Google Workspace Individual account storage increased from 15GB to 1TB
Googlehas announced a couple of new features for Workspace Individual users, including a new storage limit of 1TB, instead of the usual 15GB. The Google Workspace Individual account is meant for small business owners and entrepreneurs, who need a single Google account for managing daily work needs. The option for such single workspace accounts was introduced last year by Google.
In a blog post, Google said that the upgraded storage limit will be implemented on its own. These users do not need to do anything extra to get the storage. The blog post does not mention the exact time when the storage increase will start rolling out. The blog post adds that business owners will be able to “store over 100 file types in Drive, including PDFs, CAD files and images,” and also “collaborate on and edit Microsoft Office files without converting them.”
Google also announced an update for Gmail in these account that makes it easier to email multiple recipients without compromising on privacy. The capabilities of the multi-send mode on the mail service have been expanded to include mail merge tags.
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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 processes can benefit multiple stakeholders the world over.
Creating multimodal digital monographs, for many authors, is about making the humanities relevant and accessible to wider audiences who can both benefit from and contribute to scholarly production in tangible, meaningful ways. At the same, open access publication provides not only wide distribution but also a mechanism by which digital scholarship may undergo formal development and evaluation with a university press. But the ability to create open multimodal publications is itself fraught with inequity, requiring collaboration partners, expertise, and funding not yet widely available to all scholars or to their publishers.
In an effort to take stock of the wide range of innovative practices and system-changing interventions that characterize a growing body of digital scholarly publications, Brown University and Emory University co-hosted a summit in spring 2021. The intention from the start was to call attention to the faculty-led experimentation that was taking place across a number of libraries and humanities centers, some of which already involved university presses. Shifting the focus away from tools and technology, as important as those discussions remain to the larger scholarly communications ecosystem, the summit emphasized author and audience needs and opportunities. As such, it highlighted the importance of investing in a people-centric, content-driven infrastructure.
“How can we encourage a shared vocabulary for these reimagined forms of humanities scholarship?”
Case studies of eight recently published or in-development OA works provided the basis for in-depth, evidence-based discussions among scholars, academic staff experts, and representatives from university presses: What models for publishing enhanced and interactive scholarly projects are emerging? What are the common challenges that remain and how do we address them? How can we encourage a shared vocabulary for these reimagined forms of humanities scholarship among the wider scholarly communications community?
While each of the projects, representing a broad disciplinary range and span of subject matter, offers a different perspective, when taken together they reveal lessons learned and clarify key priorities. All the projects demonstrate in myriad ways how digital content and affordances can enrich and deepen a scholarly argument. Some works provide distinct opportunities to examine the ethical implications of humanities research and to consider the new ways in which digital publication engages with audiences beyond the academy. Others foreground the powerful outcomes of collaborations between university presses and universities, modeling how such partnerships leverage resources and expertise to strengthen the humanities infrastructure and allow for innovation within it.
Although the summit focused on a selection of projects supported by the Mellon Foundation’s Digital Monographs Initiative, the presentations and generative discussions that followed raised important concerns and opportunities that extend well beyond the featured projects. These findings were released in July 2022 at the Association of University Presses 2022 Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. A key objective of the report, “Multimodal Digital Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community,” is to promote greater inclusion and equitable access of diverse voices as the development, validation, and dissemination of digital scholarship continues to unfold.
That digital scholarship developed and distributed as an OA monograph can transform how and where research is carried out and whom it reaches is undeniable. In the case of Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, 2021), four project editors compiled the contributions of more than 100 scientists, humanists, artists, designers, programmers, and coders. The atlas contains 330,000 words and 600+ media assets, and had attracted 60,000 unique visitors in the six months between its publication and the date of the summit. The publication As I Remember It: Teachings from the Life of a Sliammon Elder (University of British Columbia Press, 2019), published on the RavenSpace platform, offers a model for including Indigenous communities in the creation of scholarship, while also addressing the needs of both public and academic audiences through a thoughtful interplay of text and multimedia.
“We need to continue putting pressure on what it means for scholarship to be open, to be digital, to be public.”
For all the successes noted in the report, we need to continue putting pressure on what it means for scholarship to be open, to be digital, to be public. Such scholarship has the potential to offer powerful counterpoints and alternatives to the disinformation that pervades current discourse on the web, and to bridge the gap between scholarly and public discourses.
