Publications and outreach
Publications
The new IIASA Scientific Publications and Copyright Policy merges the old publication policy (from 1996) and copyright policy (from 1979), and aligns them with the IIASA open access policy (from 2016). The text was updated and re-drafted in 2019 and will be implemented upon approval by the Science Leadership Committee and Council in 2020. This policy aims to set forth the principles governing the various types of publications used by the institute to communicate its research results to outside audiences.
Of the 401 journal articles published in 2019, 308 have a publicly available full text version in the IIASA Publications Repository (PURE). As of January 2020, 79% of articles published in 2019 will be fully available after twelve months and will be compliant with the open access policy. In 2019, there were 375,358 downloads from PURE, compared to 339,156 in the previous year. IIASA has established publishing agreements which allow for a discount on article processing charges or enable open access publishing without additional costs for authors affiliated with IIASA with major publishers like Springer, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, and MDPI. In addition, in 2019 a new pilot agreement with Elsevier has been negotiated through the Austrian Academic Consortium for 2020.
Outreach
IIASA aims to achieve higher visibility for its scientific achievements and therefore promotes its research findings and activities to demonstrate expertise in systems analysis and science-policy advice. A range of channels are used to reach a diverse global audience including the research community, policymakers, funders, and the general public. These channels include press releases, the Nexus blog, newsletters, social media, and policy briefs. The biannual Options magazine, presenting the institute’s latest research to a non-specialist audience, continued year on year readership growth with 6,276 subscribers in 2019.
The communications team continue to expand their use of multimedia materials, producing infographics and video content. The IIASA social media channels have had consistent annual growth in both reach and engagement resulting in 7,680 followers on Twitter, 5,540 likes on Facebook, and over 1,200 subscribers on YouTube in 2019.
In 2016 at Councils request, IIASA started the process for improving open access to its data. As a result of this data, models, and tools were catalogued in 2017, and an open access to data policy approved in 2018, In line with international best practice and technology readiness principles, IIASA will be engaging with key players like the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) and other international bodies to ensure the quality of the models and tools it shares with the wider scientific community. In addition to a more comprehensive open access strategy in terms of data, models, and tools, future activities will be based on state-of-the-art procedures and expert input. In 2019, IIASA launched a data repository (DARE) which holds 32 distinct datasets. In addition to complying with many funder’s requirements, all researchers are encouraged to deposit their datasets there.