Tableau visualisation of Open Access policies in Europe

While it was agreed that the effectiveness exercise was useful it was recognised that long, comprehensive reports often fail to have the required effect on policy makers. One idea was to carry out some data visualisation work on the ROARMAP data and create both an online data visualisation hub and a series of infographics to feature as part of the advocacy material being developed.

Getting started

I was chosen to lead on the data visualisation work for PASTEUR4OA, but I hadn’t created a series of visualisations like this before. The prospect was a little daunting! However I was lucky enough to have a more experienced colleague whom I could ask for help and bounce ideas around with.

My main brief was to exploit the ROARMAP database and create visuals to be produced for advocates to use in presentations, literature etc. These visuals would show the statistics in attractive and interesting ways, so for example in the form of maps etc. The visualisations would need to be useful for policy makers, institutions, researchers and individuals interested in Open Access. It was also suggested that we use live data when possible.

Some of the questions I asked myself and others prior to starting the work are listed below:

• What is the budget for the work?
• What is the resourcing/time available for the work?
• How will we get the data out of the system it is in? API, URL or other?
• Where will we store the visualisations?
• Where will we store the new data created? Will we release it openly?
• How often will the data be updated?
• Who can help me with my work?
• What is genuinely do-able given my skill set?

There are quite a few guides on the process of data visualisation creation but one that I found particularly useful was this overview from Jan Willem Tulp published on the Visual.ly blog. I also appreciated the clarification of roles in the 8 hats of data visualization design by Andy Kirk.

Early on in the process to make sure that I was thinking about the story we wanted to tell I set up a scratch pad in which to record the questions we wanted to ask of the data. So for example: How many Open Access policies are there worldwide? Can I see this on a map? Which countries have the most policies? How many policies are mandatory? How many comply with the Horizon 2020 OA policy? Does mandating deposit result in more items in repositories? How many policies mention Article Processing Charges? Etc.

We also agreed on the data we would be using:

• ROARMAP data
• WP3 Open Access policy effectiveness study – collected by PASTEUR4OA Project
• Bibliographic metadata indexed by the Thompson-Reuters database (WoK)
• Publication date was estimated based on the Altmetrics database and WoK publication date

Experimenting with the Many Eyes tool

Most of the data would be coming from ROARMAP and we worked closely with the ROARMAP developers, and had had significant input into the data on the site, so we were confident that it was reliable. Usually when selecting sources it is useful to keep in mind a couple of questions: is it a reputable source? Is it openly available? Is it easy to get out and work on? Has it been manipulated? Are there omissions of data? Will you need to combine data sets? The ROARMAP site doesn’t have an API but you can get a JSON feed out of the site, or search for data and create excel dumps.

Manipulating data

To begin with I started working on excel dumps from the site. One of the first hurdles I had to jump was getting the country names added to the data. ROARMAP data was categorised using the United Nations geoscheme and the country names were missing. Most of the manipulation could be done in Excel, it is a pretty powerful tool but it requires sensible handling! Some of the useful functions I learnt about include:

• Sum – adding up
• Count – the number of cells in a range that have numbers in them
• Vlookup – lets you search for specific information in your spreadsheet
• Concatenate – lets you combine text from different cells into one cell
• Trim – removes extra spaces
• Substitute – like replace but more versatile

Although you don’t need to be an expert in Excel or Google Spreadsheets it does help if you can use the tool fairly confidently. For me much of the confidence came from being able to manipulate how much data was shown on a sheet or page: so being able to hide rows, lock rows, filter data etc. Less is more – and if there is only the data you need on the page then life becomes a lot easier. Another lesson I learnt early on is the need for regular sanity checks to ensure you are being consistent with data and using the right version of the data set. I kept copious amounts of notes on what I’d done to the data – this proved to be very useful if I wanted to go back and repeat a process. Also I’d suggest that you learn early on how to replace a data set within a tool – you don’t want to get pretty far down the line and not be able to update your data set.

Data visualisation tools

Once I had an idea of which questions needed to be answered…I began to experiment with data visualisation tools. There is a great list of tools available on the datavisualisation.ch site. The main ones I tested out were:

• Tableau Public: http://public.tableau.com/s/
• Open Refine: http://openrefine.org/
• Python Pandas: http://pandas.pydata.org/
• Many Eyes: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/analytics/many-eyes/
• CartoDB: https://cartodb.com/
• Raw: http://raw.densitydesign.org/
• Datawrapper: https://datawrapper.de/

I also experimented with the following infographic tools:

• Infogram: https://infogr.am
• Easel.ly: http://www.easel.ly/
• Piktochart: http://piktochart.com/

Whilst trialing each of these I had a few questions at the back of my mind:

• How much does it cost to use?
• What type of licence does the tool offer?
• Do I have the correct OS?
• Can we get the visualisation out of the tool?
• Can it link to live data?
• Can we embed the visualisation outside of the site?
• Can we make a graphic of the results?
• Can users download the visualisation, graphic or data?
• Does the tool expect users to be able to programme?