As the pathways for humanities scholarship expand in the digital era, “Multimodal Digital Monographs: Content, Collaboration, Community” serves as an invitation for all its practitioners to engage in conversation about the evolution of content itself, as well as with the authors who create it and the audiences whom they seek to engage. The importance of sharing and learning together as a community, for finding innovative and productive ways to share expertise and resources through collaborative models, emerges from the summit and cannot be underestimated in these still early and formative days. We further hope that more universities will seek ways to support their own faculty, as well as the publishers of their faculty’s work, in efforts to bring vital humanistic research into the digital environment and to welcome new and diverse voices and perspectives throughout that process.
Allison Levy, PhD, brings together key organizational, academic, and technological resources across Brown University to support new forms of faculty-driven scholarship. She spearheads efforts at the industry level to advance the conversation around the development, evaluation, and publication of born-digital scholarship in the humanities. @AllisonMLevy
Sarah McKee supports faculty in the development of open access and digital monographs. She previously served as managing editor for the New Georgia Encyclopedia at the University of Georgia Press. On November 1 she will join the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), working to support a healthy ecosystem for the creation and dissemination of humanistic scholarship.
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 adopted between 2005 and 2022 by institutions, according to ROARMAP.
Figure 1 shows a dramatic 10x increase of OA policies adopted between 2005 and 2022 by institutions, according to ROARMAP. Numbers of policies adopted by funders increased from 19 in 2005 to 142 to 2022. We are excited to see the growing effort in making research more open – but on the other hand, as research organisations are required to give account of how the funded projects are compliant and managed efficiently, we now are faced with a much bigger range of requirements and criteria to monitor within Symplectic Elements.
Interestingly, amidst the changing landscape of OA requirements, the latest updates to government funder policies suggest trends of similar requirements globally. For example, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Government of the UK that directs research and innovation funding, updated its OA policy in 2020, mandating all funded research outputs be made open immediately upon publication without any embargo. Comparably, in August 2022 the OSTP within the US government issued guidance for federal agencies to set up their own OA policy to make funded research available to the public immediately once published, permitting no delay.
On the other side of the world the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), the main authority of the Australian Government responsible for medical research, also revised its policy in September 2022 and listed these same criteria for compliance. These funders also underline the importance of making research data open. Both UKRI and NHMRC prescribed the reuse licence to be applied to the outputs. While it is reassuring to see major funders moving towards similar directions, the OA landscape in front of us is still full of uncertainties.
While many policies point to similar criteria, much more variables now need to be taken into consideration when calculating compliance. Table 1 below demonstrates the difference of policy requirements between three major funders in different regions: both UKRI and NIH turn to making publications available immediately, while ARC retains the option of embargo; while UKRI and ARC pay more attention to metadata and research data, it is not yet specified in NIH’s policy.
Authority
UKRI (UK)
NIH (USA)
ARC (Australia)
Mandate (articles)
Version of Record immediately available upon publication or Accepted Manuscript deposited in repository
Must be submitted to NIHMS upon acceptance & publicly available on PubMed Central
Should be open access within 12 months of publication
Mandate (metadata)
Must be used on deposit platforms
N/A
Must be public within 3 months of publication
Mandate (data)
Need to have data accessibility statement
N/A
Open access is encouraged
Table 1: Different policy requirements between three major funders in different regions.
On top of the divergent paths for making research output ‘open’ or ‘publicly available’ (which are not always clearly defined), many policies also mention requirements about metadata and/or research data. However, clearer guidance on these areas are yet to be published. There are more policies encouraging the adoption of Gold OA pathway, but hybrid models and transformative deals make monitoring increasingly complicated. Some funders specify that outputs and metadata need to be deposited on platforms meeting certain requirements, although there is no comprehensive list of such platforms.
Monitoring open access with Elements so far
Currently Symplectic Elements already helps institutions support and streamline open access workflows. With our flexible repository tools, administrators can customise harvest and deposit processes for the institutional repositories and use them as data sources to maintain an accurate representation of the outputs and minimise duplicates and efforts.
At the same time, our OA Monitor module focuses on supporting an oversight of the institution’s activities for green OA. This involves keeping an eye on very detailed metadata about different types of publications with different funding sources and potentially multiple authors of different statuses. Our OA Monitor module supports defining an OA Policy: from what groups of users and publications are included in the policy, to detailed instructions about what compliance means. You can exclude inactive users or publications with embargo requests. We offer a complex algorithm to check compliance based on deposit deadlines, embargo period, deposit file versions etc. With the defined policy, users can set up prompts for researchers at various steps of workflows to deposit full text to the institutional repository for publications covered by the policy. The goal is to provide users with actionable information about how they can increase the proportion of deposited works.
