Open Access nieuwsbrief

This second Open Access Newsletter of 2016 is released some two weeks before the annual International Open Access Week, to be held 24-30 October. This year’s theme is ‘Open in Action’. As open access becomes a more and more familiar concept, focus is now on the small steps everyone can take to make openness in research a reality.

If you have a common name such as De Groot or Wang, you may have experienced problems with retrieving your full publication list from a database. Even if your last name is uncommon, some of your publications may be difficult to find because of name (spelling) variations such as Goncharov vs. Gontcharov or van den Broek vs. Vandenbroek. With an author identifier such as ORCID you can overcome these problems. Today, almost 2.5 million researchers have registered for an ORCID iD.

Openness and transparency are core values in science, says the Peer Reviewers Openness Initiative (PRO Initiative). We spoke to one of their co-founders, Rink Hoekstra, assistant professor at the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences. What is the initiative about, why should researchers participate and what effects could this have on the review process?

The open access publisher Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is planning a German website and is seeking German-speaking academics to join their editorial team.

Openaccess.nl: a useful website

What is open science? And how does it affect your research, your research methods and the impact of your results? Many questions arise about the realisation of the ambitions in the Strategic Plan of the University of Groningen about an open and transparent research environment. Questions any researcher has to tackle sooner or later. The Research Strategy Committee (RSC) started a discussion just before the summer 2016 on the basis of the following discussion paper.

The last issue of the open access newsletter featured an article on the reliability of open access journals. It also paid attention to predatory publishers: scholarly publishers with a questionable reputation. They collect article processing charges (APCs), but do not provide any peer review or editing services. Omics Publishing Group (or Omics International) is such a publisher. This publisher recently approached UG researchers to publish in one of its journals. Unfortunately, these resea rchers were unaware of the ‘predatory status’ of Omics Publishing Group and fell prey to this dishonest organisation. The authors were willing to anonymously report on this publisher’s approach.

More and more publishers ask you to make the data related to your publication available, too. For instance, PLOS ONE encourages authors to select repositories that meet their accepted criteria as trustworthy digital repositories. The Research Data Office (RDO) offers advice and practical support for authors. It enables researchers to provide access to the research data on their terms. In the Netherlands, a collaboration of universities offers DataverseNL , a stable data environment to support data availability. DataverseNL is based on an open source initiative initially launched by Harvard University. Read how UG researcher Sanne Kuijper used DataverseNL.