensure my research was transparent. After adding components of open science to my work, I finally decided in fall 2017 that I would conduct a fully open science project. My only regret was that I didn’t fully embrace open science earlier.
See Resource
- Social & Behavioral Sciences
- 2020
- Perspective/Op-Ed
The CROSS Incubator: A Case Study for funding and training RSEs
Stephanie Lieggi, Ivo Jimenez, Jeff LeFevre, Carlos Maltzahn
The incubator and research projects sponsored by the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) at UC Santa Cruz have been very effective at promoting the professional and technical development of research software engineers. Carlos Maltzahn founded CROSS in 2015 with a generous gift of $2,000,000 from UC Santa Cruz alumnus Dr. Sage Weil and founding memberships of Toshiba America Electronic Components, SK Hynix Memory Solutions, and Micron Technology. Over the past five years, CROSS funding has enabled PhD students to not only create research software projects but also learn how to draw in new contributors and leverage established open source software communities. This position paper will present CROSS fellowships as case studies for how university-led open source projects can create a real-world, reproducible model for effectively training, funding and supporting research software engineers.
See Resource
- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2020
- White Paper
Cost-Benefit analysis for FAIR research data – Study
PwC EU Services
[W]e found the annual cost of not having FAIR research data costs the European economy at least €10.2bn every year. In addition, we also listed a number of consequences from not having FAIR which could not be reliably estimated, such as an impact on research quality, economic turnover, or machine readability of research data. By drawing a rough parallel with the European open data economy, we concluded that these unquantified elements could account for another €16bn annually on top of what we estimated. These results relied on a combination of desk research, interviews with the subject matter experts and our most conservative assumptions.
See Resource
- Interdisciplinary
- 2018
- Report
Why institutional review boards should have a role in the open science movement
Sean Grant and Kathryn E. Bouskill
Institutional Review Board (IRB) review is a critical aspect of the scientific enterprise. As the movement for “open science” gains support in the research community, the increased use of open science practices in research involving human subjects is likely to have important implications for IRB review. IRBs can assist open science proponents in ensuring promotion of the ethical principles detailed in the Belmont Report, compliance with Common Rule regulations, and navigating other federal regulations for protecting human subjects in specific contexts, regulations at other levels of governance, and supplemental mandates for IRB operations made by their host institutions. Including IRBs in the movement toward open science will not only facilitate the “contribution of open science to producing better science”, but also maintain continued public trust in the research enterprise by protecting its most important stakeholders: the members of the public who participate in research.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2019
- Perspective/Op-Ed
RIT creates Open@RIT, a university-wide initiative for all things open
Scott Bureau
Rochester Institute of Technology is establishing Open@RIT, an initiative dedicated to supporting all kinds of “open work,” including — but not limited to — open source software, open data, open hardware, open educational resources, Creative Commons licensed work, and open research. The new open source programs office aims to determine and grow the footprint of RIT’s impact on all things “open,” leading to more collaboration, creation and contribution, on and off campus.
See Resource
- Interdisciplinary
- 2020
- Popular Press
Pushing for Open in Nepal in Fight Against COVID
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)
Roshan Kumar Karn puts in 16 to 18 hours, seven day a week, working at two hospitals in Nepal’s capital city of Kathmandu caring for the influx of patients with COVID-19. As a student and participant in SPARC’s OpenCon program for early career open advocates, Karn recognized the value of the open sharing of research. In 2013, he established Open Access Nepal and has hosted regional meetings to garner support. Through hardships of earthquakes, political instability, and now the novel coronavirus, Karn has been a leader working with policy makers and campus administrators to advance Open.
See Resource
- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2020
- Interview/Profile
Open COVID pledge around patents and copyright
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)
As people around the world wrestle with how to manage the global pandemic, it’s clear that development of testing kits, vaccines, medicine, medical equipment, and software can’t happen soon enough. The Open COVID Pledge was launched in April to help speed this process, by encouraging organizations to make their patents and copyrights freely available in the fight against COVID-19.
See Resource
- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2020
- Case Study
Making it Easier to be Open – PASS at JHU
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)
G. Sayeed Choudhury is always looking for ways to do things more efficiently. It comes from his training as a civil engineer, which he learned is about focusing on people, processes, products and the workflows that connect them. Choudhury, Associate Dean for Research Data Management and the Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at Johns Hopkins University, applied his engineering expertise to transform the campus library system’s infrastructure and technology capabilities. Most recently, he led a team that built the “Public Access Submission System” (PASS), a platform to help researchers comply with the access policies of their funders and institutions. After the 2013 White House policy requiring public access was passed, SPARC encouraged developers to create a “unified deposit portal” for manuscript deposit.