I looked primarily at free services, which obviously have some limitations. Some tools wouldn’t allow me to take the visualisations and embed them elsewhere while others required that I had significant programming skills (in SQL, PHP, Python, R or Matlab) – something I seriously didn’t have time to learn at that point.

Tableau Public  came out on top as an all-round tool and I made the decision to stick with one tool for the online visualisations (Tableau public) and one tool for the infographics (here I chose Infogram). Unfortunately both tools didn’t link to live data, in fact none of the free tools seemed to do this in any user-friendly type way.

Linking to live data

Whilst I’ve been working on the data visualisations for PASTEUR4OA the number of Open Access policies that have been submitted to ROARMAP has been increasing. While this is great news for the project it has meant that my data is out of date as quickly as I download it. However I’ve discovered that linking to live data isn’t that easy. Few of the free tools allow it and the best way to create visualisations that do this seems to require programming skills. A colleague of mine helped me pull the JSON feed into a Google spreadsheet and then build a map on top of it but the result is slow to load and not particularly attractive. Linking to live data was going to require better skills than those I possessed – so I asked PASTEUR4OA’s project partner POLITO to help us. Their main work so far has been creating Linked Data SPARQL end points for some Open Access data sets but they have also been experimenting with live data visualisations. You can see an example of their efforts so far in this dynamic ball map.

ROARMAP live data in a Google map

Delivering data visualisations

Once I started creating the data visualisations it made sense to have somewhere to store them all. I set up a Github site and worked on a series of pages. Our in-house designer added some PASTEUR4OA styling and the result is available at http://pasteur4oa-dataviz.okfn.org/. The site has information on the questions we have been asking and the data used as well as a FAQ page to explain what the visualisations are for. The visualisations site is linked to from the main menu on the PASTEUR4OA website.

At this point I spent some time thinking about the look and feel of the visualisations. The PASTEUR4OA team suggested we use the ROARMAP colours as a ‘palette’ for the visualisations.

The PASTEUR4OA palette

I also added headings, legends and explanations for the online visualisations to explain what questions they were asking. As part of this work a series of infographics (.png files) have been created from the Infogram visualisations with the intention of using them in blog posts, presentations etc. The images are embedded in the main data visualisation website.

Treemap Infographic of Open Access Policies Worldwide by Continent

Some things I thought about in more detail at this stage:

• What are the infographics going to be used for?
• What format should they be in?
• Is there a colour theme? What colours look good?
• Can I create a custom palette
• Can viewers distinguish between different parts of the chart?
• Is it clear what question the visualisation is answering?
• Is there enough information on the data visualisation?
• Is there a heading, comment box, labels, annotation, legend etc.?
• Is the result honest?
• Document where all the visualisations are held

PASTEUR4OA are also keen to make the data we’d be using openly available so have uploaded versions to Zenodo, a service which allows EU Projects to share and showcase multidisciplinary research results. The data set urls are listed on the data set page on the main visualisation website. Over time we intend to add links from the main data visualisation website to other Open Access open data that believe could be of interest. As mentioned earlier, POLITO will be making some of this data available as linked data. The idea is that developers can use the work we’ve done as ‘proof of concept’ or inspiration and build more visualisations using the data available.

Conclusion

Through carrying out this piece of work for PASTEUR4OA I have learnt many significant lessons about the data visualisation process. Hopefully this blog post has provided a taster of the challenges and benefits such a process brings. As a newbie it wasn’t always easy, but it was certainly interesting and rewarding. If you are thinking about making your own visualisations you might find this complimentary slideset I have created useful.

I believe that the results collected on the PASTEUR4OA data visualisation website are an example of the kind of things those wishing to advocate for Open Access could do without any programming skills. They are there to inspire people, developers, researchers and those new to visualisation and interested in Open Access. It would be great to see some of the visual aids we’ve created in presentations, posters and articles – maybe they can make the (at times!) dry data we were given interesting and accessible.

References

• PASTEUR4OA data visualisation website: http://pasteur4oa-dataviz.okfn.org/
• Github site: https://github.com/okfn/PASTEUR4OA-dataviz/
• Pad: https://pad.okfn.org/p/pasteur4oa-data-viz
• My Tableau profile: https://public.tableau.com/profile/marieke.guy#!/
• My Infogram profile: https://infogr.am/mariekeguy
• Live ROARMAP data: http://bit.ly/1Ri7rjl
• Data stored on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/
• The seeing data – a useful resource when creating visualisations: http://seeingdata.org/about-seeing-data/

The PASTEUR4OA Data Visualisations website

The participants will exchange ideas and policy practices and discuss concrete actions to improve existing or develop new Open Access policies aligned with the European Commission’s Recommendation to Member States of July 2012 and the Horizon 2020 Open Access requirements. The agendas of these regional workshops will be tailored to the specific needs of the respective target groups (funders or universities/research centers) and the level of Open Access policy development in the region.

