Co-Change

Source: https://cochangeproject.eu/article/brief-talk-with-branislava-lalic-1

Branislava Lalić

• Professor of meteorology and biophysics at University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Agriculture (PFNS)

• Expertise and interest: modeling physical processes describing atmosphere-biosphere interaction

• Co-Change leader of the RRIzing lab together with Mila Grahovac

The Co-Change Lab called RRIzing Lab at the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Novi Sad focuses on several RRI keys. In a previous interview, we introduced how the Lab members worked on gender equality; here, we discuss their open data and science education journey.

A university is a science education practitioner. So what would you like to change in that term?

When we talk about science education, we should think about it at different levels. Here, we focus on science education at the university level -undergraduate, graduate or PhD level. And that's okay, as we are scientists working at universities. But suppose science education is not adequate at high schools. In that case, you cannot be very optimistic at university because education is not starting at age 19, and here, at the university, we are just at the end of this process.

By experience, we see with my colleagues that the number of students on STEM studies (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), except IT, is generally reducing. So I think that it should be taught more excitingly. I would like to motivate my colleagues to prepare some popular books for middle or high school students because there is a massive gap between 21st-century science and high school students books. It's challenging to be in touch with the latest scientific inventions, results, but we could prepare some small useful textbooks for teachers to present these results and these discoveries to their students in high schools.

Have you already started to find some colleagues who would like to take part in writing these books?

Unfortunately, not because it's pretty difficult to motivate people to perform such a massive job without any kind of reward. I’m not entirely optimistic about that, and I'm not so sure that even if I had some budget for it, I would be able to motivate people to do this. I'm afraid that only a slight quantitative impact will be achieved on science education because it is tricky to measure the institutional change in science education.

So the question is, how can you make your colleagues believe that going to high school can be an essential and very entertaining part of a professor’s job?

It’s not easy at all, although if you want to make a popular lecture about climate change, that can be organized easily. But suppose you're going to introduce sensitive topics and speak with the students about critical thinking, about problem-solving, which is the essence of science education. In that case, we face strong resistance from the high school administration. We wrote with my colleague to some of the high schools in Novi Sad, and just one of them (Gymnasium “Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj”) responded.

Luckily, you are also working on open science, especially the open access, open data aspects.

And here is the challenge: we have several repositories. One university-level repository, two repositories at the faculty of agriculture, and a national repository. These were developed quite independently, which presents a technical issue: how to merge these repositories. As for open access, people commonly know about gold open access, which is extremely expensive and available mainly for international projects. But we will do our best to promote green open access in general and green open access for data sets. Some of my colleagues have an enormous amount of data from field experiments. Experiments sometimes last for more than 60 years at a faculty of agriculture, which means an unbelievable amount of data. In general, colleagues are unaware of the possibility of putting datasets in a data repository. And on the other hand, some datasets are not large enough to be a part of some scientific paper. But they can be very important still. Making such data open to the general public and the scientific community is our motive in this endeavor.

Source: https://cochangeproject.eu/article/brief-talk-with-mila

Mila Grahovac

• Associate professor at University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Agriculture (PFNS)

• Expertise and interest: innovation in plant protection in agriculture, phytopathogenic bacteria and fungi, biological control of plant pathogens, mycotoxigenic fungi, gender mainstreaming

• Co-Change leader of the RRIzing lab together with Branislava Lalić

The Co-Change Lab called RRizing Lab at the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Novi Sad focuses on several RRI keys. In this interview, we are talking about the steps that have been made for the implementation of gender equality at the faculty.

How were you studying the state of gender equality at your faculty?

In the beginning, we had just freely selected some indicators, for instance, pure numbers regarding the number of males and females in certain areas. But later on, when we continued to do the analysis, we considered some other indicators found in the literature. We also widened the number of factors we were observing, and it helped us see some things that we should target in the future. We also surveyed 95 staff members and started dialogues with the scientific and teaching staff of the faculty. But during the interviews, it became clear that figures and numbers are not enough to answer specific questions. It would be best if you had live dialogues because sometimes you can't predict what the right question is. The answers can take you to unexpected results.

