#cesaer

Pablo de Castro, Open Access Advocacy Librarian

       One may see Open Science (which some prefer to call Open Research) as an altruistic movement towards opening up research methods and especially its outputs for the sake of their visibility and open availability to the wider society. The legitimate right for any citizen to read research outputs resulting from public funding is regularly raised by every Open Access advocate – including yours truly – when explaining the rationale for Open Science. Patients, schoolteachers, doctors are highlighted as the sort of citizens that may need to access scientific literature and may be forced to pay for such access unless we succeed in our push towards Open Science. And SMEs. Yes, one always mentions SMEs here as well. In fact anyone who happens to be outside the institutional subscription bubbles. There is another take to Open Science though, a far more pragmatic and hence more likely to succeed approach. This other take, although not unconcerned with access to research results by the average citizen, is mostly about the possibility of exploiting the synergies between research and industry by making not only research results but other areas such as research facilities or expertise as openly available to industry (and the wider outside world) as possible. This is the approach driven by innovation that sees research and its commercial application as a continuum and understands the value of openness for the purpose of realising that continuum. The first concept of Open Science is traditionally adopted by research libraries, whereas the second one is characteristic of research offices and any pragmatic approach to research such as research assessment (the REF) and the measurement of research impact. This is hardly surprising: libraries have made a historical emphasis on their users (nowadays often called "customers") and making content available to them in as freely as possible a way. One has also elaborated elsewhere ("spenders not fundraisers") about the traditionally poor approach that libraries display towards raising funding besides spending large amounts of it. While hardly surprising then, this difference in approaches also creates a large ideological divide that tends to isolate university libraries and the research support services they host with regard to practically any other research-related instance at the institution and beyond. This is of course unless there is a carefully nurtured bridge between services and a communication channel that allows the mutual understanding and respect for each other's practices and drivers. Collaboration with industry is perhaps not part of the traditional mission for universities – 'traditional' meaning here the foundation of the University of Bologna in 1088 – but the triple helix concept has been around – and deeply influenced the way universities operate – for quite some time now. These days collaboration with industry may well be among the most important missions of a public university within a knowledge society (see in this regard the enlightening white paper "The role of universities of Science and Technology in innovation ecosystems: towards Mission 3.1" produced at Strathclyde Uni in collaboration with other European Universities of Science & Technology within the CESAER Task Force Innovation). All this is not just about job creation and general scientific and technological progress, but mostly about implementing this continuum between research and its commercial application in a way that allows public investment to benefit the wider socio-economic tissue that surrounds higher education institutions. Same as it is deeply right that elderly ladies outwith the Strathclyde sphere of influence are able (and so happy!) to use the brand new, flashy Sports Centre the University has built on Cathedral Street, it is deeply right that master students at the University are able to conduct their learning and their training at commercial partners where they may well end up employed in a couple of years' time. There are of course many issues raised by the innovation-driven approach to Open Science becoming mainstream (if none of them is unsolvable). The attitude to adopt with regard to basic research and to research in the Humanities is one of them. The seemingly unstoppable trend towards an ever increasing commercialisation of research is another one. The clash between openness for the sake of widening access to research outputs for everyone and openness for the sake of their commercial exploitation is perhaps the key one to explore as part of the current effort for the definition of the workflows associated to Open Science implementation. But there are also many upsides stemming from this approach too. The main one of these may well be that this is a deeply shared philosophy across European countries and regions (and beyond), where the economic return of the investments on research infrastructure and activity is solidly sitting on the radar of policymakers everywhere – hence the European and Regional Innovation Scoreboards where every country and region in Europe may assess its progress within this general trend to strengthen the continuum between Academia and Industry. Moreover, this is not a zero-sum game: because of the deeply transnational character of research and innovation, there is a knock-on effect whereby improved innovation systems in a given region benefit the global competitivity of the wider economic area, be it a country or a Union thereof. In the meantime, and from a library perspective, it would be good for research support services at research libraries to widen their perspective a bit. It's not just that the discussion around (for instance) Plan S and Gold Open Access implementation via Read & Publish agreements gains a whole new dimension when examined under an innovation-driven perspective. It's also that the kind of tasks that research support services are currently undertaking could be redesigned for a better alignment with this mainstream approach to the institutional research activity so that the potential synergies could be much better exploited. These aspects will be addressed in a companion post that will look into what Open Science services currently do and what else they could do if they managed to find the resources for it by adequately redistributing their workload.