See Resource
- Interdisciplinary
- 2019
- Case Study
Approaching Coverage of COVID-19 Through the Lens of Open
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)
Working as a journalist in Hong Kong, Linda Lew has drawn on her experience from OpenCon in her coverage of the novel coronavirus. The early career reporter for the South China Morning Post went to Wuhan, China in early January to cover the outbreak of the then-unknown virus. Lew went in with as much precautions as were suggested at the time – a facemask, gloves, and disinfecting spray. Looking back, she says she’s lucky that she didn’t contract COVID-19. Since then, Lew has sometimes been putting in 10-12 hour days writing articles on everything from policies to politics to the impact of the global pandemic on scholarly communication.
See Resource
- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2020
- Interview/Profile
Profiles in Open: Michael Gottlieb
Open Research Funders Group (ORFG)
Michael Gottlieb served as the principal investigator for the Etiology, Risk Factors, and Interactions of Enteric Infections and Malnutrition and the Consequences for Child Health and Development (MAL-ED) study. MAL-ED explored how the interaction among a variety of factors – including environment, nutrition, public health, and local medical issues – influenced physical and cognitive childhood developments around the world. Because of the gravity of the issues under examination, the MAL-ED team felt an urgency to share these data quickly and widely with qualified researchers around the world.
See Resource
- Interdisciplinary
- 2019
- Interview/Profile
Profiles in Open: David Ludwig
Open Research Funders Group (ORFG)
David Ludwig, a professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, studies how the type of calories you consume may influence your likelihood of losing weight and keeping it off for the long term. The project has real-world ramifications for public health planning, treatment of obesity, and health care systems. Dr. Ludwig and his colleagues chose to make the underlying data behind their work openly available for others to test, replicate, challenge, and build upon.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2019
- Interview/Profile
Profiles in Open: David Yokum
Open Research Funders Group (ORFG)
David Yokum is an adjunct associate professor at Brown University, where he is establishing and directing a new center that will support applied public policy research with state and local governments. His research aims to embed the scientific method into the heart of day-to-day governance, so as to produce timely, relevant, and high-quality evidence for decision makers that, in turn, will improve communities. Dr. Yokum and his colleagues made their police body camera research plan available in the pre-analysis phase, part of a commitment to research transparency across the life cycle of the project.
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- Social & Behavioral Sciences
- 2019
- Interview/Profile
Open Science Practices are on the Rise: The State of Social Science (3S) Survey
Christensen, G., Wang, Z., Levy Paluck, E., Swanson, N., Birke, D., Miguel, E., & Littman, R.
Has there been meaningful movement toward open science practices within the social sciences in recent years? Discussions about changes in practices such as posting data and pre-registering analyses have been marked by controversy—including controversy over the extent to which change has taken place. This study, based on the State of Social Science (3S) Survey, provides the first comprehensive assessment of awareness of, attitudes towards, perceived norms regarding, and adoption of open science practices within a broadly representative sample of scholars from four major social science disciplines: economics, political science, psychology, and sociology. We observe a steep increase in adoption: as of 2017, over 80% of scholars had used at least one such practice, rising from one quarter a decade earlier. Attitudes toward research transparency are on average similar between older and younger scholars, but the pace of change di˙ers by field and methodology. According with theories of normal science and scientific change, the timing of increases in adoption coincides with technological innovations and institutional policies. Patterns are consistent with most scholars underestimating the trend toward open science in their discipline.