The regional workshops will take place on:

• September 28, 2015 in Madrid, Spain: The regional workshop for research funders from the South-West region (Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain), contact person: Clara Parente Boavida (claraboavida@sdum.uminho.pt);
• October 29 and 30, 2015 in Budapest, Hungary: The regional workshops for research funders and research performing organizations from the Eastern Europe (Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia): http://openaccess.mtak.hu/meeting;
• November 4, 2015 in Athens, Greece: The regional workshop for research performing organizations from the South-East region (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey), contact person: Victoria Tsoukala (tsoukala@ekt.gr);
• February 9 and 10, 2016 in Brussels, Belgium: The regional workshops for research funders and research performing organizations from the North-West region (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the UK) in collaboration with Science Europe and the European University Association, contact person: Alma Swan (almaswan3@gmail.com);
• February 22, 2016 in Turin, Italy: The regional workshop for research performing organizations from the South-West region (Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain), contact person: Clara Parente Boavida (claraboavida@sdum.uminho.pt);
• March/April 2016: The regional workshops for research funders and research performing organizations from the Nordic region (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden and Norway) in collaboration with Rectors’ conference and the Nordic Council of Ministers, contact person: Nina Karlstrøm (nina.karlstrom@cristin.no);
• April 1, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey: The regional workshop for research funders from the South-East region (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey), contact person: Victoria Tsoukala (tsoukala@ekt.gr).

For further details see the PASTEUR4OA website.

The account will support the Future of Scholarship Project which aims to build a stronger, better connected network of people interested in open access in the humanities and social sciences.

The Twitter account is available at @OpenAccessHSS. Get following!

Image from Pixabay, CC0

This timeline has used What is Open Peer Review as its foundation. Once again any suggestions would be much appreciated.

1665

• First recorded editorial pre-publication peer-review process at the Royal Society of London in 1665 by the founding editor of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society]

20th century – Peer review became common for science funding allocations.

1948

• Launch of Project RAND, an organization formed immediately after World War II to connect military planning with research and development decisions. The project evolved into the RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision making through research and analysis. [http://www.rand.org/]

1955

• Dr. Garfield’s article on citation indexing appeared in Science – led to the Genetics Citation Index. [http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v7p515y1984.pdf]

1961

• Irving H. Sher and Eugene Garfield created the journal impact factor to help select journals for the Science Citation Index (SCI) [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.80.6316&rep=rep1&type=pdf]

1969

• Term bibliometrics was coined by Alan Pritchard in a paper published in 1969, titled Statistical Bibliography or Bibliometrics? [https://www.academia.edu/598618/Statistical_bibliography_or_bibliometrics]

1976

• A recursive impact factor that gives citations from journals with high impact greater weight than citations from low-impact journals was proposed. [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0306457376900480]

1986

• First exercise of assessing of research in Higher Education in the UK took place conducted by the University Grants Committee, a predecessor of the present Higher Education Funding Councils. Went on to be carried out in 1992, 1996, 2001 and 2008.

1989

• First peer review congress meeting. [http://www.peerreviewcongress.org/]

1996

• Michael Power writes The Audit Explosion – an anti auditing and measuring paper. [http://www.demos.co.uk/files/theauditexplosion.pdf]
• PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page and Sergey Brin
• CiteSeer goes public – first such algorithm for automated citation extraction and indexing

1998

• PageRank is introduced to Google search engine

1999

• BMJ starts revealing reviewer names to authors. [http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=194992]

2000

• BioMed Central launches, and soon after that starts including reviewer names and pre-publication history for published articles in all medical journals in their BMC series of publications. [http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=194992]

2001

• Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics introduces a system where manuscripts are placed online as a “discussion paper”, which is archived with all comments and reviews, even before approved and peer-reviewed articles appear in the journal.

2002

• Thompson Reuters Web of Knowledge launches. [http://wokinfo.com/]

2004

• The official U.S. launch of Scopus was held at the New York Academy of Sciences. [http://www.scopus.com/]
• BMJ published the number of views for its articles, which was found to be somewhat correlated to citations
• Google Scholar index launched

2005

• European Commission report Enhancing Europe’s Research Base, DG Research, Brussels. Report by the Forum on University‐based Research. [http://ec.europa.eu/research/conferences/2004/univ/pdf/enhancing_europeresearchbase_en.pdf]

2006

• Johan Bollen, Marko A. Rodriguez, and Herbert Van de Sompel propose replacing impact factors with the PageRank algorithm. From their paper (based on 2003 data)
• Twitter launched
• Commission Communication on the modernisation of universities report asks “How to create a new and more coherent methodology to assess the research produced by European universities?” [http://bookshop.europa.eu/en/assessing-europe-s-university-based-research-pbKINA24187/]
• Launch of Biology Direct, which includes reviewer comments and names with published articles.
• Peter Warry’s report challenges the UK research councils to go further in demonstrating their economic impact. [http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/Publications/archive/TheWarryReport/]
• EC Communication report ‘Delivering on the modernisation agenda for universities: Education, research and innovation’. [http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2006:0208:FIN:en:PDF]

