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Preprints enable new forms of peer review that have the potential to be more thorough, inclusive, and collegial. In December 2022, 80 researchers and representatives of funders, institutions, preprint servers, journals, indexers, and review services were invited to gather online and at the Janelia Research Campus for a workshop on Recognizing Preprint Peer Review. Sponsored by HHMI, ASAPbio, and EMBO, this meeting aimed to catalyze community consensus and support for preprint peer review and to create model funder, institutional, and journal policies that recognize both preprints with reviews, and reviews of preprints. Here, we make a call to action to stakeholders in the community to help capture the growing momentum of preprint sharing and empower researchers to provide open and constructive peer review for preprints.

Repositories represent critical infrastructure for open science / open scholarship. They preserve and provide access to a wide range of valuable research and educational resources, including articles, pre-prints, research data, images, software, and so on. However, the value of any individual repository is greatly enhanced when it becomes part of a distributed network, enabling resources to be more discoverable, linked with other related content, and part of the larger international corpus of international research. This article discusses the evolution of repository networks since the early 2000s and presents the current vision of the COAR Next Generation Repository Initiative to significantly enhance the networking capabilities of repositories.

Preprints catalyze rapid and open communication of research. A frequent criticism of preprints, however, is their lack of peer review. In recent years, myriad new initiatives have enabled review of preprinted research to be coordinated, collected, and displayed alongside preprints. This provides evaluation and context for readers, as well as feedback for the authors. The processes behind preprint review are diverse and may differ from journal peer review, which can be a challenge for readers seeking to compare and interpret the reviews. To address this, the ASAPbio organized a working group that set out to define key features of preprint review processes. Here, we describe Preprint Review Features (PReF) as descriptors and provide an implementation guide. PReF captures the key elements of preprint review processes using 8 standard key-value pairs. PReF can serve within the descriptions of individual preprint review processes, and act as search filters on indexing services. Widespread adoption of PReF will promote understanding and categorization of preprint review and improve its discoverability.

Five sources of methodological data: the interview recordings, transcribed interviews, interviewer’s pre and post field notes, interviewer reflective journals, and team meeting notes.

International audience; Green and gold are artificial distinctions in open access publishing, mainly driven by the technical and business separation between publishing platforms and institutional and thematic repositories operated by research institutions or research communities. This project builds on the vision of next-generation repositories by pursuing the prospects for greater integration between repositories and journal publishing platforms. It involves developing, through consultation with the academic communities, a conceptual model for highly configurable publishing overlay services to sit atop distributed repository platforms. The model removes the green and gold dichotomy by providing a system that enables academic communities to integrate publishing capabilities with repository capabilities, thereby combining the strength of the two worlds, while building out a community controlled, integrative, and interoperable infrastructure for scholarly communication.

Kathleen Shearerhas been working in the areas of open access, research data management and digital libraries for many years. Shearer is the Executive Director of COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories), an international association of repository initiatives that was launched in October 2009. COAR is located in Gottingen, Germany and has a membership of over 100 institutions worldwide from 36 countries in 5 continents. COAR has been developing a model for sustainable scholarly communications based on a global network of open access repositories and has also been actively promoting the role of libraries in the future of scholarly communication. Shearer is also a consultant for several other organizations. She has been a Research Associate with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) since early 2000. She was instrumental in the launch of the Portage Research Data Management Network in Canada and contributed to the development of the recently released CARL Scholarly Communication Roadmap. She is also a Partnership Consultant with the US-based Association of Research Libraries (ARL), providing expertise to the Association about international activities and scholarly communication. Shearer has also done extensive work for the Canadian federal government and research funding agencies including a project to develop metrics and indicators framework for open science.

This paper describes the plans and strategies to develop Portage, a national network of sustainable, shared services for research data management (RDM) in Canada. A description of the RDM context in Canada is provided. This environment has heightened expectations around the Government of Canada’s Open Science plans and includes deliverables aimed at improving access to publications and data resulting from federally funded scientific activities. At the same time, a recent environmental scan published by Canada’s three federal research granting councils reveals significant gaps in services, infrastructure, and funding mechanisms to support RDM. In addition, Canada’s RDM environment consists of stakeholders from a variety of communities with minimal ongoing coordination or cooperation. The Portage network was conceived as a collaborative network model based on libraries’ strong connections with researchers across the disciplines, an ethos of curation and preservation, and experience with systems for managing data in all its forms. A pilot project provided Portage with a vision and set of principles, and identified several objectives as the small wins that would build the trust and shared understanding required for a successful network. Current services and activities of Portage, including a data management planning tool and an infrastructure project, are described in this paper. Portage now faces the challenge of moving from project to operational network, and the challenge of establishing a sustainable governance model. CARL appointed a Steering Committee that will be proposing a full governance model at the conclusion of this transition period. Using a framework of factors identified in the literature, several relevant collaborative and network governance models are being explored.This paper outlines experience to date with Portage and matters under consideration for long-term sustainability, with a goal of engaging international colleagues in discussion and furthering the concepts for the benefit of RDM networks everywhere.Â