See Resource
- Social & Behavioral Sciences
- 2020
- White Paper
Open Science Promotes Diverse, Just, and Sustainable Research and Educational Outcomes
Grahe, J. E., Cuccolo, K., Leighton, D. C., & Cramblet Alvarez, L. D
Open science initiatives, which are often collaborative efforts focused on making research more transparent, have experienced increasing popularity in the past decade. Open science principles of openness and transparency provide opportunities to advance diversity, justice, and sustainability by promoting diverse, just, and sustainable outcomes among both undergraduate and senior researchers. We review models that demonstrate the importance of greater diversity, justice, and sustainability in psychological science before describing how open science initiatives promote these values. Open science initiatives also promote diversity, justice, and sustainability through increased levels of inclusion and access, equitable distribution of opportunities and dissemination of knowledge, and increased sustainability stemming from increased generalizability. In order to provide an application of the concepts discussed, we offer a set of diversity, justice, and sustainability lens questions for individuals to use while assessing research projects and other organizational systems and consider concrete classroom applications for these initiatives.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2020
- Research Article
Built to last! Embedding open science principles and practice into European universities
Tiberius Ignat, Paul Ayris
The purpose of this article is to examine the cultural change needed by universities, as identified by LERU in its report Open Science and its role in universities: a roadmap for cultural change.1 It begins by illustrating the nature of that cultural change. Linked to that transformation is a necessary management change to the way in which organizations perform research. Competition is not the only, or necessarily the best, way to conduct this transformation. Open science brings to the fore the values of collaboration and sharing. Building on a number of Focus on Open Science Workshops held over five years across Europe, the article identifies best practice in changing current research practices, which will then contribute to the culture change necessary to deliver open science. Four case studies, delivered at Focus on Open Science Workshops or other conferences in Europe, illustrate the advances that are being made: the findings of a Workshop on Collaboration and Competition at the OAI 11 meeting in Geneva in June 2019; alternative publishing platforms, exemplified by UCL Press; open data, FAIR data and reproducibility; and a Citizen Science Workshop held at the LIBER Conference in Dublin in June 2019.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2020
- Perspective/Op-Ed
Beyond the Pandemic: Harnessing the Digital Revolution to Set Food Systems on a Better Course
Julian Lampietti, Ghada El Abed, and Kateryna Schroeder
Think of the impact of releasing the genetic sequence of coronavirus COVID-19. More than 150 possible vaccines are now being developed by the private and public sectors, some using traditional technologies and others unproven ones. Open data dissemination throughout the complex food system is also essential to correct information asymmetries, encouraging innovation, and increase the efficiency of public spending.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2020
- Research Article
Earth Observations Inform Cities’ Operations and Planning
Margaret M. Hurwitz, Christian Braneon, Dalia B. Kirschbaum, Felipe Mandarino, and Raed Mansour
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Chicago, Ill., are using NASA Earth observations to map, monitor, and forecast water and air quality, urban heat island effects, landslide risks, and more.
See Resource
- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2020
- Popular Press
Reacting to the unprecedented urgency of COVID-19 research at Harvard: DASH’s fast-tracking deposit program
Colin Lukens
This past March, the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC) launched a program to facilitate the rapid release of Harvard’s COVID-19 research. Under this program, authors submit coronavirus-related papers to DASH, Harvard’s open-access institutional repository, where they are expedited, or “fast-tracked,” through the standard workflow. Now, seven months on, this program has successfully distributed a collection of vital research open-access to a global audience.
See Resource
- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2020
- Perspective/Op-Ed
Advancing Open Science Practices: Stakeholder Perspectives on Incentives and Disincentives
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
The actual and potential benefits of open science include strengthened rigor and reliability, the ability to address new questions,faster and more inclusive dissemination of knowledge, broader participation in research, effective use of resources, improved performance of research tasks, and open publication for public benefit. As one effort to increase the contributions of open science among many, the Board on Research Data and Information of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering,and Medicine established the Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science. On September 20, 2019, the Roundtable organized a public symposium in Washington, DC to consider some of the barriers and challenges to open science, as well as ways to overcome them. Key external stakeholders – including researchers, librarians, learned societies, publishers and infrastructure developers – shared their insights on the current state of the research ecosystem, as well as their visions for how open science can function at scale. This publication highlights the presentations of the event.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2020
- Conference Proceeding
Reflections on Sharing Clinical Trial Data
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Health and Medicine Division; National Cancer Policy Forum; Roundtable on Genomics and Precision Health; Board on Health Sciences Policy; Board on Health Care Services; Forum on Drug Discovery, Development, and Translation; Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders; Theresa Wizemann, Eeshan Khandekar, Jennifer Hinners, and Carolyn Shore, Rapporteurs
On November 18 and 19, 2019, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hosted a public workshop in Washington, DC, titled Sharing Clinical Trial Data: Challenges and a Way Forward. The workshop followed the release of the 2015 Institute of Medicine (IOM) consensus study report Sharing Clinical Trial Data: Maximizing Benefits, Minimizing Risk, and was designed to examine the current state of clinical trial data sharing and reuse and to consider ways in which policy, technology, incentives, and governance could be leveraged to further encourage and enhance data sharing. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.
