International Conference on Science, Health and Engineering

Bringing humanistic research into the digital environment – and supporting new and diverse voices and perspectives – is one of the great benefits of Open Access, write the authors of the latest in our OA books series. How research is generated and shared can drive meaningful change across disciplines, organizations, and communities. Consider digital scholarship. Emerging tools and methodologies prompt new questions; resultant hypotheses and argumentation call for innovative presentations; interactivity and other enhanced user experiences bring about heightened awareness and agency; increased inclusivity leads to new, diverse perspectives. Combining digital scholarship with open access (OA) publishing models expands significantly the possibilities for impact by offering more equitable access to research, alongside new and powerful ways for authors to articulate complex arguments. In sum, the intersection between innovative forms of scholarship and revolutionary dissemination proce...

Globally, the past decade has seen a move from 70% of all publishing being closed access to 54% being open access . In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed science publishing and necessitated a huge acceleration in transitioning to Open Access (OA) models, driven by a need for speed in publishing and an accompanying growth in preprints . The even more recent memo from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) will see this trend advance rapidly in the United States, with not only federally funded publications themselves but associated datasets being required to be made publicly available without embargo. In this blog post, Symplectic ‘s Tzu-I Liao examines global shifts in approach to Open Access, and discusses how Symplectic plans to continue to evolve Elements’ functionality to build in more flexibility and support for multiple OA pathways.  Tracking global trends – and differences – in the OA landscape Figure 1: Open access policies ad...

A New Zealand university has become a leader in demonstrating its research expertise, equipment and facilities – and it’s building a stronger research community along the way. In the Māori language, the word “rāpoi” means to “cluster” or to “gather together”. It just so happens that a high-performance computing cluster (HPC) at Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington (Te Herenga Waka) is named the Rāpoi HPC, and – perhaps by a happy coincidence – it’s become one of the star attractions of that university’s new showcase of research equipment, capabilities and expertise. Over the past couple of years, Te Herenga Waka in the nation’s North Island capital of Wellington has been working closely with Symplectic and its own research community to “gather together” what is now among the world’s most impressive – and publicly searchable – collections of resources at any university available for research and consultancy. Human resources (expertise) and infrastructure resources ...

If the story of the 20th Century is one of the decline of the power and influence of the West, then the 21st Century tells the story of the ascent of Asia and more specifically China. Indeed, the era in which we live currently, with the cultural and economic dominance of the West, is something of a historical aberration. A 2012 report from McKinsey points out that for the better part of the last 2000 years, the centre of economic wealth in the world has been firmly positioned in the East, with a period from the 1500s until 2000 where the centre of mass moved and dwelt (for a while at least) in the West. The enlightenment and the industrial revolution took place first in Europe and our own work shows the movement of the centre of mass of research since the late 1600s to present day – a journey that starts in the UK, moves West to the US, reaching its nearest point in the mid-1940s before moving ever more quickly eastward towards China. This week’s Communist Party Congress wil...