Issue 38

Open access publishing in developing countries

OPEN SCIENCE

Nature journals report good experiences with a trial where code is deposited with CodeOcean as part of the peer review process. Reviewers engage with the code prior to publication, and 54% of authors have been willing to participate and share their code on publication.

Insights into European research funder open policies and practices. A report by SPARC Europe on research funders’ open science attitudes. Posted on Zenodo.

TechRxiv for the engineering community has been launched. It is run by IEEE on the Figshare platform.

France has launched a €2.6 million call for open science projects in publishing and scientific publication.

PUBLISHING

The Future of OA: A large-scale analysis projecting Open Access publication and readership. A study by Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem, and Richard Orr that predicts that by 2025 44% of all journal articles will be available as OA, compared to 31% in 2019. Posted on bioRxiv.

Open Access in developing countries – attitudes and experiences of researchers. A survey of 507 researchers from developing countries highlights the problems in accessing subscription-based literature and the preference for open access publishing.

Universities UK Open Access Monograph report. The UK universities studied the potential of opening up the market for monographs, but have taken a cautious stance towards open access policies for monographs. The approach taken appears to be one based on the avoidance of distorting existing markets. Read the full report here.

RESEARCH

All of this year’s Nobel Prize awards went to male laureates. Nature has an interview with Göran Hansson, the secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, who suggests changes have been made to promote gender and ethnic diversity also for the science-based awards. Let’s hope that these changes will be visible soon.

PLOS

PLOS-facilitated preprinting is particularly popular with authors from Africa.

EVENTS

Driving Institutional Change for Research Assessment Reform. A meeting organized by DORA and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to discuss how to develop and adopt new research assessment policies. October 21 – 23, 2019, at HHMI, Chevy Chase, MD, and online.

Science ouverte au Sud. A conference about open science initiatives and policies in the French-speaking countries of the South. October 23 – 25, 2019, in Dakar, Senegal.

Creative Commons Global Summit 2020. May 14 – 16, 2020, in Lisbon, Portugal.

OTHER

SciDraw is a free repository of scientific drawings, distributed under a CC-BY license.

Open access publishing in developing countries

The fraction of researchers from developing countries that have encountered open-access publishing, and their assessment of its usefulness.
Credit (CC-BY): Nobes, Andy, & Harris, Sian. (2019). Open Access in developing countries – attitudes and experiences of researchers. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3464868