CESAER and Strathclyde: a subject-based approach to Open Science implementation
Pablo de Castro, Open Access Advocacy Librarian
For many years Open Access implementation has been approached in a generic way without much emphasis in the differences across disciplines. In a community often prone to schisms, there was a lively argument some years ago between advocates of subject-based repositories – a solution much preferred by researchers – and proponents of institutional repositories. After some heated exchanges on the mailing lists it became clear that, as usual, the way to follow would be a co-existence of both approaches. Once Open Access has gradually become mainstream thanks to the policies issued by research funders and public administrations, there is still a fundamental discipline-agnostic roadmap guided by the commitment to achieve full OA by 2020. At the same time though, initiatives like SCOAP3, the Open Library of Humanities and LingOA are exploring new business models to support a large-scale shift to Open Access on a disciplinary-based approach while subject-based repositories like arXiv and PubMed Central (PMC) regularly top the worldwide repository rankings.
It is in this disciplinary-based context where the Conference of European Schools for Advanced Engineering, Education and Research (CESAER) aims to play a relevant role in the discussions around the future of European Higher Education, Research and Innovation. CESAER is an association of 51 European Technical Universities from 26 countries in which the University of Strathclyde is currently the sole British member. Founded in 1990, CESAER has just held its Annual Meeting 2017 at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) in Budapest, Hungary.
While the meeting programme included sessions and discussions in many different areas – see for instance the speech delivered by the European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport Tibor Navracsics on "Why STEM subjects and democratic citizenship go together" – it is the activities held in Budapest by the CESAER Task Force for Open Science (TFOS) which are relevant for the purpose of this blogpost, and especially the discussions held by the Working Group on Open Access within such TFOS.
At the moment this OA WG within the CESAER TFOS contains representatives from TUs in eight European countries: the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, the UK, Poland, the Czech Republic, Italy and Finland. Jointly coordinated by TIB Hannover and the University of Strathclyde, the group aims to apply a subject-based approach towards Open Access implementation that bridges the gaps across national- or institutional-level Open Access implementation policies. Regardless of whether a specific country has expressed a preference for Green or Gold OA, this group aims to identify and follow avenues for technical collaboration that benefit the wider OA community. On top of this, CESAER is included in the list of relevant stakeholders involved in the discussions on Open Science governance and support at European level. In fact a second – and arguably more important – TFOS working group coordinated at the Danish Technical University is currently looking into disciplinary-based approaches to Research Data Management.
The Open Access group is currently working on different lines for a wider OA implementation such as:
Analysis of institutional research profiles and their comparison across institutions and countries: even if all institutions in the group share a broad disciplinary focus around Science and Engineering, there are (unsurprisingly) very significant differences in the publishing profiles in areas like total research output, distribution by publishers and presence of fully Open Access journals
Analysis of presence of institutional academics in journal editorial committees: this is seen as a potentially useful information in the framework of the negotiations with big publishers. Because the CESAER OA group is international and very homogeneous from a disciplinary viewpoint, synergies are bound to arise in this area with initiatives like the Finnish #nodealnoreview
Mutual support for Open Access implementation: by analysing the degree of co-authorship for CESAER member institutions represented in the working group, the opportunities for a collaborative cross-institutional work will be numerous beyond the benefits from internal discussion and sharing of training materials.
The advantages of this subject-specific teamworking are even clearer in the area of Research Data Management where the strategies for a successful advocacy and funder policy implementation are still being laid out. Areas where this collaboration could be more valuable are for instance the analysis of the optimal institutional platforms to use for research data storage, sharing and preservation or the identification of best practice case studies in the metadata description and researcher engagement for managing and curating research data in specific common disciplines across the network.
During this CESAER Annual Meeting 2017 in Budapest it was announced that the University of Strathclyde will become President of CESAER as of Jan 1st, 2018. More updates on exciting work within the CESAER TFOS are then to be expected in forthcoming months – watch this space.