Policy Development Guide
As the launch and continued growth of the Open Research Funders Group demonstrates, momentum around the open sharing of research outputs is building within the funder community. Many organizations have expressed an interest in developing their own open policies. One significant hurdle is a lack of clarity about what factors an effective and comprehensive policy should address. Another is a concern that policies must follow a rigid ideology in order to be considered "truly open". In response to these considerations, the ORFG is pleased to announce the release of the HowOpenIsIt? Guide to Research Funder Policies. Built off the success of the highly visible HowOpenIsIt? Guide for Evaluating the Openness of Journals, this new resource frames the choices funding organizations should consider in developing an open policy. Further, it highlights the spectrum that exists between a fully open and a fully closed approach to funded research outputs.
Interested in sharing with other research stakeholders? Download a PDF copy.
Research funders seeking help in developing or implementing their own policies are warmly encouraged to contact us for further assistance.
Reading List
A wealth of scholarly research and real-world case studies demonstrate the myriad ways in which open access and open data benefit researchers and society alike. A representative sample is found below. If you have a suggestion for this list, please contact us.
SCHOLARLY RESEARCH
Bertagnolli, Monica M., et al. "Advantages of a Truly Open-access Data-sharing Model." The New England Journal of Medicine 376.12 (2017): 1178-1181. This article argues that a key way to honor and reward the altruism of patients who participate in clinical trials is to share the data gathered in these trials with other researchers in a responsible and meaningful way.
Jain, Anubhav, Kristin A. Persson, and Gerbrand Ceder. "Research Update: The materials genome initiative: Data sharing and the impact of collaborative ab initio databases." APL Materials 4.5 (2016): 053102. This article examines data sharing in materials science. It observes that data sharing can drastically shorten the materials research cycle by reducing the burden of data collection for individual research groups, and by enabling more efficient development of scientific hypotheses and property prediction models. This, in turn, has the practical benefit of speeding the discovery and optimization of new materials.
Tennant JP, Waldner F, Jacques DC et al. “The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review [version 3; referees: 3 approved, 2 approved with reservations].” F1000Research 2016, 5:632. This review analyzes the scholarly literature on the impact of open access. It concludes that the overall evidence points to a favorable impact of open access on the scholarly literature through increased dissemination and reuse. It also finds that current levels of access in the developing world are insufficient and unstable, and only open access has the potential to foster the development of stable research ecosystems.
Yang S, Cline M, Zhang C, Paten B, Lincoln S e. “Data Sharing and Reproducible Clinical Genetic Testing: Successes and Challenges. Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing.” 2016;22:166-176. This conference proceeding examines the open sharing of clinical genetic data. It concludes that participation in the NIH ClinVar initiative has improved research reproducibility. This, in turn, positively impacts direct patient care in oncology, cardiology, neurology, pediatrics, obstetrics, and other clinical specialties.
CASE STUDIES
Online Epidemic Tracking Tool Embraces Open Data and Collective Intelligence. Researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Imperial College London developed Microreact, a free, real-time epidemic visualisation and tracking platform used to monitor outbreaks of Ebola, Zika and antibiotic-resistant microbes. The Microreact team collaborated with the Microbiology Society to openly share data and metadata sets, which can then be visualised and explored dynamically by any researcher around the world. This collaboration is explicitly designed to democratise genomic data and resulting insights about disease outbreaks.
From Ideas to Industries: Human Genome Project. With openness as a core tenet, the Human Genome Project generated $965 billion in economic output between 1988 and 2012, creating more than $293 billion in personal income through wages and benefits, and nearly four million jobs.
Battling Disease with Open: Open Source Malaria Consortium. The Open Source Malaria Consortium invites scientists from around the around to freely share their research on anti-malaria drugs through a transparent, online platform. The hope is to accelerate discovery of new drug candidates to be entered into pre-clinical development. The Consortium has attracted more than a hundred contributors who post their drug discovery and development findings, discuss their work, and build on each other’s ideas for potential cures. The project serves as a repository of projects so researchers can see what molecules have and have not proven promising. All information is machine discoverable so others can locate the work and reuse the data.
Sluggish Data Sharing Hampers Reproducibility Effort. The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology is examining the replicability of 50 high-impact cancer biology studies, published between 2010 and 2012. The project coordinators have found that free, unfettered access to the experimental data has been a major hurdle to overcome. Without this access, understanding whether promising research in cancer biology can reproduced and verified is a significant challenge. This may slow follow-on research, or, in a more dire outcome, lead scientists to pursue experiments that are, in fact, a dead-end.
Policy Implementation Tools
A key goal of the Open Research Funders Group is the creation of resources to assist stakeholders in developing, managing, and assessing open policies. The following annotated list of tools and services can help research funders in the operational aspects of policy oversight. If you have a suggestion for this list, please contact us.
