University of Helsinki
Open science means that the research publications, research data and methods used in research are published openly to be used by all. This has a significant impact on the work libraries do to satisfy the information needs of their customers.
By Esa-Pekka Keskitalo, Head of development, the National Library of Finland
What’s important for libraries?
Three aspects are particularly important to libraries: their role in open publishing, the impact of openness on their collections and information service work, and the rise of research data and methods as information materials alongside publications.
Libraries have invested a great deal of work in promoting openness, particularly in relation to Open Access publications.
For a variety of reasons, the number of Open Access publications has not increased at the rate that was originally hoped for, but the concept of openness has been recognised as a useful and viable one. So the work continues.
The golden road of openness
Open Access can be implemented in two ways. “Gold” Open Access means that the academic publications are openly available online, and revenue is accrued from fees collected from authors.
For Finnish academic journals, which are often small, transferring from subscription fees to author fees may not be easy. This is why the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) and the National Library recently received funding from Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture for their project to support Finnish academic journals to transfer into open practices and increase their impact.
The project includes a redesign of the TSV open publication platform for Finnish journals, a new funding model for Finnish open journals, and methods to measure their impact.
“Green” access
“Green” Open Access means that material published through academic media is republished in openly accessible publication archives. This way, the content from paid journals can also be made openly available, while all publications produced by the research organisation are collected in one place.
“Media literacy is increasingly important in the academic world.”
The National Library has maintained such a self-archiving service for many years, used by approximately forty institutions of higher education and other organisations. Through the Open Science and Research project, the Library has received funding to further develop these services.
Funding has also been received for other development and report targets. It will be used to develop identifying codes and description methods for research data as well as to solve issues relating to the long-term preservation of open publications. In addition, the funding will support the development of methods for covering the author fees associated with open journals.
Many projects
The Ministry of Education and Culture has also funded several projects of universities and universities of applied sciences that will help promote open science.
The Helsinki University Library is developing a tool to draft data management plans. Aalto University is promoting the publication of research data as linked open data. The University of Jyväskylä and the University of Eastern Finland are researching and improving the publication processes for open data, while the Hanken School of Economics has a project to facilitate a rapid shift to an open culture of publishing. The Research Unit for the Sociology of Education at the University of Turku is researching metrics for measuring the social impact of open science. Universities of applied sciences are also launching a project, which aims to increase their openness.
Challenges for libraries
How will all this impact libraries? New publication channels are a challenge for collections and information service work. The field of publishing is in constant flux. So-called “predatory” journals have also appeared on the market. These are journals, which publish all articles regardless of quality to collect author fees. Simple online publishing also means that the same content may be available in different places. One article may be available in several slightly different versions. This means media literacy is increasingly important in the academic world.
Research data and research methods are actually becoming their own type of publications. Researchers and libraries have much to learn in this area, both in making the material ready for publication and in finding and using useful data materials.
It has become apparent that the current organisation of researcher services does not support open science in the best possible way. Publishing, data management and applying for research funding, for example, can no longer be easily kept separate.
Libraries, IT departments and research administrators are finding that they must cooperate in order to provide good services to researchers. The increasingly international and networked nature of academic work adds its own dimension to this. Accordingly, participating in international cooperation, involvement and debate are included in the basic duties of the National Library and the library sector at large.