The numbers come from OpenALex, the bibliographic catalogue of scientific papers, authors and institutions accessible in open access mode, named after the Library of Alexandria. The Dimensions database - a for-profit service - shows SciLifeLab is publishing 39 percent Gold Open Access, 28 percent Green and 24 percent Hybrid. A total of 265 preprints were published by SciLifeLab in 2023.
Public access is often a central part of the expanding open science policy landscape from national to regional levels and even at the funder and publisher levels. Open access also enables further information to be extracted such as data and software sharing which can help towards building a more complete picture of the research graph and ultimately move us beyond just the paper being the central piece of the research process”, explains Christopher Erdmann, head of the unit for open science at the SciLifeLab.
Inside the Lab
The SciLifeLab Data Centre is located at Uppsala University, serving the entirety of SciLifeLab. Some of the staff at the Data Centre are distributed at the other of the SciLifeLab sites, among which is Stockholm University.
One of the initial goals of the open science team is to explore the formation of an open science focus group, a community of practice from across the spectrum of research, that will be a resource for decision making and the development of SciLifeLab's open research services. Another important area the unit works with its outreach and training.
At the centre there is a unit for open science bringing on roles in communities, metrics, software, and FAIR metadata/ semantic technologies working with the wider Data Centre team to further open science/ FAIR data services, platforms and projects.
Chris Erdmann, the head of the unit for open science, was previously the Associate Director for open science at the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research in New York, focusing on open science strategy and policy.
Change is needed in research culture
Preprints and open peer review is one way to go to move further from the transformative agreements to real open access, according to Christopher Erdmann: “Change is also needed in the research culture, which we are starting to see by the rise of open science initiatives, like CoARA, across the globe.”
Erdmann adds that there likely will be further innovation to help facilitate open science, not least when it comes to generative AI and Large language models (LLMs), very large deep learning models that are pre-trained on vast amounts of data.
Other Highlights this month:
AMU invites all CIVIS librarians to join an international academic network of peers
ULB calls for support for arrested Azerbaijani researcher Bahruz Samadov
Excellence scholarships for international students offered by UNIL
International students on the rise at Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, counting now 130 nations