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Today, I learned about an important initiative: Call to Commitment: A Future-Proof Approach to Open Access Publishing in the Netherlands. It raises big questions about how we share research and who has control over it.

The Problem with Current Deals

Since 2015, Dutch universities have made deals with big publishers. These deals, called transformative agreements, let researchers publish Open Access (OA) without extra costs. They also give universities access to subscription journals.

At first, these deals seemed like progress. But they have big downsides. They keep publishers in control and focus on making money. Researchers lose control of their work. The costs are also very high. This system does not match the values of Open Science, which aims for fairness, openness, and equality.

A New Direction

The Call to Commitment asks universities to take a different path. Many of these agreements will end soon. This gives us a chance to create a better system. A system that focuses on community needs, not company profits.

The group behind this call wants universities to follow the Open Science principles from UNESCO. These principles focus on fairness, openness, and public benefit. They can help us build a publishing system that works for everyone.

What Can Change?

The Call to Commitment suggests new ways to share research:

• Institutional Repositories: Free platforms where researchers can share their work without paywalls.
• Diamond Open Access: Journals run by communities, free for authors and readers, supported by public funding.
• Preprint Servers: Sites where researchers can share their work before formal publication, encouraging faster sharing and feedback.
• Thematic Curation: Tools to help different audiences easily find and use research.

Instead of spending large amounts on current deals, universities could fund these alternatives. This would make research sharing fairer and give control back to the academic community.

Why It Matters

How we share research affects everyone. Current systems benefit big companies but limit who can take part. A new system could give all researchers and institutions equal opportunities. It would also make knowledge more available to the public.

This is our chance to make real change. Dutch universities have always been leaders in Open Access. By acting now, they can set an example for others around the world.

What Can You Do?

If you care about Open Science, you can support this initiative. Talk about it with your colleagues, or share it with your institution. Change takes action, and every voice helps.

Let’s build a future where research is open, fair, and for everyone.

DTU in Copenhagen hosts a fantastic data scientist training for librarians.

http://www.altbibl.io/dtu/

All you need to know about and understand how a researcher works with their data; cool words are involved like data-scrapin’, data wranglin’ and more. Register here and get data-savvy yourself.

Data Scientist Training for Librarians (DST4L) is an experimental course, started at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics John G. Wolbach Library and the Harvard Library to train librarians to respond to the growing data needs of their communities. Data science techniques are becoming increasingly important to all fields of scholarship. In this hands-on course, librarians learn the latest tools for extracting, wrangling, storing, analyzing, and visualizing data. By experiencing the research data lifecycle themselves, librarians develop the data savvy skills that can help transform the services they offer. Read more about the program here.

Thanks to Foster Open Science, the DTU Library and our contributors, DST4L is coming to Copenhagen. The course is free and open to beginners. Registration opens on June 3rd and closes on June 10th. Space is limited and acceptance will be based on the strength of your application. The course runs from September 9th to the 11th

THe Onion Router vs Technical and Human infrastructure for Open Research. Despite of the terrible confusing acronyms used in EU projects, I do sympathise with the important initiative linking the world’s body of scientific artifacts.

http://project-thor.eu

My current THOR-like activities involve Research Data Management training for PhD’s at TU Delft and University of Twente, where I tell them about using ORCID and connecting their research artifacts; data and publications using DOI’s.
Also I do have high hopes the data and publication repositories in the Netherlands will incorporate ORCID, if the Dutch universities get to sync their DAI’s to ISNI’s and the ISNI’s to ORCID’s.

THOR builds on the lessons and recommendations from the ODIN (ORCID and DataCite Interoperability Network) project, and will:

Leverage two community-driven global PID initiatives for contributors (ORCID) and scientific artefacts (DataCite) to build tools to serve the evolving needs of the research community.
Deliver PID-based services to submit, identify, attribute, and cite artefacts, starting with four disciplinary communities: Biological and Medical sciences, Environmental and Earth Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Sciences and the Humanities
Create PID integration and interoperability solutions for research institutions, libraries, data centres, publishers, and research funders
Enhance the expertise of the European research community by running an intensive training programme, and creating a knowledge base for practitioners integrating PIDs into research information systems.

School of Data works to empower civil society organizations, journalists and citizens with the skills they need to use data effectively – evidence is power!

Home 2

For me it is a great way to learn and understand what a researcher must do with data.

