OPEN SCIENCE
Zenodo is removing its Altmetric badges from its site. The trigger was the establishment of a usage fee that subsequently let Zenodo reflect also on using Altmetric. A team from Make Data Count has blogged in support and emphasized that the data around academic publishing metrics, such as references or citations data, need to fully open, accessible and not proprietary. This is an important point that has been repeatedly made in the community, see previous issues of this newsletter. At the same time, an open infrastructure seems not inconsistent with commercial offerings in the alternative metrics space, because data curation or the integration of data from social media platforms and news outlets are a value adding service.
PUBLISHING
Research Communication: Ways to increase equity, diversity and inclusion. The eLife Early-Career Advisory Group has provided advice on how eLife, and other journals, could increase their efforts around equity, diversity and inclusion.
NISO has approved MECA 2.0 as a recommended practice for manuscript exchanges between manuscript systems. This improves the technological framework for cross-publisher manuscript transfers.
RESEARCH
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has announced that student and academic exchange visitors with F-1 and M-1 visa are not exempt for online-only education, making their stay in the US impossible for online-only tutoring owing to the COVID pandemic.
The Guardian has a news report on how immunity to COVID-19 could be lost in a few months after infection. It would suggest a behavior similar to other coronaviruses, such as the virus causing the common cold. The study reported on from Kings College London is not peer reviewed yet, and there clearly needs to be more research on more patients and for a longer duration of time to allow for firmer conclusions. The study does, however, underline the complexity of dealing with the disease, and adds further caution towards concepts such as herd immunity. Original study posted in medRxiv (apparently there is no public dataset available).
The iReceptor Gateway has an open repository of COVID-19 related antibody/B-cell and T-cell receptor data to assist the development of vaccines. It so far contains the datasets of seven recent studies.
EVENTS
Workshop On Open Citations And Open Scholarly Metadata 2020. An online event on 9 September, 2020, from 3pm – 6pm CET. Abstract submission deadline is 3 August.
OTHER
Creative Commons have appointed Catherine Stihler as their new CEO. Congratulations!
A snapshot of daily COVID-19 cases worldwide. Reporting and testing inconsistencies aside, the mixed national successes in controlling the spread of the disease are apparent. It is a situation where more, not less, international collaboration is needed.
Credit (CC-BY): Our World in Data.