Tim Winkler

Nigeria recognised as a global OA leader   Nigeria’s role as a global leader in open access has become more widely recognised as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, COKI-co-lead Professor Cameron Neylon has said.

Nigeria recognised as a global OA leader

A new alliance of researchers led by Curtin University will work together to improve the way research is shared, charting new pathways for the future of universities around the world.

Arcadia funds new Curtin-led alliance to help universities share research

Cameron Neylon

Tracking and Mitigating Climate Change - How open is the research?

 Bianca Kramer and Cameron Neylon v0.9 10 March 2022


 Update – The linked dashboard now also contains the references from the 2021 WG1 Report on the Physical Sciences Basis. The original dashboard is still available.

On Monday 28 February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the Working Group 2 contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report.

Tracking and Mitigating Climate Change

Where's the big idea? The extent to which University staff represent the demographics of the community that they serve may be a key indicator of whether institutions are missing talent, perspectives and ideas as a result of their employment preferences.

Where’s the big idea?

COKI co-lead Professor Cameron Neylon has co-authored a new book.

Peering into Peer Review COKI co-lead Professor Cameron Neylon has co-authored a new book,

 Reading Peer Review: PLOS ONE and Institutional Change in Academia,

published by Cambridge University Press. The book describes the database of peer review reports at the largest scientific journal in the world, PLOS ONE for the first time.

Redefining Peer Review

Award recognition for COKI team   Presentations by two COKI Project staff have been recognised with Delegates Choice awards at the 2020 eResearch Australasia Online Conference.   Senior Data Scientist Dr Rebecca Handcock and Data Trust Scientist Aniek Roelofs both won the awards following their presentations at the October conference.

Award recognition for COKI team

New rankings system shows flaws in university league tables   A new university rankings system based on one of the world’s most comprehensive databases of university performance has demonstrated the inherent flaws in league tables that rank universities in simple numerical order.

New rankings system shows flaws in university league tables

Tracking Global Open Access   Today the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative is releasing a resource that has been in the works for a long time. The new Open Access dashboard provides information on the OA status of research outputs by country and by institution. It provides some surprises and reinforces some of what we know.

Tracking Global Open Access

Bringing students on a voyage of discovery   As part of National Science Week (15-23 August 2020) Dr Rebecca Handcock gave a guest presentation to parents, students and staff of Chisholm Catholic College (Perth, Western Australia) about her expedition to Antarctica, the broader challenges we face as a planet and how future scientists, engineers and mathematicians can make a difference.

Bringing students on a voyage of discovery

The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) project is developing online, interactive data dashboards relating to aspects of university research performance. Dashboards include a broad range of metrics, relating to open access, citations, collaboration, funders, publishers and journals, altmetrics, and the diversity of academic and non-academic staff.

COKI Open Knowledge Dashboards

COKI's Dr Karl attracts international attention  Dr Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang (COKI team) presented COKI’s research findings at the 7:AM Altmetrics Conference on 21 Oct 2020. The presentation is titled “How open are universities?

COKI’s Dr Karl attracts international attention

The threat of COVID-19 to health and economies has sparked an unprecedented growth in open access to research outputs.

By Professor Cameron Neylon, COKI Project Co-lead  The threat of COVID-19 to health and economies has sparked an unprecedented growth in open access to research outputs. There have been extraordinary outcomes from international collaboration: 53 viral genome sequences were available and analysed by February – in comparison to the three months it took to determine the sequence of the SARS virus.

The Virus Pandemic’s Greatest Lesson

There are often lots of questions when we talk about our latest project, building the world’s first data repository for open access books. Most people accept that free books are a good thing, particularly if they are providing insights into cutting-edge research – but how many are free, how frequently are they read and are they having an impact in the community?

A data repository tracking open access books

Great careers often don’t take linear paths. Most people don’t tend to phone in for their job interview on their way to board a ship travelling to Antarctica, but after a research career spanning multiple continents and a range of sectors, the setting seemed appropriate for Dr Rebecca Handcock – who was subsequently snapped up as a Senior Data Scientist with the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) project.

Building knowledge one byte at a time

**Laura J. Wilkinson and Katherine Skinner **    The Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) Project (2022-2025) is focused on creating a sustainable open access (OA) book focused analytics service. During this project, we are scaling up from our prototype dashboard to a fully functioning service. New to BAD? Learn more about the people, background, and work packages in our project overview.

Top findings from the BAD focus groups

Katie Wilson    A special issue of Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analysis | Scholarly Communication co-edited by COKI team member Dr. Katie Wilson explores the state of open science, open data and open access across Africa.

Open Science in Africa

Katie Wilson

Katie Wilson. Karl Huang, Lucy Montgomery   COKI team members Professor Lucy Montgomery, Dr. Katie Wilson and Dr. Karl Huang are co-editors of a special issue of the journal

 Publications

exploring issues of

 Open Access and Equity, Justice and Diversity.

