New report confirms positive momentum for EU open science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press release: “The Commission released the results and datasets of a study monitoring the open access mandate in Horizon 2020. With a steadily increase over the years and an average success rate of 83% open access to scientific publications, the European Commission is at the forefront of research and innovation funders concluded the consortium formed by the analysis company PPMI (Lithuania), research and innovation centre Athena (Greece) and Maastricht University (the Netherlands).

The Commission sought advice on a process and reliable metrics through which to monitor all aspects of the open access requirements in Horizon 2020, and inform how to best do it for Horizon Europe – which has a more stringent and comprehensive set of rights and obligations for Open Science.

The key findings of the study indicate that the early European Commission’s leadership in the Open Science policy has paid off. The Excellent Science pillar in Horizon 2020 has led the success story, with an open access rate of 86%. Of the leaders within this pillar are the European Research Council (ERC) and the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme, with open access rates of over 88%.

Other interesting facts:

  • In terms of article processing charges (APCs), the study estimated the average cost in Horizon 2020 of publishing an open access article to be around EUR 2,200.  APCs for articles published in ‘hybrid’ journals (a cost that will no longer be eligible under Horizon Europe), have a higher average cost of EUR 2,600. 
  • Compliance in terms of depositing open access publications in a repository (even when publishing open access through a journal) is relatively high (81.9%), indicating that the current policy of depositing is well understood and implemented by researchers.
  • Regarding licences, 49% of Horizon 2020 publications were published using Creative Commons (CC) licences, which permit reuse (with various levels of restrictions) while 33% use publisher-specific licences that place restrictions on text and data mining (TDM).
  • Institutional repositories have responded in a satisfactory manner to the challenge of providing FAIR access to their publications, amending internal processes and metadata to incorporate necessary changes: 95% of deposited publications include in their metadata some type of persistent identifier (PID).
  • Datasets in repositories present a low compliance level as only approximately 39% of Horizon 2020 deposited datasets are findable, (i.e., the metadata includes a PID and URL to the data file), and only around 32% of deposited datasets are accessible (i.e., the data file can be fetched using a URL link in the metadata).  Horizon Europe will hopefully allow to achieve better results.
  • The study also identified gaps in the existing Horizon 2020 open access monitoring data, which pose further difficulties in assessing compliance. Self-reporting by beneficiaries also highlighted a number of issues…(More)”

Using Satellite Imagery and Machine Learning to Estimate the Livelihood Impact of Electricity Access

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nathan Ratledge et al: “In many regions of the world, sparse data on key economic outcomes inhibits the development, targeting, and evaluation of public policy. We demonstrate how advancements in satellite imagery and machine learning can help ameliorate these data and inference challenges. In the context of an expansion of the electrical grid across Uganda, we show how a combination of satellite imagery and computer vision can be used to develop local-level livelihood measurements appropriate for inferring the causal impact of electricity access on livelihoods. We then show how ML-based inference techniques deliver more reliable estimates of the causal impact of electrification than traditional alternatives when applied to these data. We estimate that grid access improves village-level asset wealth in rural Uganda by 0.17 standard deviations, more than doubling the growth rate over our study period relative to untreated areas. Our results provide country-scale evidence on the impact of a key infrastructure investment, and provide a low-cost, generalizable approach to future policy evaluation in data sparse environments….(More)”.

Social welfare gains from innovation commons: Theory, evidence, and policy implications

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jason Potts, Andrew W. Torrance, Dietmar Harhoff and Eric A. von Hippel: “Innovation commons – which we define as repositories of freely-accessible, “open source” innovation-related information and data – are a very significant resource for innovating and innovation-adopting firms and individuals: Availability of free data and information reduces the innovation-specific private or open investment required to make the next innovative advance. Despite the clear social welfare value of innovation commons under many conditions, academic innovation research and innovation policymaking have to date focused almost entirely on enhancing private incentives to innovate by enabling innovators to keep some types of innovation-related information at least temporarily apart from the commons, via intellectual property rights.


In this paper, our focus is squarely on innovation commons theory, evidence, and policy implications. We first discuss the varying nature of and contents of innovation commons extant today. We summarize what is known about their functioning, their scale, the value they provide to innovators and to general social welfare, and the mechanisms by which this is accomplished. Perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, and with the important exception of major digital platform firms, we find that many who develop innovation-related information at private cost have private economic incentives to contribute their information to innovation commons for free access by free riders. We conclude with a discussion of the value of more general support for innovation commons, and how this could be provided by increased private and public investment in innovation commons “engineering”, and by specific forms of innovation policymaking to increase social welfare via enhancement of innovation commons….(More)”.

