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This version of the article was accepted for publication by the Journal for Electronic Publishing after revisions made as part of the peer-review process. Final publication to be published in April 2023: https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.3398

Presentation on the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative project and research into diversity in higher education to the Learning Lab, a higher education research entityatTe Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington.

The goal of open access is to allow more people to read and use research outputs. An observed association between highly cited research outputs and open access has been claimed as evidence of increased usage of the research, but this remains controversial.1,2 A higher citation count also does not necessarily imply wider usage such as citations by authors from more places.3,4,5 A knowledge gap exists in our understanding of who gets to use open access research outputs and where users are located. Here we address this gap by examining the association between an output’s open access status and the diversity of research outputs that cite it. By analysing large-scale bibliographic data from 2010 to 2019, we found a robust association between open access and increased diversity of citation sources by institutions, countries, subregions, regions, and fields of research, across outputs with both high and medium-low citation counts. Open access through disciplinary or institutional repositories showed a stronger effect than open access via publisher platforms. This study adds a new perspective to our understanding of how citations can be used to explore the effects of open access. It also provides new evidence at global scale of the benefits of open access as a mechanism for widening the use of research and increasing the diversity of the communities that benefit from it.

This blog post appeared in the LSE Impact Blog on 14 June 2022.Academic success is regularly framed in terms of a particular set of publishing activities that disadvantages women. In this post,Katie WilsonandLucy Montgomerydiscuss their recent research into how women researchers have pioneered the use of open access and the potential this could have for developing programmes that support more diverse and equitable forms of success for all researchers.

Universities are key creators of knowledge. Ensuring that research outputs are not inaccessible behind paywalls, and that research data can be interrogated and built upon is central to efforts to improve the effectiveness of global research landscapes. Mandating and promoting open science and open access (OA) for published research outputs and sharing research data are important elements of building a vibrant open knowledge system, but there are additional benefits. Supporting diversity within knowledge-making institutions; enabling collaboration between universities and communities; addressing inequalities in access to knowledge resources and opportunities for contributing to knowledge making are also important. New tools are needed to help universities, funders and communities understand the extent to which a university is operating as an effective open knowledge institution; as well as the steps that might be taken to improve open knowledge performance. The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the vital need for open research and knowledge to help find a global solution. The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) is a Curtin University funded strategic research project exploring ways of understanding and assessing institutional progress towards knowledge openness through analysis of research output, diversity data, policies and outcomes, and access to knowledge resources including libraries. This paper discusses the COKI team’s multidimensional approach to assessing institutional knowledge openness beyond, but including, measures of OA, open science and open data. The COKI dataset of more than 12 trillion items enables exploration and analysis of many questions around publication, impact, research performance, university engagement, diversity and access to knowledge. This information can assist universities, libraries, funders and communities to understand and enhance institutional open knowledge performance and contributions.

Background Monitoring blood glucose concentrations is common in critically ill neonatal foals, especially septic foals and those receiving naso-esophageal feedings or IV parenteral nutrition. Glucose typically is measured using a point-of-care (POC) glucometer but requires repeated restraint and blood collections, which may cause irritation at venipuncture sites and increased demands on nursing staff. Continuous glucose monitoring systems (CGMS) may provide an accurate alternative for monitoring blood glucose concentration. Objectives To determine the correlation and accuracy of a CGMS to monitor neonatal foals' blood glucose concentrations as compared to a POC glucometer and laboratory chemistry analysis (CHEM). Animals Samples from 4 healthy and 4 ill neonatal foals. Methods A CGMS was placed on each foal, and glucose measurements acquired from this device were compared to simultaneous measurements of blood glucose concentration using a POC glucometer and CHEM. Results Two-hundred matched glucose measurements were collected from 8 neonatal foals. The mean bias (95% limits of agreement) between CGMS and CHEM, CGMS and POC glucometer, and POC glucometer and CHEM was 3.97 mg/dL (-32.5 to 40.4), 18.2 mg/dL (-28.8 to 65.2), and 22.18 mg/dL (-9.3 to 53.67), respectively. The Pearson's correlation coefficient (r) was significantly correlated among all devices: GCMS and CHEM (r = 0.81), CGMS and POC glucometer (r = 0.77) and POC glucometer-CHEM (r = 0.92). Conclusions and Clinical Importance Within the blood glucose concentration ranges in this study (78-212 mg/dL), CGMS measurements were significantly correlated with CHEM, suggesting that it is an acceptable method to provide meaningful, immediate, and continuous glucose concentration measurements in neonatal foals while eliminating the need for repeated restraint and blood collection. Ace Construction Published version Ace Construction