2007

• EC on resolution on ‘Modernising Universities for Europe‘s Competitiveness in a Global Knowledge Economy’ [http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/en/intm/97237.pdf]
• EC expert group launched by the Scientific and Technical Research Committee (CREST)- Mutual Learning on Approaches to Improve the Excellence of Research in Universities
• Frontiers launches, and includes reviewer names with articles.
• Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) issued a circular letter announcing that a new framework for assessing research quality in UK universities would replace the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), following the 2008 RAE

2008

• European Commission, DG Research set up the Expert Group on Assessment of University-Based Research to identify the framework for a new and more coherent methodology to assess the research produced by European universities.
• Last Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) run in UK
• The MRC launch a new online approach to gather feedback from researchers about the output from their work, first called the “Outputs Data Gathering Tool”, it is revised and renamed “MRC eVal” in 2009 and then re-developed as “Researchfish” in 2012. [http://www.mrc.ac.uk/research/achievements/evaluation-programme/?nav=sidebar]
• The MRC, Wellcome Trust and Academy of Medical Sciences publish the first “Medical Research: What’s it worth?” analysis the result of two years of discussion under the auspices of the UK Evaluation Forum, and ground-breaking analysis by the Health Economics Research Group at Brunel, RAND Europe and the Office of Health Economics. The findings provide a new UK estimate of the return on investment from medical research. [http://www.mrc.ac.uk/news-events/publications/medical-research-whats-it-worth/]

2009

• Public Library of Science introduced article-level metrics for all articles.
• UK research councils introduce “pathways to impact” as a major new section in all RCUK applications for funding. Applicants are asked to set out measures taken to maximise impact. [http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/innovation/impacts/]

2010

• Multirank launched – new multi-dimensional, user-driven approach to international ranking of higher education institutions. [http://www.umultirank.org/]
• EMBO journal starts publishing review process file with articles. Editors are named, but referees remain anonymous. [http://emboj.embopress.org/about#Review_Process]
• Altmetrics manifesto is released. [http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/]
• EU report on Assessing Europe’s University-Based Research Expert Group on Assessment of University-Based Research released. [http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/assessing-europe-university-based-research_en.pdf]

2011

• BMJ Open launches, and includes all reviewer names and review reports with published articles. [http://bmjopen.bmj.com/site/about/]

2012

• Google scholar adds the possibility for individual scholars to create personal “Scholar Citations profiles”
• Several journals launch with an open peer review model:
  • GigaScience – publishes pre-publication history with articles and names reviewers (opt-out system)
  • PeerJ – Peer review reports published with author approval, reviewer names published with reviewer permission. (Info)
  • eLife – Decision letter published with author approval. Reviewers anonymous.
  • F1000Research – All peer review reports and reviewer names are public, and appear after article is published online.
• MRC launches a new funding initiative for studies aimed at better understanding the link between research and impact over the next two years 7 awards are made totaling £1M. [http://www.mrc.ac.uk/funding/how-we-fund-research/highlight-notices/economic-impact-highlight-notice/]
• Subset of higher education institutions in Australia ran a small-scale pilot exercise to assess impact and understand the potential challenges of the process: the Excellence in innovation for Australia impact assessment trial (EIA). [https://go8.edu.au/programs-and-fellowships/excellence-innovation-australia-eia-trial]
• ORCID launches its registry and begins minting identifiers

2013

• EU Innovation Output Indicator launched. [http://ec.europa.eu/research/innovation-union/index_en.cfm?pg=output]
• RAND ImpactFinder tool released. [http://www.rand.org/randeurope/research/projects/impactfinder.html]
• Article on Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank by Björn Brembs, Katherine Button and Marcus Munafò. Article reviews the data suggesting that we have journal rank upside down: high-IF journals publish the worst science. [http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291/full]

2014

• First Research Excellence Framework held in UK
• RCUK extends the Researchfish approach to all disciplines and implements the process across all research council funding. 18,000 principal investigators complete the process, providing 800,000 reports of outputs linked to over £16 billion of RCUK funded awards.
• European standard for social impact measurement announced. [http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/social_business/docs/expert-group/social_impact/140605-sub-group-report_en.pdf]

2015

• 100 research funding organisations are using Researchfish in the UK, tracking the progress and productivity of more than £4.5billion of funding for new grants each year.

OpenCon 2015 is the student and early career academic professional conference on Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data and will be held on November 14-16, 2015 in Brussels, Belgium. It is organized by the Right to Research Coalition, SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), and an Organizing Committee of students and early career researchers from around the world.

Jonathan Gray from Open Knowledge is on the organising committee and we are very excited to be supporting this event! Open Knowledge’s mission is to open up all essential public interest information and see it used to create insight that drives change. Open Access, Open Access to Research data and Open Education are an important part of this mission.

Applications to attend OpenCon are open until June 22nd, but applicants are encouraged to apply early. OpenCon seeks to bring together the most capable, motivated students and early career academic professionals from around the world to advance Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data—regardless of their ability to cover travel costs. In 2014, more than 80% of attendees received support. Due to this, attendance at OpenCon is by application only.

