Data, Discovery, Discussion
From data tracking to the fair publication of research data and publishing with the community-led services: As part of International Open Access Week, the KIT Library once again offered various perspectives on the world of open access under this year’s theme, “The Cost of Knowledge.”
International Open Access Week takes place annually in late October. It is a global event involving stakeholders from libraries, research institutions, and initiatives. From October 19 to 26, lectures, panel discussions, and other events took place as part of the week. This year, the KIT Library also decided to try something new and plan events that it had never offered in this format before—or had only rarely offered in the past.
The series kicked off with an Open Paper Dialog titled “Wie viel Daten kosten Wissen? – Datentracking im Wissenschaftssystem.” Based on the concept of a journal club, researchers and research support staff were invited to discuss a text together. What made this format special was that the author, Dr. Renke Siems, was invited as a guest speaker. As a result, a lively discussion about data tracking by big academic publishers unfolded during the course. Together with the audience, participants explored how academic libraries can better support researchers and what options exist to steer these developments in a positive direction.
On Wednesday, the event moved toward the northern part of Karlsruhe , at Campus North, with an in-person event: a roundtable on research data management titled “Open Science at KIT: Show us your data.” Researchers from four different KIT institutes presented their work, focusing on the specific characteristics of the research data generated in the process. It became clear that research data is as diverse as the research behind it and requires a wide variety of workflows and management systems. For the KIT Library, as a research support organization, this also provided an insight, and a better understanding of researchers’ needs for services—ranging from data management systems to repositories and databases. In particular, the informal session over coffee and cake provided an opportunity for discussions among various KIT stakeholders and facilitated the formation of new connections.
The closing event on Thursday also followed the principle of community exchange: a panel discussion on the topic of community-led publication services. In the online event “Low-cost and no-cost community-developed services: A showcase and discussion from the institutional publishing perspective,” representatives from OPERAS, SeDOA, and Thoth Metadata presented their services. In addition, representatives of AG Universitätsverlag and Berlin Universities Publishing added constructive perspective to this theme. United by the question of how services and initiatives that enable scholarly publications at the lowest possible cost—or at no cost at all—can be strengthened and expanded, the experts shared their perspective.
In the end, everyone—the organizers from the KIT Library as well as the invited guests—agreed: We have already achieved a great deal in line with the principles of open access and open science, but we still have many old and new challenges to overcome. Events such as International Open Access Week help us work toward common targets, develop formats for collaboration, and keep the dialog alive.