Commission publishes study on the impact of Open Source on the European economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release (European Commission): “It is estimated that companies located in the EU invested around €1 billion in Open Source Software in 2018, which brought about a positive impact on the European economy of between €65 and €95 billion.

The study predicts that an increase of 10% in contributions to Open Source Software code would annually generate an additional 0.4% to 0.6% GDP, as well as more than 600 additional ICT start-ups in the EU. Case studies reveal that by procuring Open Source Software instead of proprietary software, the public sector could reduce the total cost of ownership, avoid vendor lock-in and thus increase its digital autonomy.

The study gives a number of specific public policy recommendations aimed at achieving a digitally autonomous public sector, open research and innovation enabling European growth, and a digitised and internally competitive industry. In the long-term, the findings of the study may be used to reinforce the open source dimension in the development of future software and hardware policies for the EU industry.

Moreover, since October 2020 the Commission has its own new Open Source Software Strategy 2020-2023, which further encourages and leverages the transformative, innovative and collaborative potential of open source,  in view of achieving the goals of the overarching Digital Strategy of the Commission and contributing to the Digital Europe programme. The Commission’s Strategy puts a special emphasis on the sharing and reuse of software solutions, knowledge and expertise as well as on increasing the use of open source in information technologies and other strategic areas….(More)”.

No revolution: COVID-19 boosted open access, but preprints are only a fraction of pandemic papers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jeffrey Brainard: “In January 2020, as COVID-19 spread insidiously, research funders and journal publishers recognized their old ways wouldn’t do. They needed to hit the gas pedal to meet the desperate need for information that could help slow the disease.

One major funder, the Wellcome Trust, issued a call for changing business as usual. Authors should put up COVID-19 manuscripts as preprints, it urged, because those are publicly posted shortly after they’re written, before being peer reviewed. Scientists should share their data widely. And publishers should make journal articles open access, or free to read immediately when published.

Dozens of the world’s leading funders, publishers, and scientific societies (including AAAS, publisher of Science) signed Wellcome’s statement. Critics of the tradition-bound world of scientific publishing saw a rare opportunity to tackle long-standing complaints—for example, that journals place many papers behind paywalls and take months to complete peer review. They hoped the pandemic could help birth a new publishing system.

But nearly 2 years later, hopes for a wholesale revolution are fading. Preprints by medical researchers surged, but they remain a small fraction of the literature on COVID-19. Much of that literature is available for free, but access to the underlying data is spotty. COVID-19 journal articles were reviewed faster than previous papers, but not dramatically so, and some ask whether that gain in speed came at the expense of quality. “The overall system demonstrated what could be possible,” says Judy Luther, president of Informed Strategies, a publishing consulting firm.

One thing is clear. The pandemic prompted an avalanche of new papers: more than 530,000, released either by journals or as preprints, according to the Dimensions bibliometric database. That fed the largest 1-year increase in all scholarly articles, and the largest annual total ever. That response is “bonkers,” says Vincent Larivière of the University of Montreal, who studies scholarly publishing. “Everyone had to have their COVID moment and write something.”…(More)”.

Afyanet

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Afyanet is a voluntary, non-profit network of National Health Institutes and Research Centers seeking to leverage crowdsourced health data for disease surveillance and forecasting. Participation in AfyaNet for countries is free.

We aim to use technology and digital solutions to radically enhance how traditional disease surveillance systems function and the ways we can model epidemics.

Our vision is to create a common framework to collect standardized real-time data from the general population, allowing countries to leapfrog existing hurdles in disease surveillance and information sharing.

Our solution is an Early Warning System for Health based on participatory data gathering. A common, real-time framework for disease collection will help countries identify and forecast outbreaks faster and more effectively.

Crowdsourced data is gathered directly from citizens, then aggregated, anonymized, and processed in a cloud-based data lake. Our high-performance computing architecture analyzes the data and creates valuable disease spread models, which in turn provide alerts and notifications to participating countries and helps public health authorities make evidence-based decisions….(More)”

Empowered Data Societies: A Human-Centric Approach to Data Relationships

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

World Economic Forum: “Despite ever-increasing supply and demand, data often remains siloed and unavailable to those who seek to use it to benefit people, communities and society.