Applicants can request a full or partial travel scholarship, which will be awarded to most of those accepted. OpenCon 2015 will convene students and early career academic professionals from around the world and serve as a powerful catalyst for projects led by the next generation to advance OpenCon’s three focus areas—Open Access, Open Education, and Open Research Data. Through a program of keynotes, panel discussions, workshops, and hackathons, participants will build skills in key areas—from raising institutional awareness to coordinating national-level campaigns effectively. Apply early at www.opencon2015.org/attend.

I am no expert in data visualisation and am very much learning as I go along. I hope to share my experiences in creating the visualisations later down the line. Today I have been working with Tableau Public and have produced a number of different visualisations. With APCs in mind (you may have seen the APC timeline we have been collating) here is an attempt at a visualisation of Open Access Policies (by country) that offer some form of APC grant.

Any feedback welcome – I’m still learning so please be gentle!

Image CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay

Some of you may have seen our Open Access to Research Data Timeline. We now have an APCs timeline we’d appreciate feedback on. Again this timeline builds on Peter Suber’s Open Access timeline – but other important events and papers have been tricky to find.

1930s

• American Physical Society (APS) devised page charges in the 1930s to help finance journals. The reasoning was that the research
  published in that journal was not only of interest to those in academia, but also in the broader research community. From Paying for knowledge one page at a time: the author fee in physics in twentieth-century America by Tom Scheiding.

1965

• In the United States government authorized researchers with federal grants to pay page charges, in order to support these not-for-profit organizations. From An examination of author-paid charges in science journals.

1970s

• Half of all science articles written by U.S. authors required some form of author payment – King, Donald W., Dennis D. McDonald, and Nancy K. Roderer. Scientific Journals in the United States: Their Production, Use, and Economics. 1981. Stroudsburg, PA: Hutchinson Ross Publishing Company (a division of Academic Press). Most common requirement was page charges. From Should Commercial Publishers Be Included in The Model for Open Access through Author Payment?

1983

• National Institutes of Health (NIH) guide allowed payment of page charges from research grants to both
  profit and not-for-profit organizations.

1994

• Revised guidelines allowed page charges to be paid not only by government-sponsored contributors, but also by non-funded contributors, a guide still followed in the latest (2003) NIH Grants Policy Statement. From Should Commercial Publishers Be Included in The Model for Open Access through Author Payment?

2002

• BioMed Central started charging processing fees to cover the costs of free online access.

2003

• Public Library of Science (PLOS) launch the journals PLOS Biology and PLOS Medicine with APCs.
• Introduction of article-processing charges (APCs) for articles accepted for publication in the Journal of Translational Medicine. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC317385/]

2004

• Springer-Verlag and Kluwer Academic Publishers pioneers hybrid journal model. [http://www.springer.com/about+springer/media/pressreleases?SGWID=0-11002-2-803577-0]

2006

• Biomed Central deals with angry editors re APCs.
  [http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006/05/growing-pains-at-bmc.html]
• The European Parliament reached a compromise on the INSPIRE Directive (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe). Geospatial data “designed for the general public” will “generally” be open access although government agencies may charge cost-recovery fees “for access to data that has to be updated frequently, such as weather reports”. The directive takes effect in the summer of 2007.

2012

• Finch report – cost of APC anticipated.
  [http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf]
• Open-access policy at the Research Councils UK (RCUK) – If a journal with a suitable gold OA option levies an Article Processing Charge (APC), then RCUK is willing to pay the APC. The RCUK will provide block grants to universities for paying APCs, which they will manage through the establishment of publication funds, and universities will decide how to spend the money to best deliver the RCUK policy. [http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/]
• Public Library of Science (PLoS) raise publication fee by up to $1,000. [http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/24086/title/Author-fee-spikes-at-PLoS/]

2013

• SAGE has reduced APC levied for published articles in SAGE Open to $99
  [https://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/article-processing-charges-reduced-to-99-on-sage-open-humanities-and-social-sciences-mega-journal/]
• Consortium of partner funders – Jisc, Research Libraries UK, Research Councils UK, the Wellcome Trust, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics – came together to commission a study to examine the rapidly developing market for open access article processing charges (APCs).
• Jisc APC pilot launched [https://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Jisc-APC-project/]

2014

• Wellcome Trust APC Data released and cost of open access publishing: a progress report.
  [http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/03/28/the-cost-of-open-access-publishing-a-progress-report/]
• Developing an Effective Market for Open Access Article Processing Charges – study released. [http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@policy_communications/documents/web_document/wtp055910.pdf]
• Call to arms – analysis of Wellcome Trust data
  [https://access.okfn.org/2014/04/01/wellcome-trust-apc-data-thank-you/] – analysis of data
  [https://access.okfn.org/2014/05/16/the-cost-of-scientific-publishing-update-and-call-for-action/]
  [https://access.okfn.org/2014/03/24/scale-hybrid-journals-publishing/]
• RCUK Independent Review of Implementation. Spending on APCs is tracked. [http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/2014review/]
• Dramatic growth of BioMedCentral open access article processing charges. Increased 27% from 2010-11 to 2012-13. The 15% increase from 2011-12 to 2012-13 is 10 times the rate of inflation. [http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/the-dramatic-growth-of-biomedcentral.html]
• Jisc Monitor launched – Cross-institutional APC monitoring initiatives [http://jiscmonitor.jiscinvolve.org/wp/]

