This week, we celebrate reaching 11 000 downloads on our figshare page! We highlight the upcoming Make it Public Week – organized by the UK’s Health Research Authority – and an upcoming OASPA webinar on scholarly communication data. We also share upcoming webinars from shift+OPEN about flipping journals to open access and from PLOS about sharing data using Dryad. Finally, we read about creating equity in open access, about Twitter removing free access to its data, and about lab protocol preprints at PLOS.
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Open Pharma reaches 11 000 downloads on figshare! via figshare
This week, we celebrated reaching 11 000 downloads from the Open Pharma figshare site! All of our resources on figshare are publicly available, including the Open Pharma position statement on open access. Our figshare site also hosts our two latest research posters on plain language summary (PLS) metatag usage in PubMed and ORCID uptake in pharma-sponsored research, which were presented at the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) EU conference in January.
Take part in Make it Public Week via Eventbrite
Openness and transparency in research comes with a wealth of benefits, including greater access to information for patients and the public, as well as allowing health professionals, researchers and policy makers to use a broader range of research to inform decision-making. To improve the openness and transparency of healthcare research in the UK, the Health Research Authority (HRA) is hosting its Make it Public Week between 20 and 24 March 2023. Covering a range of topics – including the importance of publishing trial results summaries, how to raise awareness of research opportunities and the future of research transparency – there will be workshops, panels and talks taking place throughout the week, and you can join any of these events for free!
Exploring the data on scholarly communications via Mailchimp
Join the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) for their webinar titled Reviewing the data on knowledge creation: access, governance and equity. Taking place on 7 March 2023, the webinar will discuss the data that exist about scholarly communication. This includes data that allow researchers to investigate the processes, connections and entities underpinning scholarly publishing. The webinar will also discuss issues surrounding the availability of representative, equitable and complete scholarly communications data covering the Global South, and potential solutions to this problem. You can register for this free webinar here!
The process of flipping to open access: the Quantitative Science Studies experience via Eventbrite
We recently highlighted the launch of the shift+OPEN initiative by MIT Press to facilitate the transition of subscription-based journals to a diamond open access model. To learn more about the underlying processes of flipping a journal to open access, join the editors of Quantitative Science Studies, who share their experiences from having undergone the flip to open access in 2019. The webinar will take place on 6 March 2023 at 17:00 UK time (12:00 EST). The webinar is free to attend, but you will need to register for a spot.
Sharing data with Dryad: the possibilities for PLOS authors via Zoom
Dryad is an open access research data repository that helps make research data discoverable, reusable, citable and shareable. The publisher PLOS has partnered with the Dryad repository to support data sharing for authors publishing in all PLOS journals. This free webinar, taking place on 8 March 2023, provides information on the Dryad data sharing opportunities available for PLOS authors.
To read:
How to achieve equity in open access via OASPA | 4-minute read
The common consensus within the publishing world is that open access publishing is currently not equitable or inclusive. Hurdles to achieving equity and inclusivity in open access publishing include the often prohibitive costs of publishing open access, such as article processing charges and transformative agreements, which only authors with the requisite funds are able to afford. To discuss these problems in more depth, OASPA will be hosting a series of Equity in Open Access workshops between March and May 2023. These events will bring libraries and publishers together to discuss the current problems in the publishing sphere, with the aim of determining solutions to fix them. For more information on the workshops, you can read OASPA’s briefing paper.
Twitter to end free public access to its data via Nature | 5-minute read
For many years, Twitter has provided free access to its application programming interface (API), which has allowed researchers to extract and evaluate large amounts of data from the social media platform. Earlier this month, Twitter announced that it would be ending free access to its API, meaning that the data will no longer be widely accessible. Twitter has not yet confirmed the details of the change, but the company has suggested bringing in tiered subscription costs starting at $100 a month for ‘low-level’ access, although it is not clear what ‘low-level’ means. This article discusses what this announcement means for researchers and what problems it may cause, especially for European Union-funded research projects that were planned under the assumption that API access would remain free.
Preprint posting begins for lab protocols at PLOS via PLOS | 1-minute read
For authors publishing lab protocols in PLOS ONE, PLOS have introduced an expanded partnership with preprint server BioRxiv to allow the hosting of lab protocol preprints. This will allow authors to post their lab protocols as preprints on BioRxiv during the journal submission process, meaning that the work can be made available to other researchers within a matter of days while peer review is ongoing.
Have you read the December 2022 issue of Medical Writing about Open Science and Open Pharma? Read the full issue here!
