A glimpse into the issue’s content:

Editorial – Embracing Open Access and FAIR Publishing Principles by Editor in Chief – Pietro Gennari

The editorial outlines a comprehensive vision for the SJIAOS’s adoption of Open Access and FAIR publishing principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), emphasising its vital role in disseminating methodological research and best practices in official statistics. The key challenges and complexities of implementing FAIR principles are discussed, stressing the importance of adopting stringent citation and metadata documentation practices while ensuring open access not only to papers but also to referenced data sets, graphs, and tables through hyperlinks.

The editorial explores, at the same time, the benefits and challenges of transitioning to full open access, like financial sustainability and inclusivity, and proposes a few distinct mechanisms for resource recovery that would not burden authors, especially those from developing countries and those not institutionally supported. Achieving open access requires a multifaceted strategy and the collective effort of the entire community of official statisticians with a view to ensuring a more equitable and interconnected landscape of statistical research.

Register-based Population Statistics (by Jean-Michel Durr)

This section focuses on the evolution of Population and Housing Censuses to reduce costs, improve data quality, and shorten processing times. In this regard, the increasing use of geographical information systems, electronic means of data collection, and administrative sources is highlighted. The absence of an established population register means that several administrative sources must be integrated and cross-checked. This raises issues of record linkage, record matching, and decision-making in the event of discrepancies between data sources. The three articles included in this section illustrate the experiences of New Zealand, Iran, and the US in using advanced data science techniques to address these issues.

New Developments in Science Publishing in Official Statistics

This section summarises the main conclusions of the Invited Paper Session on this topic held at the ISI World Statistics Congress in Ottawa. Pieter Everaers, then Editor-in-Chief of SJIAOS, introduces the four papers presented at that session. The first paper, by Gaby Umbach, discusses the four academic openness paradigms, their meanings and interrelations, as well as the potential benefits and challenges arising from their application in data-driven academic research. In the second paper, Francesca Perucci and Eric Swanson, from Open Data Watch, identify key factors that promote the expansion of open data adoption. In this regard, they highlight the modernization of data governance, the increased importance of citizens’ contributions to data production, and the role of watchdog organisations in monitoring progress. In the third paper, Christine Laaboudi, Martin Karlberg, and Maja Islam describe the new Eurostat approach to open data dissemination, the challenges faced, and the initiatives taken to adopt a Linked-Open-Data approach. Lastly, Gregory Arofan from CODATA advocates for increased involvement of the official statistics community in the FAIR movement. He lists various projects and activities as a starting point for statistical organisations wishing to increase their contributions in science publishing.

Miscellaneous Papers

Diverse papers in this section cover a wide range of methodological research in statistical and academic institutions. Topics include testing the multivariate distributional accuracy of state-of-the-art imputation methods; introducing an open-source tool for efficient computation of Kantorovich-Wasserstein Distance between spatial distributions; assessing data quality in blended data on three health-related case studies; proposing a new methodology for measuring inflation in Kazakhstan; analysing grape farm efficiency in Armenia; and highlighting the mutual benefits of establishing partnerships between national statistical offices and academia.

These diverse papers, either proposing new tools and methods, or applying them to a variety of use-cases or domains, offer valuable insights that significantly contribute to the field of official statistics.