FORCE2018

Better recognition and reward for a full range of contributions of varying types and intensities are necessary to move science forward. Unfortunately, little infrastructure exists to identify, aggregate, present, and (ultimately) assess the impact of the hundreds of contributions made each day by a diverse research workforce. These significant problems are technical as well as social. Here we will describe approaches to address these issues, including data models to better represent contributor roles and the full array of research outputs, as well as opportunities and challenges related to the cultural aspects of incorporating these tools into traditional academic workflows. Finally, we'll apply these tools to real-life examples described in social media and elsewhere to illustrate the frustrations, the strains on the system, the lack of credit to underrepresented voices in research, and to empower real solutions. 

Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, MIT, and 221B are developing the Public Access Submission System (PASS) which will support compliance with US funding agencies' public access policies and institutional open access policies. By combining workflows between the two compliance pathways, PASS facilitates simultaneous submission into funder repositories (e.g., PubMedCentral) and institutional repositories. We intend to integrate a data archive such that researchers can submit articles and data at the same time. This talk will engage the audience by offering a demonstration of PASS in action and by outlining the steps by which we have engaged the university's central administration (including the President's office) to provide funding and sponsorship for PASS and engaged US funding agencies who have offered access to APIs, etc. Further information about PASS is available at https://osf.io/8qfzj/

Whether you're diving to measure coral reefs in Tahiti or hunched over a computer running statistical analyses, participating in scientific research can be one of the most fun and challenging experiences in the world. The one part we all dread, though, comes after the excitement of a new discovery fades - when we have to sit down and spend the next few months (or years!) publishing a manuscript. Part of what makes this process so aggravating is that far too often it brings out the worst in us - the politics, getting scooped, pressure to over-interpret results, and hiding those really annoying results deep in the supplemental figures. Most if not all of these issues arise from a single source -trying to spin our own small set of results into a really good story. Atomizing research updates into "micro-publications" relieves these conflicts and lets us speak freely about what's actually going on - the good, the bad, and even the mundane. Most importantly, in aggregate micro-publications let us tell the most engaging research stories of all- the ones that involve the whole community, are reproducible, and will stand the test of time. But don't take my word for it, come see for yourself with an interactive game that pits slow, long form individual narratives against short, community driven narratives!

Conflicts of interest: I'm founder and CEO of a startup company that is building micro-publishing services for basic scientists. I am not planning to speak specifically about our product, but rather focusing on the underlying motivation for why I'm doing what I'm doing :).

At the 2018 UKSG Conference in Glasgow, Liam Earney, the Director of Jisc Collections, questioned the extent of progress of the OA transition in the UK as well as its impacts. He showed some eloquent numbers regarding the sustainability of the Gold model with APC: “[a]verage APC increased in cost by 16% from 2013 to 2016”. Moreover, “70% of UK OA articles are published in hybrid journals, yet subscription expenditure has continued to grow”. Far from being a solution to the infamous periodicals crisis that relentlessly eats away at libraries’ acquisition budgets, open access funding based on the author-pays model – largely picked up by commercial publishers – appears to have had the opposite effect of adding to the problem. In order to deal with this situation, a third approach must be found to ensure fair funding for journals in open access, as well as increased participation of stakeholders in the scholarly publication field to the administration of non-commercial research dissemination infrastructures. This is what Érudit and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network have achieved, by developing a partnership model in support of open access, and which is now part of Coalition Publi.ca. This presentation will provide an overview of the current editorial offering in the open access sector and address the impacts of its development. It will then focus on the Coalition Publi.ca initiative and how its full implementation is tide to by a renewed engagement of the scholarly community in the publishing ecosystem.

In 1998, the Presses de l’Université de Montréal launched a pilot project aiming to ensure scholarly journals’ transition to digital format. Erudit.org, a platform dedicated to research production and dissemination, was born out of this local initiative and remains, to this day, the only Canadian platform in the humanities and social sciences, providing access to over 160 journals, 97% of which are available in open access. Registering over 23 million yearly page views, Érudit has recently strengthened its strategic partnership with the Public Knowledge Project in order to develop a comprehensive offering of editorial services. Together, they have created Coalition Publi.ca, a pan-Canadian alliance uniting stakeholders from the field of scholarly publishing - research libraries, acquisition consortia as well as universities - to promote open access and open science. Érudit and PKP are collaborating through Coalition Publi.ca to implement a fair funding model for open access and to develop research activities, as well as an open and community-managed technological infrastructure.

