Usage data on research outputs such as books and journals is well established in the scholarly community. Yet, as research impact is derived from a broader set of scholarly outputs, such as data, code, and multimedia, more holistic usage and impact metrics could inform national innovation and research policy. While usage data reporting standards, such as Project COUNTER, provide the basis for shared statistics reporting practice, mandated access to publicly funded research has increased the demand for impact metrics and analytics. In this context, stakeholders are exploring how to scaffold and strengthen shared infrastructure to better support the trusted, multistakeholder exchange of usage data across a variety of outputs. In April 2023, a workshop on Exploring National Infrastructure for Public Access and Impact Reporting supported by the United States (US) National Science Foundation (NSF) explored these issues. This paper contextualizes the resources shared and recommendations generated in the workshop.

One of the goals of open science is to promote the transparency and accessibility of research. Sharing data and materials used in network research is critical to these goals. In this paper, we present recommendations for whether, what, when, and where network data and materials should be shared. We recommend that network data and materials should be shared, but access to or use of shared data and materials may be restricted if necessary to avoid harm or comply with regulations. Researchers should share the network data and materials necessary to reproduce reported results via a publicly accessible repository when an associated manuscript is published. To ensure the adoption of these recommendations, network journals should require sharing, and network associations and academic institutions should reward sharing.

This commentary article explores some of the problems encountered by independent scholars seeking to get their work published in peer-reviewed journals and in particular the difficulties they face in accessing online resources. Though often hidden, these issues are nevertheless very real for aspiring historians and those who have returned late to the historical fold. The article acknowledges the efforts of a number of journals to encourage different voices, but highlights how the limitations of current licensing and Open Access arrangements hinders this ambition.

Marine litter poses a complex challenge in Indonesia, necessitating a well-informed and coordinated strategy for effective mitigation. This study investigates the seasonality of plastic concentrations around Sulawesi Island in central Indonesia during monsoon-driven wet and dry seasons. By using open data and methodologies including the HYCOM and Parcels models, we simulated the dispersal of plastic waste over 3 months during both the southwest and northeast monsoons. Our research extended beyond data analysis, as we actively engaged with local communities, researchers and policymakers through a range of outreach initiatives, including the development of a web application to visualize model results. Our findings underscore the substantial influence of monsoon-driven currents on surface plastic concentrations, highlighting the seasonal variation in the risk to different regional seas. This study adds to the evidence provided by coarser resolution regional ocean modelling studies, emphasizing that seasonality is a key driver of plastic pollution within the Indonesian archipelago. Inclusive international collaboration and a community-oriented approach were integral to our project, and we recommend that future initiatives similarly engage researchers, local communities and decision-makers in marine litter modelling results. This study aims to support the application of model results in solutions to the marine litter problem.

The advancement of technology has drastically changed the way information is being stored in the law library. With current technology, many have found that legal information is easy to retrieve from federal or state government websites in Malaysia. But while federal legislation can be accessed via the internet, some of the law cannot be accessed for the public to review or download. Also, older law is unavailable from the federal gazette website, and it is crucial for the lawyer or law librarian to publicly access it. This paper, by Qudri Ali Abu Bakar, discusses the restriction of access to legal information and looks at some alternative ways of gaining full access to federal and state law in Malaysia.

This article explores ways of decolonising Development Studies by: (1) examining the discipline’s tendencies towards what some have called ‘imperial amnesia’, that is, proclivities towards disavowing if not erasing European colonialism, most evident in 1950s–1960s Modernisation theory, but also more recently in the work of such analysts as Bruce Gilley and Nigel Biggar; (2) considering the opportunities and perils of ‘epistemic decolonisation’, that is, ways of decolonising knowledge production in the discipline, including the limits of ‘non-Eurocentric’ pedagogies; and (3) reflecting on forms of material decolonisation (e.g., the reduction of socioeconomic inequalities by improving better access to education or resisting the corporatisation of publicly funded research) that need to accompany any epistemic decolonisation for the latter to be meaningful.

The National Archives launched a new service called Find Case Law in April of last year. Here Daniel Hoadley, Amy Conroy and Editha Nemsic, of Mishcon de Reya LLP, argue that while this does offer some accessibility and legibility it's perhaps not providing access to the full corpus of law that it could, or even should. Also, on a broader level, they propose that there is a case to be made for access to the law being guaranteed and publicly funded.

Geospatial research in archaeology often relies on datasets previously collected by other archaeologists or third-party groups, such as state or federal government entities. This article discusses our work with geospatial datasets for identifying, documenting, and evaluating prehistoric and historic water features in the western United States. As part of a project on water heritage and long-term views on water management, our research has involved aggregating spatial data from an array of open access and semi-open access sources. Here, we consider the challenges of working with such datasets, including outdated or disorganized information, and fragmentary data. Based on our experiences, we recommend best practices: (1) locating relevant data and creating a data organization method for working with spatial data, (2) addressing data integrity, (3) integrating datasets in systematic ways across research cohorts, and (4) improving data accessibility.