There are a growing number of institutional services aimed at collecting research data sets that fall outside the scope of large discipline-specific, or government data repositories. Such data sets represent a diversity of formats, may have documentation and curation weaknesses, and are often not easily found. In addition, there are significant variations in approaches in collecting and managing those data. A 2011 survey by Science found that, "even within a single institution there are no standards for storing data, so each lab, or often each fellow, uses ad hoc approaches." The European Commission says, "Different institutions archive their research data in different ways – making access difficult from outside the institution." This paper will present the results of an international survey of research data repositories that collect and manage heterogeneous data sets. The survey will be conducted in January/February 2013 under the auspices of the RDA Long Tail of Research Data Interest Group. The results will provide the broader community with a deeper understanding of the metadata and vocabularies that are currently in use within these contexts, with the aim of developing community-based recommendations to ensure lightweight interoperability and visibility of this type of research data across the globe.

Institutional repositories (IRs) are digital collections that capture and preserve the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community. Their aim is to provide access to scholarly material without the economic barriers that currently exist in scholarly publishing. If successful, IRs hold the promise of being very advantageous to researchers everywhere, especially those in the developing world.

Competitive intelligence (CI) is an example of a particular set of information-related activities aimed at adding value to information to support decision making. There is a growing number of software applications aimed at providing assistance to organizations for implementing a CI system. An exploratory study was undertaken to compare selected CI packages to assess their value. A review of the literature led to the identification...

Academic researchers are the major actors in the scholarly communication system and, as such, it is extremely important that any research being conducted in this area be guided by their needs. This study assembles a diverse panel of Canadian academic researchers in order to define a research strategy for the dissemination of scholarly knowledge in Canada that is defined by relevance to the research community. The major research question addressed here is the nature of a research agenda for the dissemination of scholarly research in Canada. These results so far reflect a substantially different approach to defining a research agenda for the dissemination of scholarly research than those outlined in the past.Les chercheurs académiques sont les acteurs principaux du système de communication universitaire et en tant que tel, il est extrêmement important que toute recherche poursuivie dans ce domaine soit guidée par leurs besoins. Cette étude rassemble un groupe de chercheurs universitaires canadiens dans le but de définir une stratégie de recherche pour la diffusion des connaissances académiques canadiennes et qui sera considérée comme pertinente par le milieu de la recherche. La principale question de recherche soulevée ici est la nature de l’agenda de recherche pour la diffusion de la recherche universitaire au Canada. Jusqu’à présent, ces résultats reflètent une approche considérablement différente pour définir un agenda de recherche pour la diffusion de la recherche académique par rapport aux agendas produits dans le passé.

Improved survival rates for congenital heart disease (CHD) have increasing numbers requiring lifelong specialized health care. In this interpretive description, interview data were analyzed to understand how adolescents with CHD describe everyday life and relate to questions about quality of life. Most viewed themselves as normal, their CHD something that they situated into the foreground or background of their lives as it suited their needs. They spoke of quality-of-life issues in a concrete manner focusing on physical activity limitations and their need to fit in. These findings can direct interventions for adolescents with CHD for transition to adulthood.

Despite millions of dollars being spent on research each year in Canada, little attention is paid to the dissemination of the results of research. There is a disconnect between Canadian public policies in this area; although a high priority is assigned to the generation of research, there is a lack of policies addressing its dissemination. Meanwhile, the environment in which research knowledge is being disseminated is undergoing a profound transformation because of several important drivers. In particular, these drivers include new technology, changing research patterns, new users, economics, and commercialization. The major objective of this study was to examine the rapidly transforming environment in which research knowledge is disseminated and determine whether there is a need for a national research strategy to adapt to the new, dynamic scholarly communication environment in Canada. To address the latter question, the study adopted a consensus panel process. A consensus panel of 10 Canadian academic researchers from across Canada from a variety of disciplines and at different stages of their careers was recruited from over 70 volunteers. The objective of the panel was to reach a consensus on priorit ies for research into scholarly communication in Canada. The consensus panel identified five major themes in which there is a need for research in scholarly communication in Canada: Knowledge systems; knowledge/data storage and retrieval; power and infrastructure within the academy; knowledge production and the social contract; copyright and intellectual property. These themes are expanded upon in more detail in the full paper and specific research topics discussed. The results of this study also clearly support the creation of a more holistic and integrated knowledge ecosystem for scholarly communication. In its report, the consensus panel strongly recommended that, "a coherent national policy of knowledge preservation and dissemination must be devised to create a greater cohesion, accessibility, security and access to research findings."