In this talk I will introduce the reproducibility initiative of the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (www.conp.ca). CONP offers a flexible and reproducible approach to publishing academic research, combining transparency, data curation and code sharing to create the reproducible paper of the future. Our main goal is to share analyses in a way that lets readers replicate key figures from a journal article, as well as modify the code of the analyses to explore the impact of arbitrary parameters on those figures. To make it easier to re-run a research analysis, CONP integrates containers, data queries and Jupyter notebooks. Instead of acting as a replacement to traditional journal publishing, the CONP initiative will produce a complementary publication focused on analytical reproducibility and sharing. For each study published through CONP, our team will work with the authors to select elements of the study that capture the most important results and facilitate reproduction and exploration by reviewers and readers. We envision that our pipelines will become the standard in peer-review and remove the overhead that comes with accessing other lab’s data and running their analysis code.

This talk will address the process and outputs of the European Commission’s Expert Group on FAIR-data implementation, which builds on the FAIR principles first articulated via Force11 (https://www.force11.org/fairprinciples). It will pay particular attention to how the report that emerged from the EC group’s work was built on consultation and engagement across geographies, sectors and domains. Significantly, the report takes a holistic, systemic approach and provides a comprehensive action plan engaging a wide range of stakeholders. The presentation will address therefore how the action plan highlights the importance of engaging with disciplinary actors, member states and their networks, as well as the fundamental role of direct researcher engagement relating to the potential for FAIR-data uptake. It will also point to how researchers and data stewards can draw on well developed disciplinary practices to engage across disciplinary boundaries. Format-wise, the presentation will use sli.do or similar to poll attendees on recommended actions and best stakeholder groups to target for successful implementation, and may solicit comparisons across geographies or sectors. The intention is to keep the audience actively involved throughout the presentation, instead of leaving the interaction to the end.

microPublications are peer-reviewed, indexed, and fully citable publications. During the submission process, microPublications capture and verify atomized data, directly depositing it into authoritative databases/knowledge repositories. We've launched the "microPublication Biology" journal as the first facet of this project with more domain-specific journals to come. This strategy represents a welcome alternative to scholarly communication, expanding both the nature of published data as well as engaging more members of the science community in the publication process. I will talk about these expanded roles and newer stakeholders in this talk.

The co-chairs of the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Working Group will give a short update on recent work in the area, including around providing guidance on implementing the software citation principles, progress on technical implementations and tooling, and next steps. The majority of the talk will be a Q&A with directed questions to enable those new to this area to get up to speed and to identify other communities who have a stake in this work.

Open Access in Latin America is the predominant publishing model because governments have committed with the diffusion of science outputs since 20th century, therefore it is publicly funded. Science policies have considered the relevance of publishing journals as one of the main strategies to spread the research results, however there are several challenges journals face in terms of infrastructure, professionalization of editors, funds, among others. This talk will provide some data on the main concerns that publishers have been discussed during my experience in workshops and meetings on DOAJ, that has committed to improve quality of journals published in the Global South.

Git is arguably an essential tool of modern scholarship and research communication. It offers robust, distributed version control and mechanisms for collaboration and sharing through online platforms such as GitHub. Yet, Git is obtuse, abstract, and a challenge to both teach and learn. Even well-designed lessons such as those offered by The Carpentries (https://carpentries.org/) put novice learners in situations of potential cognitive overload as they work to understand the processes behind fundamental commands like git init, git add, and git commit. Creating a mental model of Git's functions without assistance from tangible examples is error-prone and may result in confusion, frustration, and discouragement. Enter LEGO. Novice learners can manipulate LEGO to build their understanding of Git's functions at the same time that they are learning the commands that make these functions happen. Jamene, a Carpentries instructor, and Tami, a LEGO Serious Play facilitator (http://seriousplay.training/), will engage FORCE2018 attendees with a hands-on-your-LEGO demonstration of teaching Git with tactile materials. While playing with LEGO, we will:
•Acknowledge characteristics of text-based tools that intimidate and challenge novice learners
•Participate in the use of tactile materials for teaching and/or learning text-based tools
•Consider teaching text-based tools with tactile materials to support learners in moments when they are overwhelmed by new information

The positive impact of collaboration on academic performance is well documented. Hence the rise of “team science”, helping bridge specialties and focus efforts. Taking a similarly collaborative approach to dissemination of research can further increase reach and impact – helping researchers expand and transcend their networks, benefit from each others’ skills and capabilities, reduce time and effort by sharing tasks and providing incentives and recognition to encourage individual participation in support of group outreach and impact goals. We are currently undertaking research exploring attitudes towards collaborating for dissemination and impact; we propose to present highlights from the results, and outline proposed mechanisms for supporting and encouraging this more strategic approach to dissemination within the research community.

