Papers
Open@RIT Position Paper: Accessibility Issues in Federal Grant Funding
Persons with disabilities (PWDs) are considered the largest minority in the nation and in the world, but only a few group policies and procedures from agencies, directorates, or funding programs address accessibility support in federally funded research efforts and convenings. There are a wide variety of support types available, and each has different requirements, processes, deadlines, and restrictions. This lack of standardization can make it difficult to acquire the necessary support for PWDs by placing the onus on PWDs to navigate complex and unique application processes for the same support.
In this opinion paper, we propose the development of a standardized support mechanism across all federally funded research to provide access and accommodations for individuals with disabilities as they conduct research and disseminate their work through conferences and convenings. This could be implemented by mandated policy across agencies, by an entity that handles all post-award and conference requests for accessibility and accommodations or another, similar effort.
Open@RIT's POSE Analysis: High-Level review of the 2023 NSF POSE Awards and Recommendations for Enhancing the Solicitation
Open@RIT, RIT’s Open Programs Office, has analyzed the Phase I and Phase II abstracts from the 2023 awards from the NSF Pathways to Open Source Ecosystems (POSE) as a service to our campus and the greater Open Work community at large. It is our hope that this will help potential applicants for the coming year’s solicitation have a better understanding of the program and its alignment with their own efforts overall.
Open@RIT Position Paper: Federal Funding To Support Peer Review in Government-Funded Research
In the last several years, we’ve seen significant federal guidance emerge to support aspects of Open Science and national plans for Open Science, such as the French National Plan, outside of the US. The year 2023 was designated the “Year of Open Science” by the White House.
These efforts to support Open Science are partly driven by the number of challenges facing peer review, including the decreasing number of qualified reviewers. This, along with the massive growth in the area of for-profit, not-for-profit, pre-prints, and Open Access journals, has created a surplus in demand for reviewers.
Open Peer Review, as part of the larger Open Science push, has been suggested as one possible avenue to expand the pool of reviewers and build greater efficiencies into the system. That concept lacks a significant body of evidence to establish acceptance in mainstream academia. And it doesn’t address the lack of incentives to engage as a reviewer.
In an ideal world, peer review would extend beyond journal article-style publications to include the review of data sets and source code. This is already required on work done directly by the federal government under the Information Quality Act and is in place for some journals such as the Journal of Open Source Software and the Journal of Statistical Software.
It is time for the federal government to support peer review directly as part of its efforts to move toward Open Science and greater reliability in the scientific enterprise.