Month: September 2022

Examining the role of governance in scholarly communication and open research

A recent Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) blog post, “Good governance: Investigating models in scholarly communication and open science,” offers a community governance framework specifically for scholarly communication and open research infrastructures that breeds transparency, accountability and trust. As academics and scholarly communication practitioners struggle to share research outputs through unfettered channels, attention to the controlling mechanisms of undergirding platforms is timely. In this context:

…governance structures that empower a broad and diverse group of community stakeholders to meaningfully impact the strategic planning and management of infrastructure providers are urgently needed to move beyond the parroting of shareholder and market-driven models prevalent in the for-profit industry and realize a true “commoning” of open research infrastructure.

Key characteristics are established organizational structures that de-centralize decision-making; codified processes for how the organization operates; and codified organizational vision and norms. Good governance must be an early consideration for a developing organization, it must be intentional and rules-based, and it must be an embedded process that continually responds to change.

The report, “Community Governance in Scholarly Communication” offers a rationale for good governance and detailed explanations of its characteristics.

Humanities Commons to expand to STEM education research

Michigan State University announced it has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to build out its open-source Humanities Commons platform to establish a Commons that focuses on STEM education research. Established in December 2016, the Humanities Commons currently facilitates collaboration among thousands of humanities scholars and practitioners around the world through discussion forums, open access publication of scholarly works, profiles, networks and a robust search and discovery platform. It is a not-for-profit platform operating under a shared governance model. The Humanities Commons is free for anyone to join and use.

The NSF Award describes this new STEM Commons as a “Discipline-Based Education Research plus (DBER+) Commons” that will “…build consensus around and capacity for open science, the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) practices, principles, and guidelines for use in undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, graduate, and postdoctoral science education research activities.” Other goals include advancing quality control of metadata for research products, stewardship practices, interoperability, reproducibility, sustainability, equity, and democratization of access to research data.” This is a $1.2 million, three year grant starting January 1st, 2023.

Campaign links open science to climate change solutions

Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL have partnered to launch the Open Climate Campaign “to promote open access to research to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity.” The Open Climate Campaign directly connects the open availability of research and knowledge with the development of remedies to the climate crisis across disciplines and geographies. With funding from the Open Society Foundations and Arcadia, this multi-year campaign has 11 goals, including:

  • Bring attention to the issue of access to knowledge on climate change;
  • Clear legal and policy barriers;
  • Help national governments, funders and environmental organizations to adopt and implement strong OA policies;
  • Ensure inclusive outcomes throughout the campaign; and
  • Identify and open important climate and biodiversity research.

The Campaign offers action kits for researchers, funders, environmental organizations and national governments with recommendations and resources for each entity to contribute to making climate change and biodiversity research openly available. Additional resources and services are in development.

The launch of the Open Climate Campaign is in sync with this year’s Open Access Week theme, “Open for Climate Justice.” Open for Climate Justice events at UMass Amherst will be announced soon.