A number of federal agencies are celebrating 2023 as a Year of Open Science. This initiative is focused on sparking change and inspiring open-science engagement through events and activities that will advance adoption of open, equitable, and secure science. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) applauds the ongoing commitment of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to public access through the Year of Open Science.
In 2023, through their public-access program, the NSF has funded 10 awards totaling over $1.8 million. These awards support strategic investments in critical national infrastructure for public access, such as machine-actionable data management and sharing plans (DMSPs) and a national summit for US-based research data organizations; culture change, such as the transformative work happening at MIT Library to create a fellows program for open and equitable scholarship; and a number of open-publishing initiatives.
ARL is especially pleased to see research libraries represented throughout many of these investments. Research libraries are key partners on campus to advance open-science practices. Many ARL member libraries provide services and infrastructure to support open-science initiatives and research data–related activities and best practices. Research libraries foster community building and support researchers across disciplinary areas.
Following are brief descriptions of the 10 projects funded by the NSF public-access program:
Doctoral Consortium Support for JCDL 2023
Old Dominion University
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2325052
This project provides travel support for Ph.D. students in the disciplines of computer science and library and information science, who are in the early stages of their dissertation work, so that they can attend the doctoral consortium (DC) of the 2023 ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2023). The goal of the consortium is to help these students develop their dissertation proposals and research plans through feedback and guidance from prominent professors and experienced practitioners from the field of digital library research and development.
INFORMATE: Improving Networks for Organizational Repositories through Metadata Augmentation, Transformation and Evolution
Metadata Game Changers
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2334426
This project seeks to analyze the interaction of many components of the scientific communication ecosystem, characterized for purposes of this project as the Global Research Infrastructure (GRI). Core questions for analysis include how the scientific field measures the impact and benefits of research funding in the US. This is a challenging task, requiring careful analysis and characterization of data and tools for collecting and presenting it, and understanding the breadth and capabilities of the entire infrastructure. Several key aggregate data repositories will be utilized for this early concept research, notably centering on the CHORUS alliance of scientific publishing information. CHORUS provides analysis ready extracts from the GRI, and currently acts as an interface between publishers and 12 federal agencies, providing a proxy for the broader infrastructure. The project will 1) characterize available CHORUS data, focusing on sources and connections, 2) determine connectivity for funder and researcher identifiers and organization affiliations, 3) search for and find currently missing identifiers for organizations, 4) discover collaborations across funders, organizations, and datasets in journal article metadata, and 5) compare CHORUS and agency repository content to understand the contributions and limitations of both sets. This project will help federal agencies understand the capabilities of the Global Research Infrastructure and jump start understanding of new metadata sources and impact assessment.
Integrating Open and Equitable Research into Open Science
MIT Library
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2335657
This project will explore a transformative model of interdisciplinary research and evaluation of current and proposed open science policies, practices, and interventions. This model, the Fellows and Leaders in Open and Equitable Scholarship (FLOES) model, aims to help academic researchers partner with operational platforms and ongoing open science initiatives to embed experiments and measurements into existing science systems and activities. The program will be transformative by pioneering a new scalable methodology, seeding a new generation of researchers focused on open scholarship, and building a coalition among practitioners and researchers engaged in open and equitable research. This Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure project is co-funded by the Science of Science program in the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.
Investigating Reasonable Costs to Achieve Public Access to Federally Funded Research and Scientific Data
Code for Science & Society, Invest in Open Infrastructure Initiative
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2330827
This project will investigate costs involved in publishing research outputs in a range of publicly accessible venues. Using a mixed research model, the project will produce insights, tools, and intervention strategies to highlight and mitigate current disparities between institutions and researchers in different research tiers and institution types. National adoption of open science practices aims to ensure that all citizens benefit from immediate and free access to federally funded research. However, even when those digital research outputs are free for users, their publication and management are not “free”. This raises significant questions regarding who should pay for these processes and how much. As researchers, research offices, scholarly societies, publishers, libraries, and various data management and scholarly communication infrastructure providers actively grapple with emerging policy changes, this research will address key questions: 1) What are the costs of publishing publicly available research, and how do these differ across publication types, institution types, and disciplines; 2) What do US researchers and research institutions pay directly or indirectly (e.g., through transformative agreements) to make federally funded outputs publicly available; 3) What workflows and decision chains do researchers and their research institutions use to secure appropriate public access channels for research outputs; and 4) How do researchers and research institutions currently establish a threshold for reasonable cost for publicly available venues, and do they budget this as allowable expense? As this research is conducted, the project will especially look for differences in both thought and action across institutional types and tiers.
Mapping Open Science through the Journal Editors Discussion Interface
Syracuse University
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2332061
This project will conduct exploratory research to pursue an opportunity arising from the Journal Editors Discussion Interface (JEDI) group of repositories previously launched from the Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (Data-PASS). JEDI’s main focus is on the aspects of the editorial process that concern data and code and their management, citation, and accessibility; additional aspects of research transparency; and reproducibility, replication, and verification. JEDI provides a mechanism for journal editors to interact with each other and with other stakeholders in the academic ecosystem. Editors can pool their collective experience, and make their hard-won expertise available to their successors and other new editors. JEDI has hosted numerous discussion threads on Open Science (OS) and journal editing. Drawing on information and materials provided in these discussions by its members, JEDI has begun to compile a substantial collection of OS resources. While the network’s editor-centered approach has been strikingly successful, it has also demonstrated the need for exploratory research to prepare JEDI to take a more directed approach to its resource collection. The project will draw from existing OS taxonomies to map the individual elements of OS, and how they connect (and are sometimes in tension) with one another. The team will curate an account of OS which, while reflecting mainstream views of the topic, is framed for the needs and interests of journal editors.
