Following two successful virtual conferences, the 9th Conference on Scholarly Communication in the Context of Open Science PUBMET2022 took place in the city of Zadar from 14-16 September 2022.
The conference focused on research data and the exchange of information and ideas via workshops, presentations, posters and roundtables. Specifically, the topics of the event were:
- Assessing the quality of research process, research outputs and publication channels
- Redesigning Open Access – Rights retention strategies and alternatives to paid OA
- FAIRness of Open Science
- Potentials of public engagement in science and environmental activism
- Raising efficiency and effectiveness in scholarly communication
September 13th was reserved for the workshop Third TRIPLE That Camp on Sustainability in Open Science, which was an opportunity for participants to share concepts, strategies of sustainability in Open Science, while the pre-conference day offered 9 workshops. The workshops provided insights on the future of scholarly communication & digital education, enhanced digital tools through the DIGITOOLS project, as well as on the importance of science communication and how it can help to reach a broader audience. Several workshops regarding Open Access and publishing were presented by publishers Scientific Knowledge Services, Elsevier, Oxford University Press, Research Square Company, Bentham Science, EMERALD Publishing, Pensoft Publishers, Kriyadocs.
The first session was dedicated to redesign of Open access. The theme was introduced by invited speakers Pierre Mounier (OpenEdition / OPERAS) and Mario Malički (Stanford University). Current objectives and challenges were defined and potential solutions were proposed. Lessons learned from Opera were mentioned as well as the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access. Stephen Wyber, IFLA and Vanessa Proudman, SPARC Europe presented the Arcadia Foundation funded programme whose goal is to reform copyright laws and regulations thus enabling libraries to provide significantly improved access to and use of copyrighted works. SPARC Europe 2020 study was presented giving insights into copyright and retention policies of the publishers including 10 large publishers and numerous smaller, stressing some positive examples.
NI4OS-Europe was presented during the conference with three presentations. The presentation entitled “Open Science in an open cloud” Alen Vodopijevec, Ruđer Bošković Institute and Draženko Celjak, University Computing Centre University of Zagreb (SRCE) gave an overview of NI4OS-Europe and EOSC, stressing the importance of national open science cloud initiatives and presenting the Croatian Open Science Cloud (HR-OOZ).
Vladimir Otašević, member of the University of Belgrade NI4OS team gave a presentation on open infrastructures and its role on assessing and the quality of research outputs. The most common measurement of research assessment is metrics used by Scopus and Web of Science which is still very important when it comes to career advancement. Beside the traditional measurement the presentation gave an introduction of alternative services like Dimensions, Altmetric, OpenCitations, Publons, OpenAlex etc.
Ákos Lencsés from Hungary described the promoting activities carried out in Hungary by the Governmental Agency for IT Development (KIFÜ) as part of the NI4OS-Europe project. Among activities news feed, interviews with researchers, e-learning activities, open science events including Open science forum were analyzed. According to the results the visitors showed more interest in the local events than the international ones, among participants, librarians prevailed while researchers were more actively involved when the funds were in focus.
Additionally, two posters presented NI4OS-Europe:
Sargsyan, S., Astsatryan, H., & Mirzoyan, A. (2022). Towards the Armenian Science Citation Index. PUBMET, 80–81. https://doi.org/10.15291/pubmet.3955
Kanavou, K., Lenaki, K., Kosanović, B., Papadopoulou, E., Papastamatiou, I., Sifacaki, E., Ševkušić, M., & Toli, E. (2022). Building National Open Science Cloud Initiatives (NOSCIs) in Southeast Europe: supporting research and scholarly communication. PUBMET, 74–75. https://doi.org/10.15291/pubmet.3952, and http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7315249
Also, in the meantime, two PUBMET 2022 presentations have been published as full papers:
Lencsés, Á.; Sütő, P. Challenges of Promoting Open Science within the NI4OS-Europe Project in Hungary. Publications 2022, 10, 51. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10040051
Ševkušić, M.; Toli, E.; Lenaki, K.; Kanavou, K.; Sifakaki, E.; Kosanović, B.; Papastamatiou, I.; Papadopoulou, E. Building National Open Science Cloud Initiatives (NOSCIs) in Southeast Europe: Supporting Research and Scholarly Communication. Publications 2022, 10, 42. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications10040042
Apart from Triple Camp, the Triple project along with the GoTriple platform was presented by Sona Arasteh as a part of a regular programme. Thanks to Juan Pablo Alperin we could find out how Open Journal Systems (OJS) and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) can improve bibliodiversity and efficiency of journal operations, thus supporting transformation of the system. The conference also addressed topics such as peer review, scholarly communication, OA publishing policies, data sharing, open books, citizen science etc. Panel discussion was dedicated to media visibility.
Although Open Access is global trend today and have positive impact in regard to citation there are still many publications behind the paywall, there are differences between scientific disciplines, differences in availability between journals and books and it seems that Article Processing Charges (APCs) as a model of providing open access are deepening the inequalities.
Despite the not so nice weather forecast PUBMET Run was held successfully. The fastest runner was Niels Stern, who as the winner won free PUBMET participation for next year!
The conference brought together about 130 in-person participants, and more than 100 streaming followers.
The authors of selected abstracts will be invited to publish a full paper free of charge in the Special Issue of Publications (ISSN 2304-6775), an international, peer-reviewed, fully open access journal.
The conference was organized by the University of Zadar, Department of Information Sciences, Ruđer Bošković Institute, the Croatian Association for Scholarly Communication, University of Zagreb, University of Rijeka, Faculty of Medicine under the auspices of the Croatian Ministry of Science and Education, NI4OS-Europe, OpenAire, EASE., OPERAS and Sparc Europe.
Looking forward to see you at PUBMET2023!