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?
<em>
 Bianca Kramer and Cameron Neylon v0.9 10 March 2022
</em>
<em>
 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.
</em>
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,
<em>
 Reading Peer Review: PLOS ONE and Institutional Change in Academia,
</em>
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
<em>
 Publications
</em>
exploring issues of
<strong>
 Open Access and Equity, Justice and Diversity.
</strong>

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?
<strong>
 Arcadia Project Update
</strong>
<strong>
 By Professor Cameron Neylon – COKI Project co-lead
</strong>
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.

Fireside Chats at the Open Publishing Festival   ::: {.elementor-element .elementor-element-c24f938 .elementor-widget .elementor-widget-video data-id=“c24f938” element_type=“widget” settings=“{"video_type":"hosted","autoplay":"yes","play_on_mobile":"yes","mute":"yes","loop":"yes"}” widget_type=“video.default”}
<em>
 <strong>
  Project co-lead Cameron Neylon writes about online festivals, celebrating success and the challenges of
 </strong>
</em>

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
<em>
 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.
</em>

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.

<strong>
 By Associate Professor Lucy Montgomery – co-lead, COKI project
</strong>
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
<em>
 Scientometrics Using Open Data
</em>
. 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

<strong>
 Kathryn Napier,
</strong>
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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leaves](https://openknowledge.community/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/perth-leaves-oh4c2fg9pu8abs8fymb1rslmcb89cgjdwleqdh6av0.jpg "perth leaves"){decoding="async"
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## Divergence, Dialogue and Diversity {#divergence-dialogue-and-diversity .elementor-heading-title .elementor-size-default}
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[Dr Katie
Wilson](https://staffportal.curtin.edu.au/staff/profile/view/katie-wilson-df21953d/)
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. The paper is
published in the Springer Nature [*Lecture Notes in Computer
Science*](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-030-71305-8_36){target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer"} *Book Series.*
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## Award recognition for COKI team {#award-recognition-for-coki-team .elementor-heading-title .elementor-size-default}
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<div>

Presentations by two COKI Project staff have been recognised with
Delegates Choice awards at the 2020 eResearch Australasia Online
Conference.

</div>

<div>

 

</div>

<div>

Senior Data Scientist Dr Rebecca Handcock and Data Trust Scientist Aniek
Roelofs both won the awards following their presentations at the October
conference.

</div>

<div>

 

</div>

<div>

Aniek presented on *Dynamic allocation of computational resources using
Airflow and Terraform* while Rebecca presented on *Semi-auto generated
reports from a large dataset for non-expert users*.

</div>

<div>

 

</div>

<div>

Both presentations showcased aspects of work that has been underway on
the COKI Project this year and the awards are a welcome recognition of
the achievements of the team in continuing to develop one of the world's
leading open knowledge databases.*  
*

[Aniek outlined the details of her presentation and how she had worked
to make it precise and at the same time
engaging.]{style="mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"}

["In my presentation I discussed two tools (Airflow and Terraform) that
we are using in our project and showcased how we use both of these
together in a demo," Aniek said.  
]{style="mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"}

["It was quite exciting to do the demo live, as it is always a bit risky
to have some of the technology failing; but luckily everything went as
planned. ]{style="mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"}

["I did have the idea the participants were interested in the talk, but
did not expect to receive an award, so it was definitely a nice
surprise."]{style="mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"}

[Rebecca described how she focussed her talk on the users of the more
than 12 trillion pieces of information on university research,
publications, and funding that are held in the COKI
datasets.]{style="mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"}

["Users often need a summary reports from large datasets but may not
have the technical skills to extract it from the cloud-based databases
that COKI uses. It was great to show a real example of "literate
programming" where tables graphs are mixed with text from the user to
semi-auto generate these reports," Rebecca
said]{style="mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"}

["I was surprised to receive this award, because on the day I had a
technical issue and could not share my presentation slides! This is a
presented a real challenge, given the conference was entirely online
this year.]{style="mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"}

[ "Right after my session I made a recording of the presentation and
sent it around to the attendees of my session. Everyone was really nice
about it; I think because we all worry that it will happen to
us!"]{style="mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"}

</div>

<div>

 

</div>
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## End to rankings? {#end-to-rankings .elementor-heading-title .elementor-size-default}
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Dr Karl Huang of the COKI Project at Curtin University discusses his
recent paper on Open Access. To read the paper please [click
here](https://elifesciences.org/articles/57067).
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# New rankings system shows flaws in university league tables {#new-rankings-system-shows-flaws-in-university-league-tables .elementor-heading-title .elementor-size-default}
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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.

