Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader definition takes into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system-to-system performance.
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.
The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-PMH must support representing metadata in Dublin Core, but may also support additional representations.
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. The project defines open access journals as scientific and scholarly journals making all their content available for free, without delay or user-registration requirement, and meeting high quality standards, notably by exercising peer review or editorial quality control. DOAJ defines those as open access journals where an open license is used so that any user is allowed immediate free access to the works published in the journal and is permitted to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of [the] articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose. The mission of DOAJ is to "increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language."
Scholarly communication involves the creation, publication, dissemination and discovery of academic research, primarily in peer-reviewed journals and books. It is “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use." This primarily involves the publication of peer-reviewed academic journals, books and conference papers.
Preservation metadata is item level information that describes the context and structure of a digital object. It provides background details pertaining to a digital object's provenance, authenticity, and environment. Preservation metadata, is a specific type of metadata that works to maintain a digital object's viability while ensuring continued access by providing contextual information, usage details, and rights.
Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection, and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains, and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars. Enterprises are starting to use digital curation to improve the quality of information and data within their operational and strategic processes. Successful digital curation will mitigate digital obsolescence, keeping the information accessible to users indefinitely. Digital curation includes digital asset management, data curation, digital preservation, and electronic records management.
Site saturation mutagenesis (SSM), or simply site saturation, is a random mutagenesis technique used in protein engineering, in which a single codon or set of codons is substituted with all possible amino acids at the position. There are many variants of the site saturation technique, from paired site saturation (saturating two positions in every mutant in the library) to scanning site saturation (performing a site saturation at every site in the protein, resulting in a library of size [20 x (number of residues in the protein)] that contains every possible point mutant of the protein).
Open scientific data or open research data is a type of open data focused on publishing observations and results of scientific activities available for anyone to analyze and reuse. A major purpose of the drive for open data is to allow the verification of scientific claims, by allowing others to look at the reproducibility of results, and to allow data from many sources to be integrated to give new knowledge.
PeerJ is an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences. It is published by a company of the same name that was co-founded by CEO Jason Hoyt and publisher Peter Binfield, with initial financial backing of US$950,000 from O'Reilly Media's O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and later funding from Sage Publishing.
NASIG is an independent professional association of librarians and academic publishing professionals, working to advance and transform the management of information resources in all formats and business models, with an emphasis on scholarly communications, serials and electronic resources. Founded in 1985, NASIG is registered in the state of New York as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
SciCrunch is a collaboratively edited knowledge base about scientific resources. It is a community portal for researchers and a content management system for data and databases. It is intended to provide a common source of data to the research community and the data about Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs), which can be used in scientific publications. After starting as a pilot of two journals in 2014, by 2022 over 1,000 journals have been using them and over half a million RRIDs have been quoted in the scientific literature. In some respect, it is for science and scholarly publishing, similar to what Wikidata is for Wikimedia Foundation projects. Hosted by the University of California, San Diego, SciCrunch was also designed to help communities of researchers create their own portals to provide access to resources, databases and tools of relevance to their research areas
The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.
The Journal of Open Source Software is a peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal covering open-source software from any research discipline. The journal was founded in 2016 by editors Arfon Smith, Kyle Niemeyer, Dan Katz, Kevin Moerman, and Karthik Ram. The editor-in-chief is Arfon Smith, and associate editors-in-chief: Dan Foreman-Mackey, Olivia Guest, Daniel Katz, Kevin Moerman, Kyle Niemeyer, George Thiruvathukal, and Krysten Thyng. The journal is a sponsored project of NumFOCUS and an affiliate of the Open Source Initiative. The journal uses GitHub as publishing platform.
FAIR data are data which meet principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR). The acronym and principles were defined in a March 2016 paper in the journal Scientific Data by a consortium of scientists and organizations.
Micah Altman is an American social scientist who conducts research in social science informatics. Since 2012, he has worked as the head research scientist in the MIT Libraries, first as director of the Program on Information Science (2012-2018) and subsequently as director of research for the libraries' Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship. Altman previously worked at Harvard University. He is known for his work on redistricting, scholarly communication, privacy and open science. Altman is a co-founder of Public Mapping Project, which develops DistrictBuilder, an open-source software.
Mary J. O'Connell is an evolutionary genomicist and Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham. She is the Principal Investigator of the Computational & Molecular Evolutionary Biology Group in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Nottingham.
ReScience C is a journal created in 2015 by Nicolas Rougier and Konrad Hinsen with the aim of publishing researchers' attempts to replicate computations made by other authors, using independently written, free and open-source software (FOSS), with an open process of peer review. The journal states that requiring the replication software to be free and open-source ensures the reproducibility of the original research.
Karthik Ram is a research scientist at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and member of the Initiative for Global Change Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for being the co-founder of rOpenSci. Ram's work focuses on global change, data science, and open research software.
Susanna-Assunta Sansone is a British-Italian data scientist who is professor of data readiness at the University of Oxford where she leads the data readiness group and serves as associate director of the Oxford e-Research Centre. Her research investigates techniques for improving the interoperability, reproducibility and integrity of data.