As a researcher you have to make a cost estimate of your project. Wouldn’t it be really nice to have a one-stop shop where you can select your research analytics tools like R (as a service) and your datasets, all in the cloud by the way, and pay at a checkout counter.

This is just an idea where I describe the potential of the SURFmarket’s pilot project “Cloud distribution channel” when adding “Quality Data” next to the so called “Apps”.

In the Netherlands there is an increasingly need for an overall overview of the apps, tools, services and data you can utilise as a research in your research project. At the universities “Research Service Centers” are popping up, trying to help and support the researcher in their different phases of their research project, by combining the knowledge and services of the different university departments together in one one-stop-shop at the institutional level. The University library of Maastricht is growing their service center together with all the researchers and staff departments, trying to evolve and improve their offerings. Also the Technical University of Delft is creating a specialised department for Research Support. All these people in the Netherlands who are committed to deliver the support structure for the needs of the researchers, are united in a special interest group (SIG) from SURF, called the SIG Research Support.

Looking at ‘research data’ services in particular is that the University service departments are, for now, concentrating  on services where you can store your research data at an optimum balance between costs and availability. When you have your data sitting there, stored, well described, stamped with a quality brand and ready to be reused and citable, it would be great if you could put it on a market place to cover for the digital curation costs, right?  Well lets assume we live in a paradigm where this is a great idea! What are then the potential possibilities?

I will put in another ingredient in your mind to this conceptual idea. As an analogy of the iTunes App Store (Trade Mark, and so forth), this market place that I will describe can offer little corners of scientific disciplines where small editorial boards are making collections of tools and high quality datasets for researchers to delve into.

Lets just focus on some “neutral” databases with factual data, or factoids. I will try to sum-up some of those databases that are out there; public geo spacial data (NL:kadaster), commercial publisher data Web of Science, demographic statistical data (NL:CBS), international bibliographic data (VIAF), etc.

In a potential use case where I am a researcher, I would like to visit this collection of my discipline and search, filter and look at the datasets available. I would like to select the dataset to use and it shows me the costs. It is maybe even possible to make a query for a sub-section of the data, and reduce the total costs. Then I get two buttons: Try and Buy. The Try button gives me a sample of 10 records of data to look if it is useful enough, or to see if I can find values to connect the data to other datasets. The Buy button sends me to a licence agreement page where it tells me how to cite the dataset or subset, what I can and can’t do with it, if it has an expiration date, can it be reused, combined, made publicly available, etc.

And just as you this might be great for research! … it is already done by the commercial industry. Bringing data for apps in iTunes style.  Edd Dumbill has written for the Oreilly blog an article called “Data markets compared” which gives a pretty good overview of the data markets available.

For the sake of LOCKSS curation principle, I will just cite a big part of that blog content here.

Data markets compared

	Azure	Datamarket	Factual	Infochimps
Data sources	Broad range	Range, with a focus on country and industry stats	Geo-specialized, some other datasets	Range, with a focus on geo, social and web sources
Free data	Yes	Yes	–	Yes
Free trials of paid data	Yes	–	Yes, limited free use of APIs	–
Delivery	OData API	API, downloads	API, downloads for heavy users	API, downloads
Application hosting	Windows Azure	–	–	Infochimps Platform
Previewing	Service Explorer	Interactive visualization	Interactive search	–
Tool integration	Excel, PowerPivot, Tableau and other OData consumers	–	Developer tool integrations	–
Data publishing	Via database connection or web service	Upload or web/database connection.	Via upload or web service.	Upload
Data reselling	Yes, 20% commission on non-free datasets	Yes. Fees and commissions vary. Ability to create branded data market	–	Yes. 30% commission on non-free datasets.
Launched	2010	2010	2007	2009

Other data suppliers

While this article has focused on the more general purpose marketplaces, several other data suppliers are worthy of note.

Social data — Gnip and Datasift specialize in offering social media data streams, in particular Twitter.

Linked data — Kasabi, currently in beta, is a marketplace that is distinctive for hosting all its data as Linked Data, accessible via web standards such as SPARQL and RDF.

Wolfram Alpha — Perhaps the most prolific integrator of diverse databases, Wolfram Alpha recently added a Pro subscription level that permits the end user to download the data resulting from a computation.

cited from: http://strata.oreilly.com/2012/03/data-markets-survey.html

Perhaps the research community can learn from the commercial industry and engage in collaboration. What is so bad about storing your research data at a commercial storage facility, as long as they use DOI’s for citing, the bucks acquired can be used to curate your data for the generations to come.

What are your thoughts?