Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies Blog, Results and impact, Strategies and research practices

CoE GameCult Open Science update 2022

"Open Science 우산" by eotls4387. Used under CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0).

In February 2021, we openly published our CoE GameCult Open Science Strategy. In the strategy, we defined several goals for our Open Science practices:

  • All CoE GameCult researchers will register an ORCID.
  • All new CoE GameCult publications (scientific journal articles, conference papers, and book chapters) will be self-archived, and as many previous publications as possible will be retroactively self-archived, in university repositories.
  • All new CoE GameCult research data will be stored following the principles of open science, from a minimum level of opening the metadata to storing the complete data in open archives. As many previous datasets as possible will also be retroactively opened.

In the original strategy document, we promised to proceed towards these goals gradually and evaluate our progress regularly. To track our progress in these goals, we agreed to:

  • Add ORCID numbers in the researcher introductions on the CoE website.
  • Tack the numbers related to our open access publication goals in collaboration with the university libraries and publish the results on the CoE website.
  • Collect and publish a list of research data collected within the CoE, including links to the openly stored (meta) data.
  • Track the numbers of the public events organised by the CoE, public talks given by our researchers, public media interactions by our researchers, and other public societal interactions (annually during our Academy of Finland reporting).

In this blog post, we will present a public update of our progress in each of these areas.

ORCID identifiers

To encourage the use of ORCID identifiers amongst our researchers, we have provided them with Open Science training explaining their function for researchers. In February 2021, we have included ORCID identifiers in the researcher profiles on our website. Currently, in March 2022, out of the 45 CoE GameCult researchers currently listed on our website, 41 have created an ORCID identifier for themselves.

Open publications

The first analysis of CoE GameCult publications was conducted in October 2020 by the University of Turku library’s metrics and evaluation team. The analysis included a total of 135 publications, 36 (26.7 %) of which were self-archived and 38 open access +1 hybrid open access publication (28.9 %).

According to the newest CoE GameCult publication analysis conducted by the University of Jyväskylä Open Science Centre in February 2022, of the 348 CoE publications produced between 2018–2021, 211 (60.6 %) are fully open access or hybrid open access, and 203 (58.3 %) have open access parallel copies in university repositories.

While we are happy about our progress in this area, we are still quite far from our goal of having all of our journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers openly available, and we will keep working to get closer to this target. To support our researchers in this area, we have included information on resources available for open access publishing in each of the CoE universities in our Open Science Strategy, and organised support sessions for self-archiving publications in the university repositories.

The CoE has also put resources into publishing selected high-impact edited collections of our current research topics as fully open access publications, such as Olli Sotamaa & Jan Švelch (Eds., 2021) Game Production Studies (Amsterdam University Press) and Maria Ruotsalainen, Maria Törhönen, & Veli-Matti Karhulahti (Eds., 2022) Modes of Engagement in Overwatch Esports (Palgrave Macmillan), the latter reaching over 5200 downloads during the first week after its publication. Our researchers are also members of the editorial board of Pelitutkimuksen vuosikirja, which is a fully open access peer-reviewed game studies journal published in Finnish.

To make our publications more easily available, we have added our full publication list on the CoE GameCult website, including links to their open access versions: https://coe-gamecult.org/publications.

Open data

At the time of creating our Open Science strategy, we had not opened any of our research data. Since then, we have organised researcher training of opening data and collaborated with the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) to instruct our researchers on archiving their data. We have also mapped out all the existing datasets collected by CoE GameCult researchers and their level of openness. In March 2022, several datasets have been opened (see the list below), and there are plans for opening many more after the current analysis has been concluded.

Currently opened datasets:

Public societal interactions

In connection to our annual reporting to the Academy of Finland, we have also tracked the numbers of the public events organised by the CoE, public talks given by our researchers, public media interactions by our researchers, and other public societal interactions based on CoE GameCult research. In March 2022, our current reported number of such interactions is 408.

We have also listed public events organised by the CoE and selected media appearances from CoE GameCult researchers on our website.