The predominant research publishing system is not equitable by design, nor optimised to advance research to create knowledge and ultimately to benefit society. Open Research Central (ORC) was created to foster the re-imagination of the research dissemination system to facilitate trust, transparency and equitable participation. In five years of operation, before dissolving, the non-profit organisation produced outputs and learnings valuable to the development of a responsible research dissemination system. We are sharing our experience in the hope that it will provide others who share the same vision and goals with useful materials to build on. We think that there remains a need for global, cross-stakeholder exploration to build collective understanding of research validation and dissemination and to pilot solutions. However, as this article will explore, enabling and supporting the development of such a collective voice and consequent action is a challenging endeavour in the current landscape and funding environment.

The predominant research publishing system is not equitable by design, nor optimised to advance research to create knowledge and ultimately to benefit society. Open Research Central (ORC) was created to foster the re-imagination of the research dissemination system to facilitate trust, transparency and equitable participation. In five years of operation, before dissolving, the non-profit organisation produced outputs and learnings valuable to the development of a responsible research dissemination system. We are sharing our experience in the hope that it will provide others who share the same vision and goals with useful materials to build on. We think that there remains a need for global, cross-stakeholder exploration to build collective understanding of research validation and dissemination and to pilot solutions. However, as this article will explore, enabling and supporting the development of such a collective voice and consequent action is a challenging endeavour in the current landscape and funding environment.

Peer review is an important part of the scientific process, but traditional peer review at journals is coming under increased scrutiny for its inefficiency and lack of transparency. As preprints become more widely used and accepted, they raise the possibility of rethinking the peer-review process. Preprints are enabling new forms of peer review that have the potential to be more thorough, inclusive, and collegial than traditional journal peer review, and to thus fundamentally shift the culture of peer review toward constructive collaboration. In this Consensus View, we make a call to action to stakeholders in the community to accelerate the growing momentum of preprint sharing and provide recommendations to empower researchers to provide open and constructive peer review for preprints.

Nosotros amábamos tanto el Acceso Abierto

Preprints enable new forms of peer review that have the potential to be more thorough, inclusive, and collegial. In December 2022, 80 researchers and representatives of funders, institutions, preprint servers, journals, indexers, and review services were invited to gather online and at the Janelia Research Campus for a workshop on Recognizing Preprint Peer Review. Sponsored by HHMI, ASAPbio, and EMBO, this meeting aimed to catalyze community consensus and support for preprint peer review and to create model funder, institutional, and journal policies that recognize both preprints with reviews, and reviews of preprints. Here, we make a call to action to stakeholders in the community to help capture the growing momentum of preprint sharing and empower researchers to provide open and constructive peer review for preprints.

Nós amávamos tanto o acesso aberto

Slides from Wellcome's 'Open Access policy update' webinar series discussing:- changes to our Open Access policy;- the impact of these changes to our grant conditions that will support researchers to comply with the new policy;- the Journal Checker Tool which will help researchers navigate different routes to compliance;- how Wellcome will continue to fund open access publishing costs.

As the rush intensifies to find ways to treat and manage COVID-19, one thing is clear: researchers, along with their counterparts in industry and the health services, need unrestricted access to the research literature. However, after more than 15 years of Open Access (OA) mandates, declarations, and discussions, some 75% of the world’s research literature is, on publication, only available to paying subscribers.1 Not only is this lack of access morally unacceptable — as much of this research is funded by the public purse — but it also has serious and damaging consequences. A letter in The New York Times ,2 and signed by the Chief Medical Officer in Liberia, stated that the Ebola epidemic could have been prevented had earlier research been made OA, while a study in Nature Biotechnology reported that a pharmaceutical company suffered a 6-month setback to a drug development programme because a paper was missed in an inaccessible journal.3 Aware of such concerns, and following a global call from science advisors, more than 50 publishers agreed to make all their COVID-19-related content freely available and accessible through PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC. To date, more than 60 000 research articles have been made available through this initiative,4,5 which complements the OA research already published. Crucially, this content is licensed in ways that support text and data mining and machine learning technologies, allowing researchers and machines to search for and discover new and unexpected connections. One group of scientists have developed a digital coronavirus ‘knowledgebase’ (https://corona.cansar.icr.ac.uk), which uses AI technology to organise large amounts of COVID-19 data as it becomes available. Perhaps even more significant than making the COVID-19-related …