In this Open Access week presentation Katie Wilson talks about the work of the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), a critical multidisciplinary project that collects and analyses global data on institutional research performance, open access output and academic workforce demographics. She also discuss open access and the gender narrative in research output and correlations with research performance in universities.Dr. Katie Wilson is a Research Fellow with the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), a strategic research project located in the Centre for Culture and Technology, School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University, Western Australia. She is currently a Visiting Scholar, School of Education, Victoria University of Wellington. She analyses data, researches and writes about diversity and equity in research production, understanding research performance and access to academic libraries as dimensions of institutional knowledge openness.

The adoption of institutional diversity, equity and inclusion policies and programs in recent decades highlights an ongoing need for structural and cultural change within higher education institutions. It also raises questions around gender, race and disability politics, the decolonisation of diversity and neoliberal management of higher education. How are institutionalised policies enacted and what are the outcomes? Charting the impacts of changes can be achieved through analysis of publicly available statistics. Demographic statistical data provide insights into the outcomes and impacts of diversity policies and practices. However, obtaining and analysing such data in order to understand institutional, national and regional diversity depends on multiple factors. Underpinning institutional diversity data collection and availability are national and international imperatives through policy and program reform, but also institutional reputation and world university rankings. Drivers for data collection include political and social change movements, government imperatives, priorities and funding programs. Gender equality or gender parity is now an expressed target in many countries, often in relation to professional level, disciplines and the percentages of teaching and research in academic faculty positions. More variable across geographic locations are data relating to institutional staff and faculty age, ethnicity, nationality, race, indigeneity and disability. Our project embraces diversity as an indicator of openness in higher education institutions on the path to Open Knowledge Institutions. Analysis of publicly available data relating to diversity in research and staffing (academic/faculty and professional/administrative) in order to understand institutional openness reveals a varied datascape. This article explores and discusses the data presence, gaps and significance in global higher education staff demographic diversity data.

International audience; This paper discusses research undertaken by the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) andparticipants during and following an Open Knowledge international workshop held in Mauritiusin September 2019. The workshop brought together key experts to explore the role of openknowledge in the creation of equitable and inclusive global knowledge landscapes. This paperexplores the role of open access and institutional repositories in knowledge sharing and thedissemination of research output from higher education and research institutions within theAfrican continent. The paper reviews the landscape of research output from the Africancontinent; analyses open access research output, overviews of institutional knowledge sharingpositions and the dissemination of research output from Ghana, Rwanda, South Africa andUganda.

International audience; This paper reports on a study of social media events relating to 28 Open Access (OA) monographs,published between 2014 and 2015. As with citations (Cronin 1981) social media events representthe frozen footprints of the journey that monographs take as they move through digitallandscapes. The study captured mentions of the study-set of monographs via Twitter, Facebook,Wikipedia and online blogs; as well as user ratings on Google Books, Amazon and Goodreads.Information relating to the ways in which the books were bookmarked and cited was capturedvia the online reference managing platform Mendeley. The benefits and limitations of differentaltmetrics approaches to capturing and analyzing this data are discussed. Practical suggestionsfor researchers interested in the application of Altmetrics approaches to studies of monographsare also provided.