How OA changes impact upon Elements
As all these different mandates emerge, there are more criteria and more specifications at different levels that need attention. Our current approach to focus on monitoring the Green OA pathway may see more gaps going forward.
For example, the updated UKRI policy now no longer allows any embargo for the Green OA pathway– all outputs should be made open by the time of publication. To be compliant, there are no more grace periods (as for REF submissions) or any embargo that could serve as a buffer zone. This could mean that the deposit monitoring workflow likely needs to start much earlier in the publishing cycle. Alternatively, institutions might also see more researchers considering taking the Gold OA pathway, and thus need to monitor such activities more rigorously.
In other words, the sets of data points to capture and/or curate in order to fulfil the institutional needs in the OA monitor are now different.
More and more institutions feel the need to set up their own policies: partly responding to the funder mandates, partly trying to simplify the workflows required for widening needs. More stakeholders of various levels and focuses need to be brought onboard, with wider impacts on more parts of an organisation.
The work entailed to support researchers and departments to be as compliant as possible has also changed significantly. Perhaps you want to help researchers choose an open journal to publish in, prompting researcher to deposit the right version of the work with the right licence together with the research dataset, and also include a statement about data availability or handle support with Author Processing Charges (APCs) or copyright retention etc
All these lead to more complex and institution- or even funder-specific monitoring workflows. We see institutions develop very specific reporting needs around these processes, some of which can be fulfilled partly by custom reports. These reports work well for specific needs, but are often less flexible and require more maintenance effort. While our OA Monitor and reports cater very well to the current scope of monitoring, there are some limitations because of the single-policy framework. Not all OA Monitor concepts, like first deposit date or reuse licences, are in the Reporting database – which means we are not always utilising everything we already have curated.
Responding to OA changes with Elements
As the landscape of Open Access continues to evolve, with national and even regional disparities and a growing proliferation of pathways to OA, supporting OA monitoring and reporting within Elements necessitates greater flexibility and ongoing attention to global mandates. Here are some of the changes in Elements functionality that have either been made, are in progress, or are planned in our upcoming roadmap:
Extending support for repository integrations
Repository integrations remain an important part of OA monitoring, and we continue to support streamlining deposit workflows. For the majority of institutional and funder policies, the Green OA pathway remains the central part of the workflow. Organisations using Elements can continue with the established data verification and curation workflows, and use our powerful Repository Tools 2 (RT2) integration with repositories to customise harvesting, depositing and automated updates. These functionalities are now offered to clients using DSpace (fully supported from Elements v.6.9), Eprints, Hyrax, and Figshare for Institutions (fully supported from Elements v.6.9).
Capturing more OA-related metadata from existing data sources
We have expanded the range of metadata available to provide organisations with a fuller picture of their OA activities and OA publishing patterns.
One disruptive side-step in the workflow for many institutions is needing to go out of Elements to check whether an article has been published in a fully OA journal. Elements now allows institutions to capture this information manually or from integrated sources (eg. Dimensions, WoS & DOAJ) to flag potential Gold OA status (available from v.6.9).
New inclusion of relevant data points will assist tracking key funder requirements. For example, The Wellcome Trust and NIH require deposits of publications to PubMed Central/ EPMC. From v.6.10 Elements starts to capture file level metadata from EPMC, offering additional information on full-text deposits, relevant dates and licences that could be integrated into your verification workflow. Another example is the improved control over deposit versions and reuse licences in recent releases, which will help make it easier for researchers to remember to select CC-BY licence for the Author’s Accepted Manuscript and make that deposit compliant for the UKRI policy.
Next steps in Elements
Following on from extensive user research in this space, we plan to build upon our existing rich feature set to offer additional open access monitoring functionality to help institutions understand the many different pathways their researchers use to make their research openly available. We also plan to evolve our OA policy compliance capabilities to remain in step with the changes in key funder policies.
The future of the OA landscape
Following on from extensive user research in this space, we continue to engage with clients in an ongoing series of user-led workshops which aim to craft guidance on the more nebulous areas of open access – such as data availability statements and rights retention policies.
We will continue to closely monitor this shifting landscape, proactively working to create functionality to fit incoming mandates across geographies and working closely with the Elements community to identify ways to support OA engagement, compliance and reporting.
