Issue 18

Open Science Newsletter

OPEN SCIENCE

Invest in Open Infrastructure has been launched. The initiative’s aim is “to increase the availability and sustainability of open knowledge infrastructure.”

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is going to invite applications for essential open source software projects for biomedical research

Four reasons to publish software articles – even if you’re not a computer scientist. A post by Elsevier’s Chiara Farinelli and José Stoop. 

Data sharing and how it can benefit your scientific career. A career feature in Nature by Gabriel Popkin.

PUBLISHING

According to a report in Science, to be compliant with Plan S publishers are considering immediate green open access of the prepublication version of papers and with CC BY license, whilst continue selling the published version in subscription journals. Typically the embargo period for publishing prepublication versions is several months, although some publishers already offer immediate green open access.

The top open access countries come from Asia, Latin America and Africa, according to a study by Heather Piwowar quoted in Nature. These would be Indonesia, Colombia, Bangladesh and Brazil, each with an open access share of more than 60% of published output. This number includes repositories. Amongst Western countries the UK comes closest with nearly 60% of output being open access.

Article processing charge hyperinflation and price insensitivity. A study by Shaun Yon-Seng Khoo into increases of article processing charges at major publishers. These charge increases can go substantially beyond inflation, but as the data also shows, they usually have not substantially affected submission volumes. Published in Liber Quarterly.

How I became easy prey. A researcher tells how he fell victim to a predatory publisher. Published in Science.

PLOS

I’ve blogged about the significant improvements in manuscript turnaround time at PLOS ONE.

EVENTS

The registration for the 14th RDA Plenary is now open. The theme is “Data Makes the Difference.” October 23 – 25, 2019, in Helsinki, Finland.

Research transparency and reproducibility training, offered by BITS. September 11 – 13, 2019, Washington, D.C.

OTHER

A new study shows that around 18% of author email addresses in MEDLINE are invalid, and that around 2.1% of all contact emails in MEDLINE become invalid every year. To mitigate such issues from career changes, around 32% of 2018 corresponding authors used email addresses from free email providers.