By Lucia Loffreda, 04/11/19 In late 2018, Research Consulting completed an independent review of the UK Department for International Development’s (DFID) Research Open and Enhanced Access Policy. Now, at a time of rapid development in the open access (OA) and open research data (ORD) landscapes, we’re pleased to share the findings in our latest report. The review stems from the …
Report on European research funder Open Policies and practices
By Victoria Ficarra, 30/09/19 Research Consulting was commissioned by SPARC Europe to undertake research on European research funder Open policies and practices. The report is now publicly available on the SPARC Europe website and on the Reports page of our website. We supported SPARC Europe in the development and analysis of a survey conducted in spring this year, with responses …
Openness and integrity: A tale of two papers
By Rob Johnson, 09/09/2019 This is the text of a talk given by Rob Johnson, Director, at the Westminster Higher Education Forum event Next steps for protecting research integrity in the UK (9 September 2019) I’d like to tell you the story of two papers, published in perhaps the two most prestigious academic journals in the world, Nature and Science. …
A resilient and optimistic community: My first time at the ARMA conference, Belfast 2019
By Victoria Ficarra, 25/06/19 On Sunday 16th June, I boarded a small plane heading to Belfast with my colleagues, Rob Johnson and Mattia Fosci. Our destination was the 2019 ARMA Conference, which this year explored the themes of ‘prosperity and resilience in research management.’ It was my first time attending a conference on research management and I was feeling a …
Are preprints paving the way to science in real time?
Written for Knowledge Exchange (KE) by Andrea Chiarelli, 22/05/2019. This article was originally posted on the KE website and the Jisc Scholarly Communications blog. ArXiv, the most widely known preprint server, has received over 1.5 million preprints since its inception in 1991. BioRxiv, a growing equivalent in the life sciences that was started in 2013, hosts over 40,000 submissions representing …
Levelling the playing field in scholarly communications
By Andrea Powell (Research4Life) and Rob Johnson, 04/03/19 Levelling the Playing Field: how can the global scholarly communications community address economic and infrastructure imbalances that prevent researchers from the Global South from achieving equality? This was the question posed to a group of delegates at this year’s Researcher 2 Reader conference, held at BMA House in London on 25th & …
Publication of the STM Report 2018
By Rob Johnson, 09/10/2018 Today sees the launch of the 50th anniversary edition of ‘The STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly publishing’ (2018). Over the last six months I and my co-authors, Anthony Watkinson and Michael Mabe, have been hard at work pulling together the evidence base for this authoritative report covering all aspects of journal publishing, including …
The end of the road for hybrid open access?
By Rob Johnson, 17/07/2018 Over the past few weeks, I have discussed the role of ‘hybrid’ open access (OA) in a post on the Scholarly Kitchen (Time to Check Out of the Hybrid Hotel?) and in a Podcast in the Copyright Clearance Center “Beyond the Book” series. Hybrid journals are closed-access subscription journals that allow authors, institutions, or funders to …
Getting ready for open research
By Andrea Chiarelli, 29/06/2018 On Tuesday 26th June, I attended the Inside Government event Moving Towards Full Open Access in Higher Education in London. The event dealt with open access and its challenges but also, more broadly, with open research. Thanks to a pool of high-profile speakers, we were presented with a series of significant observations – in this post, …
Eight reasons early posting models are taking off in 2018
Guest post by Christine Ferguson, 06/03/2018 Momentum continues to grow for early posting initiatives such as preprints and ‘Open Research’ platforms. In a previous post, I provided a recap of early posting models that have attracted buy-in from key stakeholders in the life sciences in recent years. Below, I recount eight reasons why these platforms are likely to be used …