The new ranking, released today by Curtin University's Open Knowledge
Initiative (COKI) and included in a research paper published in the
Journal eLife, is one of the first to show the reliability of ranking
scores and draws on an immense database sourced from across the world.

Lead author Dr Karl Huang, from COKI, said the Index sets the scene for
a fresh conversation about how universities collaborate and give back to
their communities.

"Each year, the release of a range of university rankings provokes
significant debate about the relevance and value of each ranking system,
but these rankings have become highly influential over the past two
decades, impacting on student recruitment and university strategy," Dr
Huang said.

"Our paper developed an index of the top 100 universities in terms of
open access performance, assessing the reliability of the score for each
institution. We found that universities can't be easily ranked from best
to worst with a simplistic league table.

"This new ranking highlights deep flaws in our reliance on existing
league tables as dependable measures of how good each university is."

Dr Huang said that no score is perfect, but we can estimate how precise
the score for each university, and therefore the rank position, is.

"Simple rankings have always been misleading and what our statistical
work shows is just how much of an issue that is," Dr Huang said.

"We can measure a performance for each university, but statistically
speaking many in the top 100 are not different from each other. What
this means it that the question of which university is at the top, or
whether university A is one position above university B is meaningless."

Co-author Professor Cameron Neylon, the co-lead of COKI, said the
findings have serious implications for many other league tables, which
have not addressed the issue of variability in the measures they use.

"Whole continents are largely ignored by current league tables, which
raises questions about the measures currently relied upon to decide
whether a university is doing its' job," Professor Neylon said.

"Examining data across a much wider range of measures, drawing in
statistics from around the world will help redefine the impact and role
of universities in the 21st century.".
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## Initiative for Open Abstracts {#initiative-for-open-abstracts .elementor-heading-title .elementor-size-default}
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By COKI Project Co-lead Professor [Cameron
Neylon](https://research.curtin.edu.au/supervisor/prof-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. But there
is a tension here as well. Small improvements relieve pressure on the
system. How do we address the risk that they reduce progress over all?
The key to this is in understanding what those small steps can achieve.

Improving the quality and openness of metadata about scholarly
communications is an example where many small steps have been made.
Because metadata is infrastructure, underpinning many other systems, it
is almost entirely invisible. But the work to make it is not.

We make elements of progress, each of them seemingly quite small, but
then in combination they suddenly enable significant change. 

What we do within the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative is possible in
large part due to incremental improvements in the infrastructure of
persistent identifiers and the quality of open metadata data generally.
The improvement in access to open citations data as a result of
[I4OC](https://i4oc.org/) has been a major boost to our research
allowing us, for instance to [make a fair comparison of how a citation
count index would perform if it used different bibliographic data
sources](https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00031) to define the set of
outputs to count citations for.

But where does metadata end and content begin? As a research project we
also want to be able to do more granular analysis of the contents of
research. Lots of data sources provide a classification of the topics of
articles, either at the journal or article level. But mostly these are
black boxes that tell us more about who made those classifications than
about the things we're interested in. For instance, in my work I've
frequently been more interested in categorising articles by the
technique that they use, rather than the topic being studied. Sometimes
the region a study focuses on is more important than the discipline
label. In a perfect world any researcher would be able to process the
full text to create their own categorisations, but then we're restricted
to open access content, even assuming we can gather all the content
together efficiently. Titles can tell us something, but certainly not
enough.

What would make a huge difference is comprehensive and central access to
abstracts.

> Abstracts give enough detail to be useful, they often touch on the
> techniques used or the specific scope of a study. They're small enough
> to be easy to work with at scale and rich enough to have valuable
> detail.

Microsoft Academic goes a long way towards providing this, and we're
using this great openly licensed source at scale. But what would be even
better is a central source of high quality metadata provided directly by
publishers. Having a single central source makes our work a lot easier.
Having the data direct from publishers also means it is direct from the
source and has been through fewer extra systems. It means we have the
raw data. And finally, placing it in a system where publishers are
providing the metadata means it can be comprehensive, not restricted to
what a third party filter decides to include.

