Group of 25 research funders and publishers collaborate in experimental project to unlock funding information to progress open access
7 March 2023 by Yvonne Campfens, Executive Director OA Switchboard
Building on collaborative work in the OA Switchboard community and pilots in 2022, a project was defined earlier this year to take the pilots to the next level and is well underway. Participants in the 2023 project share the belief that PIDs, metadata, standardisation, and transparency are critical in the transformation to open access.
Thirteen publishers are participating, including JMIR Publications, Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Company of Biologists, Copernicus, eLife, Hindawi, Oxford University Press, Pensoft, Rockefeller University Press, and The Royal Society. These publishers are making content and structured metadata available for advanced searching on names of research funders in all variations known to be in use. Through this additional sourcing, the publishers aim to provide better quality reporting to research funders on relevant publications by sending P1-messages via OA Switchboard
in bulk.
The twelve research funders participating, including Austrian Science Fund (FWF), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Dutch Research Council (NWO), Fundación Séneca, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), Swedish Research Council for Health Working Life and Welfare (FORTE), and Wellcome Trust. They are interested in the data in the P1-messages and aggregated reports to support the monitoring of policy compliance and development, as well as the fulfilment of open access publication-level arrangements, and the potential of increasing open access and making it highly visible.
The hypothesis of this pilot project is that there is valuable information on research funding, related to research output, ‘hidden’ in the current (eco)system, and that we can get this out and shared with the stakeholders in a systematic way.
Together the participants aim to gain a better understanding of the different approaches, systems and best practices of research funders and publishers. They will also review and explore standardisation and (technical) options to get the metadata available in publishers’ systems, not only in OA Switchboard P1-messages, but also into open data sources (such as Crossref) so the wider community can benefit.
The project will run till June 2023 and we expect to communicate results and recommendations before Summer via our blog, to which you can get alerts by signing up to our newsletter.
For more information, please contact:
Yvonne Campfens, Executive Director OA Switchboard
yvonne.campfens@oaswitchboard.org
About OA Switchboard:
The OA Switchboard is a mission-driven, community led initiative designed to simplify the sharing of information between stakeholders about open access publications throughout the whole publication journey. It provides a standardised messaging protocol and shared infrastructure that is designed to operate and integrate with all stakeholder systems, and can help with these challenges above. It is built by and for the people who use it, and is leveraged with existing PID’s.
In 1.5 minutes (video animation): Learn how OA Switchboard is a safe space for publication metadata