Pablo de Castro, Open Access Advocacy Librarian

For many years Open Access implementation has been approached in a generic way without much emphasis in the differences across disciplines. In a community often prone to schisms, there was a lively argument some years ago between advocates of subject-based repositories – a solution much preferred by researchers – and proponents of institutional repositories. After some heated exchanges on the mailing lists it became clear that, as usual, the way to follow would be a co-existence of both approaches. Once Open Access has gradually become mainstream thanks to the policies issued by research funders and public administrations, there is still a fundamental discipline-agnostic roadmap guided by the commitment to achieve full OA by 2020. At the same time though, initiatives like SCOAP3, the Open Library of Humanities and LingOA are exploring new business models to support a large-scale shift to Open Access on a disciplinary-based approach while subject-based repositories like arXiv and PubMed Central (PMC) regularly top the worldwide repository rankings.

It is in this disciplinary-based context where the Conference of European Schools for Advanced Engineering, Education and Research (CESAER) aims to play a relevant role in the discussions around the future of European Higher Education, Research and Innovation. CESAER is an association of 51 European Technical Universities from 26 countries in which the University of Strathclyde is currently the sole British member. Founded in 1990, CESAER has just held its Annual Meeting 2017 at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) in Budapest, Hungary.

While the meeting programme included sessions and discussions in many different areas – see for instance the speech delivered by the European Commissioner for  Education, Culture, Youth and Sport Tibor Navracsics on "Why STEM subjects and democratic citizenship go together" –  it is the activities held in Budapest by the CESAER Task Force for Open Science (TFOS) which are relevant for the purpose of this blogpost, and especially the discussions held by the Working Group on Open Access within such TFOS.

At the moment this OA WG within the CESAER TFOS contains representatives from TUs in eight European countries: the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, the UK, Poland, the Czech Republic, Italy and Finland. Jointly coordinated by TIB Hannover and the University of Strathclyde, the group aims to apply a subject-based approach towards Open Access implementation that bridges the gaps across national- or institutional-level Open Access implementation policies. Regardless of whether a specific country has expressed a preference for Green or Gold OA, this group aims to identify and follow avenues for technical collaboration that benefit the wider OA community. On top of this, CESAER is included in the list of relevant stakeholders involved in the discussions on Open Science governance and support at European level. In fact a second – and arguably more important – TFOS working group coordinated at the Danish Technical University is currently looking into disciplinary-based approaches to Research Data Management.

The Open Access group is currently working on different lines for a wider OA implementation such as:

Analysis of institutional research profiles and their comparison across institutions and countries: even if all institutions in the group share a broad disciplinary focus around Science and Engineering, there are (unsurprisingly) very significant differences in the publishing profiles in areas like total research output, distribution by publishers and presence of fully Open Access journals

Analysis of presence of institutional academics in journal editorial committees: this is seen as a potentially useful information in the framework of the negotiations with big publishers. Because the CESAER OA group is international and very homogeneous from a disciplinary viewpoint, synergies are bound to arise in this area with initiatives like the Finnish #nodealnoreview

Mutual support for Open Access implementation: by analysing the degree of co-authorship for CESAER member institutions represented in the working group, the opportunities for a collaborative cross-institutional work will be numerous beyond the benefits from internal discussion and sharing of training materials.

The advantages of this subject-specific teamworking are even clearer in the area of Research Data Management where the strategies for a successful advocacy and funder policy implementation are still being laid out. Areas where this collaboration could be more valuable are for instance the analysis of the optimal institutional platforms to use for research data storage, sharing and preservation or the identification of best practice case studies in the metadata description and researcher engagement for managing and curating research data in specific common disciplines across the network.

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Jean-Léon Gérôme Cleopatra before Caesar (1866), Oil on canvas

Blandishment \-dish-mənt\ n. something that tends to coax or cajole : allurement; A flattering or pleasing statement or action used to persuade someone gently.

"When all the blandishments of life are gone the coward sneaks to death; the brave lives on." - Marcus Valerius Martialis

ORIGIN Middle English blandishen, from Old French blandir, blandiss-, from Latin blandr, from blandus, flattering; see mel-1 in Indo-European roots.

Spanish: halago