2015

• Max Planck Digital Library study on Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access.
• EC/OpenAIRE Gold Open Access Pilot – arrival of a large funder (the Commission) aiming to cover a very fragmented funding landscape re APCs across countries [https://www.openaire.eu/goldoa/fp7-post-grant/pilot]

]]> https://access.okfn.org/2015/05/18/apcs-timeline/feed/ 14 705 https://access.okfn.org/2015/05/06/pasteur4oa-newsletter/ https://access.okfn.org/2015/05/06/pasteur4oa-newsletter/#respond Wed, 06 May 2015 08:31:38 +0000 https://access.okfn.org/?p=702 The PASTEUR4OA Project Newsletter is out today and has some great content including links to all the most recent Open Access posts and reports, news from Europe and national updates on Open Access.

For those interested in subscribing to the Newsletter you can register your details online. You can view past issues from the Mailchimp site.

]]> https://access.okfn.org/2015/05/06/pasteur4oa-newsletter/feed/ 0 702 https://access.okfn.org/2015/04/30/open-access-to-research-data-timeline/ https://access.okfn.org/2015/04/30/open-access-to-research-data-timeline/#comments Thu, 30 Apr 2015 12:08:50 +0000 https://access.okfn.org/?p=698 As part of our work for the PASTEUR4OA Project Open Knowledge will be writing a briefing paper on Open Access to research data, to form one in a series of advocacy papers. Sharing the raw data behind published outputs is a key complementary activity to Open Access and the paper will give an overview of the benefits, challenges, policy developments and European Commission directions in this area.

Image CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay

We will be including a simple visual European timeline showing key dates and initiatives in the move towards Open Access to research data. Unfortunately one-page of A4 won’t do the timeline justice so I wanted to share my findings with you and ask if there are any significant events that have been missed!

This timeline builds on Peter Suber’s excellent Open Access timeline and the EC Open Science (Open Access) chronology, and adds in complimentary dates.

Sharing scientific results, or other forms of research, is not a new idea. The great Isaac Newton famously said of his own research methods: “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants”, a quote built on an expression from the 12th century. Robert King Merton, one of key researchers leading in the sociology of science, advocated in as early as 1942 that the results of research should be freely accessible to all. “Each researcher must contribute to the “common pot” and give up intellectual property rights to allow knowledge to move forward.” The concept of Open Access to scientific data available in a digital form is attributed to the formation of the World Data Center system, created to archive and distribute data collected from the observational programmes of the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year. For the International Council of Science (ICSU) who ran the system the idea of data sharing was to counteract the risk of data loss and to maximize data accessibility.

1942

• Robert King Merton, one of key researchers leading in the sociology of science, advocated in as early as 1942 that the results of research should be freely accessible to all. “Each researcher must contribute to the “common pot” and give up intellectual property rights to allow knowledge to move forward.”

1957

• The concept of Open Access to scientific data available in a digital form is attributed to the formation of the World Data Center system, created to archive and distribute data collected from the observational programmes of the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year. For the International Council of Science (ICSU) who ran the system the idea of data sharing was to counteract the risk of data loss and to maximize data accessibility.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Data_Center]

2003

• The National Institutes of Health (NIH) adopted its Data Sharing Policy http://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/data_sharing/
  2003 – Royal Society report on keeping Science Open [https://royalsociety.org/~/media/Royal_Society_Content/policy/publications/2003/9845.pdf]
• European Union issued a directive on the re-use of public sector information [http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CONSLEG:2003L0098:20130717:EN:PDF]

2004

• 30 OECD countries form Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding [http://acts.oecd.org/Instruments/ShowInstrumentView.aspx?InstrumentID=157]
• The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) issued a public statement calling for an open-access registry and database of drug trial data [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/art.21276/pdf]
• UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [http://www.dcc.ac.uk/] was launched funded by Jisc

2005

• Participants at the ENBI-GBIF Digitisation Workshop (Chania, Greece, January 2005) formulated a Statement On Free And Open Data Access [http://circa.gbif.net/Public/irc/gbif/pr/library?l=/access_statement/_EN_1.0_&a=i]
• Creative Commons officially launched Science Commons [http://creativecommons.org/science]
• Open Knowledge Foundation Network published a manifesto, Open Access to State-Collected Geospatial Data [http://www.pledgebank.com/geodata]
• CODATA announced the launch of the Global Information Commons for Science [http://www.codata.org/task-groups/global-information-commons-for-science-initiative]

