I have been challenged to talk about innovation in the light of Open Research today. This blog post is a write-up of some ideas as I prepare my slides. Looking at my blog, I have only written about innovation once in the past, in connection to a presentation in Brussels about Open Innovation. Then, I highlighted how my fundamental music research led to developing a medical tool. That is an example of “classic” innovation, developing software that solves a problem.

Last week, my book was published by the MIT Press, and I am happy to announce that the source code is available on GitHub. Most people are probably mainly interested in the content of the book. If so, you should grab a free copy of the final version. This blog post explains why I have made the source code available. License I was fortunate to secure funding from the University of Oslo to make the book freely available, what is often referred to as Open Access.

The Norwegian Career Assessment Matrix (NOR-CAM) is a toolbox for recognition and rewards in academic careers that was launched by Universities Norway in May 2021. I was part of the working group developing the toolbox and have blogged about this experience previously. There has been much interest in NOR-CAM and I have held numerous presentations about it since it was launched. Most of these presentations have been held live (and often on Zoom).

I participated in the closing event of the FAIRsFAIR project last week. For that, I was asked to share thoughts on the status of FAIR in higher education. This is a summary of the notes that I wrote for the event. What is FAIR? First of all, The FAIR principles state that data should be: Findable: The first step in (re)using data is to find them. Metadata and data should be easy to find for both humans and computers.

This blog post is written to have a URL to send to Elsevier editors that ask me to review for their journals. I have declined to review for Elsevier journals for at least a decade, but usually haven’t given an explanation. Now I will start doing it alongside my decline. My decision is based on a fundamental flaw in today’s commercial journal publishing ecosystem. This is effectively summarized by Scott Aaronson, in an analogy in his Review of The Access Principle by John Willinsky

After a fairly long publication process, I am happy to finally announce a new paper: Best versus Good Enough Practices for Open Music Research in Empirical Musicology Review. Summary The abstract reads: Music researchers work with increasingly large and complex data sets. There are few established data handling practices in the field and several conceptual, technological, and practical challenges. Furthermore, many music researchers are not equipped for (or interested in) the craft of data storage, curation, and archiving.

After nearly three years of planning, we can finally welcome people to MusicLab Copenhagen. This is a unique “science concert” involving the Danish String Quartet, one of the world’s leading classical ensembles. Tonight, they will perform pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Schnittke and folk music in a normal concert setting at Musikhuset in Copenhagen. However, the concert is nothing but normal. Live music research During the concert, about twenty researchers from RITMO and partner institutions will conduct investigations and experiments informed by phenomenology, music psychology, complex systems analysis, and music technology.

Earlier today, I presented at the national open research conference Hvordan endres forskningshverdagen når åpen forskning blir den nye normalen? The conference is organized by the Norwegian Forum for Open Research and is coordinated by Universities Norway. It has been great to follow the various discussions at the conference. One observation is that very few questions the transition to Open Research. We have, finally, come to a point where openness is the new normal.

Novelty is often highlighted as the most important criterion for getting research funding. That a manuscript is novel is also a major concern for many conference/journal reviewers. While novelty may be good in some contexts, I find it more important that research is solid. I started thinking about novelty versus solidity when I read through the (excellent) blog posts about the ISMIR 2021 Reviewing Experience. These blog posts deal with many topics, but the question about novelty caught my attention.

It is challenging to find good illustrations to use in presentations and papers. For that reason, I hope to help others by sharing some of the illustrations I have made myself. I will share them with a permissive license (CC-BY) to be easily reused for various purposes. I start with the “puzzle” that I often use in presentations about Open Research. It outlines some of the various parts of the research process and how they can be made (more) open.

Earlier this year, I wrote about my 23 tips to improve your web presence. Those tips were meant to encourage academics to care about how their employee web pages look at universities. Such pages look different from university to university. Still, in most places, they contain an image and some standard information on the top, followed by more or less structured information further down. For reference, this is an explanation of how my employee page is built up:

What is the future of academic career assessment? How can open research practices be included as part of a research evaluation? These were some of the questions we asked ourselves in a working group set up by Universities Norway. Almost two years later, the report is ready. Here I will share some of the ideas behind the suggested Norwegian Career Assessment Matrix (NOR-CAM) and some of the other recommendations coming out of the workgroup.

