Weekly digest: what’s happening in open science?

Amy Williams

Featuring ORCID’s 5th birthday celebration, a new tool to help authors reclaim copyright ownership and the unfortunate afterlives of retracted papers.

Happy birthday ORCID! via ORCID

ORCID celebrated its 5th birthday this week and marked the occasion with the launch of new resources that make it easier than ever before to use an ORCID iD.

New tool helps authors to reclaim copyright ownership of their work via Authors Alliance

The legal nuances of the process of taking back ownership of copyright of your own work from a publisher can be daunting to many. With this in mind, the Authors Alliance and Creative Commons have jointly developed a Termination of Transfer tool that is designed to support US authors in regaining rights over the distribution of their work so that they can share it without restriction.

Tentative headway made in Project DEAL via German Rectors’ Conference

Project DEAL has been working toward a licensing agreement with the publisher Springer Nature in Germany in recent months. This week, it was agreed that existing Springer Nature contracts will be extended by 1 year on a cost-neutral basis ahead of a more in-depth discussion on a plan for a national licence.

What kind of research affects policy decisions?  via LSE Blogs

In recent years, policy initiatives such as the EU’s 2020 Open Access resolution have provided a major boost to open science organizations and activities. This article gives advice from a policy-maker on how to present research in such a way that it is more likely to influence public policy-makers. The key take-home message? Make it short and sweet, and avoid the term ‘neoliberal’.

Retracting bad science doesn’t make it disappear via Wired

Scholarly articles do not exist in a vacuum; Newton famously wrote of ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, but what can be done when some of those giants fall down? This piece looks at the difficulties for authors of citing work that has since been retracted, or even retracted before citation.

The influence of reviewer availability on editorial decisions via The Scholarly Kitchen

Highlighting findings from a recent study in Scientometrics, this article reports on the unfortunate trend of higher rejection rates for articles for which reviewers are difficult to find compared with those for which a reviewer can easily be sourced.

New standards from the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine introduce reproducibility as a prerequisite for publication via Radiology Business

The Journal of Digital Imaging has recently announced that it will adopt the Centre for Open Science’s Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines and will commit to publishing reproducible research only. This comes as a welcome announcement in light of the current reproducibility crisis.