Did you find some weak points regarding gender equality at your faculty?

Yes. We found some gaps by looking at the glass ceiling index (the measurement representing the working environment for women). The number of women in top academic positions is quite low compared to the number of women in academia. We also found that at the highest managing positions, there was only about 20% of women involved. So that’s a huge gap. We also found a pay gap: actually, we have the same salaries as men and the same possibility of gaining some additional incomes. Problems come into light when a woman goes on maternity leave. In Serbia, you receive the total but basic salary (only connected to lecturing activities). Unfortunately, the other part of your salary (linked to your activity in different projects and commercial work) disappears. This is the most significant gap we found during our survey. It is not widely known that they will get a different salary; mothers usually realize this when they get their first maternity payment, often a few months late. We understand that this salary difference can’t be solved here, at our Faculty, as this is a public administration problem. We can only hope that we’ll influence the process at the national level. And I must add that it does not only affect women. It also affects men involved in academia as university professors if they go on paternity leave, which is also possible in our country. Finally, we also found a gap in project management positions. If you look at the international level, the project management leaders are balanced regarding genders. But when you look at the domestic projects, you see that women manage only 20% of projects while men 80%. It shows a socio-cultural problem here, but the reason is not completely clear for me right now.

During the interviews or the survey you were making at your faculty, did something change in your mind or influence you in some ways?

Yes, though I have never thought about gender equality before Social Labs. I got involved in it in 2018, and with the Co-Change Project, I wasn't feeling any inequality. I must say that I could do whatever I wanted to do in my professional career here. At least it seemed that way in most cases. But now, I feel happy to be able to change the ecosystem and make it more friendly for others who want to start a family. I think it’s a great thing that they feel some support in the time when you experience a lack of sleep, a lack of time, a lack of everything.

You have already started to build a gender equality board at the faculty.

Yes, we have initiated the constitution of the gender equality board; it became formal a couple of weeks ago. We needed the approval of several faculty commissions and boards. It was a bumpy road because many people found it unnecessary at our faculty. The GE Board consists of really many members: 22, so it is a massive board. I started with the idea of naming one person per cathedra (a teaching unit at the University of Novi Sad) for the board. But then I was told, “oh, it will be a feminist movement,” so we decided to depute one man and one woman from each cathedra into this board. Now we are starting to work on a gender equality plan, first, of course, a draft version as our faculty and university don’t have one.

Did you look at other institutions gender equality boards or plans? Did you find some good examples?

First, I read the gender equality plan of the University of Belgrade. Still, I felt that this was just a well-written document with excellent numbers, but it was hard to follow and understand clearly. I think that such a document should be comprehensive. I have already contacted our Co- Change partners, and they sent me some versions of gender equality plans. I received one from Bologna University, which I like very much, so it seems that this is a model that we will also follow by developing our version.

What do you expect from this board? What will they do for gender equality?

The board members should have in mind that they should transfer the principles of gender equality to their colleagues. They always need to take into consideration this aspect in whatever they do. We want to meet at least the minimum proposals of the European Commission about gender equality to help our board members to support their colleagues in whatever they plan to do at the faculty. I also think that we need regular meetings, discussions about the current state of gender equality at our faculty.

And how do you imagine the institutional change? Having a gender equality board and a plan is not enough to have institutional changes, I believe.

If we write a plan and put it on our website, nothing will change, I guess. So I think that each member of this gender equality board should be responsible for gender equality impact in their cathedra. It would help a lot to see and follow good examples, so probably we should find some places, a website, for instance, to show, record and promote good practices in terms of gender equality at our faculty. But you can’t make an institutional change overnight. First, we should inspire people to think about gender equality, and then we can do an act that consists of rules, maybe sanctions and instructions. I’m sure it won't happen shortly; we have just started the process to institutionalize this aspect.

