Supporting an open research ecosystem | UKSG

"In a June 2019 blog post, EBSCO noted our vision for open science and unfettered access to scholarly research. At the time we posed several questions around the collection and dissemination of research output. We have now taken an additional step in support of open science by partnering with companies that help advance open research: Code Ocean, protocols.io and Arkivum. The first two of these companies provide platforms for the reproducibility and re-use of research while enabling institutions to gain better stewardship over the totality of their research output. Arkivum, on its part, ensures the long-term data management and preservation of research. Through these partnerships, we further support an open research ecosystem for the creation, dissemination, discovery and preservation of scientific knowledge.

The issues that surround the reproducibility of research are well understood. A 2016 survey published in Nature sheds light on the crisis in research noting that “more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments.” In January of this year, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Frances Arnold, made news when she retracted her paper as her work was not reproducible. When we consider the underlying problems with reproducibility, the research article may indeed lie at the heart of the problem; it often constitutes merely the ‘advertisement’ of the research without providing adequate access to the data, the computational code and the methods that underly the research itself...."