Statement by YAE and other young academies about the importance of fundamental research and early-career researchers

The Young Academy of Europe along with 29 other transnational and national young academies and associations​​​​​​​ joined the initiative led by the Global Young Academy to release A Call for Action from Young Academies and Young Associations: Reaffirming the Role of Fundamental Sciences in Achieving Sustainable Development through Enhanced and Equitable Support of Fundamental Research and Early- to Mid-Career Researchers. The statement was officially released on 15 December at the closing ceremony of UNESCO’s International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development 2022-2023.

Hiba Baroud announcing the statement in Geneva

FEBS article to celebrate the YAE’s 10th anniversary

The YAE Chair, Gemma Modinos, and YAE Board Members, Katalin Solymosi and Anna Kuppuswamy, have published an invited article for the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS).

The post, “The Young Academy of Europe: 10 years supporting science advice and policy“, provides an overview of the key YAE achievements from a decade of making the voice of European young scholars heard for science advice and policy. The full text of the post is accessible following the link below:

https://network.febs.org/posts/the-young-academy-of-europe-10-years-supporting-science-advice-and-policy

Celebrating 20 years of young academies

Next year, the German young academy, Die Junge Akademie, will be 20 years old. As it was the first young academy to be established (in 2000), there will be a celebration to mark the 20th Anniversary of the idea of young academies. This is a great opportunity to talk about research and the potential of young academies.

Members of the Young Academy of Europe are therefore invited to join a global initiative to further the dialogue between researchers and other members of the community. The initiative is called YoungAcademies@, indicating that members of young academies will speak at different places than the ones typical for academia. The aim is also to reach people that are not directly in touch with research, which may be more important than ever in a time of growing skepticism and “alternative facts”.

YoungAcademies@ can take many forms, from a talk at your favourite museum to a scientific consulting booth at your local market or a 5-minute elevator/train/ferry pitch on what your work looks like. The German Young Academy will offer an online platform where all individual events can be listed and documented. The organisation of the event will be done locally by you.

If you want to participate or have questions, please get in touch with Oliver Rymek at the office of the German Young Academy (rymek@diejungeakademie.de).

31st July 2019. For further information please contact info@yacadeuro.org

 

YAE participates in Wellcome Trust and Estonian Academy of Sciences event

Chair of the YAE, Mangala Srinivas attended a meeting for early career researchers from the Baltic region on engaging in research policy discussions.

Chair of the YAE, Mangala Srinivas with delegates at the meeting (Back row, 5th from the right)

The meeting, organised by the Wellcome Trust and the Estonian Academy of Sciences, took place in Tallinn on 19th June 2019. It was also attended by members of the Estonian, Lithuanian and Latvian Young Academies.

Mangala Srinivas was invited to lead a panel discussion on the role of Young Academies. There was a lively talk, with plenty of questions from the audience. It proved particularly interesting to learn about the salary situation for academics from this part of the world and how challenging it can be.

Coincidentally, the keynote speaker was 2019 YAE prize winner, Professor Janusz Bujnicki who spoke about the importance of young academics taking an interest in science policy, even if it is somewhat frowned upon, as it was in his case.

The event was a great opportunity for the YAE to build stronger links with colleagues in the Baltic region.

20th June 2019. For further information please contact info@yacadeuro.org

Joint Statement on Implementation Guidance for Plan S

Plan S is an initiative by cOAlition S to achieve full and immediate Open Access to scientific publications after 01 January 2020 in Europe. At the heart of the plan are 10 principles currently being developed into a set of implementation guidelines. We, representatives of early-career and senior researchers across Europe, have already commented on Plan S and hereby reaffirm our general support and offer our views on the implementation guidance.

We commend cOAlition S for addressing initial concerns and for the open consultation on the guidance. There are now three clear routes to compliance via either author-accepted manuscripts or versions of record of publications. It is crucial, however, that cOAlition S ensures that these routes are viable through appropriate regulations, funding, and support. We reiterate three key concerns from our first statement on Plan S: disruption for doctoral dissertations should be minimised; venues with no author-facing fees and societies as well
as open infrastructures should be supported; institutions and funders should modernise their researcher evaluation and implement the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).

(1) We agree that copyright on publications should stay with the original copyright holder
and not be transferred to publishers. The copyright holder is typically the author and/or institution, which can depend on legal requirements, but is often not explicitly stated. We encourage cOAlition S to recommend the author as copyright holder where legally possible.

(2) We agree that the licence on publications should by default be Creative Commons (CC) Attribution (BY), to maximise benefits of research for society via the right to reuse, modify, and redistribute. We also agree that Non-Commercial (NC) licences are not justifiable for publicly funded works. While Non-Derivative (ND) licences can restrict text-and-data mining (TDM) and Open Education, we disagree that they should not be allowed, because of concerns over misrepresentation and translations in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We encourage cOAlition S to allow researchers to opt out of CC BY for a CC BY-ND licence.

(3) We agree that publications should be identifiable via persistent identifiers (PIDs) and archived via long-term digital preservation programmes. Publications should use PIDs such as Digital Object Identifier (DOI) that enable versioning, and link to underlying data and code and author PIDs such as Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID). Archiving programmes should use multiple data pools and bitstream preservation such as Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (CLOCKSS). We note that there are other valid options and encourage cOAlition S to specify the requirements for PIDs and for archiving programmes.