2006

• U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) endorsed open access to data in its Cyberinfrastructure Vision For 21st Century Discovery, version 5.0 [http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/ci_v5.pdf]
• Charles Arthur and Michael Cross launched the Free Our Data campaign for open access to publicly-funded geodata in the UK with an article in The Guardian [http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/]
• Twenty-two US federal government agencies formed an Interagency Working Group on Digital Data (IWGDD) and plan to deposit the data generated by their research grantees in a network of OA repositories [http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/03/agency-level-oa-data-policies-coming-to.html]
• The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued Principles And Guidelines For Access To Research Data From Public Funding to implement its Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding (January 2004) [http://webdomino1.oecd.org/horizontal/oecdacts.nsf/Display/3A5FB1397B5ADFB7C12572980053C9D3?OpenDocument]
• In December 2006, the fledgling European Research Council (ERC) issued a Statement on Open Access that addressed both scientific publications and research data. This statement was made more concrete in the first issue of the ERC Scientific Council Guidelines for Open Access, with a very clear line on the deposit of research data in relevant repositories within 6 months.
  The two documents can be downloaded from the ERC website (in fact, the document with the Guidelines from 2007 includes the Statement from 2006 as annex):
  ERC Scientific Council guidelines for open access (17 December 2007) [http://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/document/file/erc_scc_guidelines_open_access.pdf] and ERC Scientific Council Statement on Open Access (1 December 2006)
  [http://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/press_release/files/erc_scc_statement_2006_open_access_0.pdf]

2007

• ChemXSeer launched, an OA database and search engine for chemical literature, formulae, tables, and data. One of the co-developers was C. Lee Giles, who was also one of the co-developers of CiteSeer [http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/]
• The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe recommended “wide public access to research results to which no copyright restrictions apply” (i.e. data) [http://www.coe.int/cm/]
• The UK Medical Research Council added a data access policy to its larger open access policy [http://www.mrc.ac.uk/]
• Open Knowledge Foundation – draft Open Data Commons – Databases licence [http://opendatacommons.org/]
• Australian government proposed an Australian National Data Service (ANDS) to promote OA, preservation, and re-use of publicly-funded research data [http://www.ands.org.au/]
• Science Commons released its protocol for implementing open access data [http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/]
• EC conclusions on Scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation [http://www.consilium.europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressData/en/intm/97236.pdf]
• Results of question 21 on EU-level policies to improve access to and dissemination of raw data from ERA Green Paper presented at a hearing in Brussels [http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/hearing-24september_summary_en.pdf]
• The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe recommended “wide public access to research results to which no copyright restrictions apply” (i.e. data) [http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/highereducation/News/pub_res_EN.pdf]

2008

• Office of Public Sector Information Data Unlocking Service is launched [http://www.opsi.gov.uk/unlocking-service/OPSIpage.aspx?page=UnlockIndex]
• Dariah Project (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) launched [http://www.dariah.eu/]

2009

• US government was the first to establish its own open data portal, data.gov [http://www.data.gov/]
• Panton Principles for open data formulated [https://pantonprinciples.org/]
• First Report of the European Research Area Board called ‘Preparing Europe for a New Renaissance: A Strategic View of the European Research Area’ [http://ec.europa.eu/research/erab/pdf/erab-first-annual-report-06102009_en.pdf]
• Jisc Managing research data Programme commences [http://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/managing-research-data]
• Open Knowledge Open Science Working Group launched [http://science.okfn.org/]

2010

• DMPOnline launched: enables users to create data management plans [https://dmponline.dcc.ac.uk/]

2010

• ODE (Opportunities for Data Exchange) Project launched [http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/survey-on-scientific-information-digital-age_en.pdf]
• OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) Project launched [https://www.openaire.eu/]
• Riding the wave report: How Europe can gain from the rising tide of scientific data [http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/e-infrastructure/docs/hlg-sdi-report.pdf]

2011

• Open Data Research network launched, a collaborative project, coordinated by the Web Foundation and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) [http://linkedscience.org/]
• World Bank’s repository launched [http://data.worldbank.org/]
• RCUK Common Principles on Data Policy [http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/datapolicy/]
• Jisc Digital infrastructure for research data management Programme: Improving the capability of the institutions taking part to manage their research data [http://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/digital-infrastructure-for-research-data-management]

2012

• LinkedUp Project (Linking Web data for Education) launched [http://linkedup-project.eu/]
• The Commission released the Report on the online survey on scientific information in the digital age held from July-September 2011 [http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/survey-on-scientific-information-digital-age_en.pdf]
• EU Communication on Towards better access to scientific information:Boosting the benefits of public investments in research [http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/era-communication-towards-b]
• EU Data Protection Regulations published [http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/document/review2012/com_2012_11_en.pdf]

2013

• EC’s Working Group on Text and Data Mining (TDM) Licences for Europe Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe [https://ec.europa.eu/licences-for-europe-dialogue/en/content/text-and-data-mining-working-group-wg4]
• The first plenary meeting and official launch of Research Data Alliance held in Gothenburg, Sweden [https://www.rd-alliance.org/]
• Horizon2020 Data Pilot announced [http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/grants_manual/hi/oa_pilot/h2020-hi-oa-data-mgt_en.pdf]
• RECODE Project (Policy Recommendations for Open Access to Research Data in Europe) launched [http://recodeproject.eu/]
• EC released the Report on a public consultation on open research data held in July 2013 in Brussels [http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/report_2013-07-open_research_data-consultation.pdf]
• EC Data Harvest Report [http://europe.rd-alliance.org/documents/publications-reports/data-harvest-how-sharing-research-data-can-yield-knowledge-jobs-and]

