Abstract
The open science movement enables the accessibility and reusability of research output across the globe. Researchers and other stakeholders in the research process can now easily collaborate to add to the body of knowledge. This chapter documents how open science is impacting the role of libraries, publishers, and authors in the digital era. A structured document analysis and web analysis were done to find out how authors, publishers, and librarians are affected by open science. It was found that librarians are taking advantage of open science to provide various information sources to patrons, the publishers are now charging article processing fees to make the journal articles open access upon publishing, and authors are now able to access many information sources during the research process and enjoy greater visibility of their research output. The author recommends the adoption of open science especially in the developing countries and the enactment of policies that support open science at national, regional, and international levels.
TopOpen Science Initiatives
There are various open science initiatives that have been taking place globally (Lasthiotakis, Kretz, Sá 2015). These were driven by various open science platforms such as the African Open Science Platform (AOSP), Open Science Policy Platform by the European Commission, China Open Science among others. In Europe, the European Open Science Cloud was created to support the archiving of data in research funded by public funds using the FAIR principles (Orion open science 2019). The Panton Principles were also written to promote open science in July 2009 in Cambridge. Vollmer states that the Amsterdam call for action on open science advocates for open access of scientific publications especially those funded by public funds (Vollmer 2016). Ahinon and Havemann (2018) pointed out that in Africa, the adoption of open science has been slow in various countries especially the French-speaking Sub-Saharan African countries. The African Open Science Platform is funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology while it is managed by Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAF) and the direction is provided by CODATA (AOSP 2019).
It has been pointed out that open science would develop if there is favourable infrastructure to acquire, curate and disseminate data and information and the availability of protocols, policies and procedures to support the research process as shown in figure 1.
Figure 1. Open science at different stages of the research process
The diagram shows that open science can only be achieved if it is promoted at every stage of the research process. Therefore, this calls for the development of inter-regional links, collaboration among various stakeholders, and exchange of ideas and good practices in order to achieve the objectives of open science. Most of the supporting policies are on open access and these include the AmeLICA, Coalition S, OA 2020, SciELO, Sao Paulo statement on OA 2018, Berlin declaration 2003, Bethesda statement 2003 and Budapest OA initiative 2002. Therefore, there is need to look at other facets of open science to ensure that there are enabling policies which would promote the adoption of open science in research institutions and publishers.
TopMethodology
A structured document analysis and web content analysis were done to find out how authors, publishers and librarians are affected by open science. The search words that were used to look for documents were open science AND libraries, open science AND authors, and open science AND publishers. The content from the retrieved information sources was analysed using content analysis and the data was presented thematically.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR): The rights given to the owners of intellectual property. IPR is protected either automatically (e.g., copyright, design rights) or by registering or applying for it (e.g., trademarks, patents). Protecting your intellectual property makes it easier to take legal action against anyone who steals or copies it. IPR can be legally sold, assigned or licenced by the creator to other parties, or joint-owned.
Article Processing Charge: A fee charged to the author, creator, or institution to cover the cost of an article, rather than charging the potential reader of the article. APCs may apply to both commercial and Open Access publications. APCs are sometimes charged to authors in order to cover the cost of publishing and disseminating an article in an Open Access scholarly journal.
Green Open Access: Making a version of the manuscript freely available in a repository.
Publisher: A company whose purpose is to make the outputs of research publicly available.
Gold Open Access: Making the final version of manuscript freely available immediately upon publication by the publisher.
Open Data: Making data freely available on the public internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyse, re-process, pass them to software or use them for any other purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.
GitHub: A web-based service that provides a source code repository that works exclusively with the Git command-line tool.
Open Access: Making peer reviewed scholarly manuscripts freely available via the Internet, permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any lawful purpose, without financial, legal or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. May also refer to theses, books, book chapters, monographs and other content.
Open Science: Is the practice of science in such a way that others can collaborate and contribute, where research data, lab notes and other research processes are freely available, under terms that enable reuse, redistribution and reproduction of the research, and its underlying data and methods.
Open Educational Resources (OER): High quality, openly licensed, online educational materials for sharing, use, and reuse. They act as a mechanism for instructional innovation as networks of teachers and learners share best practices.
Scholarly Communication: The creation, transformation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge related to teaching, research, and scholarly endeavours; the process of academics, scholars and researchers sharing and publishing their research findings so that they are available to the wider academic community. The creation, transformation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge related to teaching, research, and scholarly endeavours; the process of academics, scholars and researchers sharing and publishing their research findings so that they are available to the wider academic community.
Institutional Repository: An online database designed to collect the intellectual output of a particular institution or university, including digital collections such as electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), pre-prints, or faculty scholarship, and presents associated metadata regarding these items.