The State of Open Data 2021 report was released in November 2021. It is the sixth report in the series published by Springer Nature, Digital Science, and Figshare and presents the findings of a six-year longitudinal survey that gathered data about “researcher motivations, challenges, perceptions and behaviors toward open data” (Digital Science, 2021, 5).
In August 2021, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) published an organizational open access policy that applies to publications supported by funding from any of its seven research councils, Research England, and Innovate UK. This new policy is the result of a consultation process that began in 2018, with a draft policy for consultation released in February 2020 (see “UKRI Open Access Policy Review and Consultation”).
Data, famously, just wants to be free. But it might also be said that data just wants to dance. Digital data is notably social at heart. Its binary form enables it to mingle easily with other digital data. Machine reading technologies mean that data can communicate directly with other data, bypassing human mediation. This potential for social capability has given rise to data management techniques that favour comparison, correlation and conformity and are built on value systems that prioritise precision, simplification and efficiency.
On June 1, 2021, the Fonds de Recherche du Québec (FRQ) announced they had joined cOAlition S, making them the first public organization in North America to apply the principles of Plan S, effective March 2023. An ambitious initiative launched in 2018 by a group of European organizations under the name cOAlition S, Plan S aims to implement immediate open access to scholarly publications based on research projects funded by their members.
open, community-led research infrastructure and works toward coordinated and sustainable funding models. In August 2021, IOI released the final report from the Future of Open Scholarship (FOS) project. This research project aims to develop a sustainable, open model for research infrastructure, which IOI defines on its website as “the sets of services, protocols, standards and software that the academic ecosystem needs in order to perform its functions throughout the research lifecycle.”
In January 2018, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) began a collaboration with OpenAIRE, a European Open Science infrastructure organization, with the goal of improving the visibility of Canadian research. One of the outcomes of this collaboration is Canada Explore, a portal to research in Canadian institutional repositories.