Special Issue on “Open Access and Equity, Justice, and Diversity”

2020 locks in shift to Openness - but Australia lags   In October 2020, UNESCO made the case for open access to enhance research and information on COIVD-19. It also joined the World Health Organisation and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in calling for open science to be implemented at all stages of the scientific process by all member states.

2020 locks in shift to Openness – but Australia lags

Dr Katie Wilson has published a short paper on a new short research paper on divergence, dialogue and diversity.

Divergence, Dialogue and Diversity   Dr Katie Wilson presented a short research paper at the iSchools virtual iConference 2021 on March 23, discussing the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) project in terms of divergence, dialogue and diversity. iSchools is an international movement of information schools in universities that Curtin joined last year, one of four Australian members.

Divergence, Dialogue and Diversity

Charting the future of HE   Higher Education institutions around the world have not only an opportunity, but also a responsibility to reconsider their mission, capacity and impact in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) Co-lead Professor Cameron Neylon provides an update on the value of COKI data, dashboards and analytical tools in providing new insights into university performance.

Charting the future of HE

End to rankings? Dr Karl Huang of the COKI Project at Curtin University discusses his recent paper on Open Access. To read the paper please click here.

End to rankings?

Who decides what our brightest minds should be discovering? By Associate Professor Lucy Montgomery, COKI Project co-lead, Curtin University  Amid an international debate over research sovereignty, question marks hang over the future direction of Australian research with new analysis showing that more Australian research articles acknowledge funding from China than Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council.

Who decides what our brightest minds should be discovering?

Naked scientist shines spotlight on COKI   COKI’s own Dr Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang was recently interviewed by The Naked Scientist, talking about open access publishing and findings from the COKI team’s eLife Feature Article “Evaluating the impact of open access policies on research institutions”.  The podcast is available at https://elifesciences.org/podcast/episode70 and https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/interviews/how-open-open-access

Naked Scientist shines spotlight on COKI

COKI Project Co-lead Professor Cameron Neylon outlines why he is supporting a campaign calling for all abstracts to be made open access.

Initiative for Open Abstracts   By COKI Project Co-lead Professor Cameron Neylon  One of the tactical questions that often comes up with moving towards more open practice in research is the value of taking small steps vs fighting the large battles. Sometimes big changes occur – and the shift towards open access, although slow is an example of a big shift – but often a set of small steps can help to build towards progress.

Initiative for Open Abstracts

Read more about three PhD opportunities with the cutting-edge COKI project at Curtin University.

New PhD scholarship opportunities for COKI   The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) has up to three PhD scholarships available for outstanding prospective students with an interest working at the intersection of policy, data science, and institutional studies and a passion for the potential for Open Knowledge. Three projects have been identified as part of the Curtin allocation of Australian Government RTP Scholarships.

New PhD Scholarship opportunities for COKI

In September last year – or in another universe depending on how you want to look at it –  the COKI project received funding from Arcadia …

How else can community be built?

 Arcadia Project Update


 By Professor Cameron Neylon – COKI Project co-lead

In September last year – or in another universe, depending on how you want to look at it –  the COKI project received funding from Arcadia to develop a community around the concept of Open Knowledge Institutions.

How else can community be built?

Project co-lead Cameron Neylon writes about online festivals, celebrating success and the challenges of infrastructure.

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 Project co-lead Cameron Neylon writes about online festivals, celebrating success and the challenges of

Fireside Chats at the Open Publishing Festival

Setting one benchmark for universities is hard.

Battle of the Benchmarks   Setting one benchmark for universities is hard. Setting 27 benchmarks is a Herculean task – but after three years of poring over measurement and data as the statistical expert on the COKI team, it is a task which Research Fellow Dr Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang is taking in his stride.

Battle of the Benchmarks

Over the past 20 years, higher education systems in wealthier countries have embraced narrow rankings systems which purport to evaluate and recognise global excellence but in fact exclude many of the discoveries and insights of universities in countries in the Global South.

Spotlight on an invisible continent   While many universities across Africa have grown their research productivity over the past 20 years, the scale of and impact of their outputs are not recognised by world university rankings. South Africa and Egypt dominate research outputs from Africa, with research output also growing significantly in Tunisia, Nigeria, Morocco and Algeria.

Spotlight on an invisible continent

**The intersections between less privileged groups are easy to overlook – but essential to understand in order to develop a clearer picture of equity, diversity, and inclusion. **  For example, a person who is both a woman and non-white may experience bias and discrimination relating to each of those characteristics separately, or in combination. Specific issues may also arise only for people who have both of these characteristics.