If you’d like to engage with us on any of the areas raised in this blog, please get in touch.
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 (equipment, facilities and services) are now all discoverable at the Wellington university’s portal, which is powered by Symplectic: https://people.wgtn.ac.nz/
Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington’s Hunter Building.
Sheila Law, Research Information Systems Administrator with Te Herenga Waka’s Research Office, says having earlier built a showcase of the university’s academic expertise through new, searchable staff profiles, the next challenge was to tackle its infrastructure.
“The aim was to create a searchable catalogue of specialist equipment, to showcase our state-of-the-art capabilities, which could be used to support external engagement and facilitate long-lasting collaborations with other researchers,” Sheila says.
But until work began in late 2021, there was no central location or asset register of equipment to refer to. “All the information was held in institutes and schools and centres, with no overview of the resources that we had.”
Kate Byrne, VP Product Management with Symplectic, says: “We’ve found from working with organisations around the world that although many of them have data of this kind, it is very fragmented. And so one of the things we’ve been looking at most is to help some of our clients to start thinking about the early stages of that journey, because it’s very easy to look at our tools and go: isn’t this shiny, it would be great to do that. But actually stepping back and looking at where that data is going to come from, and how you’re going to work with your community to enable it, is part of the challenge,” Kate says.
Wellington’s university was up to the challenge. The small project team worked closely with school managers and technical managers, and with the assistance of internal champions, they gathered all the data needed, arranged for photos to be taken, and identified four categories under which equipment could be clustered: software, instruments, database, and services.
While the data gathering and entry was painstaking, the result is that Wellington’s university now has a central register with 300 pieces of equipment on show both internally and externally. The portal is notable for its data completeness and quality, and provides images to help demonstrate its equipment and facilities.
Te Herenga Waka now has a central register with 300 pieces of equipment on show both internally and externally.
Sheila says the university’s staff responded to the finished product straight away. “As soon as we launched it, we started to get interest from areas where they were seeing the potential in it.
“There was one – the Rāpoi – it’s a sort of computer data hub, which is available for anybody across the university to use. It was great to get that on there. And as soon as that was available, the staff that were using it wanted to link to it from their personal profiles. So that was nice to see – that was our first proof that people are liking this, and now they can see how useful it is, that they can actually show the full capability of their expertise and the resources they have available to them.”
Since its launch earlier this year, the Wellington university’s equipment website has also gathered interest from staff in New Zealand government departments, who are currently working on a solution for a National Research System.
Symplectic has been with Te Herenga Waka every step of the way. “How Wellington’s university has approached this challenge and developed such a successful outcome should become a showcase example to other institutions. It’s been a pleasure working with them,” Kate says.
Sheila Law, Research Information Systems Administrator with Te Herenga Waka’s Research Office.
Sheila says the University’s staff have been critical to the project’s success. “One of our key learnings is how we engage with staff to ensure they become the experts in using the system, and managing the categories and resources that they need to optimise the curation of research activities.
“By providing ongoing support, we increase the understanding and build confidence in using the system, and we also seek and receive feedback from those users to understand how they’re using the system, and also how they would wish to use it.”
The concept of “gathering together” – of information and the research community – is ongoing:
“We continue to look at ways in which we can enhance our profiles further, to create a one-stop ecosystem of interconnected research activities. We continue to explore and test new functionality as it’s made available, to see how we can reduce manual effort, to curate a rich and versatile research ecosystem, to build our reporting capability, and to help researchers expand their research opportunities and find new collaborators.”
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 will see it hand leader Xi Jinping an historic third term. If we were to assess China’s growth in non-research terms during his leadership, we might look at its financial output such as GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP), in which case you would notice that China overtook the US to become the world’s largest economy in 2016. In Rachman’s 2016 book Easternisation a framework for thinking about the rise of China is presented. While Rachman looks at the world through the lens of the Thucydides Trap (the Greek-inspired notion that when the pre-eminent nation in the world changes, there must be war between the incoming power and the incumbent) we take a different view in the context of research. Research leads to knowledge that should be the property of all humankind and hence, perhaps naively, we will take the view that the more countries that choose to invest in research, the better it is for all, since, so long as that research is done openly and made openly available, the more innovation and advancement is possible.
In this short blog, we propose a set of research-based measures to track the rise of China.