Recently, I have been engaged in an internal discussion at the University of Oslo about our institutional web pages. This has led me to realize that a university’s web pages are yet another part of what I like to think of as an Open Research “puzzle”: Cutting down on web pages The discussion started when our university’s communication department announced that they wanted to reduce the number of web pages. One way of doing that is by unpublishing a lot of pages.

Many people talk about “opening” the research process these days. Due to initiatives like Plan S, much has happened when it comes to Open Access to research publications. There are also things happening when it comes to sharing data openly (or at least FAIR). Unfortunately, there is currently more talking about Open Research than doing. At RITMO, we are actively exploring different strategies for opening our research. The most extreme case is that of MusicLab.

I am presenting at the Norwegian Forskerutdanningskonferansen on Monday, which is a venue for people involved in research education. I have been challenged to talk about why open research is better research. In the spirit of openness, this blog post is an attempt to shape my argument. It can be read as an open notebook for what I am going to say. Open Research vs Open Science My first point in any talk about open research is to explain why I think “open research” is better than “open science”.

During the NIME conference this year (which as run entirely online due to the coronavirus crisis), I led a workshop called NIME Publication Ecosystem Workshop. In this post, I will explain the background of the workshop, how it was run in an asynchronous+synchronous mode, and reflect on the results. If you don’t want to read everything below, here is a short introduction video I made to explain the background (shot at my “summer office” up in the Hardangervidda mountain range in Norway):

I was in Tromsø to hold a keynote lecture at the Munin conference a month ago, and was asked to contribute to a podcast they are running called Open Science Talk. Now it is out, and I am happy to share: Open Science Talk · #26 Music Research In this episode, we talk about Music Research, and how it is to practice open research within this field. Our guest is Alexander Jensenius, Associate Professor at the Department of Musicology Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion (IMV) at the University of Oslo.

Yesterday I gave a keynote lecture at the Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing in Tromsø. This is an annual conference that gathers librarians, research administrators and publishers, but also some researchers and students. It is my first time to the conference, and found it to be a very diverse, interesting and welcoming group of people. Abstract Is it possible to do experimental music research completely openly? And what can we gain by opening up the research process from beginning to end?

This week I led the workshop “Open Research Strategies and Tools in the NIME Community” at NIME 2019 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. We had a very good discussion, which I hope can lead to more developments in the community in the years to come. Below is the material that we wrote for the workshop. Workshop organisers Alexander Refsum Jensenius, University of Oslo Andrew McPherson, Queen Mary University of London Anna Xambó, NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology Dan Overholt, Aalborg University Copenhagen Guillaume Pellerin, IRCAM Ivica Ico Bukvic, Virginia Tech Rebecca Fiebrink, Goldsmiths, University of London Rodrigo Schramm, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul Workshop description The development of more openness in research has been in progress for a fairly long time, and has recently received a lot of more political attention through the Plan S initiative, The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), EU’s Horizon Europe, and so on.

I have written a short article for the latest edition of LINK, the magazine of the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators. Self-archiving a couple of the article here. Towards Convergence in Research Assessment Open Science is on everyone’s lips these days. There are many reasons why this shift is necessary and wanted, and also several hurdles. One big challenge is the lack of incentives and rewards. Underlying this is the question of what we want to incentivize and reward, which ultimately boils down to the way we assess research and researchers.

Open Science is on everyone’s lips these days. But why don’t we use Open Research more? This is a question I have been asking regularly after I was named Norwegian representative in EUA’s Expert Group on Science 2.0 / Open Sciencecommittee earlier this year. For those who don’t know, the European University Association (EUA) represents more than 800 universities and national rectors’ conferences in 48 European countries. It is thus a very interesting organization when it comes to influencing the European higher education and research environment.

I participated in the opening of the Guild of Research Universities in Brussels yesterday. The Guild is a transformative network of research-led universities from across the European continent, formed to strengthen the voice of universities in Europe, and to lead the way through new forms of collaboration in research, innovation and education. The topic of the opening symposium is that of Open Innovation, a hot topic these days, and something that the European Commission is putting a lot of pressure on.