UK Universities face diversity dilemma

Amanda

Open Access and Open Data are critical elements of effective vibrant scholarly communication systems. However, they are not sufficient on their own to guarantee that universities remain relevant and engaged. To unlock the potential for the production and mobilisation of knowledge, universities must democratise access to be not only a knowledge taker but also a knowledge maker.

Universities find relevance in sharing knowledge

As universities across Australia look to enrol more domestic students in 2021, trends indicate that female students are likely to dominate first year intakes across the country.

COVID-19 presents opportunity to re-think diversity in Australian HE   As universities across Australia look to enrol more domestic students in 2021, trends indicate that female students are likely to dominate first year intakes across the country. A total of 58.74% of domestic students enrolled in Australian universities in 2018 identified as women, compared to 41.17% of male students.

COVID-19 presents opportunity to re-think diversity in Australian HE

This post introduces the Open Edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking, published today by CWTS in collaboration with the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative, Sesame Open Science, and OurResearch. The Leiden Ranking Open Edition is the first fully transparent university ranking.

Ludo Waltman, Nees Jan van Eck, Martijn Visser, Mark Neijssel, Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon, Bianca Kramer, Kyle Demes, Jason Priem

 This post introduces the Open Edition of the CWTS Leiden Ranking, published today by CWTS in collaboration with the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative, Sesame Open Science, and OurResearch.

Introducing the Leiden Ranking Open Edition

How do you avoid talking to the same groups of individuals with your research publications?

Avoiding thought bubble captivity   How do you avoid talking to the same groups of individuals with your research publications? COKI Research Fellow Dr Katie Wilson had written a paper on international research into higher education staff diversity and wanted to submit it to the higher education journal that has the most international engagement.

Avoiding thought bubble captivity

The evolution of the internet has resulted in digitisation of many scholarly tomes, but also further obscured what we know about the influence of monographs.

Once upon a time, books were stored in libraries and bookstores, read by lenders and purchasers and the insights from them observed and retold or else contested and discussed. The evolution of the internet has resulted in digitisation of many scholarly tomes, but also further obscured what we know about the influence of monographs – written studies on specialised topics which are frequently produced by university researchers.

If a publication lands in the library and nobody is near, does it still make a noise?

Around the world, respect for the work of university researchers appears to be on the rise.

By Associate Professor Lucy Montgomery – co-lead, COKI project

Around the world, respect for the work of university researchers appears to be on the rise. A recent opinion poll commissioned by the UK Open Knowledge Foundation found that 64% of voters were more likely to trust expert advice from scientists – an outcome which anecdotally appears to resonate around the world.

Why open knowledge is central to the future of HE

Curtin University researchers will help create a new international data trust to improve the measurement and analysis of open-access (OA) books, which will be delivered through a US$1.2 million (AUD$1.75 million) project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Curtin develops cyber knowledge bank for open-access books

Open Knowledge Institutions: Reinventing Universities book goes live

Curtin Mauritius recently hosted a workshop for the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), attended by global experts on research evaluation, data science and scholarly communications. The attendees discussed empowering universities to work with local and global communities in the production of knowledge, and how to broaden the impact of higher education and research.

COKI Mauritius Workshop

Cameron Neylon, Ludo Waltmann, Lucy Montgomery The COKI team is excited to be working with CWTS to deliver a course on

 Scientometrics Using Open Data

. As part of our growing collaboration the COKI team will work with the world-leading experts at CWTS to deliver an online synchronous course from October 31 to November 3. More details on the course are available below and on the CWTS website.

Using Open Data in Research Evaluation – A collaborative course from COKI and CWTS

Kathryn Napier, Cameron Neylon and Jamie Diprose    The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative has just released a long awaited update to the Open Access dashboard. The migration from Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) to OpenAlex is now complete. The (currently available) data for research outputs published in 2022 has also been released.

Tracking Global Access- the move to OpenAlex and inclusion of 2022 data

Lucy Montgomery, Kathryn Napier    Year One of the Book Analytics Dashboard Project   The first year of the BAD project has flown by! We have achieved a huge amount and are excited by how far we have come.  The BAD project formally kicked off in April 2022. The project is being led by a truly international team located in Australia, the US and Europe.

Updates from Year One of the Book Analytics Dashboard Project

Kathryn Napier,

BAD project Technical Lead, Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), Curtin University The Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) project (2022-2025) is a 3-year, Mellon Foundation funded project that is creating a sustainable analytics service to support diverse Open Access (OA) book publishers.