Source: https://cochangeproject.eu/article/a-brief-talk-with-dejan-beukovic

Dejan Beukovic

• Assistant professor at University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Agriculture (PFNS)

• Expertise and interest: animal science, animal nutrition, control and quality of feedstuffs, wildlife & game management

• Member of RRizing lab of Co-Change project at PFNS, responsible for open access

• Visit on Twitter and LinkedIn

The Co-Change Lab called RRizing Lab at the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Novi Sad focuses on several RRI keys. In this interview, we are talking with Dejan Beukovic about the steps that have been made for the implementation of open access aspects at the faculty.

How did you analyse the status of open access (OA) in recent years at your faculty and what results did you get? What is the rate of OA publications at your faculty?

We collected data on the year of publication, category, publishers, Directory of Open Access Journals listing, publication fee, commercial publishers, OA publishing, embargo, copyright owner, publisher deposit conditions. I needed to check all the entries manually as the Faculty doesn’t have a repository, so analytics that would filter the database couldn’t work. Sometimes I met publications in journals that weren’t listed on Sherpa Romeo (where the OA policies of journals are stored). This meant going to the journal site and patiently searching for the necessary information. Some information could not be found or was not clearly defined (especially in the case of the less influential journal sites). In these situations, the result was named: "no data'' or ''unknown”. Systematization of such collected data took a while.

The evaluation of the elements of OA, present in the publication of scientific production can be defined as follows. The biggest minus is the absence of an official institutional repository. This can be solved by using the Institutional Repository of the University of Novi Sad. However, using this option does not solve the ultimate goal of timeliness and motivation of the author to feed our repository. This type of work requires continuous education and highlighting the benefits not only for the authors but also for the institution they represent. The small share of journals does not require a publication fee. This is very difficult to avoid, especially with giant publishers who own reputable journals. The expectation is that the current situation will be maintained and difficult to change. The share of non-commercial publishers is close to 50%, which is optimistic. This group of publishers should be targeted. Nearly 40% of open access journals may be associated with a high share of publication cost, as well as with commercial publishing. Representation of Creative Commons Attribution Licence is about 50%, a positive result that contributes to higher rates of OA and open publishing. No embargo and OA pathway are hopeful elements. Still, work needs to be done to place the content in an adequate repository to increase visibility.

The report about our OA study is available here.

The publishing rulebook of your faculty is currently being modified. Which amendments are you going to add to this regulation which will support OA publications?

The amendments to the policy will refer to a closer definition of copyright. The Faculty will take over the ownership rights with the appropriate financial compensation to the authors. Also, the publications will be protected with the relevant Creative Commons license and freely published in OA.

Implementing OA aspects to the publishing rulebook of the faculty is a sound institutional change. Should you change the repository of publications as well?

The rulebook will include changes regarding the repository where textbooks and monographs will be kept. The rulebook will define what the authors need to submit from the data to prepare the metadata. As well as other technical details in that regard. What was under consideration but currently rejected is the possibility to make the migration of textbooks and monographs that have already been published in the Zenodo public repository. Objective reasons are that Zenodo implies the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which conflicts with the stated conditions in the introductory page of textbooks and monographs. Therefore, instead of Zenodo, we will search for another service or platform. And replacing the text that defines the terms of use with the appropriate Creative Commons license would mean republishing the entire production so far, which is currently likewise questionable.

Putting new points in the rulebook is not sufficient to make colleagues effectively use OA aspects. How will you engage or train them?

The application of the rulebook will include training. The first training will be organized through a webinar in February 2022 in Serbian. Experts of this field who apply OA within their universities and institutions will introduce the basic principles to the participants. There will also be a discussion that is always full of tricky questions. After that, a survey will be conducted. Then, the draft rulebook will go on a public debate (it is always tense and tricky). The bodies of the Faculty will adopt the final version of the rulebook. Honestly, the problem of using the repository for books and monographs is not expected, as the author's work ends with the submission of the manuscript and the receipt of compensation for the acquired publishing rights. Further work should be in the hands of the data manager. The bigger problem will be the self-archiving of scientific papers in the repository. Further application on this issue will include tutorials, motivation and education for assistants and doctoral students, emphasizing the benefits of visibility and citations.