We thank Marcia McNutt (1) for her opinion piece in PNAS where she supports the goal of open access (OA). We agree with her assertion that further changes in scholarly publishing are inevitable as it “aspires to serve science and society.” This ambition is at the heart of the Plan S principles. We seek to work in partnership with funders and other stakeholders—including learned societies—to ensure that the outputs of funded research can be accessed and used by all.The opinion piece very much focuses on the challenges that learned societies and researchers will face in the transition to full and immediate OA. It concludes with a rhetorical question: What problem is Plan S designed to solve? The answer is simple: We believe that by maximizing access to research results—including by digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and text and data mining—we stand a better chance of understanding and addressing the many challenges society now faces.As research funders, we are dedicated to serving the research … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: r.kiley{at}wellcome.ac.uk. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

On behalf of the cOAlition S Executive Steering Group, I commend the Editors of The Lancet for their positive support for Plan S and the ambition to make full and immediate open access a reality. Finding ways in which researchers can seek to publish in their preferred journals, while ensuring that the outputs of funded research can be accessed and used by all, is a key part of our strategy. It was especially pleasing to read that the Lancet group's hybrid journals will be fully compliant with Plan S. As the payment of article processing charges in hybrid journals will no longer be supported by Plan S funders, we welcome the stance the Lancet family of journals have adopted: researchers who have articles accepted for publication in these venues can self-archive the Author-Accepted Manuscript (at no cost) in a repository where it can be made publicly available at the time of publication (no embargo) under a CC BY Open Access license. This approach is in line with that of other publishers such as the Royal Society and the Microbiology Society, and we look forward to other publishers moving to a fully open access model. I also commend the Lancet group's work on global health and its campaigning for important values such as the right to health, health equity, and social justice. However, when cOAlition S says that it will not pay for “brand value”,1The Lancet GroupPlan S: the final cut.Lancet. 2019; 393: 2276Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (5) Google Scholar this is about not being willing to pay more for an equal quality of publication services in journals with perceived higher prestige. We value high-quality peer review that can improve the quality of research and will assess the research on its own merits, not based on where it is published. We also value transparency and call for more information on the prices of services the journals provide. I am Head of Open Research at the Wellcome Trust and interim cOAlition S Coordinator. Plan S: the final cutA consortium of research funders, Coalition S, has published its revised recommendations for accelerating the transition to open access for scientific publications. The fundamental principles of Plan S remain intact. No scholarly publication should be locked behind a paywall. Open access should be immediate, without embargoes. The preferred Creative Commons licence is CC BY. Funders will support open access fees at reasonable levels. Funders will not pay for publication in hybrid journals, unless they are part of transformative arrangements with clearly defined open access endpoints. Full-Text PDF

Serious concerns about the way research is organized collectively are increasingly being raised. They include the escalating costs of research and lower research productivity, low public trust in researchers to report the truth, lack of diversity, poor community engagement, ethical concerns over research practices, and irreproducibility. Open science (OS) collaborations comprise of a subset of open practices including open access publication, open data sharing and the absence of restrictive intellectual property rights with which institutions, firms, governments and communities are experimenting in order to overcome these concerns. We gathered two groups of international representatives from a large variety of stakeholders to construct a toolkit to guide and facilitate data collection about OS and non-OS collaborations. Ultimately, the toolkit will be used to assess and study the impact of OS collaborations on research and innovation. The toolkit contains the following four elements: 1) an annual report form of quantitative data to be completed by OS partnership administrators; 2) a series of semi-structured interview guides of stakeholders; 3) a survey form of participants in OS collaborations; and 4) a set of other quantitative measures best collected by other organizations, such as research foundations and governmental or intergovernmental agencies. We opened our toolkit to community comment and input. We present the resulting toolkit for use by government and philanthropic grantors, institutions, researchers and community organizations with the aim of measuring the implementation and impact of OS partnership across these organizations. We invite these and other stakeholders to not only measure, but to share the resulting data so that social scientists and policy makers can analyse the data across projects.