The Book Analytics Dashboard project: reflections on coordination, collaboration, and community consultation

Julian Tonti-Filippini, Cameron Neylon, Kathryn Napier Research Impact Evaluation System COKI team member Julian Tonti-Filippini led the construction of a pilot Research Impact Evaluation System (RIES) demonstrating the feasibility of conducting an on-demand, ERA-like analysis for research-active institutions (locally and globally), using journal-level metadata from the Australian Research Council and article-level metadata from publicly

Julian Tonti-Filippini, Cameron Neylon, Kathryn Napier

Automating ERA benchmarks, and a call for expressions of interest from institutions

*Katie Wilson and the COKI team, *pdf available here 2022 Highlights  The COKI Open Access Dashboard Launch. In 2022 COKI launched a powerful new open access dashboard that makes it possible to engage with data about open access publications by region, country and institution.

COKI 2022 Update Newsletter

There is a lot of lip service paid to the idea of diversity in scholarly publishing and often diversity of language is used as an example.But while the groups that work actively in languages other than English have been making this point consistently and forcefully, it has had limited traction in the scholarly anglophone literature.

Data Processing and production: Jamie Diprose Analysis and Text: Cameron Neylon and Bianca Kramer  There is a lot of lip service paid to the idea of diversity in scholarly publishing and often diversity of language is used as an example.

Language Diversity in Scholarly Publishing

Can I be taught by someone like me? Students will be able to look at new indices to determine whether a university is a good fit for them before they enrol, as a result of research from Curtin University’s Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI). The COKI team have developed one of the most comprehensive sets of […]

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Can I be taught by someone like me?

COKI

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**By [Associate Professor Lucy
Montgomery](https://staffportal.curtin.edu.au/staff/profile/view/Lucy.Montgomery/)
-- co-lead, COKI project**

Around the world, respect for the work of university researchers appears
to be on the rise.

A recent opinion poll commissioned by the UK [Open Knowledge
Foundation](https://blog.okfn.org/2020/05/05/brits-demand-openness-from-government-in-tackling-coronavirus/)
found that 64% of voters were more likely to trust expert advice from
scientists -- an outcome which anecdotally appears to resonate around
the world.

Most importantly, the poll found that 97% of people believed it was
important for information to be free to use, re-use or distribute
information relating to COVID-19. The poll comes hot on the heels of a
[UNESCO
initiative](https://en.unesco.org/news/unesco-mobilizes-122-countries-promote-open-science-and-reinforced-cooperation-face-covid-19)
to promote open science and greater collaboration across 122 countries
to fight the virus.

Openness of data, research conclusions and expert analysis of
universities has never been more topical. However, based on past
performance, there is no certainty that collaboration and information
sharing will continue -- or in some disciplines, simply begin -- once
the virus is gone.

> #### There is recent evidence of a genuine desire among many universities and research funders to improve equity of access to research results, diversity of students and staff and impact from their knowledge making activities. {#there-is-recent-evidence-of-a-genuine-desire-among-many-universities-and-research-funders-to-improve-equity-of-access-to-research-results-diversity-of-students-and-staff-and-impact-from-their-knowledge-making-activities.}

However, open knowledge aspirations are being stymied by comparative
rankings that are built on data that excludes the work of entire
disciplines, continents and languages. These rankings are not capable of
capturing important aspects of the value that universities create.

Communities that use these rankings to inform decision making, including
prospective students and industry collaborators, are often unaware of
the prejudices and blind-spots within universities that current
measurement tools create and perpetuate.

World-famous universities are lauded and validated by rankings which are
at best deeply flawed and able to be manipulated by wealthy universities
to achieve advantage -- while other up and coming institutions are often
ignored, particularly those in less wealthy countries.

The result is that university systems in Australia, the UK, the USA,
Canada and Europe are frequently geared towards rewarding and
recognising universities for climbing up rankings tables that mean
little. As a result, they tend to grow away from a focus on how they can
share information most effectively and instead zero in on parking
research findings behind expensive paywalls, all but invisible to many
who can't afford to pay.

This does not mean that world-famous institutions are performing poorly
-- but rather that the pedestal we have placed them on is fundamentally
compromised.

> #### **At a time when universities across the world are re-examining their operation and structure as a result of the impacts of the virus, it is COVID-19 that also points a way forward -- elevating the esteem for university research and showcasing the effectiveness of open knowledge practices.** {#at-a-time-when-universities-across-the-world-are-re-examining-their-operation-and-structure-as-a-result-of-the-impacts-of-the-virus-it-is-covid-19-that-also-points-a-way-forward-elevating-the-esteem-for-university-research-and-showcasing-the-effectiveness-of-open-knowledge-practices.}

An open knowledge university provides opportunities for talented
individuals from a range of backgrounds to create, learn and share in
the knowledge creation and propagation process.

The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) is working with partners
around the world to examine the ramifications of this new reality for
higher education. Drawing on evidence from the world's leading database
on open knowledge practice, our project team are producing a range of
tools to measure and understand how open knowledge universities can play
a key role in the future of communities around the world.

There has never been a more important time to understand the value of
open knowledge.
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