This article by Jules Winterton, CEO of BAILII, is an expanded version of the presentation he delivered as the Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture 2022. The article briefly recounts the history of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) and its achievements, the features of the service and the challenges of publishing judgments. It sets BAILII in the context of recent government initiatives and outlines plans for the future of BAILII.

This paper investigates how poverty reduction and natural resource preservation can be simultaneously achieved in a small open dual economy with urban wage rigidity, open access rural resources, and rural-urban migration. An increase in the export tax rate on the rural resource good increases urban unemployment in both the short run and the long run with resource dynamics. Given the institutional failures, the first-best policy is an urban wage subsidy combined with either a rural wage subsidy at a lower rate or, if the urban output price is sufficiently high, a rural tax. When the institutional failures can be resolved endogenously, an increase in the export tax on the resource good can induce rural institutional change away from open access. However, tariff protection of urban manufacturing hinders such a rural institutional change.

Success in academic archaeology is strongly influenced by the publication of peer-reviewed articles. Despite the importance of such articles, minimal research has explicitly examined the factors influencing publishing decisions in archaeology. In order to better understand the landscape of archaeological publishing, we distributed a short survey that solicited basic professional and demographic information before asking respondents to (1) identify journals that publish important archaeological research, (2) identify journals that people who read archaeological academic CVs value most highly, and (3) rank the factors that affected their decisions about where to submit an article for publication. Our results from 274 respondents generated a list of 167 individual journal titles. Prestige was viewed as the most important factor that affected publishing decisions, followed by audience and open access considerations. There was no relationship between respondent-generated journal rankings and SCImago Journal Ranks (SJR), but there were significant differences in average SJR by gender and career stage. Responses showed consensus on only a small number of highly ranked archaeology and science-subject journals, with little agreement on the importance of most other journals. We conclude by highlighting the areas of disciplinary consensus and divergence revealed by the survey and by discussing how implicit prestige hierarchies permeate academic archaeology.

This article describes and critically examines the challenging task of compiling The London–Lund Corpus 2 (LLC–2) from start to end, accounting for the methodological decisions made in each stage and highlighting the innovations. LLC–2 is a half-a-million-word corpus of contemporary spoken British English with recordings from 2014 to 2019. Its size and design are the same as those of the world's first machine-readable spoken corpus, The London–Lund Corpus of Spoken English with data from the 1950s to 1980s. In this way, LLC–2 allows not only for synchronic investigations of contemporary speech but also for principled diachronic research of spoken language across time. Each stage of the compilation of LLC–2 posed its own challenges, ranging from the design of the corpus, the recruitment of the speakers, transcription, markup and annotation procedures, to the release of the corpus to the international research community. The decisions and solutions represent state-of-the-art practices of spoken corpus compilation with important innovations that enhance the value of LLC–2 for spoken corpus research, such as the availability of both the transcriptions and the corresponding time-aligned audio files in a standard compliant format.

The idea of assessing the costs and benefits of public and private projects is not new to Europe, dating back to studies at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees (Paris) in the XIX century. Later on, in the last century, Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA) in its current form has been more extensively used in the United States than in Europe. In the last two decades, however, there has been a rapid increase in its use in a number of European countries and at the European Union (EU) level. European governments often undertake tasks that would be done by private companies in the United States, such as the provision of transport, energy, water and waste management, health services, etc. In the United States the focus of BCA has often been regulatory impact analysis, rather than public project evaluation. One might, therefore, expect that Europeans might approach some things differently from their American counterparts and that new insights might result from these efforts. The articles in this symposium, taken from the recent European Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis (SBCA) conference in Toulouse, illustrate some of these differences and some converging themes.

In 2008 European Commission launches the open access infrastructure for research in Europe project (OpenAIRE), supporting open access (OA) in scientific information and research output. In this paper, we assess the economic sustainability of the OpenAIRE project. The empirical strategy is developed through a Cost–Benefit Analysis framework to evaluate and compare the costs and benefits of OpenAIRE services to provide recommendations on the project’s economic efficiency and sustainability, a non-market valuation method based on the results of a “Choice Experiment” to calculate the Total Economic Value generated by OpenAIRE and a full preference ranking approach. Findings indicate that stakeholders prefer interoperability between research platforms and output, better access to scientific results and compliance to OA mandates. Furthermore, net social benefits for the basic services for 15 years are at least five times higher than costs’ present value while the potential R&D effect from research suggests even larger benefits in the long run. Subscriptions based on the estimated willingness to pay and cost, institutional subsidies and public awareness are the main recommendations for the sustainable operation of OpenAIRE. This study contributes to the literature on monetary valuation of the benefits and costs of OA to scientific knowledge.