Tagged / open science

UKRO Conference Report – important EU funding updates

UKRO logoThe UK Research Office (UKRO) is the European office of the UK Research Councils. It delivers a subscription-based advisory service for research organisations (in the main UK HEIs) and provides National Contact Point services on behalf of the UK Government. UKRO’s mission is to maximise UK engagement in EU-funded research, innovation and higher education activities. One way UKRO supports this mission is through the annual conference.

The slides are publicly available via the UKRO website. To access further subscriber-only information, including events notifications and news, BU staff members can register today!

The 2016  UKRO Annual Conference took place at Glasgow ​Caledonian University in Glasgow on Thursday 30th June and Friday 1st July 2016.​​ Please follow the links below to access slides and other information from the event:

Conference Programme​​

Biographies of Speakers

Presentations:

Thursday 30 June 2016

Opening plenary session

Horizon 2020: Are We On the Path to Success?
Mr Wolfgang Burtscher (DG RTD, Deputy Director General)

European Research Council: An Update and Future Directions
Mr Theodore Papazoglou (ERCEA, Head of Unit, Support to the ERC Scientific Council)

Parallel sessions 1

A) Horizon 2020 Health Challenge: Zika, Ebola & Antimicrobial Resistance
Ms Line Matthiessen (DG RTD, Head of Unit, Fighting Infectious Diseases and Advancing Public Health)

B) Being Ethics Ready and Compliant
Ms Maria Filipa Ferraz De Oliveira (ERCEA, Head of Ethics Sector)

C) Horizon 2020 Funding for Research into Migration and Mobility
Ms Elisabeth Lipiatou (DG RTD, Head of Unit, Open and Inclusive Societies)

Parallel sessions 2

A) Marie Skl​odowska-Curie Actions Reporting: IT’s That Time of the Year Again…
Ms Cathy Souto Enriques (REA, MSCA Project Advisor)

B) Funding Research for a Secure Society
​Mr Graham Willmott (DG HOME, Head of Unit, Innovation and Industry Security)​

Friday 1 July 2016

Open Innovation: The Future of EU Innovation Funding? Ideas for Creating a European Innovation Council
Ms Sophie Laurie (NERC, Associate Director of Innovation and Translation)
Mr Matthew King (DG RTD, Head of Unit Open Innovation)​​

Parallel sessions 3

A) Open to the World: Co-Funded Calls and How it Works in Practice
Mr Diego Sammaritano (DG RTD, Policy Officer, R&I Cooperation with China)

B) Open Science: Opening Up Scientific Information in Horizon 2020
Ms Joy Davidson (Collaborative Research & Services Provision Manager, University of Glasgow)

Parallel sessions 4

ELO Profiles for the Future of EU Funding
Ms Angela Noble (University of Edinburgh, Manager – Europe)
Ms Philippa Shelton (University of the West of England, Bristol, Senior Research Business Development Manager)
Ms Kimberly Cornfield (UCL, Head of EU Proposal Management)

Managing Intellectual Property in Horizon 2020
Mr Jakub Ramocki (EU IPR Helpdesk, Intellectual Property Advisor)

If you would like to discuss potential EU funding activity, please contact Emily Cieciura, RKEO’s Research Facilitator: EU & International. To see related articles, just search for ‘UKRO’ on the BU Research blog.

 

FOSTER e-learning resources on open science and open access in Horizon 2020 now freely available

Open-Access-logoThe European project FOSTER (Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research) aims to establish mechanisms for researchers to embed open sciences in their daily workflow, thus supporting them to optimize their research visibility and impact and comply with the EU open access policies.

Two of the current courses are particularly relevant for BU staff:

  • Introduction to open science: provides a general introduction to the various components and philosophies of open science including why open science is essential to rigorous, reproducible and transparent research, as well as to future research evaluation criteria focused on societal impact. This is relevant to anyone undertaking research.
  • Open access to publications in Horizon 2020: provides information on how to adhere to the H2020 mandate by depositing publications in open access and therefore ensuring they are freely available. This is relevant to anyone currently working on a Horizon 2020 research project and anyone considering applying to Horizon 2020.

These resources are freely available from the FOSTER website.

Five Minutes with Ulrich Herb on Open Science: “Open Science must be adapted to disciplinary specificities”

sociologyYesterday the Research Blog featured a post on open science, what it entails and how it is different to open access. In a recent interview conducted by OpenAire, open science veteran Ulrich Herb shares the main findings of his research on the extent of open research practices in the discipline of sociology, as well as his wider thoughts on the history and future of the Open Science movement. This interview originally appeared on the OpenAIRE portal here.

 

Ulrich_HerbWhat do you understand by the term “Open Science”? Is it a cohesive phenomenon?

Open Science, as I understand it, is the area of Open Knowledge that deals with scientific information. Open Knowledge, in turn, is knowledge that can be used, edited and distributed according to Open Source principles. The ideal of Open Science is to make all objects involved in the research cycle openly accessible in this sense.
Open Science, as generally understood, is mainly about the objects or items of scientific work, such as text, data and software, but also includes “Open Review” (of text, data and possibly code), as well as “Open Metrics” as scientific para-information. Review and metrics are crucial since they often don’t merely report on the impact of science but can actively steer it as scientists often strongly orient their actions towards such evaluative criteria. In Open Review and Open Metrics the focus is less on OA to research products per se, but on transparency in the evaluation and assessment of scientific work. However, ideally reviews and the raw data that underlies metrics should also be made openly accessible.

 

openscienceYou studied the state of play of Open Science in Sociology. What were your main findings?

