Date: January 13, 2022
Time: 3 – 4.15 pm UK/UTC
Other time zones: 7.00 am Pacific Time, 8.00 am Mountain Time; 9.00 am Central Time, 10.00 am Eastern Time, 12.00 pm Brasilia Time, 4.00 pm Central European Time, 4.00 pm West Africa Time, 5.00 pm South Africa Standard Time, 8.30 pm India Standard Time, 11 pm Singapore Time (Time converter tool)
OASPA is delighted to welcome you to its first webinar of 2022, where we take an evidence-informed approach to how publishers and others in the scholarly communications system responded to the pandemic and explore what the findings can tell us about the future of scholarly communication.
The sharing of the COVID genome by researchers, preprinting, and a commitment by many publishers to make all the COVID research they published freely available, has become a poster child for the power of Open Science. And within one year of the pandemic being announced, there were not one but five viable vaccines globally available – a remarkable human achievement. What is the evidence that the scholarly communications system contributed to this progress? In particular, can we now seize the opportunity to use the evidence to improve the way all global scholarly knowledge is shared, evaluated and communicated?
At the beginning of the pandemic, OASPA endorsed and published an open letter of intent from a small group of publishers and others who wanted to work together to speed up the review of COVID19 research articles. The group formed in direct response to a Wellcome statement calling on the community to make research and data about COVID19 rapidly and freely accessible. The Research on Research Institute (RoRI) worked as scientific advisors to the rapid review group to collect, share and analyse data, not just from the participants, but about the scholarly communications system as a whole. The resulting report, including analyses of preprinting, data sharing, peer review practices and the social and scientific attention that COVID papers received, was published on Dec 6th 2021.
In this OASPA webinar, members of RoRI summarise the approach and evidence that has informed the key recommendations of the report. We also hear responses to the report – and reactions to how publishers and others shaped up – from key representatives involved in the pandemic and an early career researcher who explains why he has committed to forgo the normal journal route to publication and make all his work available as preprints.
Please read the report in advance if you can and come and join us live armed with your responses and questions for RoRi and the panel. We look forward to a lively discussion on the future of scholarly communication with you all.
You can register for this free webinar here.
The line up for the webinar
- Presenting the report from the Research on Research Institute: Ludo Waltman (Leiden University) and Stephen Pinfield (Sheffield University)
- Five minutes responses to the report from: Robert Terry (World Health Organisation), Hannah Hope (Wellcome), Jessica Polka (ASAPBio) and Stefano Davide Vianello (EPFl, Lausanne, Switzerland)
- Q&A session
- Chair: Catriona J. MacCallum (Hindawi and OASPA Board Member)
Further reading
- Waltman, Ludo, Stephen Pinfield, Narmin Rzayeva, Susana Oliveira Henriques, Zhichao Fang, Johanna Brumberg, Sarah Greaves, et al. ‘Scholarly Communication in Times of Crisis: The Response of the Scholarly Communication System to the COVID-19 Pandemic’. Report. Research on Research Institute, 6 December 2021.
- Vianello, Stefano Davide. ‘The “Pre” in [My] “Preprint” Is for Pre-Figurative’. Commonplace (blog), 7 October 2021.
- OASPA COVID-19 Rapid Review Collaboration Initiative Hub
- Most COVID-19 research articles have been made open or free access.
- Levels of preprinting and data sharing are (much) lower than many had hoped.
- There has been a lot of pressure on the journal peer review system – rejection rates for COVID-19 research were high because of issues with quality – yet many journals managed to speed up peer review of COVID-19 research.
- Publishers, platforms and other service providers are innovating new forms of peer review, but only at a small scale.
- Different stakeholders jointly made a strong commitment to open sharing of COVID-19 research results, but there seems to have been less ongoing collaborative working in ensuring the commitment was implemented.
The report concludes that there is no magic bullet to improving scholarly communication and provides 16 recommendations for the future. Improving scholarly communication is a joint responsibility that requires stakeholders working together more intensively to realise change in the system.
Webinar registration link: bit.ly/OASPA-Jan-Webinar
Panelists
Catriona MacCallum, Chair (Hindawi and OASPA Board) @catmacOA
Hannah Hope (Wellcome) @hjhope
Hannah Hope is Open Research Lead at Wellcome, a global charitable foundation that wants everyone to benefit from science’s potential to improve health and save lives. Hannah is responsible for enabling Wellcome-funded research to be open and accessible (where appropriate) to everyone who needs it. Hannah is a director of the OA Switchboard. Prior to Wellcome, Hannah worked for a UK learned society as a publisher and science communicator following the completion of her PhD in molecular biology.
Stephen Pinfield (University of Sheffield) @StephenPinfield
Robert Terry (World Health Organization and RoRI) @Terry364
Robert Terry is a senior strategic and project manager with more than 20 years’ experience in strategy development and implementation. He has specialized knowledge in natural resources development and health research policy in low and high income countries for governmental, non-governmental, philanthropic and UN organizations.
His early career in research and development was in agriculture and he went on to positions at the Royal Society where he ran the international research exchange programme and the Wellcome Trust where he was senior policy advisor. He led the development of Wellcome’s first open access policy and the subsequent establishment of Europe PubMed Central.
Robert joined the World Health Organization in 2007 and led on the development and implementation of the Organization’s strategy on Research for Health. He is one of the lead authors of the 2013 WHO World Health Report– Research for Universal Health Coverage and developed the concept which led to the creation of the WHO Global Health R&D Observatory. Currently he works for the World Health Organization’s Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR) where he is responsible for knowledge management, open access, data sharing and ensuring evidence is translated into policy and practice.
He has lived and worked in the Middle East and undertaken development consultancies in a number of African and Asian countries for Oxfam, UNAIS and DFID. He has a PhD in Global Health Research Policy from the University of Cambridge as well as an MPhil. in Plant Breeding (crop genetics) and a BSc from the University of Sheffield.
Stefano Vianello (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL))
Stefano recently defended his PhD in Developmental and Stem Cell Biology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He obtained a Master of Philosophy in Genetics at the University of Cambridge, UK and is interested in data communication and visual storytelling in Developmental Biology. He strongly resonates with knowledge equity movements of embodied knowledge and pedagogy, and writes to provide an ERC perspective on bibliodiversity, literature sourcing, and literature curation in the era of preprints. He recently articulated his vision of “preprints as the end-product” in terms of “prefigurative printing”.
Ludo Waltman (Leiden University and RoRI) @LudoWaltman
Ludo is Professor of Quantitative Science Studies at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University and Associate Director of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI), where he co-leads a research program studying the scholarly communication system. Ludo also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Quantitative Science Studies, published by MIT Press.
With thanks to the Royal Society of Chemistry who are sponsoring this webinar. 
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