Secure Research Impact Metric Data Exchange: Data Supply Chain and Vocabulary Development
University of North Texas
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2335827
Fostering open science requires usage and impact data for publicly accessible information. This project will advance open science by accomplishing the following: a) documenting the usage and impact data supply chain for article and data research outputs, to complement findings for books, and b) engaging research infrastructure stakeholders to crosswalk usage and impact related vocabularies across scholarship outputs and disciplines. The usage and impact data pertaining to a single publicly accessible research output (book, article, or dataset) are created across a complex array of public and private publishers, publication distributors and aggregators, repositories, discovery services and service platforms. Comparable, high-quality information access is vital to research information management systems, impact reporting, and innovation policy; and is inherent to the provision of scholarship impact statements alongside data management plans. Yet, compiling usage and impact metrics for publicly accessible scholarship across public and private repositories, services, and publishers is a time and data-science intensive activity undertaken by individual researchers, universities, libraries, and publishers. While services provision some usage data, challenges related to secure data brokerage, automated data access, and auditing by a trusted, neutral infrastructure complicate the exchange and aggregation of usage data across commercial and non-commercial competitors. This project aims to inform whether a national cyberinfrastructure is needed to support the exchange and processing of sensitive and proprietary usage and impact metrics generated by US-based research publishers and distributors.
Shift+OPEN: Catalyzing the Transition to Diamond Open Access
MIT Press
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2332993
This project will assess the viability of a distinctive approach to stimulate the uptake of Open Access (OA) in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and HSS (humanities and social sciences) journals. Goals include flipping two journals currently being published using a subscription model at another publisher and migrate that journal to a sustainable diamond OA model. The proposal addresses the urgency and risk in the need for new sustainability models,and will analyze a novel financial framework and the strategic viability of a new potentially high-impact publishing model for advancing and sustaining the outputs of scientific and scholarly research on a fully unencumbered open access basis. The hypothesis is that a robust diamond publishing program will help to accelerate STEM and HSS research (although not necessarily at the same rate), and by so doing, incentivize the creation and advancement of knowledge.
SMART-DMSP: Streamlining Metadata, Automation, and Research Tracking for Data Management and Sharing Plans
University of California System, California Digital Library
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2332353
This project will investigate multiple strategies to enhance and support the adoption of machine-actionable Data Management and Sharing Plans (maDMSPs) in the academic environment. As federal mandates for DMSPs continue to increase, maDMSPs offer an efficient means to generate optimal DMSPs and serve as a crucial mechanism for ensuring compliance with these policies. The project focuses on structured metadata, PIDs (persistent identifiers), DOIs (digital object identifiers), and research output tracking to streamline data management and effectively implement maDMSPs. In addition, the project aims to uncover new opportunities for optimizing data management and tracking research outputs by automating processes, improving quality, and adhering to standards. The research project consists of two main work packages. The first work package aims to advance maDMSPs by retooling the DMPTool and experimenting with three key feature areas: automated updates to the DMSP, incorporating externally created DMSPs, and developing dashboards for stakeholders. The second work package explores the potential of machine learning (ML) in a maDMSP workflow, focusing on automating the conversion of narrative text documents into maDMSPs, generating narrative DMSPs from structured data inputs, and addressing privacy concerns surrounding sensitive information.
US Research Data Summit
National Academy of Sciences
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2335787
The US Research Data Summit held by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies) will convene representatives of approximately 40 key research data organizations across all sectors for a discussion of strategies to: a) increase coherence of interests and activities among the various organizations, b) to increase communication and collaboration, and c) to reduce duplication of effort. The summit will also explore how participating organizations can work together to position the United States to be appropriately represented in and benefit from international discussions on research data. The summit planning committee will bring together a diverse group of invitees and will include individuals from research institutions, industry, US federal agencies, scholarly societies, disciplinary and basic and applied data science professional societies and those that nucleate underserved populations, research libraries, higher education associations, and US-based project funders. The summit will be held October 10-11, 2023 in Washington, DC. See: https://www.nationalacademies.org/event/40636_10-2023_us-research-data-summit
Workshop Exploring National Infrastructure for Public Access Usage and Impact Reporting
University of Michigan
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2315721
This targeted convening of experts on open science and public access will bring together specific leading cyberinfrastructure experts to: a) explore approaches to producing cross-platform public and open impact analytics at scale, b) discuss open infrastructure opportunities to improve the FAIRness of usage data, and c) identify needed steps to scaffold America’s national infrastructure for scholarly output impact reporting in light of the Nelson memo and the European Open Science Cloud Core and Interoperability Framework. Workshop findings will be documented in a report that will be distributed through public repositories.