In the article “Evaluating institutional open access performance: Methodology, challenges and assessment” we develop the first comprehensive and reproducible workflow that integrates multiple bibliographic data sources for evaluating institutional open access (OA) performance. The major data sources include Web of Science, Scopus, Microsoft Academic, and Unpaywall. However, each of these databases continues to update, both actively and retrospectively. This implies the results produced by the proposed process are potentially sensitive to both the choice of data source and the versions of them used. In addition, there remain issues relating to the use of different definitions of the various open access categories, and selection bias in sample size and margin of error. The current work shows that the levels of sensitivity relating to the above issues can be significant at the institutional level. Hence, the transparency and clear documentation of the choices made on data sources (and their versions), definitions, and cut-off boundaries are vital for reproducibility and verifiability., A companion white paper to the article "Evaluating institutional open access performance: Methodology, challenges and assessment"

Introduction. Open access to digital research output is increasing, but academic library policies can place restrictions on public access to libraries. This paper reports on a preliminary study to investigate the correlation between academic library access policies and institutional positions of openness to knowledge. Method. This primarily qualitative study used document and data analysis to examine the content of library access or use policies of twelve academic institutions in eight countries. The outcomes were statistically correlated with institutional open access publication policies and practices. Analysis. We used an automated search tool together with manual searching to retrieve Web-based library access policies, then categorised and counted the levels and conditions of public access. We compared scores for institutional library access feature with open access features and percentages of open access publications. Results. Academic library policies may suggest open public access but multi-layered user categories, privileges and fees charged can inhibit such access, with disparities in openness emerging between library policies and institutional open access policies. Conclusion. As open access publishing options and mandates expand, physical entry and access to print and electronic resources in academic libraries is contracting. This conflicts with global library and information commitments to open access to knowledge.

While the movement for open access (OA) has gained momentum in recent years, there remain concerns about the broader commitment to openness in knowledge production and dissemination. Increasingly, universities are under pressure to transform themselves to engage with the wider community and to be more inclusive. Open knowledge institutions (OKIs) provide a framework that encourages universities to act with the principles of openness at their centre; not only should universities embrace digital OA, but also lead actions in cultivating diversity, equity, transparency and positive changes in society. Accordingly, this leads onto questions of whether we can evaluate the progress of OKIs and what are potential indicators for OKIs. As an exploratory study, this article reports on the collection and analysis of a list of potential indicators for OKIs. Data for these indicators are gathered for 43 Australian universities. The results show evidence of large disparities in characteristics such as Indigenous employment and gender equity, and a preference for repository-mediated OA across the Australian universities. These OKI indicators provide high-dimensional and complex signals that can be widely categorised into three groups of diversity, communication and coordination.

BACKGROUND There is an increasing demand for high quality subnational estimates of under-five mortality. In low and middle income countries, where the burden of under-five mortality is concentrated, vital registration is often lacking and household surveys, which provide full birth history data, are often the most reliable source. Unfortunately, these data are spatially sparse and so data are pulled from other sources to increase the available information. Summary birth histories represent a large fraction of the available data, and provide numbers of births and deaths aggregated over time, along with the mother's age. OBJECTIVE Specialized methods are needed to leverage this information, and previously the Brass method, and variants, have been used. We wish to develop a model-based approach that can propagate errors, and make the most efficient use of the data. Further, we strive to provide a method that does not have large computational overhead. CONTRIBUTION We describe a computationally efficient model-based approach which allows summary birth history and full birth history data to be combined into analyses of under-five mortality in a natural way. The method is based on fertility and mortality models that allow direct smoothing over time and space, with the possibility for including relevant covariates that are associated with fertility and/or mortality. We first examine the behavior of the approach on simulated data, before applying the model to survey and census data from Malawi.

Objectives To report the estimated trend in prevalence and years lived with disability (YLDs) due to vision loss (VL) in the Eastern Mediterranean region (EMR) from 1990 to 2015. Methods The estimated trends in age-standardized prevalence and the YLDs rate due to VL in 22 EMR countries were extracted from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2015 study. The association of Socio-demographic Index (SDI) with changes in prevalence and YLDs of VL was evaluated using a multilevel mixed model. Results The age-standardized prevalence of VL in the EMR was 18.2% in 1990 and 15.5% in 2015. The total age-standardized YLDs rate attributed to all-cause VL in EMR was 536.9 per 100,000 population in 1990 and 482.3 per 100,000 population in 2015. For each 0.1 unit increase in SDI, the age-standardized prevalence and YLDs rate of VL showed a reduction of 1.5% (p

This study examines the effects of shifting data sources in the rankings of universities. In particular, universities are ranked according to their levels of average citation counts (ACC) and open access (OA) for publications indexed by each of three different bibliographic sources, namely Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and Microsoft Academic (MSA). Metadata on ACC and OA are retrieved from two external databases, i.e., Unpaywall and OpenCitations, to avoid internal biases. The results demonstrate how changing the data source can have significant impact on the perceived performance of individual universities. This work forms part of the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) project [1], spearheaded by Curtin University.

