Conference Agenda

In repositories, we have the tools to power open access in a way that is cost effective and equitable to all. We have the tools to re-engineer how academic publishing operates. This has only been amplified by the growing global reach of the web. However, since 2011, the uptake of Gold vs Green Open access globally indicates that Green Open Access is losing the race for significance. Gold Open Access, while expensive, offers a more streamlined publication process, greater visibility, and often, a more polished platform for research dissemination. This has led to a growing divide in access to academic resources, where well-funded research is more readily available than research from less affluent sources.

This presentation will highlight ways for librarians to demonstrate to research offices, the opportunities for more impact in their research and reduced publishing budgets via Green Open Access. We will investigate the differences in citation counts and altmetric scores across different formats of academic publishing, from closed access, to gold and green. The talk will highlight the integrations that repositories can use to superpower their repository submissions.

To empower progress, it is vital to ensure that scientific research results are made transparent and freely available for all members of society. Open access is intended to solve issues that have long constrained scholarly communication and research advancement, namely accessibility, affordability, and equity. Yet, there is little agreement among funding and research agencies, policymakers, repository managers, and data producers about what equity means in open access. This presentation reports on a study currently in development by a collaborative team of researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park, and representatives from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agricultural Library (NAL). It offers insights on the meaning of equity about open access to research results, based on two sources: (1) a literature review of the concept of equity in the context of open access; and (2) an empirical analysis of how federal agencies, as a key set of stakeholders, are responding to the requirement for equity in the 2022 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Memorandum on “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research” (Nelson, 2022). The preliminary analysis indicates little consensus on the equity concept in open access to research results.

This presentation will provide a very brief overview of the Data Curation Network (DCN) and the IMLS funded project, “Developing Specialized Data Curation Training to Address Needed Expertise in Focused Areas“ (RE-252343-OLS-22). The majority of the presentation will focus on the experience of the simulation data cohort mentor, what went into developing curriculum for technical data types, and how other organizations or groups may go about working towards bridging the gaps in curation to further the field. The four specialized data types (code, scientific data, geo-spatial data, and simulation data) are integral to climate justice work. Training data curators how to curate the data will allow more reuse. Developing training materials, testing them out, editing and sharing globally will help those who are new to specialized data become more skilled as we all work to promote research transparency and elevate underrepresented communities when we make our teams more inclusive and data more FAIR. Feedback from the instructional cohorts as well as attendees of the pilot workshop will be shared to help others learn from what we may have done better.

role in the data-sharing landscape. In January 2023, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the United States started requiring most of the 300,000 researchers and 2,500 institutions it funds annually to include a data management and sharing plan and to make research data publicly available. Towards this end, the NIH launched the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) with seven generalist repositories working together to support NIH data sharing and discovery through consistent metadata, common metrics, and training on using these repositories. During this presentation, our speakers will discuss:

The GREI program, its mission, and goals

What the GREI coopetition has accomplished to date and incorporated to support research transparency and how communities worldwide can benefit from these developments and models.

How “co-opetition” amongst repositories is creating a model of data transparency, community, and sustainability others can implement.

How researchers around the world can benefit from the program