That's what the [Initiative for Open Abstracts](https://i4oa.org/) is
advocating for. And why I am supporting it.

I4OA advocates for publishers that already provide metadata to Crossref
to use an already available capacity to deposit abstracts. Many major
publishers, but also many smaller publishers are already on board. For
our research work we could probably scrape all of their websites, and
probably no-one would really object (or notice), but that's not a polite
way to get this metadata. Provide it once, provide it in a single place
that is properly provisioned to support large-scale use. Our work at
COKI is at a large scale and moves beyond research, so we want to apply
best practice, ethically, technically and through financial support of
the data holders where appropriate. COKI is a [Crossref Metadata
Plus](https://www.crossref.org/services/metadata-retrieval/metadata-plus/)
member for precisely this reason (we also subscribe to [the data feed
from Unpaywall](http://unpaywall.org/products/data-feed) and plan to
become an [Open Citations member](http://opencitations.net/membership)).

As a researcher I need reliability, and ease of use to create
transformed information resources. As a builder of services we need
stable, reliable and technically robust means of getting data at a large
scale. For publishers it makes sense to drive discovery as efficiently
as possible to the content they host and curate.

> In our work, we want to use the work that publishers do best --
> curation, markup and metadata provision -- to drive new discoveries,
> drive new ways of making discoveries and to help others to find the
> best copy of that content they have access to.

Making abstracts available through Crossref is one step towards
improving that. Far from being a step backwards on a route towards
fully-funded systems for global open-access it will help to demonstrate
what is possible, and to showcase what publishers do well.
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## Bringing students on a voyage of discovery {#bringing-students-on-a-voyage-of-discovery .elementor-heading-title .elementor-size-default}
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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.

Rebecca's talk focussed on all of the interesting places that a career
in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine)
can take you. She used examples from her experience as part of the
largest all-women voyage to Antarctica with the [Homeward
Bound](https://homewardboundprojects.com.au/hb1-participants/hb4-participants/)
program in Nov-Dec 2019.  

Homeward Bound is a leadership program for [women in
STEMM](https://womeninscienceaust.org/), and Rebecca was selected as one
of 100 women from around the world to participate. The program involves
training in mentorship, strategy, visibility and science communication,
to build future female leaders in STEMM. This global leadership
initiative aims to heighten the influence and impact of women in making
decisions that shape our planet.

Rebecca talked about leadership, diversity, and team-work, and how these
are important in school, scientific field work, in the close-confines of
an expedition ship. She advised students to getting involved in lots of
things -- "as everything you do will end up helping you at some point in
life".

The students asked many interesting questions, such as how to be
prepared for travelling someplace as remote as Antarctica and how the
Antarctica bases are supplied with food. Rebecca's favourite question
was about how she kept in contact with her family when there was almost
no internet.

[Dr
Handcock](https://staffportal.curtin.edu.au/staff/profile/view/rebecca-handcock-16511e87/)
is a Spatial Data Scientist with a PhD in Geography from the University
of Toronto. She spent four years as a Research Fellow at the University
of Washington, followed by a decade at CSIRO as a Senior Research
Scientist. Rebecca is currently at the Curtin University Institute for
Computation, working with the [Curtin Open Knowledge
Initiative](https://openknowledge.community/) (COKI).
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## New PhD scholarship opportunities for COKI {#new-phd-scholarship-opportunities-for-coki .elementor-heading-title .elementor-size-default}
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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. Each will probe a different
aspect of open knowledge within universities, and each has the potential
to be shaped by a scholarship holder to focus on different aspects of
the bigger picture. These scholarships are extremely competitive. The
majority of scholarships are for Australian citizens and residents.
However a small number of scholarships are available for overseas
students and exceptional students should enquire as to their suitability
for this scheme. 

The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) is a highly
interdisciplinary team including software engineers, data scientists,
sociologists, librarians, statisticians, and theorists working to
understand, develop and implement a future for Universities as Open
Knowledge Institutions. This is a unique opportunity for scholars who
want to expand their experience beyond a narrow disciplinary background
and make a difference in the world.

A PhD within the COKI team offers the opportunity to develop skills in
policy, analysis, critical theory and software design and data science.
This combination of skills will place candidates in a strong position to
work at the intersection of society, policy and technology in the
future.

