Open Science innovations

There is considerable interest in Open Science, with a number of initiatives to encourage open access to research findings.

Many research funders now require the research that they sponsor to be published as open access with a Creative Commons licence.

This paper, Institutionalizing Open Science in Africa: Limitations and Prospects, is worth a read and concludes: "OS still remains a significant contributor in solving global problems, and thus a potent channel for Africa's development. Hence, institutionalizing OS in Africa should be on the forefront of science stakeholders in Africa more than ever before, especially due to the current pandemic."

A news item in Nature states "Open-access papers have drastically fewer lead authors from low-income regions than do paywalled articles, an analysis of tens of thousands of articles shows." The article puts part of the blame on Article Processing Fees (if the reader or their library does not pay the publisher, the author or their institution or funder has to pay). Nature charges up to $9000 to publish a research article in open access format!

This is a very big topic - some international publishing companies make massive profits, while using free labour provided by editors and reviewers.

There are open source publishing platforms availabe:

1. Open Journal Systems-an open source software application for managing and publishing scholarly journals- https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/
   
   
2. Modern Scholarly Publishing Platform. A platform for Journals, Micropubs, Preprints, PRC, Weblabs and more  –https://kotahi.community/

There are some interesting and new publishing formats, where results (and the data from which the results were derived) are posted on repositories and the peer review comes later.

The paper Next Generation Repositories from the Confederation of Open Access Repositories offers a good perspective on the importance of repositories.

Sciety aims "to grow a network of researchers who evaluate, curate and consume scientific content in the open." and offers repositories where evaluation of 'preprints' can occur.

Plan E for Education: open access to educational materials created in publicly funded universities is a recent publication which proposes a reform to higher education where educational materials are made available widely. This will require the use of innovative platforms and repositories.

The Coalition for Open Publishing of Public Health in Africa (COPPHA) has been established to create a 'Diamond Open Access Publishing Ecosystem for Public Health Research in Africa.'

We hope that you might want to join a discussion about these issues and post your reflections and ideas in the forum below.