OPEN SCIENCE
UNESCO has released its preliminary report on the first draft of the Recommendation on Open Science. Among the draft recommendations, this appears to be a good summary: “Ensuring that public research funders require Open Science practices and that all scientific outputs from publicly funded research are as open as possible, and only as closed as necessary.” Another important theme in the document, in my opinion, is the global, equitable access to research infrastructure and facilities.
The next generation discovery citation indexes — a review of the landscape in 2020. First in a series of comprehensive posts by Aaron Tay on citation indices, here taking a closer look at Google Scholar.
Creative Commons in Court. An overview by Melody Herr in Scholarly Kitchen. She summarizes the US lawsuits that were filed around Creative Commons licenses. For example, hyperlinking content to the original source was deemed sufficient in one case to satisfy the requirements of CC-BY. Likewise, a commercial company producing materials for a non-profit was considered not to violate a non-commercial (NC) license.
AfricArXiv in a nutshell – what we do, our achievements and our roadmap. AfricaArXiv is run by a group of volunteers, and there is the option to support their work with donations.
PUBLISHING
Open Access: challenges and opportunities for Low- and Middle-Income Countries and the potential impact of UK policy. The UK Foreign Office has conducted global interviews around the perception of open access publishing. The report is very interesting, and covers a broad range of items, from open access models, misperceptions, open research, and regional/national publishing infrastructures.
The Academy of Finland has adopted an open access policy. Effective January 2021 all funded projects must make their papers available open access in line with the requirements of Plan S.
PLOS
Implementing name changes for published transgender authors. I am proud that we are now able to better support our published transgender authors if they like to update their name on published papers.
EVENTS
Workshop on Open-Source Tools for Chemistry. The workshop is organized by the Royal Society of Chemistry and is taking place online from 9 – 13 November, 2020.
OTHER
A number of job opportunities. Altmetric are looking for a CTO, PLOS is recruiting for a Chief Operations Officer, Digital, and I’m looking for an Executive Editor, PLOS Medicine.
Call for Nominations: Dryad Scientific Advisory Committee. This new committee will provide input into strategies and initiatives at Dryad.
FORCE11 are looking for nominations to their Board of Directors. An opportunity for anyone interested in changing scholarly communications.
Open Access Week is this week, from October 19 – 25, 2020. See the many events that are planned on the event’s homepage.