In the digital age where everyone has an online identity by default, it is critical that we teach authors, researchers, scholars and professionals to take control of their professional identity, which reflects their unique and important career contributions. This session will model an active learning instruction approach to educating students, faculty, and staff about how to effectively manage their professional identity online. This mock instruction session will demonstrate a highly interactive, hands-on structure for teaching best practices and tools that prepare participants to present themselves unambiguously, accurately, clearly, and legally in various online environments. Force2018 participants will learn to teach these concepts through active participation in the session and should come prepared with their laptops, devices, and questions.

Manubot is a system for writing scholarly documents on GitHub. It aims to transform publishing to be transparent & reproducible, immediate & permissionless, versioned & automated, collaborative & open, linked & provenanced, decentralized & hackable, interactive & annotated, and free of charge. Manubot accomplishes these goals by applying the workflow from open source software to academic writing. This talk will introduce Manubot and its features. Compared to other methods for writing scholarly documents, Manubot is designed for more technical users as well as infrastructure providers. However, we hope many of Manubot's innovations — such as citation-by-identifier and end-to-end reproducibility — will be adopted more broadly. Hence, this talk should engage all conference participants by foreshadowing a future of publishing towards which we strive!

Alternative title: DOIs are not silver bullets.

Scholarly literature has become more than just papers. Hyperlinks are the preferred way to reference other works, including non-textual objects like datasets and software. While hyperlinks are more powerful than text-based citations, they are prone to link rot. 

Link rot is inevitable to some extent, but some practices compound the problem and cannot be mitigated without the engagement of all stakeholders. Shortened URLs, proxy URLs, vanity URLs, Sci-Hub URLs and many other non-canonical citations add an extra level of indirection that increases the risk of breaking the permanent record of science.

We are building Cobaltmetrics to set the new standard for citation tracking and foster diversity in altmetrics. The web is our corpus, and we index all URIs and identifiers as first-class citations.

In this session we'll give a hands-on introduction to Wikidata and the creation, curation and extraction of structured data about scholarly works, authors, institutions (part of the WikiCite initiative). You'll learn about the Wikidata data model and make your first edits. You'll learn how to populate a Wikidata entry from a DOI or an ORCID and how to retrieve and visualize data in SPARQL via the Wikidata Query Service. No prior knowledge of Wikidata or Wikimedia projects is required.

One of the most meaningful ways by which scientists can engage with other scientists and with the broader community is by sharing one of their most treasured possessions: data.  Indeed, publishers and funders increasingly acknowledge the importance of data as a scientific output. As such, many journals and funders now require that scientists make their data openly accessible, both to promote transparency and to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. To date, journal policies that mandate data sharing have successfully increased the accessibility to datasets underlying scientific publications. However, is the quality of these data sufficient to allow reuse and reanalysis? Even when journals mandate data sharing, our survey of the ecological and evolutionary literature found that 56% of open datasets were incomplete, and 64% were shared in a way that partially or entirely prevented reuse. Given the highly competitive nature of academia, authors might be wary of openly sharing their data for fear of criticism or of others benefiting from their work at their expense. As such, ‘scholarly altruism’ is often cited as a key reason for why some authors are willing to share high quality data that are complete and readily reusable. In this talk, I will discuss our latest (unpublished) work to test this hypothesis by assessing how researchers’ psychological motivations and level of cooperation in real-world situations relate to the quality of their shared datasets.

AI and machine learning are generating a lot of attention at the moment - but how can we engage with these technologies and what do they mean for scholarly communication? After a short introduction to AI and machine learning we will address these questions by engaging the audience in a live interactive demonstration in which we work together to train a machine learning algorithm to work with scholarly content. Examples of AI and machine learning already being used within the scholarly ecosystem will be outlined and discussed. We will conclude by sharing areas of opportunity we see as to how we might work with these technologies, and with each other, to advance the future of scholarly communication.