Audio fromSession 3: Working on Open Access, held Wednesday 26 June 2019 at the LIBER 2019 Annual Conference. Talks included: 3.1Are we plan-S ready? Level of Compliance at the University of Vienna, Rita Pinhasi, Brigitte Kromp, Guido Blechl, University of Vienna, Austria 3.2Is the Library Open? Correlating Public Access to Academic Libraries with Open Access Support, Katie Sarah Wilson, Cameron Neylon, Lucy Montgomerty, Chun-Kai Huang, Curtin University, Australia 3.3Deep Green – Open Access Transformation, Beate Rusch, Julia Alexandra Goltz-Fellgiebel, Zuse Institute Berlin and Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg, Germany, Hildegard Schäffler, Bavarian State Library, Germany 3.4Towards a Knowledge Exchange Roadmap for OA Monographs,Janneke Adema, Coventry University, United Kingdom, Jeroen Sondervan, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, Graham Stone and Verena Weigert, JISC, United Kingdom

As open access publishing options and mandates expand, how does this ‘openness’ extend to other sources of research and knowledge such as academic libraries? In this study we investigated the connection between academic library access policies and institutional positions regarding open access or open science. Analysis of library access or use policies and related documents from twenty academic institutions in Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, North America, South Africa and the United Kingdom shows that access to libraries for the unaffiliated public is often the most restricted. Many libraries impose financial and sometimes security barriers on physical entry to buildings and this limits access to the collections still in print and other non-digital formats. This has occurred over several decades as a result of factors such as budgetary restraints and increased demand. Yet increasingly academic institutions are providing open access to digital research output through institutional repositories and open access publishing policies. We contrasted library access policies and practices with those of open access publication and research sharing for the same institutions and found limited correlation between both sets of policies. This suggests the intentions expressed by the two policy actions have not been applied in similar directions, in other words to reach the same ends. Comparing the two assessments using Spearman’s rank correlation confirmed open access policies have a direct association with the narrow aspects of public access provided through online availability of formal publications, but are not necessarily associated (in the universities in this study) with delivering on a broader commitment to public access to knowledge. In this presentation, we discuss the process and the outcomes of this research. The results suggest that while institutional mission statements and academic library policies may refer to sharing of knowledge and research and community collaboration, multiple layers of library user categories, levels of privilege and fees charged can inhibit such access. This indicates disparities in openness between institutional library access policies and open access policies. As open access publishing options and mandates expand, physical entry to academic libraries and access to print and electronic resources is contracting. This varies within and across countries, but it can conflict with global library and information commitments to open access to knowledge. The study is continuing on a larger scale as part of an Open Knowledge Institutions project.

Universities are key sites of knowledge creation. Governments and research funders are increasingly interested in ensuring that their investments in the production of new knowledge deliver a quantifiable return on investment, including in the form of ‘impact’. Ensuring that research outputs are not locked behind paywalls, and that research data can be interrogated and built upon are increasingly central to efforts to improve the effectiveness of global research landscapes. We argue that mandating and promoting open access (OA) for published research outputs, as well as the sharing of research data are important elements of building a vibrant open knowledge system, but they are not enough. Supporting diversity within knowledge-making institutions; enabling collaboration across boundaries between universities and wider communities; and addressing inequalities in access to knowledge resources and in opportunities to contribute to knowledge making processes are also important. New tools are needed to help universities, funders, and communities to understand the extent to which a university is operating as an effective open knowledge institution; as well as the steps that might be taken to improve open knowledge performance. This presentation discusses our team’s efforts to develop a model of Open Knowledge that is not confined to measures of OA and open data. The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative is a project of the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University. With funding from the university, we are exploring the extent to which universities are functioning as effective open knowledge institutions; as well as the types of information that universities, funders, and communities might need to understand an institution’s open knowledge performance and how it might be improved. The challenges of data collection on open knowledge practices at scale, and across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries are also discussed.