See Resource
- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2020
- Book
Open Access Could Transform Drug Discovery: A Case Study of JQ1
Zeeshaan Arshad,James Smith,Mackenna Roberts,Wen Hwa Lee,Ben Davies,Kim Bure,Georg A. Hollander,Sue Dopson,Chas Bountra, & David Brindley
The cost to develop a new drug from target discovery to market is a staggering $1.8 billion, largely due to the very high attrition rate of drug candidates and the lengthy transition times during development. Open access is an emerging model of open innovation that places no restriction on the use of information and has the potential to accelerate the development of new drugs.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2016
- Review Article
From closed to open access: A case study of flipped journals
Fakhri Momeni, Nicholas Fraser, Isabella Peters, Philipp Mayr
In recent years, increased stakeholder pressure to transition research to Open Access has led to many journals "flipping" from a toll access to an open access publishing model. Changing the publishing model can influence the decision of authors to submit their papers to a journal, and increased article accessibility may influence citation behaviour. The aim of this paper is to show changes in the number of published articles and citations after the flipping of a journal. We analysed a set of 171 journals in the Web of Science (WoS) which flipped to open access. In addition to comparing the number of articles, average relative citation (ARC) and normalized impact factor (IF) are applied, respectively, as bibliometric indicators at the article and journal level, to trace the transformation of flipped journals covered. Our results show that flipping mostly has had positive effects on journal's IF. But it has had no obvious citation advantage for the articles. We also see a decline in the number of published articles after flipping. We can conclude that flipping to open access can improve the performance of journals, despite decreasing the tendency of authors to submit their articles and no better citation advantages for articles.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2019
- Preprint
Knowledge and Perceptions of Open Science among Researchers—A Case Study for Colombia
Clara Inés Pardo Martínez, Alexander Cotte Poveda
Open science can provide researchers diverse opportunities to collaborate, disseminate their research results, generate important impacts in the scientific community, and engage in effective and efficient science for the benefit of society. This study seeks to analyse and evaluate researchers’ knowledge of open science in Colombia using a survey to determine adequate instruments with which to improve research in the framework of open science. The aim of the study is to determine researchers’ current awareness of open science by considering demographic characteristics to analyse their attitudes, values, and information habits as well as the levels of institutionalism and social appropriation of open science. A representative sample of Colombian researchers was selected from the National Research System. An anonymous online survey consisting of 34 questions was sent to all professors and researchers at Colombian universities and research institutes. Sampling was random and stratified, which allowed for a representative sample of different categories of researchers, and principal component analysis (PCA) was used for the sample design. A total of 1042 responses were received, with a 95% confidence level and a margin of error of 3%. The majority of respondents knew about open science, especially in relation to open science tools (software, repositories, and networks) and open data. Researchers consider open science to be positively impacted by factors such as the rise of digital technologies, the search for new forms of collaboration, the greater availability of open data and information, and public demand for better and more effective science. In contrast, a lack of resources to develop research activities within the open science approach and the limited integration between traditional and open science are identified as the most important barriers to its use in research. These results are important for building adequate open science policy in Colombia.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2018
- Research Article
Data-Intensive Ecological Research Is Catalyzed by Open Science and Team Science
Kendra Spence Cheruvelil, Patricia A Soranno
Many problems facing society and the environment need ecologists to use increasingly larger volumes and heterogeneous types of data and approaches designed to harness such data—that is, data-intensive science. In the present article, we argue that data-intensive science will be most successful when used in combination with open science and team science. However, there are cultural barriers to adopting each of these types of science in ecology. We describe the benefits and cultural barriers that exist for each type of science and the powerful synergies realized by practicing team science and open science in conjunction with data-intensive science. Finally, we suggest that each type of science is made up of myriad practices that can be aligned along gradients from low to high level of adoption and advocate for incremental adoption of each type of science to meet the needs of the project and researchers.
See Resource
- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2018
- Research Article
The case for openness in engineering research
Devin R. Berg, Kyle E. Niemeyer
In this article, we describe our views on the benefits, and possible downsides, of openness in engineering research. We attempt to examine the issue from multiple perspectives, including reasons and motivations for introducing open practices into an engineering researcher’s workflow and the challenges faced by scholars looking to do so. Further, we present our thoughts and reflections on the role that open engineering research can play in defining the purpose and activities of the university. We have made some specific recommendations on how the public university can recommit to and push the boundaries of its role as the creator and promoter of public knowledge. In doing so, the university will further demonstrate its vital role in the continued economic, social, and technological development of society. We have also included some thoughts on how this applies specifically to the field of engineering and how a culture of openness and sharing within the engineering community can help drive societal development.