We propose the following set of metrics by which to rank countries to see how influential they are in the world of research. We have five metrics, in increasing importance and level of difficulty to achieve:
1. Percentage of GDP spent on research: Theoretically easy to achieve for most countries since this is mostly within the hands of the government of the day. It may be a leading indicator of research success but does not take in account the size of the economy, which is obviously a determining factor into how much difference this investment can make.
2. Gold Open Access (OA) publication volume: Slightly harder to achieve than metric 1 since it requires a change in culture and understanding of incentives. This is a stronger leading indicator of the increasing power of a research base.
3. Total publication volume: Highly related to metrics 1 and 2 – to consistently publish a large body of research content in recognised journals requires significant investment in both research infrastructure and capacity. But, also as the current trend is toward OA publication, also a significant investment in Open Access.
4. Proportion of global citations: Still harder, producing high research volume is not the same as producing research that is highly noticed, read and cited. Garnering citations is critical to demonstrate that work is noted.
5. Relative global influence: Using Eigenvector centrality, a network measure that can be considered a proxy for influence in an ecosystem, we calculate this quantity on the co-author graph. Broadly speaking this metric expresses the likelihood that a given paper picked at random from all papers in a given year has an author from a given country on it. It is not a probability but can be thought of as a related quantity.
This is necessarily a reduced list and focuses on highly quantifiable metrics. It does not assess the policy environment in a detailed manner – ease of cross-border travel and ease of access to visas for the purposes of collaboration, study and academic work are obvious ways in which a country can have a disproportionate effect on the research economy. It is also clear that attracting overseas students to study increases diversity at many levels and helps to create networks that can later result in fruitful collaborations – again, this is not something that we’ve considered here.
However, these five metrics are chosen to show causal development. From funding to being able to develop infrastructure and a research population together with the willingness to publish in Gold Open Access journals. This then leads to building a more substantial capacity that is able to produce the consistently high research volumes required for excellent research to be part of the overall mix. While citations are not a proxy for quality, high-quality work is often more noted and hence more cited. Ultimately, if there is funding and serious research worthy of note then this makes a country a destination for collaboration.
1. Percentage of GDP spent on research
Looking at Figure 1, below, we can see that Chinese investment in Research and Development (R&D) has increased steadily since 2000 to reach 2.4% of GDP in 2020. However, since around 2012 the US has increased its own investment in R&D, a trend mirrored by the EU-27 countries. At the same time GDP at PPP has increased significantly for China. In 2021, China’s GDP at PPP was $27.3tn USD versus $23tn USD for the US, $21.6tn USD for the EU and $3.34tn USD for the UK. This means that the while the US still outspends China in absolute terms, the gap is narrowing between the two countries with China spending around 20% less than the US. If the Chinese and American economies continue to grow at their current rates (3.2% for China versus 1.6% for the US) for a sustained period, China would be spending more than the US on its research base by 2032 without the need to increase the percentage of GDP invested. Of course, China may see a slowdown given the current financial picture, but it has also been clear that the country is keen to invest in research and hence it may well be that China chooses to increase the percentage of GDP that it wishes to commit to its rapidly increasing research economy.
Figure 1: Percentage of GDP spent on research by country between 2000 and 2020. Source: World Bank.
2. Gold Open Access publication volume
Advanced research economies have typically invested heavily in open models of publishing and sharing research in the last decade. The reason that we have focused on Gold rather the Green OA here is that Gold OA conflates two political components – firstly, the willingness to adopt policies to make research broadly openly available and, secondly, the ability to fund OA. Green OA, which is frequently considered a more progressive form of OA is often more difficult to track since funding for it is usually done through infrastructure, which is harder to track than Gold OA author processing charges. The UK has been a leader in Gold OA alongside countries such as Australia, Brazil and India. However, if we look at the main “blocs” – China, the EU and the US we see that the EU (see Figure 2) has historically been the most committed to supporting Gold Open Access, as can be seen in its overall volume. In 2009, China only equalled the UK in Gold OA volumes, but there is a clear inflection around that point, when China accelerated, overtaking the US around 2017, and looking to be on course for overtaking the EU this year (based on an extrapolation of partial year data).
Figure 2: Volume of Gold Open Access publications (article and conference proceedings) by country between 2000 and 2022 (partial year). Source: Dimensions from Digital Science.