OA to journal articles is well established in Sociology. This is especially true for the German-speaking world, where it is strongly promoted by journals that often allow the published versions of articles to be made available in Green OA at the end of an embargo period or even make them Open Access themselves. In addition, Closed Access journals usually have liberal OA policies as regards Green OA. Gold OA journals in Sociology very rarely charge APCs; where they do so, charges are low. On the other hand, OA to book publications is very weak in Sociology. I attribute this to a lack of professional brand building among OA book publishers. OA books will likely become more standard as established publishers develop OA options or a disciplinarily-accepted publisher develops organically from the sociological community.
OA to research data and research software is almost non-existent in Sociology, in both the German-speaking countries and the rest of the world. There is a dearth of disciplinary training, as well as a lack of positioning by the community, for example occurs through the issuing of statements as commonly occurs in other subjects.
However, incentives to move towards data-sharing that exist in other disciplines are unlikely to be effective in Sociology. Data citations are not widespread in Sociology, probably as a result, firstly, of less emphasis in general on citations as a measure of impact than in STM subjects, and secondly because domains like theoretical Sociology do not produce data at all. Sociologists, more than natural scientists, seem still to consider data to be intellectual property and fear loss of control and misuse in regards to making data OA. Finally, Open Review and Open Metrics are very rare in Sociology.

 

What results where most surprising for you?

I was positively surprised by the prevalence of OA to literature in Sociology. However, I was disappointed to find such limited use of Open Review. Peer review is thought more problematic in Sociology than in STM subjects. This can be attributed to a few factors. To give just one example, Sociology is less concerned with what Schimank und Volkmann term “puzzle-solving”, so much as with discussion of fundamental principles. In addition, Sociology sometimes deals with ideologically charged issues that imply deep ethical/moral disputes. But since its review practice is problematic, Sociology could especially benefit from the transparency of the Open Review, because this allows checks to be placed on the objectivity of assessment.

The rarity of OA to data and software was surprising in a negative sense as well. Social science data is especially well-suited for secondary analysis. Open Data also has an ethical dimension: for example, the re-use of qualitative data derived from surveys with victims of abuse, would free such people from multiple requests for information regarding these events. And considering Sociology’s widespread use of the open-source statistics framework R, including its open repository infrastructure, mean that the scarcity of OA to research software in Sociology is disappointing. In sum, Sociology could benefit greatly from all the areas of Open Science, yet has yet to take up this potential.

 

open science principlesHow does Sociology most differ from other fields as regards the uptake of Open Science?

Besides the prevalence of OA to literature, the most striking difference is the level of hesitancy to Open Science that exists among sociologists, despite the potential benefits I just described and the good infrastructural conditions, for example, provided for Germany by GESIS or the R-environments. I think this can, however, be partly explained by the inherent characteristics of the discipline. There are, for example, important sub-disciplines like theoretical sociology which deal with scientific reflection upon the discipline itself and hence do not produce any data or software itself. Another particularity is the privacy issue: Sociology frequently uses very sensitive data whose non-anonymized disclosure is of course impossible, but which are worthless in an anonymized form.

 

Where do you see Science Open in five years? What are the main challenges to come?

Fueled by increasingly stringent funder policies and mandates, OA to sscientific objects like text, data and software will continue to increase. This will also be true for books, albeit to a lesser extent than for journal articles. As for Open Review, I am more skeptical. Although I myself like the idea, I don’t think open peer review will establish itself in Sociology. In metrics, I would like to see a proliferation of metrics whose data and parameters are openly visible and re-usable and can be read via open APIs. However, I rather suspect that commercial actors such as Elsevier and Thomson Scientific for citation or MacMillan as a provider of Altmetric or Ebsco as a provider of PLUM will prevail. It is to be assumed that those providers won’t open up their data. I hope that Sociology takes up Open Science to most fully realize its potential, albeit with the caveat that Open Science must be adapted to the aforementioned disciplinary specificities.

“Open science does not equal open access” – so what is it then?

open science principlesOpen science is the movement to make scientific research, data and dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society, amateur or professional. It incorporates open access publishing as a key principle, alongside open data, open source, open methodology, open peer review and open educational resources. Examples of movements within open science include citizen science (whereby research is conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur or nonprofessional scientists) and open data (data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control). There is an excellent introduction to open science available here: what, exactly, is open science?

open science does not equal open access The open science movement is gaining momentum. Some research funders, such as the UK Research Councils and European Commission for example, now have mandates in place to enforce open access publishing and open data sharing as a requirement of receiving their funding. The RCUK public engagement strategy states the UK Research Councils will support collaborative and co-produced research (e.g. citizen science, community engagement and social participation) and the councils have funded a number of open science research projects, for example, EPSRC funded UCL’s ‘Extreme’ Citizen Science (ExCiteS) project and AHRC funded Oxford’s Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

A substantial and growing number of researchers are now embedding the principles of open science in how they design and conduct research. Dr Michael Pocock, an ecologist at CEH NERC, for example, is a keen advocate of open science and has led several citizen science projects with the aim of collectively undertaking hypothesis-led research. He has authored these excellent slides – Real science and real engagement: the value of citizen science.
openscienceThe European-funded project FOSTER (Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research) aims to establish mechanisms for researchers to embed open sciences in their daily workflow, thus supporting them to optimize their research visibility and impact. The project has created an excellent resource bank that provides a general introduction to the various components and philosophies of open science including why open science is essential to rigorous, reproducible and transparent research, as well as to future research evaluation criteria focused on societal impact.

The Open Science Federation website is an excellent source of information and inspiring ideas of how to embed open science into your research. There is an open science Twitter account if you want to keep up to date with open science information from around the world – @openscience.

If you are interested in building open science principles into your next research project, then speak with your Research Facilitator.