‘Hello, I am here to help!’ For several afternoons as an undergraduate student in New Delhi, I would take a bus to a bustling market and settle into a small office for the Childline counseling service. I was trained as a volunteer responder and counselor for children in distress. All afternoon, the phone would ring. It would usually be a child suffering from exam stress or anxiety and a few tips would go a long way.
Museums, libraries and archives play a pivotal role in the preservation of human knowledge. They also see themselves as custodians of cultural and natural heritage. The task of natural history collections is twofold: on the one hand, they preserve our knowledge about nature, on the other, they hold records of the history of human exploration and conquest of the earth.
How can a research organization systematically spark innovation in science? The Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft (LBG) borrowed its name from the famous Austrian physicist, mathematician, and natural philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann. We are greatly indebted to him for his way of looking at the world and science itself.
Let’s start with the obvious. Evaluation and assessment are part and parcel of the scientific profession. Universities want to hire the best faculty, funding agencies want to support the best projects, and journals want to publish the best papers. To this end, scientists serve as members of hiring and promotion committees and on panels for funding agencies. We also write evaluation letters and reviews of manuscripts and proposals.
From Subscriptions to Publish and Read The DEAL consortium negotiates nationwide licensing agreements for its “nearly 700 mostly publicly funded academic institutions in Germany such as universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutions and state and regional libraries”. Of concern are three major negotiations, namely those with the large corporate publishers Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley.
New digital research infrastructures and the advent of online distribution channels are changing the realities of scientific knowledge creation and dissemination. Yet, the measurement of scientific impact that funders, policy makers, and research organizations perpetuate fails to sufficiently recognize these developments.
During the last decade I have been conducting research on scholarly communication, primarily focusing on how open access in various forms has been introduced into an environment traditionally supported by subscription-based distribution models. Establishing the historical development and current status of journals and articles publishing open access still requires a lot of manual data collection.
Open Science is becoming increasingly popular globally and provides unprecedented opportunities for scientists in Africa, South East Asia, and Latin America.
The scientific community has been flooded with well-intended ideas and concrete attitudes to tackle the openness in science, or better its lack of openness. More specifically, attempts to guarantee access to otherwise ‘protected’ material have been the obsession of many (mostly early-career) researchers.
There has been increasing concern recently in ensuring that public funding for science and innovation creates truly public benefits.
