Research and Scholarly Communications - Blog - Library Guides at University of Sunderland

The theme of Open Access week this year is “Community over commercialization”.

Across the next seven days, the Research and Scholarly Communications Team in the University Library Services will share with you some initiatives that aim to transform scholarly publishing and move away from the for-profit publishing that has largely dominated academic publishing.

Preprints and Open Review.

A preprint article is the version of your work before it has been submitted to a journal or been peer-reviewed. Using a pre-print server is an opportunity to share research at an early stage. In some disciplines, the use of preprint repositories or servers has been embedded for some time and is integral to the communication of research and results. Results of research projects are disseminated more quickly and feedback from the research community can help refine your work. One of the first preprints repository, started in 1991, was ArXiv with a focus on physics.

Over the years, further preprint servers were created with different disciplinary focus. The Directory of Open Access Preprint Repositories is a useful tool to identify these.

As we move towards more open access, preprints repositories can be used to transform traditional academic publishing. Indeed, these servers could become central in the publishing process without the intervention of traditional journal structures. By embracing the notion of open peer-review, some projects see preprint repositories as an alternative route to publication which embraces the ideals of open research.

Open peer-review eschews the traditional double-blind peer-review process. The reviewers are identified, and the reviews are public. This aims to encourage both more rigor in the review process and to discourage the dreaded reviewer two comments that can be disparaging as they are discouraging, especially to early career researchers.

There are a range of different models emerging, all of them non-profit with a desire create a more equitable and fairer system of scholarly communications. These initiatives aim to speed-up the research process :

Review Commons: a preprint platform that offers a review service. It is affiliated with a number of journals to which these refereed preprints can be submitted. Their aim is a speedier process of publication.

Peer Community in (PC I) PCI evaluates articles submitted to its platform and helps the author to make them citable, Once recommended for publication they can be published for free in Peer Community Journal or be submitted to a PCI friendly journal.

Rapid Reviews – (Focus on infectious disease) An initiative that emerged from MIT during the Covid-19 pandemic, Rapid reviews seeks to accelerate the peer-review process. Its team looks through preprint servers, identifying work on infectious diseases and reviews them. These reviews are then published and linked to the preprint.

PreReview – With a focus on providing a voice to ‘systematically disadvantaged scientists’. It provides training on peer-review practices and challenges the "behind closed door" model of traditional peer-review. It aims to make the evaluation of research more equitable and provide reviews of preprints already on preprint servers.

Science CoLab – Inspired by what they call a ‘Publish, Review, Curate’ model which disrupts current practices, Science CoLab emphasises the community work behind publications. Authors decide when to publish their work, it is then assessed through open peer-reviews, improved and once the author deems the work finished, it can be placed in a curated collection.

These models all give the academic community more control over the publication process and aim to make research more open.

Recent Posts

Why participate in Open Research - #OA week

On this Friday of #OAweek, we will share the work of our fourth and final research assistant, Daniel Dunlavey. Daniel decided to consider they key benefits of Open Research. Through a series of images and short videos (see below) for social media campaigns, he captured some of the key benefits of Open Research.These are wide and range from breaking down barriers in research and promoting equity in the research ecosystem, to fostering collaborations and innovation, to enhancing the visibility of research. Open Research contributes to accelerating research through sharing methodology, data, research results through pre-prints (even negative ones that are often overlooked in formal publications), and publications. There is also an argument that Open Research is just research done properly and that it improves trust in research from the public. Serendipity wants that this year International Open Access Week partly coincides with Global Media and Information Literacy Week. This seems appropriate at a time when disinformation and misinformation circulates widely. This crisis is heightened by the proliferation of AI tools, opening research is one of the mechanisms to curb this proliferation. Have a look at some of the messages included in these short videos and think about how you could participate in Open Research. You could also read the recently adopted Open Research Statement that shows the University of Sunderland's commitment to opening research. ...

Opening education research #OAWeek

Today’s blog shares the work produced by Heidi Guest, another of our research assistant. Her work in education inspired her to look at Open Research from the point of view of an educational Researcher. She developed a range of resources to demonstrate how Open Research can enhance the impact of educational research. In her first resource she asked What can you do to make your research Open?Her second resource looks at the benefits of making educational research Open Access. While her final resource looks at five ways to make research open looking at methodology, data, analysis, professional connections and publications. Contextualising and understanding how Open Research can benefit your own discipline is important. Different disciplines will be confronted to different issues and barriers when it comes to adopting Open Research. However, what can be open should be to enable other researchers, policy makers, school leaders and teachers, parents and maybe the children themselves to engage with that research. The principles of Engaged Research might be interesting to explore in the context of Open Research. To learn more about engaged research check out the Wellcome Institute and UKRI information....

Open Access Week: Using and understanding Creative Commons Licenses

In today's blog, we are continuing to showcase the work of our research assistants. They produced a range of resources to support our collective understanding of Open Research. Today, features the work of Barbara Long-Flint about Creative Commons licenses (CC) and the part they play in Open Research. In an earlier blog, we had highlighted how the use of CC licenses was part and parcel of the Open Access and Open Research movement. Most Open Access articles are now published with an CC license. The preferred license for most funders and the REF is CC-BY. This license allows for the work to be distributed, reused, remixed without the need to ask permission. However, there are other more restrictive versions of CC licenses that might be used. In the current system, the publisher often becomes the copyright holder and charges people for the reuse, remixing and distribution of the work. If you are funded, it might be that your funder requires a specific CC license to be applied to your work. Awareness of what CC licenses are and how they work is important. As an author choosing a CC license can empower you to decide what people can do with your work.To help us with our understanding, Barbara produced a series of resources showcased below: A guide introducing Creative Commons Licenses A guide about Data and Creative Commons Licenses A poster entitled the Copyright Dilemma exploring the factors that might lead the choice of copyright. We hope these resources are useful and that they can help guide your choice and increase your understanding of this key element of Open Research and Open Access. ...

An Open Research Game for Open Access Week

Earlier this year, the Research and Scholarly Communications team was awarded funding to support and enhance the research culture at the University of Sunderland, particularly in relation to Open Research. This funding meant we could employ 4 postgraduate researchers, each of whom created a variety of materials that will enrich future advocacy and training sessions.One of these researchers, Lisa Meek, created an Open Research text-based computer game that not only promotes the benefits of open research, but also shows how researchers can best engage with open research practices at every stage of their research journey. We also love that it brings back memories of some much-cherished games from (many) decades ago!The game is fully open access, and is published under a CC-BY license which sits well with the Open Access Week imperative to ‘prioritize approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and the academic community’.Here’s Lisa explaining how the game works, and her reasons for creating it. ...

#OAweek - Preprints and Open Review

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