Blog Archives - STM Association

A strategic deep dive into our shared scholarly infrastructure | Paper launch

stmassoc — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 15:02:27 +0000

A new, independently researched report by Ithaka S+R, funded by STM Solutions and six of our members, offers an overview of the essential standards and technology, including products and services, that comprise the underlying infrastructure supporting scholarly communications. Importantly, it also identifies gaps and areas where future investments are needed. The report is freely available for download on Ithaka S+R’s website.

“Publishers have invested heavily in shared infrastructure — at the same time, we’re continuing to witness rapid change, new opportunities, and new challenges to the system,” said Hylke Koers, Chief Information Officer, STM Solutions. “In commissioning this report, we sought an independent, comprehensive study of the current landscape to provide recommendations where collective action and further investments are needed to develop and sustain a scholarly communications system that is open and trusted at scale.”

While the report is detailed and offers many insights, among the report’s recommendations for areas to target for further development and investment, the following key themes emerged:

How to design a system that delivers both ‘open’ and ‘trusted’ at scale.
The increasing presence and role of AI in scholarly communications.
The importance of PIDs, metadata, and common standards in enabling a seamless user journey across different publishing platforms and discovery services on the scholarly web.
Research Integrity.

STM is already driving multiple initiatives addressing these themes, from our recent white paper on AI in Scholarly Communications to the STM Solutions Integrity Hub and UNITED2ACT, and to our involvement in GetFTR and SeamlessAccess.

What’s Next?

In the coming months, STM will convene its members and stakeholders to collectively explore ways we can act on findings from the report. “The intent of this work is to spur thought, conversation — and ultimately, action,” said Koers.

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A clear path for research data sharing

stmassoc — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 13:50:15 +0000

Recognizing the critical role of research data in advancing open science and research integrity, STM, DataCite and Crossref have joined forces to issue a joint statement aimed at guiding the scholarly community in effective research data sharing. This statement is an update to the Joint Statement from STM and DataCite from 2012, recognizing that there has been significant progress since — but also that there is still much work to do.

While the volume of data continues to increase exponentially in the current research environment, the consistency around the sharing of research data is lacking — yet it is essential. To this end, this joint statement formulates 12 recommendations for all stakeholder groups that will help to address this critical gap.

It offers a common framework for sharing research data for key stakeholders across the research community: researchers, publishers, funders, data repositories and policymakers — offering a means to advance a more open and collaborative research environment.

“This collaboration isn’t just about sharing best practices; it’s about shaping a future where research data sharing becomes the norm, not the exception,” said Hylke Koers, CIO, STM Solutions. “Our goal is to cultivate an environment that champions reproducibility, integrity, openness, and fairer research assessments. We eagerly anticipate the advancements and collaborations this new era will bring.”

Explore the Joint Statement here and see how to get involved.

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2023 Open Access Progress Report Launch

stmassoc — Sun, 05 Nov 2023 15:11:41 +0000

STM Association, in partnership with its member publishers, has released an inaugural STM OA Progress Report. This highlight-focused report is a companion to the newly launched STM OA Dashboard, a dynamic resource for exploring in-depth figures pertaining to OA uptake by research discipline, funder, region — and model. A key takeaway from this 2023 edition —35% of all articles published were via Gold OA, continuing an upward trend toward Open Access.

This report, which offers a snapshot of data and trends, looking beyond OA uptake to include research integrity and social responsibility, sets a benchmark for annual updates to chart ongoing developments in Open Access.

The report is freely available for download.

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STM in China | June 2023

stmassoc — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 11:43:07 +0000

Where in the world is Caroline?

This June, Caroline Sutton, STM’s CEO, journeyed to China for two conferences, meetings and discussions around the ways we can best advance trusted research around the globe. Here, she lends a quick summary from the (windy!) Great Wall.

After a three-year pause due to the pandemic, the Beijing International Book Fair recommenced its in-person exhibition on 15-18 June. Here, Caroline joined several other senior STM publishers at the Gala and delivered opening remarks at the first PubTech Conference, a satellite event.

She also joined a panel to discuss “The future of publishing driven by AI”, alongside Springer Nature’s Henning Schoenenberger. Several other individuals representing STM member publishers were also involved.

Whilst in Beijing, Caroline met with STM’s China Chapter to share information on STM’s strategies, the OA Dashboard, global activities, and other recent developments — and opened the floor for discussion and conversation with STM members. It was an opportunity to thank outgoing Chair Ella Chen and welcome onboard our new China Chapter Chair Ms. Xiaoling Kang.

