By Katie Corker (ASAPbio) & Lisa Cuevas Shaw (COS)
Keeping current on organizations and initiatives that are active in the area of open scholarly communication is challenging. Like other parts of the open science community, the open scholarly communications landscape is decentralized, fast-paced, and constantly evolving. To identify both established and emerging organizations and initiatives, colleagues from ASAPbio and the Center for Open Science have created a resource that provides basic descriptive information about a variety of organizations and initiatives in this space. Access the list here and read on to learn more about this resource.
For the purposes of determining what organizations and initiatives to include on the list, we defined “open scholarly communications” as any organization or initiative that focuses on improving openness and transparency in the scholarly communications process. This definition encompasses open access to research, but extends well beyond access to include issues such as preprinting, improvements to peer review, curation services, open source infrastructure, research lifecycle publishing, and more.
The list contains more than 90 entries and is quite comprehensive, but there are certainly many more organizations and initiatives that could be included. Notably, we have omitted the majority of preprint services from the list, and instead direct readers to our existing ASAPbio resources on the topic. All information was hand coded from publicly available sources. We invite the community to suggest additional entries to our new resource by contacting Katie (katie.corker@asapbio.org). Corrections to existing entries are also welcome.
The need for such a resource was identified at an October 2023 gathering of Year of Open Science Participating Organizations, supported by funding from NASA. We hope that this initial resource can serve as a prototype for a more expansive collection of initiatives involved in open science more generally. We imagine that the list might be useful for organizations seeking partners, or for funders, institutions, and others to recognize gaps or missing pieces in the landscape. For instance, by reviewing the list, we can note that there are several open publishing platforms on the list, but very few initiatives focused on recognition and rewards.
Several themes emerged in the process of creating the list. First, the inclusion of a public roadmap was far from universal with nearly 70% of organizations or initiatives lacking representative information or visualization of major strategies and initiatives in progress and forthcoming. It may be that some of these initiatives are “complete” or not actively developing new features, rendering a roadmap less applicable. Still, the absence of a roadmap makes it challenging to determine what projects an organization is currently pursuing, which makes it difficult for those without insider knowledge to determine whether their own plans might duplicate the ongoing work of others.
Second, the majority of included initiatives are based in the U.S. or the U.K. We suspect this has less to do with the actual prevalence of initiatives worldwide, and more to do with our own blindspots. We have attempted to include organizations and initiatives from other regions as far as we are aware of them, but we would welcome suggestions of other additions from the community. In a similar way, the list skews towards infrastructure-based tools (which are perhaps easier to identify) and may be missing important contributions in the community, rewards, and policy arenas.
A final point of note concerns ROR IDs. ROR is “a global, community-led registry of open persistent identifiers for research organizations.” Just like ORCIDs can be used to uniquely and persistently identify researchers, RORs can be used to uniquely and persistently identify research organizations. ROR defines research organizations as “any organization that is involved in research.” These organizations also need to be independent entities, not subsidiaries (like, e.g., labs or departments within universities). In principle, the majority of the organizations on this list are eligible, but we found that only a little over 40% of the organizations have one. Consistent use of PIDs, including RORs, makes it easier to track outputs of projects over time.
We hope that this list is useful for the community to find and learn about initiatives in the open scholarly communication ecosystem. As previously noted, we welcome additions and corrections via email (katie.corker@asapbio.org). If there is sufficient interest in this resource, we will determine how we and others can sustain the list and could extend the work to other areas. Anyone with interest in this work is likewise invited to contact us to learn more about how to get involved.