For more details contact COKI co-lead [Professor Cameron
Neylon.](mailto:cameron.neylon@curtin.edu.au)

 

### [Diversity, Equity and Impact: Exploring the Open Knowledge performance of Universities](https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/Scholarship/?id=4341)

The higher education and research landscape is peppered with a growing
number of examples of grass-roots efforts to transform universities into
institutions that both represent and include the diversity of the
communities they serve; and to find better ways to mobilise the
knowledge that universities create in order to maximise its positive
impact. As digital technologies create new possibilities for the ways in
which data can be gathered and shared, the scope for communities to
become active partners in the research process is growing. Researchers
and universities are experimenting with new approaches to working with
communities to help shape research directions and questions, as well as
the scholarship, and education, that research enables.   

However, the open knowledge aspirations and practices of research
communities exist in tension with the ways in which university
performance is measured and rewarded (Benneworth et al 2019). In spite
of a growing list of genuine, thoughtful, and often creative efforts to
ensure that knowledge generated within universities benefits the widest
possible communities, universities themselves continue to be assessed,
ranked and evaluated according to narrow measures of performance that
depend on limited data sets and ignore the value of open knowledge. The
absence of evaluation frameworks capable of recognising or capturing
open knowledge efforts within universities makes it difficult for
university administrators to systematically support open knowledge
across an institution; or to engage effectively with the challenges and
opportunities that universities face in the context of rapid social and
technological change.  

This PhD project engages with this gap: exploring the potential for new
approaches to tracking and exploring the open knowledge efforts of
universities in order to support diversity, equity and impact in higher
education and research. The project will contribute to a larger program
of work being carried out by the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative: a
major strategic project combining cloud-based computing approaches with
critical perspectives.
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###   {#section}

### [Tracking Australia's Research Response to the COVID Pandemic](https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/Scholarship/?id=4347)

The COVID-19 Pandemic has changed the world. At the centre of responding
to these changes are questions of knowledge. Not just how our existing
research systems can respond faster, but how knowledge is used, and how
it reaches the right location, what are the risks to our institutions
and what needs to change? These are not merely questions of medical
research but issues in economics, public policy, management, media and
communications.

Utilising the data resources of the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative,
the project will focus on identifying, interpreting and understanding
changes in our research production and communication systems and
organisations. We expect to see changes in production (type, number and
subject of outputs), rhetoric (what universities say about how what they
do matters), economics (both finances and systems of resource
allocation), and policy. The effects of these changes will be tracked
throughout the course of the project during this unprecedented time.
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###   {#section-1}

### [What is excellent Astronomy? Probing disciplinary concepts of research excellence](https://scholarships.curtin.edu.au/Scholarship/?id=4351)  {#what-is-excellent-astronomy-probing-disciplinary-concepts-of-research-excellence}

"Excellence" is seen as a core goal for researchers, their institutions
and their funders. Yet what we mean by excellence is hard to pin down.
We know that it differs across disciplines and across settings. We know
that the many ways in which it is measured are largely inadequate. And
we also know that these measurements have a range of perverse effects,
from limiting diversity and excluding new talent, to creating incentives
to engage in fraud, and incentives against work on public engagement, or
access to knowledge.

In collaboration with the Curtin Institute for Radio Astronomy, the
study will leverage the existing data assets developed through the
Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative alongside the unique data available to
the astronomy community through the Astrophysics Data System. It will
combine ethnographic examination of astronomy researchers and research
with large scale textual analysis and data science to develop new tools
that dig beyond counting of citations to consider how researchers and
their institutions contribute, and how this differs across different
disciplines.
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![Treetop](https://openknowledge.community/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/Treetop-oh4c34twud6qsyjfodxqvka26sj2hccjpc9xbgv6o8.jpg "Treetop"){decoding="async"
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## COVID-19 presents opportunity to re-think diversity in Australian HE {#covid-19-presents-opportunity-to-re-think-diversity-in-australian-he .elementor-heading-title .elementor-size-default}
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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. In contrast, the gender of international students is more
balanced, with 49.57% women and 50.42% men. The percentage of domestic
university students in 2018 recorded with gender unknown (no
information) was 0.09%, and 0.01% of international students provided no
information on gender.