|
Resource |
For-Profit? |
Description |
Relevance to Funders |
|
No |
Dataverse is an open source web application to share, preserve, cite, explore, and analyze research data. |
Dataverse software can be used to create dedicated data repositories. Funders in specialized areas that do not have default repositories can build their own solutions off of Dataverse. |
|
|
No |
DOAJ is
community-curated directory that indexes and provides access to open access,
peer-reviewed journals. |
For funders that encourage or require grant recipients to publish their research outputs in open access journals, DOAJ is often used to determine whether a publication is acceptable. DOAJ maintains an evaluation process that weeds out most of the “predatory” open access journals that are considered problematic publication outlets by the scholarly communication community. |
|
|
No |
Dryad is an open, generalist repository for research data. It focuses specifically on the data underlying scientific and medical publications. |
Some funders link the sharing of research data with the publication of research articles. In these instances, Dryad integrates with a wide range of journals and publishers to facilitate data sharing at the point of publication. This streamlines the workflow for authors and simplifies tracking for funders. |
|
|
Federal Agency Article and Data Sharing Requirements Database |
No |
The Federal Agency Article and Data Sharing Requirements Database is a free resource for tracking, comparing, and understanding U.S. federal agencies’ open access and open data policies. It was developed and maintained by SPARC and Johns Hopkins University Libraries. |
This
integrated policy resource can be used to explore and compare agency plans
for sharing articles and data. This may be helpful for funders contemplating
development of their own policies. It
allows for the easy analysis of key issues such as embargoes, exclusions, and
licensing requirements. |
|
Yes |
figshare is a commercial digital repository where researchers can preserve and share their research outputs, including figures, datasets, images, and videos. It is run by Digital Science, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. |
Research
funders with open data policies typically encourage grant recipients to
deposit their research data in subject-relevant repositories (e.g., dbGAP for genotypes and phenotypes). In instances where no clear disciplinary
repository option can be identified, some research funders recommend figshare
as a stable, viable “catch-all” repository. |
|
|
No |
Flourish is a data-driven web app and API enabling users to discover relevant and reputable Open Access (OA) publications in order to maximize publishing impact. By aggregating price information and impact data, the site helps researchers to identify credible OA journals that best fit their publication needs. |
Flourish OA allows funders, who often are paying for Article Processing Charges (APCs), to search for and compare APC costs. It provides aggregated access to current and histroical journal information without needing to visit multiple sources. |
|
|
No |
The HowOpenIsIt? grid provides a means to identify where a journal’s policies sit on the spectrum between “Open Access” and “Closed Access”. Journals have built policies that vary widely across the six fundamental aspects of OA– reader rights, reuse rights, copyrights, author posting rights, automatic posting, and machine readability. It was co-developed by SPARC and PLOS. |
HowOpenIsIt? Is a resource that can be used by funders to
help establish criteria for the level of open access required for their
policies and mandates. For example, should the policy require
unrestricted reuse right? Should
authors be allowed to repost any version of their articles in institutional
and subject repositories? HowOpenIsIt? provides a useful
mechanism to focus on what the key pillars of a funders’ open access policies
should be. |
|
|
No |
Built off of the HowOpenIsIt? Grid, the OAS Evaluation Tool is a free, searchable database of 1,000+ journals. It converts journal policies across the six fundamental aspects of OA– reader rights, reuse rights, copyrights, author posting rights, automatic posting, and machine readability– into a 100 point scale. It was co-developed by SPARC and PLOS. |
For funders
that encourage or require grant recipients to publish in journals that meet
defined open access conditions, the OAS Evaluation Tool is a convenient tool
to look up specific journal policies. |
|
|
No |
The Open Funder Registry is an open taxonomy of 10,000+ standardized funder names. It is managed by CrossRef, a not-for-profit membership organization. |
The Open
Funder Registry is being incorporated by publishers into their submission
processes. Authors select funders from this list and provide grant numbers at
the time of manuscript submission. This makes it substantially easier for
research funders to track outputs derived from their grants. |
|
|
No |
This web page, maintained by Creative Commons, aggregates responses to key questions such as, “Why should foundations adopt an open licensing policy?” and “How do foundations explain open licensing to their staffs and grantees?”. It also walks through the basics of Creative Commons licenses. |
Open Licensing Resources for Foundations provides a succinct overview of the mechanics and merits of an open licensing policy. Research funders considering such a policy can mine this site to create documentation for their program officers that explains open licensing, how to communicate to grantees about the policy change, answer common questions, and so forth. |
|
|
No |
ORCID
provides researchers with unique and persistent digital identifiers. It is a community-supported effort to
address the author disambiguation process. ORCID is integrated with an
increasing range of key research workflows such as manuscript and grant
submissions. Research funders that
request or require grant applicants to include ORCIDs in their applications
can, via manual or automated means, more easily track outputs tied to these
grants. |
ORCID is
integrated with an increasing range of key research workflows such as
manuscript and grant submissions.
Research funders that request or require grant applicants to include
ORCIDs in their applications can, via manual or automated means, more easily
track outputs tied to these grants. |
|
|
No |
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free, full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal, hosted and supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine. It archives copies of more than four million articles, drawn from more than 6,000 journals. |
For funders that encourage or require grant recipients to make their research outputs freely available, PubMed Central is a prominent deposit location. However, PMC does not have a direct deposit mechanism for articles unless they are funded by NIH. Organizations that are Health Research Alliance (HRA) members can deploy a special HRA mechanism to enable deposits by their grant recipients. |
|
|
Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP) |
No |
The Registry of Open Access Repository Mandates and Policies (ROARMAP) is a free registry charting the growth of open access mandates and policies adopted by universities, research institutions and research funders. It is operated by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. |
ROARMAP is used by policy makers, bibliometricians, and others to track the growth in open access policies. The registry also provides a quick mechanism to compare policies across funders. |
|
No |
SHERPA/RoMEO is a free, searchable database of publishers’ copyright and self-archiving policies. It was developed by JISC and is run by the University of Nottingham. |
For funders that encourage or require grant recipients to retain certain reposting and redistribution rights, SHERPA/RoMEO can be used to look up the policies of specific publishers and journals. |