By Rob Johnson 12/02/2021. This is an edited transcript of a keynote given at the International Conclave on eScience and Digital Libraries on 28 January 2021 on the topic of Open Science and Scholarly Communication. The slides are available here. I’ve been fortunate in my career to participate in discussions in numerous countries and at all levels of the research and scholarly …
5 strategies to protect research funding after COVID-19
By Lucia Loffreda and Rob Johnson 19/11/2020. In the final post of our blog series on the impact of COVID-19 on research, we’ll look at five strategies to protect research funding. The economic consequences of COVID-19 will be long-lasting and unevenly felt, and stakeholders across the research landscape – including researchers, institutions and publishers – will be faced with a …
Enabling a sustainable transition to open science: 5 strategies for the future
By Lucia Loffreda 10/11/2020. Last week, we shared 5 strategies to protect research capacity as the research enterprise begins its recovery from COVID-19. Today, we’ll discuss 5 ways to enable a sustainable transition to open science – a transition that has arguably been accelerated by the outbreak of coronavirus. It’s widely agreed that COVID-19 has exposed long-standing fault lines in …
Gold and Diamond open access journals landscape
By Victoria Ficarra, 23/09/2020 This work was prepared by Maurits van der Graaf of Pleiade Management & Consultancy in collaboration with our Director, Rob Johnson at Research Consulting. The aim of this work is to bring awareness and accessibility to the dataset produced by Walt Crawford on OA journals (GOAJ) and his accompanying publications. The interactive dashboard below, prepared by …
ICSR White Paper on Achieving an Equitable Transition to Open Access in Lower and Middle-Income Countries
By Victoria Ficarra 07/09/2020 We are pleased to announce that the findings of a White Paper co-authored by our director, Rob Johnson and produced by Elsevier in collaboration with the International Association of STM Publishers, is now publicly available on the Elsevier ICSR Perspectives site. The paper assesses the current level of uptake of Open Access (OA) publishing models in …
Using business as a force for good, and why Research Consulting decided not to become B-Corp certified
By Lucia Loffreda, 04/06/2020. Research Consulting recently participated in the Nottingham Consultancy Challenge – a University of Nottingham initiative partnering Nottingham-based SMEs with undergraduate students to work on bespoke consultancy projects. Our project, which we introduced in a previous blog post, involved working with five students to investigate the potential for Research Consulting to become a certified B-Corporation – a …
Equitable access to research in a changing world: Research4Life Landscape and Situation Analysis
By Rob Johnson and Victoria Ficarra, 20/05/2020 In this time of global crisis and uncertainty, scientific research, and equitable access to its outputs, has assumed a central role in the lives of billions of people across the globe. As a mission-driven business, we are fortunate to work with stakeholders across the research and international development communities to improve the effectiveness …
What does COVID-19 mean for scholarly communication? Four areas to consider.
By Lucia Loffreda, 07/04/2020 (links updated 13/04/2020). On 30 January 2020, the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. By mid-March, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the outbreak had reached official pandemic status. And today, the coronavirus is directly affecting 203 countries and territories worldwide. In a matter of weeks, the …
An Open Agenda: European Funder Approaches to Open Science
Written for The Scholarly Kitchen by Rob Johnson and Vanessa Proudman, 26/2/2020.This article was originally posted on the Scholarly Kitchen website. Drawing on our recent survey of European funders commissioned by SPARC Europe, we explored what European funders are doing to drive change in scholarly communication, and argue that funders’ open policies could be backed up more by funders’ own …
Is scholarly publishing changing for the better? 3 themes to keep on the radar
By Andrea Chiarelli, 20/01/2020 Last week, over 270 scholarly communication professionals from 150+ organisations and 19 countries gathered in Berlin for the Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) conference. The organisers (rightly) describe the conference as “the mecca of scholarly publishing”: indeed, over the course of two days, policymakers, funders, CEOs and other organisational leaders shared their views on the changing …