Only four of Australia's 42 public universities enrolled more domestic
students who identified as men than those who identified as women in
2018: RMIT, the University of New South Wales, the University of Western
Australia and the University of Adelaide.

The proposed measure to increase fees on selected higher education
courses will have a disproportionate impact on disciplines which tend to
be female-dominated and will likely affect the percentage of women
students. Disciplines which are male-dominated include the natural and
physical sciences, while humanities, education and health tend to have
higher numbers of women enrolments.

Analysis of the diversity of student enrolments from the latest 2018
Department of Education, Skills and Employment higher education
statistics by [Dr Katie
Wilson](https://research.curtin.edu.au/supervisor/dr-katie-wilson/),
Research Fellow with Curtin University's Open Knowledge Initiative
(COKI) Project, indicated that there were many key differences between
higher education cohorts.

The impact of COVID-19 on international enrolments in the university
sector has been widely publicised, but while overseas students made up
30.72% of the total university student population within Australia in
2018, non-university higher education institutions and private
universities had much larger proportions of international students --
averaging 51.14%.

Victoria had the most international university and
non-university/private students of any State or Territory in 2018 with
40.23%, while the Northern Territory had the fewest at 17.39%.

While COVID-19 will have significantly changed the demographics of
enrolment in 2020, this analysis of past trends indicates there will be
a change in the proportions of Australia student gender enrolment as it
recovers. The proposed fee increases may contribute to this change.

Data source: *Department of Education, Skills and Employment -- Higher
Education Statistics Data Cube (uCube)*
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## Fireside Chats at the Open Publishing Festival {#fireside-chats-at-the-open-publishing-festival .elementor-heading-title .elementor-size-default}
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***Project co-lead [Cameron
Neylon](https://research.curtin.edu.au/supervisor/prof-cameron-neylon/)
writes about online festivals, celebrating success and the challenges of
infrastructure.***

For the past two weeks there has been a very different kind of event
running online. The [Open Publishing
Fest](https://openpublishingfest.org/index.html) is entirely online, and
pretty much entirely decentralized. The concept grew out of
conversations between Adam Hyde of the [Collaborative Knowledge
Foundation](https://coko.foundation/) and Dan Rudman from [Punctum
Books](https://punctumbooks.com/), two organisations that in their own
way are leading radical change in the scholarly publishing space.

The event grew out of a question. Given the success of the inaugural
[Open Publishing Awards](https://openpublishingawards.org/) last year,
how could that energy continue in a world where in-person events are
limited? From that grew a lightweight and simple approach. People would
self-organize sessions and submit them to be added to a calendar. 

Last year I had the privilege of chairing the committee that selected
the inaugural [Open Publishing
Awards](https://openpublishingawards.org/). We'd expected a fairly niche
audience and a small set of nominations but were staggered by the number
(over 200) and quality of the nominations. Similarly, with the Open
Publishing Fest, there have been [over 100 events
scheduled](https://openpublishingfest.org/calendar.html) involving
thousands of people.

The question of [what kinds of event and content can work online and
virtually](https://openknowledge.community/how-else-can-community-be-built/)
have been front of mind for all of us in the COKI project and also for
me as part of the steering group for the FORCE11 Scholarly
Communications Institute -- one of many events that has sought to take
the challenge of moving online and turn it into an opportunity. For the
Open Publishing Fest, I developed a particular format of Fireside Chat
with John Chodacki from the California Digital Library.

In these chats, we've focussed on discussions with people doing
interesting things in Open Science, and Open Publishing. Focussing on
the journey people have taken to their current work adds a human element
that I think is of particular value as we look at why they think certain
things, or work on particular issues. The choice to ask people to "sit
in a comfy chair" has had a profound effect on the atmosphere. The shift
away from "person talking to their computer" to "person having a chat"
seems to work.

Through this series I've spoken to [Kamran Naim from
CERN](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP6RUrqJk-w) about the path that
lead him to be Directory of Open Science at the international particle
physics facility, [Kaitlin
Thaney](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_15lvTsqB3c) about her history
of building up new projects, always focussing on supporting people to
build, and how that leads to her [current work on Infrastructures for
schol comm](https://investinopen.org/). I also talked to [Amy Brand
(Director of MIT Press) and Claudio
Aspesi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxMnYig7WJc) about [their recent
paper in Science](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aba3763) on the risks
of data analytics.