A breakdown, by publisher, of where Wellcome authors published in 2017.List of articles identified at: https://europepmc.org/search?query=(GRANT_AGENCY:"Wellcome Trust") AND (FIRST_PDATE:[2017-01-01 TO 2017-12-31])&page=1

Jessica K. Polka and colleagues call on journals to sign a pledge to make reviewers’ anonymous comments part of the official scientific record.

The article and associated documents present a toolkit for tracking the implementation and impact of open science (OS) partnerships. While we include the toolkit in this release, please comment directly on the GoogleDocs below; Annual report, guides and survey ; Open science measures to be considered by others ; Incomplete and rejected open science measures ; and Origin of the measurement toolkit . The article describes the need for and the collaborative process used to develop the toolkit while the associated documents contain the toolkit itself. We are now seeking comments and suggestions on both the article and toolkit from the larger community. We specifically seek comments from those studying, working with, or engaged in OS and OS-related projects. In particular, we welcome comments relating to the comprehensiveness of our measures and what may be missing. We also seek comments on whether the breadth of the toolkit is too ambitious to be effectively implemented and, if so, what measures should be eliminated. We further invite the community to identify any projects – OS or otherwise – that may be amenable to collecting and sharing data based on the toolkit indicators. The present toolkit will need to be translated into open source tools that, to the extent possible, collect the data automatically. Any assistance in developing these tools would be most appreciated. Comments will be accepted online on GoogleDocs until January 31st, 2019. After the comment period closes, our team will revise the article and toolkit, taking into account proposed edits. We then propose to submit the article and toolkit to the Gates Open Platform for publication.

a report of negative results, a large data set and its description, and more.Finally,

On November 18-19, 2016, the Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO) hosted a meeting of senior managers of key data resources and leaders of several major funding organizations to discuss the challenges associated with sustaining biological and biomedical (i.e., life sciences) data resources and associated infrastructure. A strong consensus emerged from the group that core data resources for the life sciences should be supported through a coordinated international effort(s) that better ensure long-term sustainability and that appropriately align funding with scientific impact. Ideally, funding for such data resources should allow for access at no charge, as is presently the usual (and preferred) mechanism. Below, the rationale for this vision is described, and some important considerations for developing a new international funding model to support core data resources for the life sciences are presented.

Representatives of the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation describe the importance of sharing clinical-trial data for reasons of transparency, good practice, and accelerated dissemination of results.

The Open Science Prize was established with the following objectives: first, to encourage the crowdsourcing of open data to make breakthroughs that are of biomedical significance; second, to illustrate that funders can indeed work together when scientific interests are aligned; and finally, to encourage international collaboration between investigators with the intent of achieving important innovations that would not be possible otherwise. The process for running the competition and the successes and challenges that arose are presented.

OSI2016 Workgroup QuestionAre the scholarly publishing tools we’re using today still the right ones? Is the monograph still the best format in the humanities? Is the journal article still best in STM? These products can be difficult to produce and edit, nearly impenetrable to read, and—as in the case of clinical research information—they aren’t necessarily the best-suited formats for capturing every piece of necessary information (like protocols and datasets in medical research) and showing how this information is all connected to other scholarship. What other formats and options are being considered or used? What are the prospects of change? How about the stakeholder universe itself? How are roles, responsibilities and expectations changing (and where might they end up)? Are we “settling” on half-measures or on the best possible solutions?