International audience; Universities are key sites of knowledge creation. Governments and research funders are increasingly interested in ensuring that their investments in the production of new knowledge deliver a quantifiable return on investment, including in the form of ‘impact’. Ensuring that research outputs are not locked behind paywalls, and that research data can be interrogated and built upon are increasingly central to efforts to improve the effectiveness of global research landscapes. We argue that mandating and promoting open access (OA) for published research outputs, as well as the sharing of research data are important elements of building a vibrant open knowledge system, but they are not enough. Supporting diversity within knowledge-making institutions; enabling collaboration across boundaries between universities and wider communities; and addressing inequalities in access to knowledge resources and in opportunities to contribute to knowledge making processes are also important. New tools are needed to help universities, funders, and communities to understand the extent to which a university is operating as an effective open knowledge institution; as well as the steps that might be taken to improve open knowledge performance. This paper discusses our team’s efforts to develop a model of Open Knowledge that is not confined to measures of OA and open data. The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative is a project of the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University. With funding from the university, we are exploring the extent to which universities are functioning as effective open knowledge institutions; as well as the types of information that universities, funders, and communities might need to understand an institution’s open knowledge performance and how it might be improved. The challenges of data collection on open knowledge practices at scale, and across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries are also discussed.

ethnographic, qualitative research with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people in NSW schools.Presentation at Anthropology Matters! The 116th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC, December 3, 2017, Session title: Ethnographic research for social justice? The affordances and challenges of educational ethnographic research..

There were 1765 contacts identified between DNA nucleobases or deoxyribose and cyclic (W, H, F, Y) or acyclic (R, E, D) amino acids in 672 X-ray structures of DNA–protein complexes. In this first study to compare π-interactions between the cyclic and acyclic amino acids, visual inspection was used to categorize amino acid interactions as nucleobase π–π (according to biological edge) or deoxyribose sugar–π (according to sugar edge). Overall, 54% of contacts are nucleobase π–π interactions, which involve all amino acids, but are more common for Y, F, and R, and involve all DNA nucleobases with similar frequencies. Among binding arrangements, cyclic amino acids prefer more planar (stacked) π-systems than the acyclic counterparts. Although sugar–π interactions were only previously identified with the cyclic amino acids and were found to be less common (38%) than nucleobase–cyclic amino acid contacts, sugar–π interactions are more common than nucleobase π–π contacts for the acyclic series (61% of contacts). Similar to DNA–protein π–π interactions, sugar–π contacts most frequently involve Y and R, although all amino acids adopt many binding orientations relative to deoxyribose. These DNA–protein π-interactions stabilize biological systems, by up to approximately −40 kJ mol−1 for neutral nucleobase or sugar–amino acid interactions, but up to approximately −95 kJ mol−1 for positively or negatively charged contacts. The high frequency and strength, despite variation in structure and composition, of these π-interactions point to an important function in biological systems.

Supplemental material for Estimating under-five mortality in space and time in a developing world context by Jon Wakefield, Geir-Arne Fuglstad, Andrea Riebler, Jessica Godwin, Katie Wilson and Samuel J Clark in Statistical Methods in Medical Research