In this whitepaper, the World Economic Forum and the City of Helsinki propose a new, human-centric approach to making data better available. By prioritizing the values, needs and expectations of people, policy-makers can drive meaningful actions with positive outcomes for society while maintaining the utmost respect for the people who are part of it.

This paper provides frameworks, insights, and best practices for public sector employees and elected officials –from mayors and ministers to data scientists and service developers –to adapt and build systems that use data in responsible and innovative ways….(More)”.

Future of e-Government: An integrated conceptual framework

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Suresh Malodia, Amandeep Dhi, Mahima Mishra and Zeeshan Ahmed Bhatti: “The information and hyper-connectivity revolutions have caused significant disruptions in citizens’ interactions with governments all over the world. Failures in implementing e-government interventions suggest the lack of an integrated approach in understanding e-government as a discipline. In this study, we present an overarching and integrated conceptual framework of e-government grounded in robust qualitative research to describe the factors that must be integrated to implement e-government successfully. Drawing insights from 168 in-depth interviews conducted with multiple stakeholders in India, this study defines e-government as a multidimensional construct with customer orientation, channel orientation and technology orientation as its antecedents. Building on customer orientation and relationship marketing theories, this study proposes that the most significant factor impacting success in implementing e-government projects is citizen orientation, followed by channel orientation and technology orientation. The study also identifies the digital divide, economic growth and political stability as moderators of e-government. Furthermore, the study proposes the tangible and intangible outcomes of e-government with perceived privacy and shared understanding as moderating conditions. Finally, the study presents relevant theoretical and practical implications with future research directions….(More)”.

Participatory data stewardship

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Ada Lovelace Institute: “Well-managed data can support organisations, researchers, governments and corporations to conduct lifesaving health research, reduce environmental harms and produce societal value for individuals and communities. But these benefits are often overshadowed by harms, as current practices in data collection, storage, sharing and use have led to high-profile misuses of personal data, data breaches and sharing scandals.

These range from the backlash to Care.Data, to the response to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s collection and use of data for political advertising. These cumulative scandals have resulted in ‘tenuous’ public trust in data sharing, which entrenches public concern about data and impedes its use in the public interest. To reverse this trend, what is needed is increased legitimacy, and increased trustworthiness, of data and AI use.

This report proposes a ‘framework for participatory data stewardship’, which rejects practices of data collection, storage, sharing and use in ways that are opaque or seek to manipulate people, in favour of practices that empower people to help inform, shape and – in some instances – govern their own data.

As a critical component of good data governance, it proposes data stewardship as the responsible use, collection and management of data in a participatory and rights-preserving way, informed by values and engaging with questions of fairness.

Drawing extensively from Sherry Arnstein’s ‘ladder of citizen participation’ and its more recent adaptation into a spectrum, this new framework is based on an analysis of over 100 case studies of different methods of participatory data stewardship. It demonstrates ways that people can gain increasing levels of control and agency over their data – from being informed about what is happening to data about themselves, through to being empowered to take responsibility for exercising and actively managing decisions about data governance….(More)”.

The Innovation Project: Can advanced data science methods be a game-change for data sharing?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by JIPS (Joint Internal Displacement Profiling Service): “Much has changed in the humanitarian data landscape in the last decade and not primarily with the arrival of big data and artificial intelligence. Mostly, the changes are due to increased capacity and resources to collect more data quicker, leading to the professionalisation of information management as a domain of work. Larger amounts of data are becoming available in a more predictable way. We believe that as the field has progressed in filling critical data gaps, the problem is not the availability of data, but the curation and sharing of that data between actors as well as the use of that data to its full potential.

In 2018, JIPS embarked on an innovation journey to explore the potential of state-of-the-art technologies to incentivise data sharing and collaboration. This report covers the first phase of the innovation project and launches a series of articles in which we will share more about the innovation journey itself, discuss safe data sharing and collaboration, and look at the prototype we developed – made possible by the UNHCR Innovation Fund.

We argue that by making data and insights safe and secure to share between stakeholders, it will allow for a more efficient use of available data, reduce the resources needed to collect new data, strengthen collaboration and foster a culture of trust in the evidence-informed protection of people in displacement and crises.

The paper first defines the problem and outlines the processes through which data is currently shared among the humanitarian community. It explores questions such as: what are the existing data sharing methods and technologies? Which ones constitute a feasible option for humanitarian and development organisations? How can different actors share and collaborate on datasets without impairing confidentiality and exposing them to disclosure threats?…(More)”.