1.1. Linking Research Integrity and Open Science – A New Role for Research Librarians

The digital transformation has required research libraries to reach further than mere management of content and instead adopt an active position in the research cycle of growing complexity by running repositories or library publishing units, providing persistent identifiers for research results or taking care of long-term data archiving. To run these services according to researchers’ needs, librarians interact with various stakeholders such as publishers, vendors, research institutions and funders, and deal with stakeholders’ often conflicting interests. We postulate that the holistic approach on scholarly communication that librarians have adopted in the last decade is a result of the described interaction with stakeholders and the library’s traditional role of content acquisition and management. With the holistic view research librarians have thus developed specific expertise such as consulting researchers on IPR issues, on publishing decisions and open access, up to offering support in project proposal writing to address funders’ requirements and institutional policies. These policies aim at dissemination, impact and reuse of research results to improve social welfare. At the same time they safeguard trustworthy and reliable research, e.g. ‘research integrity’, especially when backed up with data repositories or assisting staff.

However, only few researchers seem to have an intrinsic desire to conduct research as open and based on integrity as possible. In reality most researchers are caught in the dilemma of a highly competitive environment and the seemingly conflicting new paradigm of policies and requirements that demand sharing and collaborating. And despite all the policies and infrastructures to support research integrity, cases of research misconduct repeatedly happen.

What could be the remedy? We see the holistic view of librarians as an ideal approach to support an ‘ecosystem’ for research integrity and to address the researcher’s dilemma. In our contribution we introduce up-to-date standards of research integrity, and provide insights on how libraries can engage in leveraging research integrity. We therefore include samples of our open access and open science teaching which we run against the backdrop of the problematic conventional publishing system to strengthen young and established researchers’ awareness and expertise in publishing or managing research data. We will point out prevalent skills that offer librarians opportunities to collaborate with researchers towards open science that rests on good practice, reliability and transparency.

Margo Bargheer is a trained designer and holds a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology and Media Sciences. She is head of the Department for Electronic Publishing at Göttingen State and University Library, which includes the University Press, electronic theses, institutional repositories, projects like OpenAIRE, the COAR office, the university’s Open Access publication funds and campus-based publication data management within the CRIS. Margo is currently the spokesperson for the Working Group of German-Speaking University Presses and board member for the Association of European University Presses (AEUP). She teaches electronic publishing and Open Access to students and librarians and consults on Open Access strategies.

Dr Birgit Schmidt, coordinates international and national projects and initiatives in the Electronic Publishing unit at Göttingen State and University Library, with a focus on policies, infrastructures and training supporting the implementation of open access and open science. She serves as Scientific Secretary and working group co-chair in LIBER’s Steering Committee on Scholarly Communication and Research Infrastructures. She contributes to several committees, e.g. Knowledge Exchange’s Open Access Experts Group. Previously, she acted as Scientific Manager of the European OpenAIRE project (2009-2012) and as Executive Director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). She has a background in Mathematics and Philosophy, and a postgraduate degree in Library and Information Science.