John has talked to [Ginny Hendricks from
Crossref](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObxChY_rFME&list=PLIc5BEgecL7CTuR76SKbgX1D-FuLx14mR&index=5)
about [Metadata2020](http://www.metadata2020.org/), [Bruce
Caron](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8bjOFF77i8&list=PLIc5BEgecL7CTuR76SKbgX1D-FuLx14mR&index=3)
about preprints and community building in the gosciences and [Silvio
Peroni and David
Shotton](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bCPS2iIdCc&list=PLIc5BEgecL7CTuR76SKbgX1D-FuLx14mR&index=7&t=0s)
about Open Citations.

What has been interesting has been hearing about how people's
experiences shape the work they do, and how the story of those
experiences shapes the narratives that they use in their work. Context
is crucial to understanding what open means in practice in different
settings. As a format it seems to work, and the technology makes it
reasonably easy to create, but what do you think?
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![Construction crane in
Perth](https://openknowledge.community/wp-content/uploads/elementor/thumbs/Perth-crane-2-scaled-opobyd8whhkj2ecbwxez7nxp84zdmwpfinp5c2to58.jpg "Perth crane"){decoding="async"
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## How else can community be built? {#how-else-can-community-be-built .elementor-heading-title .elementor-size-default}
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##### **Arcadia Project Update**

**By [Professor Cameron
Neylon](https://research.curtin.edu.au/supervisor/prof-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.
The core of the project was a workshop to be held in July to bring
together a small set of key players who would help us to define the
parameters of what that community would look like. 

How could this open knowledge community be agile, community-governed,
sustainable, inclusive, globally relevant and yet also responsive to
local needs and issues?

> **How could we move issues of open knowledge and the engagement of
> communities in knowledge building so that it no longer languished on
> the periphery of conversations about the future of higher education?
> Openness, diversity and the other attributes of an OKI were too often
> identified as "nice to have"; an "aspiration" but not a driving
> concern at the heart of our institutions.**

Of course -- we assumed -- it needed to be an in-person meeting. How
else can community be built? Obviously, we thought, in the future there
will be more virtual and remote community building, but *this* meeting,
*our* work, meets the bar that can only be served by a workshop where we
come together in person.

Looking back, it all seems so grotesquely naive. In a moment where the
flow of good (not accurate, not right, just the best we can) information
to the right places might save hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of
lives, but where we only have at best an imperfect view of the data.

At a time where the context of data is critical, the core idea of our
project has been moved to centre stage by COVID-19.** **

The idea that optimal knowledge-making must build on enabling
negotiation and consideration of views between communities, has become
the benchmark for research speed and impact. Faster information
movement, and more data sharing is good. But those same systems allow
misinformation to travel faster as well. The web, social media and all
of the networked tools that offer us new ways to work with much wider
communities to make knowledge, also allow people, both malicious and
well-meaning to confuse, frighten, and in some cases kill. And
ironically, the isolation, the lack of context that comes from meeting
face to face can exacerbate this.

Our meeting, like many others, has moved online. Our planned program of
working with communities has been ripped up and we have started again
from scratch.

> **It is exciting to be thinking about how a virtual workshop can work
> *with* timezones around the globe to enable us to use the time of busy
> people effectively. Can we, perhaps, do better than we would have done
> in person?**

The pandemic is a challenge at so many levels. It is of course glib to
say that challenges are opportunities. Particularly in the context of so
many individual tragedies and pain. Rather, it is incumbent on us to do
better. It seems clear that the kind of travel that was assumed as part
of academic life (at least for those free to take advantage of it) will
be limited in the future. It always was going to be as the climate
crisis started to bite. 

The central concept of the Open Knowledge Institution agenda is that
universities can take a special role in society by supporting systems
and platforms that help communities make knowledge and that this will
look different in a digital and connected world. In our own limited way,
we are seeking to live that by exploring the ways in which a workshop
where we try to build trust, community and shared culture can move
online. It forces us to re-examine the traditional approaches (which are
usually less inclusive than we like to think, drinks receptions anyone?)
and to really think about what it is that matters about the
interactions.

I don't imagine we'll get it entirely, or even necessarily mostly right,
but what we will do is try to effectively share what we learn from the
process. That in the end is what open knowledge is all about.

 
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