Issue 37

Open Science Newsletter

OPEN SCIENCE

RoRI, the Research on Research Institute, has launched. “Co-founded by the Wellcome Trust, the universities of Sheffield and Leiden, and Digital Science, the RoRI consortium will undertake transformative and translational research on research.” Its director is James Wilsdon.

Ethiopia has a new national open access policy that also includes a strong focus on open science principles, such as data sharing and data management.

The physical sciences preprint server arxiv has a fundraising campaign. According to the site, 593 supporters donated around $22K within a week. It remains a small part of their budget.

PUBLISHING

The MIT Press is receiving a grant from the Arcadia Fund to develop a sustainable framework for open access monographs. The three-year $850,000 program aims to develop a shareable business framework in particular for university presses.

EMBO and ASAPbio to launch a pre-journal portable review platform: Review Commons. This multi-publisher initiative aims to streamline the peer review process by providing a portable, journal-agnostic peer-review process prior to journal submission. PLOS journals are participating in the trial, including PLOS ONE.

How can publishers support early career journal editors? Editorial by Megan Ainsworth in Learned Publishing.

EVENTS

The 10th Science Hack Day will take place on 19 – 20 October, 2019, at the GitHub headquarters in San Francisco, CA. It sadly will be the last in the series.

Better Science through Better Data. Wednesday, 6 November 2019, in London, UK.

The SPARC Africa symposium on Open Access and Social Justice Driving African Development is taking place from 2 – 6 December, 2019, at the University of Capetown, South Africa.

The 2nd PEERE International Conference on Peer Review happens from 11 – 13 March, 2020, in Valencia, Spain. Abstract deadline is on 15 November.

OTHER

Dryad is recruiting an Executive Director.

More than 100,000 images from the Wellcome Collection have been added to Artstor and are shared under Creative Commons licenses. The images cover the theme of science, medicine, technology, life, and their various intersections.