Issue 3

Open Science Newsletter

OPEN SCIENCE

In the US the “Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018” has been signed into law. As mentioned in issue 1, the bill is a major move towards open data as it “requires open government data assets to be published as machine-readable data.”

Software citations are now available in Zenodo, in collaboration with the American Astronomical Society and the NASA Astrophysics Data System.

A first strategy document has been published towards the creation of an African Open Science Platform

The talks from the Better Science Through Better Data 2018 conference have been posted online. Who doesn’t want to be taken “on a (cultural) journey towards FAIR data” by Marta Teperek…

EcoEvoRxiv has launched on the OSF Framework. It is a preprint service for ecology, evolution and conservation. 

Crossref and DataCite are holding a data citations webinar on January 31 on why publishers and data repositories should enable data citations.  

 
PUBLISHING

Rxivist posted a preprint paper presenting a wealth of data on “Tracking the popularity and outcomes of all bioRxiv preprints.”

Churchill Capital Corp (CCC) and Clarivate Analytics announced a merger agreement. CCC is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and the combined company will be as well.

Projekt DEAL, representing almost 700 institutions in Germany, has reached a new three-year deal with Wiley that will allow access to subscription journals, and members of the consortium to publish papers open access in those journals. For existing full open access journals, DEAL members receive a 20% reduction in article processing charges. 

Funders should mandate open citations.” A comment by David Shotton in Nature. As he says, “to be useful, open references must be stored in a machine-readable format in a centralized repository.”

A study claims that “Few Open Access Journals are Plan S Compliant,” based on DOAJ metadata filtered by criteria laid out in the Plan S documentation. Oops. Whilst major publishers or journals like PLOS ONE are not affected, this appears a problem in particularly for smaller publishers, and in the humanities and social sciences. There are, for example, issues with a lack of use of doi persistent identifiers or lack of long-term digital preservation schemes. These aspects of the Plan S technical implementation guidance are open for feedback until 8 February. Harvard and MIT libraries have put out some recommendations.

RESEARCH

OpenCDC has launched. It is the open data platform for the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. 

PLOS

On the PLOS Blogs network Hilda Bastian has presented her roundup of open access news from last year: “Open Access 2018: A Year of Funders and Universities Drawing Lines in the Sand.”

OTHER

Europe’s controversial ‘link tax’ in doubt after member states rebel.” A final implementation of the Copyright Directive has been postponed. The new directive has seen substantial criticism as it would allow news outlets to charge for the right to link to their articles online, and would also increase the legal liability for sites if users upload copyrighted material.   

It is the fourth annual drive of the Wikimedia Foundation for #1Lib1Ref: improving Wikipedia’s references by adding at least one citation. An opportunity to mention the study that showed that open access papers are more likely to be used as references in Wikipedia.