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- Physical Science, Math, & Engineering
- 2018
- Research Article
Open laboratory notebooks: good for science, good for society, good for scientists
Matthieu Schapira, Rachel J. Harding, The Open Lab Notebook Consortium
The fundamental goal of the growing open science movement is to increase the efficiency of the global scientific community and accelerate progress and discoveries for the common good. Central to this principle is the rapid disclosure of research outputs in open-access peer-reviewed journals and on pre-print servers. The next bold step in this direction is open laboratory notebooks, where research scientists share their research — including detailed protocols, negative and positive results — online and in near-real-time to synergize with their peers. Here, we highlight the benefits of open lab notebooks to science, society and scientists, and discuss the challenges that this nascent movement is facing. We also present the implementation and progress of our own initiative at openlabnotebooks.org, with more than 20 active contributors after one year of operation.
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- Social & Behavioral Sciences
- 2019
- Research Article
The Economic Impacts of Open Science: A Rapid Evidence Assessment
Michael J. Fell
This study systematically reviewed the evidence on what kinds of economic impacts (positive and negative) open science can have, how these comes about, and how benefits could be maximized. Use of open science outputs often leaves no obvious trace, so most evidence of impacts is based on interviews, surveys, inference based on existing costs, and modelling approaches. There is indicative evidence that open access to findings/data can lead to savings in access costs, labour costs and transaction costs. There are examples of open science enabling new products, services, companies, research and collaborations. Modelling studies suggest higher returns to R&D if open access permits greater accessibility and efficiency of use of findings.
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- Social & Behavioral Sciences
- 2019
- Preprint
OpenStax Disrupts College Textbook Market, Building Infrastructure for Open Education
Caralee Adams
OpenStax began just over two decades ago as a repository of open educational resources (OER) called Connexions where faculty around the world could publish, share, and remix educational materials. In 2012, it rebranded and started publishing its own line of free, peer-reviewed textbooks as a nonprofit educational initiative. Since then, 9 million students have used OpenStax books saving them nearly one billion dollars. Its books have been adopted in 6,900 schools and used in more than 100 countries. This spring, an estimated 3.2 million students and 24,000 faculty are using use the books – with the volume increasing by 50 to 100 percent every year.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2020
- Research Article
Sluggish Data Sharing Hampers Reproducibility Effort
Richard Van Noorden
The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology is examining the replicability of 50 high-impact cancer biology studies, published between 2010 and 2012. The project coordinators have found that free, unfettered access to the experimental data has been a major hurdle to overcome. Without this access, understanding whether promising research in cancer biology can reproduced and verified is a significant challenge. This may slow follow-on research, or, in a more dire outcome, lead scientists to pursue experiments that are, in fact, a dead-end.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2015
- Case Study
City-size impact crater found under Greenland ice
Brian Clark Howard
In 2018, an international team of scientists described “a huge new impact crater that lies under northwestern Greenland’s Hiawatha Glacier. If confirmed, it would be the first impact crater on Earth discovered under ice, the team reports in the journal Science Advances. At an estimated 19 miles wide, it is larger than Washington, D.C., and would rank among the top 25 known craters in the world.” Researchers first detected the crater by reviewing data made openly available through NASA’s Operation IceBridge, which makes images of polar ice publicly available.
Data Sharing and Reproducible Clinical Genetic Testing: Successes and Challenges. Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing
Shan Yang, Melissa Cline, Can Zhang, Benedict Paten, and Stephen e. Lincoln
This conference proceeding examines the open sharing of clinical genetic data. It concludes that participation in the NIH ClinVar initiative has improved research reproducibility. This, in turn, positively impacts direct patient care in oncology, cardiology, neurology, pediatrics, obstetrics, and other clinical specialties.
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- Biomedical & Life Sciences
- 2017
- Conference Proceeding
The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review
Jonathan P. Tennant, François Waldner, Damien C. Jacques, Paola Masuzzo Lauren B. Collister, Chris. H. J. Hartgerink
This F1000Research review analyzes the scholarly literature on the impact of open access. It concludes that the overall evidence points to a favorable impact of open access on the scholarly literature through increased dissemination and reuse. It also finds that current levels of access in the developing world are insufficient and unstable, and only open access has the potential to foster the development of stable research ecosystems.
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- Social & Behavioral Sciences
- 2016
- Review Article
The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles
Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem, Vincent Larivière, Juan Pablo Alperin, Lisa Matthias, Bree Norlander, Ashley Farley, Jevin West, Stefanie Haustein
This peer-reviewed PeerJ article analyzes the citations of more than 300,000 articles. Its findings corroborate the “open-access citation advantage”, with OA articles found to receive 18% more citations than average.
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- Interdisciplinary
- 2018
- Research Article