2014

• Jisc Research Data Spring launched [http://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/research-data-spring]
• EC public consultation launched on Science 2.0 [http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-761_en.htm]
• EC Report on text and data mining [http://ec.europa.eu/research/innovation-union/pdf/TDM-report_from_the_expert_group-042014.pdf]
• FOSTER Project (Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research) launched [https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/]
• PASTEUR4OA Project (Open Access Policy Alignment Strategies for European Union Research) launched [http://www.pasteur4oa.eu/]
• UK Research Data Discovery Service project pilot [http://www.jisc.ac.uk/rd/projects/uk-research-data-discovery]
• Contentmine launches [http://contentmine.org/]

]]> https://access.okfn.org/2015/04/30/open-access-to-research-data-timeline/feed/ 11 698 https://access.okfn.org/2015/04/08/announcing-opencon-2015/ https://access.okfn.org/2015/04/08/announcing-opencon-2015/#respond Wed, 08 Apr 2015 14:54:23 +0000 https://access.okfn.org/?p=693 Details of OpenCon 2015 have just been announced!

OpenCon2015: Empowering the Next Generation to Advance Open Access, Open Education and Open Data will take place in on November 14-16 in Brussels, Belgium and bring together students and early career academic professionals from across the world to learn about the issues, develop critical skills, and return home ready to catalyze action toward a more open system for sharing the world’s information — from scholarly and scientific research, to educational materials, to digital data.

Hosted by the Right to Research Coalition and SPARC, OpenCon 2015 builds on the success of the first-ever OpenCon meeting last year which convened 115 students and early career academic professionals from 39 countries in Washington, DC.  More than 80% of these participants received full travel scholarships, provided by sponsorships from leading organizations, including the Max Planck Society, eLife, PLOS, and more than 20 universities.

“OpenCon 2015 will expand on a proven formula of bringing together the brightest young leaders across the Open Access, Open Education, and Open Data movements and connecting them with established leaders in each community,” said Nick Shockey, founding Director of the Right to Research Coalition. “OpenCon is equal parts conference and community.  The meeting in Brussels will serve as the centerpiece of a much larger network to foster initiatives and collaboration among the next generation across OpenCon’s three issue areas.“

OpenCon 2015’s three day program will begin with two days of conference-style keynotes, panels, and interactive workshops, drawing both on the expertise of leaders in the Open Access, Open Education and Open Data movements and the experience of participants who have already led successful projects.

The third day will take advantage of the location in Brussels by providing a half-day of advocacy training followed by the opportunity for in-person meetings with relevant policy makers, ranging from the European Parliament, European Commission, embassies, and key NGOs. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of the conference’s three issue areas, stronger skills in organizing local and national projects, and connections with policymakers and prominent leaders across the three issue areas.

Speakers at OpenCon 2014 included the Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States for Legislative Affairs, the Chief Commons Officer of Sage Bionetworks, the Associate Director for Data Science for the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and more than 15 students and early career academic professionals leading successful initiatives. OpenCon 2015 will again feature leading experts.  Patrick Brown and Michael Eisen, two of the co-founders of PLOS, are confirmed for a joint keynote at the 2015 meeting.

“For the ‘open’ movements to succeed, we must invest in capacity building for the next generation of librarians, researchers, scholars, and educators,said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). “OpenCon is dedicated to creating and empowering a global network of young leaders across these issues, and we are eager to partner with others in the community to support and catalyze these efforts.”

OpenCon seeks to convene the most effective student and early career academic professional advocates—regardless of their ability to pay for travel costs. The majority of participants will receive full travel scholarships. Because of this, attendance is by application only, though limited sponsorship opportunities are available to guarantee a fully funded place at the conference.  Applications will open on June 1, 2015.

In 2014, more than 1,700 individuals from 125 countries applied to attend the inaugural OpenCon. This year, an expanded emphasis will be placed on building the community around OpenCon and on satellite events. OpenCon satellite events are independently hosted meetings that mix content from the main conference with live presenters to localize the discussion and bring the energy of an in-person OpenCon event to a larger audience.  In 2014, OpenCon satellite events reached hundreds of students and early career academic professionals in nine countries across five continents.  A call for partners to host satellite events has now opened and is available at http://www.opencon2015.org/satellite.

OpenCon 2015 is organized by the Right to Research Coalition, SPARC, and a committee of student and early career researcher organizations from around the world.

Applications for OpenCon 2015 will open on June 1st. For more information about the conference and to sign up for updates, visit www.opencon2015.org/updates.  You can follow OpenCon on Twitter at @Open_Con or using the hashtag #opencon.

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