Workshops

Presenters:   Michael D. Roy, Dean of the Library, Middlebury College, Vermont (USA)
Diane J. Graves, University Librarian & Professor Emerita, Trinity University, Texas (USA)

Purpose of the workshop:

This workshop will raise awareness of the Invest in Open initiative. Our goal is to introduce the philosophy behind the initiative, assess interest, and gain the commitment of attendees for future action. Finally, we will invite the participants to help us envision next steps for this project and for the future growth of a collective infrastructure in support of an open scholarly communications system.

Target audience(s):

The primary audience will be academic librarians, college & university administrators, and publishers and software developers committed to open models for sharing scholarly findings. A secondary audience could include entrepreneurs who wish to support Open projects. Researchers who wish to reach the widest possible international audience for their work may also find the conversation enlightening.

By attending this workshop, participants will:

• Understand the need to gather accurate, consistent data about existing investments in Open projects.
• Develop a vision for the potential impact of collective action
• Develop a sense of urgency and a desire to participate in data collection—now and in the future
• Identify ways to articulate a commitment to collaborative infrastructure—through investment and development
  • Articulation will be at the library level (philosophy, mission, policies, funding) and
  • At the university level (also philosophy, mission, policies, funding).
• Identify challenges and barriers to a shift in funding models, and identify solutions to those obstacles.

Presenters: Nick Shockey and Shawn Daugherty, SPARC

Advocacy is a critical tool in the global effort to set the default to open for research and education—from the national and internationals levels all the way down to individual institutions. Such efforts have been a driving force behind the success of the open movement to date. Public research funders in dozens of countries now have policies requiring that the results of studies they fund be made publicly accessible, and private funders have begun to follow suit.

This policy advocacy has been central to SPARC’s work for well over a decade. This workshop will leverage SPARC’s experience and success in policy advocacy, such as the successful enactment of the 2008 US National Institutes of Health public access policy and the 2013 White House Directive on Public Access to Publicly Funded Research, to teach participants advocacy skills that will be broadly applicable to campaigns at various levels.

Presenter/Facilitator: Chealsye Bowley, Ubiquity Press

With the rise of audit culture in higher education it has been argued that academic value is increasingly becoming “monetised” and as a result academic values are being transformed (Burrows 2012). Auditing is a power based relationship with those being observed being made into objects of information rather than participants in communication (Foucault 1977). Audits establish the definitions of quality as much as they evaluate (Power 1944). Ultimately, effective audit technologies transform the way people perceive themselves, and relate to their work and colleagues (Shore and Wright 2000). Since the 1980’s universities and their researchers have increasingly been assessed for performance, quality, and efficiency in order to determine value for money (Shore and Wright 2000; Audit Commission 1984). The resulting Research Assessment Exercise and Research Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom, and White House’s Public Access Policy in the United States, although great progress for open science, also epitomise the uptake of “value for money” auditing by governments. Academic reward systems are “the valuing of people’s professional lives” (O’Meara 2002), but the current emphasis on openness is a model of valuing, both economic and sociocultural, the research process as well (Levin and Leonelli 2016). Although current academic reward systems privileging high impact factor publications have hindered adoption of open science, the new funder and university Open Access policies are shifting the requirements for researchers, simultaneously creating new opportunities for open science and new hurdles for researchers. Where is the line between positive growth for open science and simple value for money? Is open science becoming yet another metric that earlier career scientists must fit into in order to survive in the academy?

The open science movement is altering what it means to be an academic scientist. PhD students and early career researchers have reported being dismissed by senior colleagues for submitting to Open Access journals, and being told their publications aren’t ‘real’ because the journal is Open Access and doesn’t have an Impact Factor. However, with the recent growth in open science, the values of the academy may shift to be more inclusive of open science just as they shifted previously in the mid twentieth century for auditing — with the caveat that researchers would then be evaluated based on openness. Or will early career researchers that want to practice open science continue being pulled in two directions and having their identity as a ‘real’ academic scientist questioned?

Purpose of the workshop: To present research on the identities of academic scientists and then have a discussion among attendees on how open science is impacting their research identities. This workshop will begin with the presenter’s discussion of their own research on the identities of academic scientists and then transition into an open discussion among attendees, particularly early career researchers, on how open science practice is impacting their researcher identities.

Target audience: Early career researchers

Learning objectives:

• Attendees will reflect on how the scientific identity is shaped by research practices.
• Attendees will share how research practices affect their researcher identity.
• Attendees will discuss how to bridge the values of open research with the requirements of academic success.

Presenter/Facilitator: Ross Mounce, Arcadia Fund

In this two-hour workshop we will attempt to overview basic concepts in text and data mining, with a focus on open source implementations in R. The examples used will be trivial, to convey understanding of the principles. We will pick out some published examples from the biological and chemical literature to show how TDM techniques have been successfully applied. The session will end with an open discussion on the theme of: “Why aren’t more researchers using text and data mining?” and all the open access related policy issues that come with this question.

Objectives: 

Overview of the power, scalability, and utility of TDM techniques

Who should be interested:

People who do not think of themselves as computer scientists

What attendees are expected to learn:

• Some of what current TDM methods can and cannot do
• The significant difference(s) between “title, abstract, and keyword” mining vs. fulltext mining
• De-mystification of TDM jargon like document-term matrix (DTM), tokenization, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, named entity recognition…
• Why open access papers must be licensed to permit public reposting, modification, and commercial use (a defence of CC BY licencing from the TDM point-of-view)

Facilitators: Angela Okune, Rebecca Hillyer, Leslie Chan – OCSDNet

This workshop will centre on how current discourse around Open Science has tended to focus on the creation of new technological platforms and tools to facilitate sharing and reuse of a wide range of research outputs, but has largely avoided tackling many important issues related to inclusion of a diversity of perspectives in science. We believe a feminist perspective can help to surface these issues, particularly with regard to the need for inclusive infrastructure, which are especially important as Open Science increasingly becomes part of government agendas and policies. We expect that researchers, practitioners and policy makers interested in Open Science will benefit from this workshop to think about issues of inclusivity in Open Science that are not receiving sufficient attention. We expect participants who attend this workshop will gain awareness about relevant resources and work that has been done by feminist technoscience scholars to expand the perspectives of Open Science. We hope that participants will take away new possibilities for their work that they may not have considered before. For policy makers, this workshop will be particularly relevant to help think about how evidence for Open Science should be assessed from a more feminist inclusive standpoint. The workshop will also present results from a two-day workshop on Feminist Open Science that will take place prior to the ELPUB workshop, with the intent of soliciting feedback and collaboration.