In order to use nanoparticles in biological applications, they need to be coated by a ligand shell (called biofunctionalisation) to provide stability in a physiological environment, including preventing non-specific binding, and to target the nanoparticle to areas of interest in the sample. One approach to synthesising ligand shells is to self-assemble a monolayer of small ligands on the surface of the nanoparticle. The ligand can be considered to consist of a ‘head’, ‘stem’ and ‘foot’. The ‘foot’ serves to anchor the ligand to the surface of the nanoparticle and, with the ‘stem’, drive self-assembly of the shell and seal off the core material from the environment. The environment is only exposed to the ‘head’ at the distal end of the ‘stem’. While the ‘stem’ and ‘head’ groups could be easily transposed to many different kinds of nanoparticles, the ‘foot’ must be adapted according to the surface properties of the nanoparticle. This approach has hitherto been successful with noble metal nanoparticles. In this thesis, it is tested with nanoparticles of very different materials: semiconductor nanoparticles or quantum dots (QDs) and superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPIONs). QDs are particularly useful for optical imaging due to their fluorescent properties, such as resistance to photobleaching, which give them important advantages over organic fluorophores. QDs have, therefore, been used to screen different ligand shells with a thiol as the “foot” and ethylene glycol (EG) as the “head”. A novel protocol, using EG alkanethiol ligands to biofunctionalise QDs, has been developed. These EG alkanethiol capped QDs are highly stable and soluble in physiological conditions according to a series of increasingly stringent stability tests. Crucially, they do not exhibit non-specific binding to cells and a controlled number of a specific recognition function can be introduced within the shell for targeting. These QDs have been used in live cell imaging. QDs monovalently functionalised with Tris-nitrilotriacetic acid (Tris-NTA) have been stoichiometrically coupled to fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2). The QDs allow direct visualisation of the interaction of FGF2 with its receptors on the surface of living cells. The approach has then been transposed to SPIONs. SPIONs, because of their magnetic properties, are particularly attractive materials for enhancing magnetic resonance imaging contrast in a variety of in vivo situations. The thiol “foot” of EG alkanethiol would not bind well to iron oxide, but phosphates bind strongly. Therefore, a new ligand was synthesised, in which a phosphoserine was placed at the foot on the ligand, to produce an EG alkane phosphoserine. A ligand exchange protocol was developed, which allowed capping of the SPIONs with this ligand. The resulting EG alkane phosphoserine capped SPIONs were, like the QDs, found to possess excellent stability in a series of tests of increasing stringency. The ligand shell also provided good protection of the SPION core against chelation by citrate at acid pH. The work presented in this thesis thus describes important advances in the mobilisation of the remarkable properties of nanoparticles for biology and medicine. Firstly, by directly synthesising small, highly stable QDs that can be stoichiometrically functionalised for imaging. Secondly, by synthesising the first ligand shell for SPIONs that provides sufficient stability to allow these materials to be used in experiments where longer term imaging is required, such as tracking transplanted stem cells in vivo. Thirdly, the strategy of synthesising ligand shells of small molecules that self assemble on the surface of nanoparticles has been extended to materials other than the noble metals. This aspect of the thesis highlights that this strategy is generic and, if a suitable “foot” unit can be identified, likely to be applicable to nanoparticles of any material.

Lucy Montgomery's presentation as part of a panel at the NHMRC Research Translation Long Weekend 2022. Plenary 6: Open science, research translation, equity and diversity 21 November 2022 In November 2021 the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science acknowledged the potential open science (including the core component open access) has to make the scientific process more transparent, inclusive and democratic. Amongst the core values described in the recommendation are equity and fairness, and diversity and inclusiveness. Although many expect that open science will facilitate a more equitable and inclusive scientific endeavour, can it really achieve this goal? Chair: Prof Ginny Barbour Co-Lead, Office for Scholarly Communications, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Director of Open Access Australasia. Presenters: Dr Ana Persic, UNESCO; Professor Lucy Montgomery, Curtin University; Dr. Robert Terry, UNICEF/UNDP/World Bank/WHO Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases Moderator: Ms Saskia Cheyne, Australian Living Evidence Consortium

Universities exist to support the creation and transfer of knowledge. Efforts by universities to enable open knowledge have the potential to broaden the impact of higher education and research institutions. Our team is exploring the mechanisms that will allow universities to work more effectively with local and global communities in the production of knowledge; as well as those that support its uptake and application both within and beyond academia. The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) group is developing a broad program of work on the theme of ‘open knowledge institutions’, supported in the first instance through a 2-year strategic research grant from Curtin University. The goal of our project is to develop tools and data that will allow universities to understand how effectively they are operating as open knowledge institutions; and to support strategic change in higher education and research.