3. Total publication volume
Another obvious marker of research development is the total volume of publications. This is harder to achieve than the previous two markers as a sustained high-level of production requires long-term development of infrastructures to support research, as well as feeder mechanisms such as training for undergraduates, PhD students and postdocs. It generally also requires a vibrant research community and opportunities to collaborate internationally (which is discussed further on). In Figure 3, we see that not only will China surpass the US this year but it also looks likely to leapfrog the EU in production volume.
Figure 3: Total volume of publications (article and conference proceedings) by country between 2000 and 2022 (partial year). Source: Dimensions from Digital Science.
4. Proportion of global citations
To be considered the preeminent research country, it is not merely about research volume but whether research is noteworthy enough to be cited. Since 2000, the research world has diversified significantly on the global stage with many countries beginning to play an active role in developing their research economies. As a result of this development the overall share of global citations garnered by established actors such as the US and UK has naturally decreased. The EU (as the old eastern bloc countries began to more seriously invest and develop) has grown its share. But, the big winner has been China, moving from a tiny single-digit share of global citations in 2000 to 13.5%, a level that is almost a full 2 percentage points ahead of the EU-27. While this is still dwarfed by the almost 31% attracted by the US, it is clear that China is producing a high level of very noteworthy research.
Figure 4: Proportion of global citations (as a percentage of overall global citation) by country between 2000 and 2022 (partial year). Source: Dimensions from Digital Science.
5. Relative global influence
Finally, we use a network measure called Eigenvector Centrality on the co-authorship graph to work out who the preferred partners are to work with by country (Figure 5). The EU-27 countries have continued to be the favoured research partner over the last two decades.This metric is heavily influenced not only by the large volume of papers produced by the EU-27 countries but also their strong links with other collaborators such as the US, UK, China and beyond. Of course, each individual country in the EU-27 will look significantly weaker on its own, however, there is significant power to be gained from being part of the bloc, as can be seen from the network effect highlighted here. Thus, coordinated funding streams such as Horizon 2020 have built an excellent platform for the research influence of the EU-27.
Figure 5: Eigenvector centrality “influence” of countries based on the global co-authorship graph between 2000 and 2022 (partial year). Source: Dimensions from Digital Science.
The relatively smaller size of the US together with its stronger internal collaboration network places it second in the list. The UK outperforms on this measure due to a number of historical advantages – its strong global connections through the Commonwealth; its past relationship and general geographic proximity to the EU-27; its historically strong relationship with the US; and the establishment of English as the global language of research. These factors all mean that the UK is something of a destination for students, who then either stay and create connections to their home countries or return to their home countries and continue to collaborate with their UK-based colleagues.
China, by comparison, has not yet had time to build a large and complex network of global collaborations. At the same time, it is growing its research capacity so rapidly that few countries have the absorptive capacity to work with China at the scale that is possible. That tends to imply that China’s research collaborations are currently more internally focused than might otherwise be the case where they too have developed to their current size more slowly. However, it is still clear that China is quickly developing into a highly collaborative global partner with scale.
This trend will be highly relevant for the scholarly communications industry. As the great and the good of academic publishing descend on Germany this week for the Frankfurt Book Fair, they are acutely aware of the rapid increase of Chinese research, and strategically one of their main challenges is how to attract authors to their books and journals and increase their market share of content. Given recent policy changes in China, traditional citation measures as represented by metric 4 and modern vectors such as metric 5 could combine to inform publishing strategies around, for example, how to encourage and facilitate global collaboration with Chinese authors.
Closing thoughts
Each one of the five measures gets successively harder to achieve pre-eminence and, in some sense, one leads to the next. A country can decide to spend a large amount of its GDP on research if it values research and believes in the long-term effects of that for its people. Of course, there are two aspects to this – government spending and industry spending. A government can encourage industry spending on research with the local tax environment and other inducements but, at the end of the day, this is also a cultural phenomenon. Those who believe in the value of research will generally invest. As a country becomes richer and levels of education increase, it is a choice often made to invest in research for future prosperity and for the long-term benefit of its people. Increasingly the richest companies appear to see things similarly.
Once a research economy is established, there is a clear value in sharing results through open access to increase the volume of material available upon which to build, which leads to metric 2. Of course, if a country is wealthy then paying for open access is also something that is within reach. But, more generally, it is important to have sufficient research volume that you can ensure that a proportion of that research is of high quality – an effect that only tends to happen at a certain scale of endeavour and hence metric 3 becomes important. As metric 3 is achieved, then the international community should begin to recognise the value of the research being produced and it should become more cited, leading to metric 4 and finally, in achieving high quality research at scale, the country becomes a destination for collaboration and gains influence in the global social research network, which is metric 5.
