Librarians and Open Science: beyond Open Access
Abstract
The duties of librarians and their professional context have dramatically transformed in the last three decades, initially due to the advent of digital technology and later because of other innovations such as Open Science and, more recently, AI. These changes have a particularly significant impact on the work of astronomy librarians too, their role, and how they provide assistance and support to researchers. All of this presents both challenges and opportunities for growth and evolution, especially in the field of Open Science—a movement that encompasses the entire scientific research process. Too often, it is assumed that librarians' role in Open Science is primarily tied to Open Access publishing. However, a closer analysis reveals how their "traditional" skills can actually be applied across multiple areas of Open Science. In this presentation, we will examine what Open Science is and its key components, and demonstrate how librarians' expertise fits into this framework.
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LIBRARIANS AND OPEN SCIENCE: BEYOND OPEN ACCESS Francesca Martines, INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo Library and Information Services in Astronomy (LISA) 10 Santiago, Chile, 3-7 November 2025
SUMMARY •Open Science: What and Why •Open Science Elements •The role of librarians •A Small Experiment and its Results •Open Science Skills for Librarians •Concluding Remarks Francesca Martines - LISA 10, Santiago (Chile), 3-7 November 2025
20252025 20212021 2018201820162016…… 20032003 20022002 20012001 20002000 19991999 19981998 19911991 PLAN-S BERLIN DECLARATION ON OPEN ACCESS BIRTH OF CREATIVE COMMONS BUDAPEST OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVE OPEN LETTER CIRCULATED BY THE FOUNDERS OF PLOS BIRTH OF ARXIV CREATION OF THE FIRST COMMERCIAL OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHER UNESCO & ICSU PUBLISH THE DECLARATION ON SCIENCE ADOPTION OF THE UNESCO RECOMMENDATION ON OPEN SCIENCE OPEN SCIENCE: A LONG, LONG STORY… …… THE FAIR GUIDING PRINCIPLES Francesca Martines - LISA 10, Santiago (Chile), 3-7 November 2025
OPEN SCIENCE: WHAT •What is "Open Science"? •There are many definitions •It's referred to as an "umbrella term," but generally, all definitions converge on one point: the goal of open science is to open the entire scientific research process, to make it accessible to (almost) everyone Francesca Martines - LISA 10, Santiago (Chile), 3-7 November 2025
OPEN SCIENCE: WHY The advantages are evident, among them: •Replicability of studies and therefore greater transparency of the scientific process and greater robustness of results. •Increased social impact of research and researchers. •Savings in time and money for researchers and research institutions: just think of the failure to disseminate negative results, which leads to repeating the same experiment. •Last but not least, the possibility for researchers in less fortunate countries to access research processes, publications, data, software - in a word, resources - even in the absence of funding. Francesca Martines - LISA 10, Santiago (Chile), 3-7 November 2025
Was ist Open Science? online 23 June 2014 from OpenScience ASAP http://openscienceasap.org/open-science/
University of Potsdam, 2023
UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science https://www.unesco.org/en/open-science/toolkit 9 PRINCIPLES Transparency, scrutiny, critique, reproducibility Equality of opportunities Responsibility, respect, accountability Collaboration, participation, inclusion Flexibility Sustainability VALUES Quality, integrity Collective benefit Equity, fairness Diversity, inclusiveness
EXPERIMENT RESULTS •Metadata •Repository (Istitutional or disciplinary) •Standards (at large) •Persistent Identifier •Policies, Institutional and funder’s •Licensing •Copyright •Networking and collaboration •Accessibility (in the broadest sense, encompassing both the FAIR principles and considerations for disabled users) •… Et al. Francesca Martines - LISA 10, Santiago (Chile), 3-7 November 2025
Francesca Martines - LISA 10, Santiago (Chile), 3-7 November 2025 LIBER Digital Skills for Library Staff & Researchers Working Group: Open Science Skills
SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING (I) Digital content creation Management and use of institutional repositories New Open Publication strategies (contracts, relations with publishers, new funding models) OA University Presses Negotiating with publishers for OA – Pay to read/Pay to publish Persistent Identifiers (ORCID, ISNI, URN, ISBN) Knowledge of Open Publication Options (Green, Gold, Hybrid) Knowledge of existing repositories (Article, Data, Disciplinary, Generic) LIBER Digital Skills for Library Staff & Researchers Working Group: Open Science Skills
SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING (II) Information and data literacy Development and Management of current research information systems Safety Open Science governance and policy Licensing in the digital environment LIBER Digital Skills for Library Staff & Researchers Working Group: Open Science Skills
FAIR DATA (I) Digital content creation Metadata for digital collections and datasets Knowledge of Linked Data Storing, saving, archiving and preserving data Data curation and interoperability Data Management Planning Knowledge of data processing software Data curation and publishing Knowledge of data policies – Institutional/Funder/National FAIR data principles Reproducibility and re-use of data LIBER Digital Skills for Library Staff & Researchers Working Group: Open Science Skills
FAIR DATA (II) Information and data literacy Data analysis and visualization Data and text mining Search Open Data sources Management of Big Data sets Cleaning Data LIBER Digital Skills for Library Staff & Researchers Working Group: Open Science Skills
METRICS AND REWARDS Digital content creation Communicating research output via Social Media Communication and collaboration Bibliometrics, altmetrics and research impact reporting LIBER Digital Skills for Library Staff & Researchers Working Group: Open Science Skills
RESEARCH INTEGRITY Information and data literacy Research integrity and ethics, GDPR Digital content creation Copyright and intellectual property in the digital environment LIBER Digital Skills for Library Staff & Researchers Working Group: Open Science Skills
CITIZEN SCIENCE Communication and collaboration Event management for online interactions, crowd-sourcing Engaging the public in research Digital content creation Open licenses for citizen science Information and data literacy Responsible research and innovation (RRI) LIBER Digital Skills for Library Staff & Researchers Working Group: Open Science Skills
CONCLUDING REMARKS •Although OS seems to reduce the importance of libraries in institutional collections’ development, librarians' skills remain essential for repositories’ management, for metadata structures that maintain information retrieval capabilities in OS, and for the mechanisms of resources’ preservation. […] •In the digital environment, librarians have the opportunity to integrate more actively in the process of knowledge creation.[…] •Leaving the comfort zone is often referred to as mandatory for the expansion of librarians’ roles and skills. (…) The destination is the embeddedness of librarians in the research teams, in close relation with different stages of research life cycle. […] •The main change will be the shift of importance from the library to the librarian: “the information professional is the library of the future”. (Revez, J. M. R. (2020). Inside the laboratory: Open science and the skills of research librarians. In The Academic Librarian in the Digital Age: Essays on Changing Roles and Responsibilities) Francesca Martines - LISA 10, Santiago (Chile), 3-7 November 2025