As part of the Forum for World STM Journals, the STM China Chapter invited members and Chinese stakeholders to attend an STM introduction event. Here, Caroline shared an overview of STM, STM Trends 2027 and its upcoming Frankfurt Conference. Participants to this event included Ms. Su Wang, CAST Journal Publishing Director, Mr. Tieming Zhang, president of the Society of China University Journals, and dozens of local publishers and stakeholders.

From Beijing, Caroline journeyed to Xi’an, capital of north-western Shaanxi province, to help open the 6th Forum of World STM Journals, organized by CAST (China Association for Science and Technology), from 18th to 20th of June. This year Caroline was one of the two vice chairs of the Academic Committee of the Forum. (The chair is Prof. Wei Yang, former president of Zhejiang University, former president of NSFC). On the eve before the conference, Caroline joined the Open Science Promotion Consortium meeting as a Director of the Advisory Board. STM’s members are well represented among the membership of OSPC.

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New STM Committee Chairs & Board Sponsors

stmassoc — Wed, 03 May 2023 10:07:18 +0000

As we transition to delivering on our new STM strategy, we are pleased to announce the following Committee Chairs and Board Sponsors:

Open Research, Vicky Gardner, Taylor & Francis; with board sponsor Steven Inchcoombe, SpringerNature.
Research Integrity, Chris Graf, SpringerNature; with board sponsor Liz Fergusen, Wiley.
Social Responsibility, Rachel Martin, Elsevier; with board sponsor Vikram Savkar, Wolters Kluwer.

An overwhelming number of individuals have been put forward to join these three committees. Announcements will be made after 30th May, when we have been able to consider proposals and ensure each committee is supported by individuals representing a diversity of professional roles.

STM would like this opportunity to thank our outgoing Committee Chairs for their outstanding contributions to STM’s work: Joyce Lorigan, SpringerNature who has chaired our Strategic Communications Committee; Jack Ochs, ACS, who has chaired our Intellectual Property Committee; and Vicky Gardner, Taylor & Francis, Chair for the Policy & Advocacy Committee. I know all members thank these individuals and everyone who has worked above and beyond with them to deliver on STM’s mission to Advance Trusted Research.

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What a survey of humanities researchers told us about data sharing

stmassoc — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 01:42:17 +0000

Authored by Rebecca Grant, Co-Chair, STM Humanities Research Project

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Humanities data sharing has lagged behind data sharing in other disciplines (for example life sciences, or social sciences), perhaps for good reason – what exactly is “data” for a historian? How can a physical artefact be shared in a data repository? At the same time, humanities journals tend to have less stringent data sharing policies, rarely mandating that authors share their research data.

As part of the STM Association’s Research Data Program, a group of publishers (including colleagues from Taylor & Francis, Routledge, F1000, Cambridge University Press, Brill, Oxford University Press, Wiley and SAGE, chaired by Matt Cannon (Taylor & Francis), Rebecca Grant (F1000) and Kate McKellar (Wiley) have been working together since 2020 to explore the challenges and opportunities presented by humanities data sharing policies. This led to the development of an author survey which opened for responses in March of this year. This is the first large-scale, targeted survey on humanities data sharing practices that we are aware of.

We were delighted to be invited to write up the results of our survey in the 2022 State of Open Data, which was published in October. The State of Open survey, and associated white paper, represent the longest running longitudinal survey and analysis of open data practices in the world. It’s a hugely impactful publication, and this year’s white paper included invited authors representing the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The report was published a month ago and has already been viewed nearly 15,000 times. Anyone interested in Open Research and research data sharing should check out the full report, here: the State of Open Data 2022.

But what did we learn about humanities data sharing?

Firstly, we found that just over half of respondents (n=345) believed that “research data” is a term which is applicable to them and their research practice; although while 52% find the term appropriate, nearly half believe that it does not apply to their work either some or all of the time. Other preferred terms suggested by respondents include “research materials,” “information,” “evidence,” and “sources” (figure 1).

Figure 1

A very high proportion (88%) believed that humanities research data should be shared with others, and a majority had shared their data, though most relied on peer-to-peer sharing methods (76% shared data by email) with only 36% sharing via a data repository, which would provide long term preservation and persistent identifiers for citation, representing best practice for data sharing (figure 2).

Figure 2

More training might be necessary to encourage best practices like repository usage: 80% of respondents stated that they had never received training on data sharing. When asked what additional support publishers could provide, guidance on selecting a suitable data repository was the most popular response (43%); in addition, 41% of respondents would like publishers to collaborate more closely with other stakeholders (institutions and libraries) to provide support for data management and sharing.

There’s a lot more to read in the full white paper, but the headline message is that our humanities authors may be more willing than we imagined to identify their sources and outputs as “data” and to share these with their peers.

The group will be building on this work with a series of interviews with humanities editors (currently underway), and we are aiming to publish a longer report on our findings. Please contact the group chairs if you would like any additional information.

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