Supporting Researchers in Open Science: A Guide for Librarians

Librarians play a critical role in supporting their institutional researchers. A critical area of support is with open science mandates, or practices that prioritize openness, transparency, and collaboration throughout the research cycle. Research that follows open science practices carries many benefits, including: 

• Reproducibility and Replicability: Others can understand, reproduce, and build upon the research by utilizing the data, methods, and code. 
• Transparency and Accountability: The entire research process, from methods to review, is open for testing, building trust in the results. 
• Equity: Open access to research tools and findings ensures that all researchers, regardless of institutional resources, can participate and benefit. 
• Efficiency and Collaboration: Standardized, shared protocols improve efficiency and facilitate collaboration among researchers. 
• Credit and Recognition: Openly sharing methods and data ensures proper credit for the resources used. 

Researchers who follow open science practices typically see increased citation rates, improved community engagement, as well as greater visibility of their work. Publishing accessible research helps democratize information, which also helps build trust in research findings. 

Librarians have become known as active advocates for open science within their institutions, helping promote collaborative research that benefits both science and society¹. However, ever-shifting policies and stricter requirements are presenting researchers with new challenges, such as knowing how and when to implement open science practices at different research stages, time and financial constraints, technology barriers, and more accountability.

This post will explore three ways librarians can directly support researchers in the shifting area of open science, including:

• Encouraging sharing preprints as a tool to collaborate
• Understanding open science publishing protocols
• Facilitating making research data transparent and available

Sharing Preprints as a Tool

To help distribute and iterate on their work faster, many researchers are using preprints to make their work openly accessible online before peer review. 

Jay Bhatt is a librarian for engineering and biomedical engineering at Drexel University, a private research university in Philadelphia². Bhatt and his colleagues in the Drexel Libraries have developed a series of tips for posting preprints:

• DO maintain version control. It’s vital to readers to understand which version they are reading; remember, also connect to the original in each version.
• DO connect your preprint to your ORCID ID. That ensures that your ORCID ID is included in the preprint server’s metadata and any preprint DOI metadata. The preprint is also included in your ORCID ID record. 
• DO check whether any publisher or journal you are considering submitting to is willing to publish preprints. 
• DO choose a recognized preprint server. JMIR Preprints is a preprint server and "manuscript marketplace" with manuscripts that are intended for community review. Great manuscripts may be snatched up by participating journals which can then make offers for publication.
• DO cite your preprints, where relevant. JMIR Preprints can be cited as they receive DOIs immediately after submission and the DOI (Crossref) handle will link to a landing page.
• DON’T deposit your preprint in multiple servers. This adds to confusion and varying metrics that are difficult to track.

Bhatt believes more education is necessary to improve the quality of preprints. “As librarians and universities, we need to teach graduate research students and researchers about integrity and ethics so that they make ethical choices. We also need to increase their awareness of preprints.”

Understanding Core Open Science Publishing Protocols

Librarians can help guide researchers through knowing when, where, and how to publish, helping them comply with funding mandates for open access.  A deep understanding of the publishing protocols enables librarians to manage repositories, curate open access resources, and negotiate agreements with publishers. The librarian's role has evolved from content acquisition to educating users about how to manage and distribute local research to the world.

• Open Access (OA): Research articles are accessible to everyone online
• Open Data: Research data is made publicly available, ideally in open repositories.
• Open Methods: Transparently sharing: protocols, materials, and analytical code used in a study, enabling reproducibility and validation.
• Open Peer Review: Reviewers’ identities and their comments are publicly disclosed along with the article.
• Preregistration: Registering reports or articles allows a study's hypotheses, design, and methods to be archived in a public repository before data collection or analysis. At JMIR Publications, registered reports are given a persistent identified called an IRRID (International Registered Report Identifier), the purpose of which is to further enhance transparency by providing a machine- and human-readable mechanism for associating the publication of peer-reviewed research protocol and the protocol’s results. 
• Open Code: The code used for data analysis is shared, making the process fully transparent and reproducible.

Making research data transparent and available

Librarians act as facilitators for helping make research data transparent and available through transparent and collaborative research by offering their guidance in data management, using FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles; and promoting the effective use of research tools. The scope of open science is broadening beyond research papers to include data, software, protocols, and other research products. Librarians can create open science awareness for their faculty by managing institutional repositories and archives for open access publications and data, making all research outputs more discoverable. They can also create platforms for data sharing, offering support for tools, like the OpenScience Framework and DMPTool to help researchers with project management and data sharing plans.

Librarians play a pivotal role in facilitating and advocating for faculty research. To accomplish these tasks, they must first understand the barriers researchers face and then take steps to directly support them as they navigate these challenges. By understanding and promoting the open science practices, librarians can promote transparent, accessible, and collaborative research that benefits the institution, as well as science and society more broadly.

Partnering with an independent, mission-driven publisher like JMIR can help your institution support a sustainable OA infrastructure.

Contact our Institutional Partnership Team today to discuss a JMIR Institutional Partnership.

References:

1. Bertram et al., “Open science,”Current Biology 33, no. 15 (August 2023): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982223006681?via%3Dihub

2. Bhatt, Willems, “Preprints: Best Practices Tips Librarians can Share with Researchers.” Connect (Dec, 2021) https://www.elsevier.com/connect/preprints-best-practice-tips-librarians-can-share-with-researchers