Marta Poblet and Amir Aryani talk about the importance of open sharing of grant data – a topic not often brought into the OA debate

Contacts on twitter: @mpoblet @amir_at_ands

Every year, the Australian Commonwealth and the State governments spend billions of dollars in grants to individuals, small business, communities, not-for-profits, universities, corporations, etc. Philanthropy organisations, nearly 5,000 in Australia, are giving approximately an extra billion dollars in grants.

Yet, to date the total, combined value of grants from the Commonwealth, the States, and the philanthropy sector can only be estimated. In 2014, the Australian National Audit Office noted that “the precise number and value of grants made by the Commonwealth Government in any one year is difficult to establish as details are contained in individual entity documents”. It also warned that  “the Commonwealth may be providing very significant subsidies for particular services or outcomes without a good understanding of the level of subsidy provided and consequently value for money”.

Monies from government, philanthropy, and corporate grants fuel research, innovation, and social change, but duplication, over or underinvestment are likely outcomes of a system that keeps confining grant data into organisational silos. Opening up access to grant information across the whole sector would certainly help maximise its efficiency and social impact.

Every year, public and private grant programs generate large volumes of data throughout the different stages of the grantmaking cycle (from publication of the call to final assessment). This grant data should not be considered as a mere by-product of the process. In addition to its organisational value, grant data can also contribute to a common good: linking grant data to recipients, and outputs (including publications, if available) improves the discoverability of the programs and increases the transparency of the overall system.

In Australia, the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) sees the value in connecting grants with grant outputs like data and publications, so the ANDS data discovery service includes open research grant data. The service currently includes grant data from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Australian Research Council (ARC) Some of these data are also linked to project outputs such as datasets and publications.

But discoverability and transparency are not the only benefits of open grant data. As Rachel Wharton from NPC puts it, “accurate and timely data allows funders to learn quickly about a strategy or area in which they are interested. It encourages them to think strategically about their giving and to communicate and collaborate with others in the sector.”

When it comes to philanthropy grants, there is a growing number of international initiatives embracing openness. Examples are the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), Glasspockets and Washfunders by the Foundation Center, PoweredbyData or the recently released GrantNav by the 360 Giving initiative in the UK. This initiative has also developed a data standard which is compatible with the IATI standard and the Foundation Center hGrant standard. More innovations in the philanthropy sector can be found in this report.

Generally, the barriers to creating a comprehensive open framework linking grantmakers with grant programs, grantees, and grant outputs (including publications) are a combination of technical and legal challenges.

A technical challenge, for instance, is how to connect grantmakers and grantees. Researchers in academia are increasingly using author identifiers, unique numbers identifying them so that their names are properly linked to their publications and/or grants. ORCID, ISNI, or ResearchID are the most widely adopted identifiers. This technology could be extended to all types of grants to disambiguate the names of both grantmakers and grantees.

Likewise, an open grant data framework needs to connect grant programs with the outputs produced with those grants. When these outputs are academic publications, platforms such as FundRef or OpenAIRE enable to link who funded what to whom, but the lack of unique and persistent identifiers for grants hinders significantly the visibility of such programs.

The technical barriers need to be addressed hand in hand with the legal and ethical issues associated with openly releasing grant data. Privacy, data protection, and confidentiality principles and rules need to be carefully weighed to protect all stakeholders from potential threat or harm. Intellectual property and licensing issues will also emerge through the process. A balanced approach needs to be translated into appropriate policies, guidelines and procedures to help building a trusted process to share grant data for the public interest.

About the authors

Marta Poblet is a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Researcher at RMIT University (Graduate School of Business and Law) @mpoblet

Amir Aryani is a project manager in Australian National Data Service and technology lead for the Research Data Switchboard (RD-Switchboard.org) @amir_at_ands

They declare no conflicts of interest

Nerida Quatermas @NeridaQuatermas on a new resource to help navigate Creative Commons licenses

Reposted from Creative Commons Australia  – read original post here.

This week is International Open Access Week.

In A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access written for this week Peter Suber identifies open access literature as “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions“.

The definitions of open access provided by the founding meetings for open access to scholarly research were deep and broad. For example, the Budapest Open Access Initiative declared that open access to literature meant:

free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other 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.

Availability of the public internet looks to many like open access. Works on the internet are not necessarily free of copyright or open. The internet is a distribution method but it does not make scholarly works ‘open’.

Open-ness is assessed by the extent to which content can be accessed free of charge and then re-used. Reuse is maximised when a work is freed from most copyright restrictions through open licensing.