Thus far, China has established itself sufficiently in metric 1 that it has been able to achieve pre-eminence in metrics 2 and 3. (This development may be surprising to some as it was not obvious that China would overtake both the US and the EU-27 in the same year in metric 3!) Metric 4 tells a broader picture – that citation patterns are diversifying. It is not merely that the proportion of citations to the US is dropping and switching to China, but rather that the proportion of citations to the US is dropping in favour of greater geodiversity, of which China is one recipient. South America, and Asia in general are developing significant research economies, which is a positive trend. Finally, China’s development in metric 5 is impressive.
Within just a few years China’s global influence has developed to a point where it is clear that, if it continues on its current path, within a decade it will be vying with the EU-27 for global pre-eminence in its ability to influence the global research conversation.
About Dimensions
Part of Digital Science, Dimensions is a modern, innovative, linked research data infrastructure and tool, re-imagining discovery and access to research: grants, publications, citations, clinical trials, patents and policy documents in one place. www.dimensions.ai
Daniel Hook is CEO of Digital Science, co-founder of Symplectic, a research information management provider, and of the Research on Research Institute (RoRI). A theoretical physicist by training, he continues to do research in his spare time, with visiting positions at Imperial College London and Washington University in St Louis.
Simon Porter
Simon Porter, Director Innovation | Digital Science
Simon Porter has forged a career transforming university practices in how data about research is used, both from administrative and eResearch perspectives. As well as making key contributions to research information visualization, he is well known for his advocacy of Research Profiling Systems and their capability to create new opportunities for researchers.
Science’s no-fee public-access policy will take effect in 2023
The publisher of the prestigious journal Science will soon allow the authors of its research papers to make public an almost-final version of their manuscript in a repository of their choice immediately on publication, without paying any fees.
This approach differs to that taken by the publishers of similarly high-impact journals Cell and Nature, which charge most authors fees called article processing charges (APCs) to make the final, published versions of their articles open access. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.)
Scienceannounced its new approach in a 9 September editorial penned by senior executives at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC. Since then, Bill Moran, publisher of the Science journals at the AAAS, has told Nature that Science’s policy will come into effect from January 2023 and applies to all five subscription journals in the Science family. (The AAAS does already have a fully open-access title, Science Advances, in which authors pay publishing fees; the new policy will not extend to this journal.)
He also said that the terms under which authors will be able to share their manuscripts have yet to be finalized, because a custom reuse licence for non-commercial use is still being developed. Open-access scholars say that this leaves questions about how liberally researchers will be able to share their work.
Currently, most authors publishing in the Science family of journals are permitted to post their accepted manuscripts only in an institutional repository or on a personal website. They have to wait six months after publication before adding the paper to other repositories, such as the life-sciences database PubMed. There are exceptions to this rule, including for some authors supported by funders who have joined the European-led open-access initiative cOAlition S.
Shifting policies
The new approach for Science comes hot on the heels of a huge policy shift by the US government regarding access to federally funded research. An August announcement stated that by the end of 2025, the findings of research funded by federal agencies should be free to read as soon as they are published — scrapping existing rules that allowed a year-long wait before work had to be made public.
It is significant that the AAAS is looking for alternatives to APCs, says Juan Pablo Alperin, who studies publishing at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. “Article-processing charges have become popular because they preserve the business of publishing, but this does not mean they are what best serves the academic community,” he adds.
The Science editorial argues that charging APCs works well for well-funded senior scientists in secure positions, who tend to be “overwhelmingly male and white”, but does not serve early-career researchers. “Also disadvantaged are scientists at smaller schools, including historically Black colleges and universities, and in underfunded disciplines like math and the social sciences,” the authors write.
The AAAS’s approach is “a step in the right direction and a better step than has been taken by some commercial publishers”, says Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London. Other non-profit publishers have introduced alternative open-access business models, such as PLOS’s Community Action Publishing scheme and the journal eLife’s ‘preprint first’ model.
Alperin and Curry await with interest the terms of the AAAS’s licence, which will dictate exactly how the work can be shared. One important question is whether the material can be used for teaching in universities, says Curry.
It’s not clear that Science’s approach would work for other journals, says Lisa Hinchliffe, a librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. “Science has almost 130,000 subscribers to their print edition. So it is unclear to me if that model is generalizable to the typical scholarly journal,” she says.
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