(4) We agree that publications should have high-quality metadata that is available under a Public Domain (CC0) licence. This includes information on the publication such as the PID, version, author, copyright holder, licence, open status, and funding as well as information on all citations in the publication. Guidelines by OpenAIRE for publication metadata and by the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) for citation metadata are ideal but there are other valid standards. We encourage cOAlition S to specify the required standards for metadata.

(5) We agree that the metadata and full text of publications should be machine-readable in
an interoperable format allowing TDM. Extensible Markup Language (XML) Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is an ideal format but is technically challenging, and other valid formats exist such as HyperText Markup Language (HTML) or minimally Word, OpenDocument, and LaTeX. We encourage cOAlition S to specify other acceptable publication formats for TDM.

(6) We agree that publishing venues should offer high-quality peer review and register their self-archiving policy in SHERPA/RoMEO , as well as be registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and be transparent in their publishing costs and pricing. Peer review should follow standards set by disciplines and the Committee on Publicat ion Ethics (COPE) . We are concerned that DOAJ acting as a sole external gatekeeper could result in a single point of failure (SPOF) for identifying compliant venues. We encourage cOAlition S to
create and maintain a ‘seal of compliance’ for venues in close collaboration with DOAJ.

(7) We agree that article processing charges (APCs) should be paid or supported by cOAlition S where applicable and that there should be equitable waiver/discount policies. The ability to publish should never be constrained by the ability to pay. There should not only be clear regulations for waivers/discounts for authors in low/middle-income countries but also for authors with limited financial means. The planned independent study on publishing costs and pricing will help to determine a reasonable range and cap for APCs. We encourage cOAlition S to develop clear regulations for APCs and for waivers/discounts for authors.

(8) We agree that repositories should use an open application programming interface (API) and be registered in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR), as well as be continuously available and offer user support. ResourceSync is an ideal API although other valid APIs exist such as Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) and Object Exchange and Reuse (ORE). We disagree that repositories should have a help desk as long as they offer adequate user support. We also disagree that repositories should have automated ingest but should be free to choose how to ingest. We are concerned that OpenDOAR acting as a sole external gatekeeper could result in a SPOF for identifying compliant repositories. We encourage cOAlition S to specify acceptable APIs and to create and maintain a ‘seal of compliance’ for repositories in close collaboration with OpenDOAR.

(9) We agree with allowing transformative agreements with publishers to read and publish
publications during a time-specified transition period. This gives hybrid venues more time and researchers more options during the transition. All agreements should be transparent and be registered with the Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges (ESAC) as well as specify how the venue will transition once the agreement expires. It is currently unclear what sanctions will be imposed if a venue does not transition as agreed and whether older paywalled publications will be opened. We encourage cOAlition S to specify the sanc tions to be imposed on venues that do not transition and to address older paywalled publications.

(10) We agree with direct deposition of publications in author-designated or centralised repositories for scientific publications. We note that a compliant repository for researchers should always be available and that there is no centralised repository in Europe apart from Europe PubMed Central . We encourage cOAlition S to designate and support Zenodo as a fall-back compliant or even as a centralised European repository for publications in Plan S.

Signed by Gareth O’Neill [President European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc) ], Matthew DiFranco [Chair Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA)], and Mangala Srinivas [Chair Young Academy of Europe (YAE) ] on 28 January 2019.

Contact details: Gareth O’Neill | @gtoneill | +31651003175 | gareth.oneill@eurodoc.net

Joint Statement on Implementation Guidance for Plan S (pdf)

Position of Young Academies on Open Access and Open Data

In preparation for the upcoming Open Science conference in Amsterdam, the YAE has joined forces with other Young Academies in Europe as well as the Global Young Academy, to prepare statements on both Open Science and Open Data. These statements will be officially presented to the European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, Carlos Moedas, at the conference on 4th April 2016. The statements can be found here and here.

1st April 2016. For further information please contact info@yacadeuro.org

 

Young Academies criticise disbanding of EU Chief Scientific Adviser post

The Young Academy of Europe joins several national young academies in an open letter to Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission. The letter criticises the decision to abolish the position of Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA). The initiative of the Young Academy of Sweden is being supported by the YAE as well as the young academies of Poland and Scotland. The signatories stress that the establishment of the post of CSA by President Barroso in 2012 was an important step forward to augment the quality of the European Commission’s decision-making process. Consideration of scientific results and thinking plays a pivotal role in identifying threats and creating policies that improve people’s lives. The academies also express concern that disbanding the office of the CSA followed an intense campaign from interest groups whose opinions were disfavoured by scientific assessments made by the CSA. Finally, the academies emphasise the importance of EU policy being informed by independent scientific advice, and asks President Juncker to reinstall the CSA or a corresponding function as soon as possible. In November 2014 Juncker announced that a new centre – European Political Strategy Centre (EPSC) – would replace the Bureau of European Policy Advisers (BEPA) of which the CSA Anne Glover has been part. The new policy-oriented centre does not include a CSA, a fact which the academies consider a significant degradation. See the open letter for more information.

7th January 2015. For further information please contact info@yacadeuro.org