How to embrace open research practices in your work
Open research: What do researchers think?
As we transition to a more open world, we wanted to know what researchers really think about open research, so we surveyed 625 researchers who shared their thoughts about open research and how they share their work.
The survey highlighted that many researchers are actively participating in open research behaviors, including open access, open data, and open peer review. Most researchers told us their primary motivations for publishing open access and utilizing open research practices are the impact and visibility it provides, public benefit, and transparency and reuse of their work.
What are the benefits of posting preprints and posters?
By posting preprints and posters to a platform, for example, the ESS Open Archive, you benefit from:
- A fully citable preprint with DOI.
- Earlier views and feedback.
- More collaboration opportunities.
- Increased visibility and recognition (especially valuable for early-career researchers).
- Compliance with funder requirements.
It’s important to:
- Deposit the data and software in a community accepted, trusted repository, as appropriate, and preferably with a DOI.
- Comply with the specific platform’s regulations, such as including data and software availability statements, using correct labels, and explaining to the reader where and how to access the data and software.
- Include citation(s) to the deposited data and software.
AGU’s policies for sharing data and software are available here and are compatible with Wiley's policies for data sharing.
What does transparent peer review do?
Transparency in peer review enables readers to see the peer reviewers’ reports, authors’ responses and editors’ decisions alongside a published article. Increasing transparency in peer review is crucial to building trust and accountability in the decision-making process and offers new insights to readers. It also recognizes the vital work of reviewers and editors.
You can:
- Demonstrate the value of peer review by publishing reviewer reports, author responses, and editor decision letters.
- Increase trust in peer review and recognition for the work done.
Transparent peer review is also compatible with other review models, e.g. double-anonymous peer review, during the process with transparency of peer review reports at publication.
How can open recognition and reward enhance transparency?
Using the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) increases the transparency of author roles. The CRediT taxonomy provides a framework for authors to have conversations and document the role they played in a piece of research. AGU encourages the use of CRediT across all their journals to acknowledge the various ways people contribute to research.
See what the Vice President of Publications at AGU said about CRediT in a previous blog.
How are we working with the community to drive open research?
Wiley is working in partnership with the AGU and in consultation with several leading international societies, to support the Earth and Space Science (ESS) Open Archive pre-publication platform for the international earth, environmental, and space sciences author community.
This platform accelerates the early and open dissemination of research outputs, by allowing you to showcase your work to the global research community pre-publication, and by supporting preprints and posters presented at major scientific meetings. The archive utilizes the practices we’ve covered in this blog, and it spans a wide range of subjects, including agriculture, atmospheric sciences, biogeochemistry, and many more. Benefits include increased visibility for your work, earlier views and citations, and compliance with funder requirements.
Many Wiley journals mandate CRediT, and we enable you to provide this information on submission, allowing for detailed information about individual contributions to the work. We also encourage our authors to make research data available as early as possible, in accordance with community practice and as required by funder and institutional policy.
In collaboration with Publons and ScholarOne (part of Clarivate, Web of Science), we launched a Transparent Peer Review pilot with over 60 journals. This initiative allows the entire peer review process, from initial reviews to the editor’s decision, to be openly published, enhancing accountability and recognizing reviewers and editors.
Each article on Wiley Online Library includes a link to its comprehensive peer review history on Publons. Every part of the review process is assigned a digital object identifier (DOI) for easy reference and citation.
What are we doing to help you overcome the funding hurdle?
Despite the benefits of publishing open access and using open research practices, 68% of researchers told us via our survey that lack of funds for publishing fees was the main obstacle. And 78% of authors would submit their article open access if the APC was paid by their institution or funder.
To support authors with this, Wiley has:
- Partnered with Research4Life, making the benefits of open access publishing available to authors in low- and lower-middle income countries. APCs in our fully open access journals are waived for 86 countries and discounted for 41 countries.
- Launched over 100 transformational agreements, giving researchers from 2,800+ institutions the opportunity to publish open access and benefit from their research being freely available.
For AGU (and all Wiley published journals), you can check coverage with our Eligibility Checker or our list of coverage on Wiley Author Services.
Embracing open research principles and practices, such as posting preprints, using CRediT, enabling transparent peer review, and more, can significantly enhance the visibility, accountability, and collaborative potential of your scholarly work.