Creative Commons offers the legal framework that enables a scholarly work to be free to share while protecting the moral rights of authors. The Creative Commons Attribution licence which is the most permissive of the CC licences enables all the uses identified by the BOAI.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) gives a Seal of Approval to journals which achieve a high level of open-ness based on a number of conditions. More restrictive CC licences meet the licensing condition so long as the licence granted to users enables them to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles”. The licences which meet this condition are CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC and CC BY-NC-SA. The only CC licences not acceptable to the DOAJ are those which include the No Derivatives condition which means that a user cannot adapt or change a work in any way.

What do these licences mean to authors in terms of exercising their rights over their works, and, to users in terms of re-use? Compared with traditional closed access publishing authors retain and users are given more rights in open access publishing.

In celebration of OA Week we have “launched” a new page on the Creative Commons Australia website called Know your rights. It shows the extent of rights that can be exercised for each of the Creative Commons licences.

Reposted from The Conversation, 23 Sept 2015
Last week there was another very public case of a journal article being retracted as a result of academic misconduct. This time it was in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), with the lead author – Dr Anna Ahimastos, working at Melbourne’s Baker IDI – reportedly admitting she fabricated data.

Sadly, the story is all-too familiar. But this is not to say that science is imperiled, only that we need to ensure the reward and support structures in academia promote the best practices rather than corner cutting.

We have only recently begun looking closely at how the scientific literature could function better, and what can go wrong. And there are conflicting opinions on how to handle underlying problems.

Peer review is currently the primary tool we have for assessing papers prior to publication. Although it has its strengths, especially when overseen by skilled editors, it can’t pick up all instances of fraud or sloppy scientific practices.

In the past these errors may have lain hidden for many years, or never come to light. Now, post publication scrutiny is picking up more and more papers with questionable data. This is leading to corrections, or even retractions. Websites such as Retraction Watch have sprung up to document these retractions.

Peerless research

To non-academics, this might all seem rather surprising. Isn’t science governed by strict protocols for performing and reporting research?

Well, no. Unlike industrial processes, for example, which have standard operating procedures and oversight, science is usually organised locally. Expert laboratory heads typically have the responsibility for the oversight of their laboratories’ work.

Many laboratories work as part of larger collaborations, which may have their own checks and balances in place, as do the academic institutions to which they belong. Even so, ultimately the researchers and individual laboratories are responsible for their own work.

The medical sciences have developed their own standards of reporting studies, including clinical trials. But even these standards are not employed universally.

The system of rewards within science is possibly even more perplexing. Academia is a highly competitive profession. The basic training in science is a PhD, with more than 6,000 awarded each year in Australia alone, which is many more than can ever end up as career researchers, even at the lowest level.

The situation gets worse the more senior a researcher gets. According to a 2013 discussion document less than 5% of those who were originally awarded PhDs find permanent academic positions. Even these senior researchers rarely have permanent positions, but are instead expected to compete for funding every few years.

And the primary way academics compete is in the number of papers they publish in peer reviewed journals, especially the handful of what are considered to be top journals, such as Science, http://www.nature.com/link text and The Lancet.

Under pressure

Why does this all matter? Doesn’t this competition lead to selection of the best of the best in research and a faster pace of advancement of science? In fact, the reverse may be the case.

In a seminal paper published in 2005, provocatively titled Why Most Published Research Findings are False, John Ioannidis discussed a number of reasons why research may be unreliable. One finding was that papers in highly competitive areas were more likely to be false than papers in less competitive fields.

In 2014, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics probed these issues among UK researchers in a year long study. What they found was alarming.

Researchers stated that there was strong pressure on them to publish in a limited number of top journals, “resulting in important research not being published, disincentives for multidisciplinary research, authorship issues, and a lack of recognition for non-article research outputs”. Even worse was that the need to get into these top journals led to “scientists feeling tempted or under pressure to compromise on research integrity and standards”.

What can be done? Increasingly, groups of scientists are coming together to develop standards in reporting, conduct and reproducibility. Organisations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which I chair, advise editors on how to handle problem papers.

Perhaps most interestingly, a number of technological innovations have arisen that could lead to more reliable science, if adopted widely. Probably the most important innovation is that of Open Science, i.e. open access to research publications, and open access to the data and methodology that underpins those publications.

But we also need to develop ways to reward scientists who do make their publications, data and methodology open for scrutiny, and don’t just pursue publication in top journals.

Research data organisations, such as the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), are developing the infrastructure for systematic and standardised ways of linking to data, but as yet funders and institutions do not routinely reward such behaviour.

In the end, science is a human endeavour. And like humans everywhere, those who work in it will do what they are rewarded for, for better or for worse. So we need to make sure those reward structures are encouraging good quality research, not the opposite.

Virginia Barbour, Executive Officer, Australasian Open Access Support Group, Australian National University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.