The Research Data Services Landscape at US and Canadian Higher Education Institutions


The following are our high-level findings:

  • While there are wide divergences in the number and variety of services offered both within and across Carnegie Classifications, R1 institutions offer approximately three times the number of services offered by R2s, and more than nine times the number offered by liberal arts colleges.
  • General research data services are the most common type offered regardless of institution type. Statistical services, geospatial services, and visualization services are also common at research universities, which typically offer a much wider range of specialized services than liberal arts colleges.
  • Libraries remain the largest provider of research data services at US and Canadian research universities, but IT and units associated with the research office play important collaborative roles, especially with specialized services.
  • Bioinformatics services are offered almost exclusively through the interdisciplinary units associated with the research office or core facilities associated with medical schools.
  • Consulting services are the most common mode of service provision, comprising almost three quarters of all data services.

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.320420

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White Paper: AI Perceptions at the University of Baltimore


This white paper, produced by the UBalt AI team, explores the perceptions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and generative AI within the UBalt community. It aims to uncover how students, faculty, and staff view AI’s role and implications in the educational landscape. The university collaborated with Ithaka S+R to acquire established, reliable and valid surveys from the AI literature, which was then adapted by the UBalt AI team to meet the needs of our academic community. This survey included a blend of both quantitative and qualitative questions, ensuring a deep understanding of the respondents’ views. . . . The responses obtained were then analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics, as well as an exploratory qualitative analysis to extract meaningful insights, setting the stage for informed discussions and decision-making around AI in education.

http://tinyurl.com/mr47zx3j

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Current State and Future Directions for Open Repositories in Europe


In January 2023, OpenAIRE, LIBER, SPARC Europe, and COAR launched a joint strategy aimed at strengthening the European repository network. As a first step, a survey of the European repository landscape was undertaken in February-March 2023. The survey found that, collectively, European repositories acquire, preserve and provide open access to tens or possibly hundreds of millions of valuable research outputs and represent critical, not-for-profit infrastructure in the European open science landscape. They are used for sharing articles that may be pay-walled in published journals, but also for providing access to a large variety of other types of research outputs including research data, theses/dissertations, conference papers, preprints, code, and so on.

However, in order to ensure the European repository network is fit for purpose and able to support the evolving needs of the research community, the survey also identified three areas in particular that could be strengthened: maintaining up-to-date, highly functioning software platforms; applying consistent and comprehensive good practices in terms of metadata, preservation, and usage statistics; and gaining appropriate visibility in the scholarly ecosystem.

Despite the challenges, the current climate offers exciting opportunities for repositories. Many funders are actively promoting the repository route for articles because of their role in supporting equitable access to content (i.e. no fees to access or deposit). The value proposition for open science is growing and repositories are increasingly recognised as the main mechanism for collecting and providing access to a wide range of other research outputs. Add to this, the nascent, but growing, interest in the publish-review-curate model in which repositories have a central function, and it seems they are well placed to expand their current role in the ecosystem.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10255559

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STM: "New White Paper Launch: Generative AI in Scholarly Communications"


The paper looks at the ethical, legal, and practical aspects of GenAI, highlighting its potential to transform scholarly communications, and covers a range of topics from intellectual property rights to the challenges of maintaining integrity in the digital age. The paper provides best-practice principles and recommendations for authors, editorial teams, reviewers, and vendors, ensuring a responsible and ethical approach to the use of GenAI tools.

https://tinyurl.com/4m6m8n9j

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MIT: "New White Paper ‘Access to Science and Scholarship: Key Questions about the Future of Research Publishing’"


The project—including MIT Press’s Director and Publisher Amy Brand and Director of Journals and Open Access Nick Lindsay—examines the current state of the research enterprise and what might come next. . . .

To illustrate how researcher behavior, funder policies, and publisher business models and incentives interact, part 1 of this report presents an historical overview of open access publishing. Part 2 of the report provides a list of key questions for further investigation to understand, measure, and best prepare for the impact of new policies related to open access in research publishing, categorized into six general areas: access and business models, research data, preprint publishing, peer review, costs to researchers and universities, and infrastructure.

https://tinyurl.com/2s3fb7n8

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Two Reports on Scientific Publishing from the International Science Council


The Council’s studies led to development of eight essential principles for modern scientific publication, which were endorsed by over 90% of the membership present at its 2021 General Assembly. The principles are listed in Paper One, The Key Principles for Scientific Publishing accompanied by an analysis of the extent to which they are observed operationally. . . .

Paper Two, The case for reform of scientific publishing, identifies many of the failures to observe the principles in Paper One as lying within the commercial sector of scientific publication. It lies not only in so-called predatory publishing, where lax or non-existent editorial standards provide a low barrier to publication, but also in journals that, although they have far higher standards, compromise the essential global distribution of scientific knowledge by excessive prices and profit margins.

International Science Council members include 45 international scientific Unions and Associations, over 140 national and regional scientific organizations, and other organizations.

https://tinyurl.com/mnavvrxt

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Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect


Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect documents a variety of data privacy practices that directly conflict with library privacy standards, and raises important questions regarding the potential for personal data collected from academic products to be used in the data brokering and surveillance products of RELX’s LexisNexis subsidiary. By analyzing the privacy practices of the world’s largest publisher, the report describes how user tracking that would be unthinkable in a physical library setting now happens routinely through publisher platforms. The analysis underlines the concerns this tracking should raise, particularly when the same company is involved in surveillance and data brokering activities. Elsevier is a subsidiary of RELX, a leading data broker and provider of "risk" products that offer expansive databases of personal information to corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies.

https://zenodo.org/records/10078610

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"Results of the 2022 NDSA Web Archiving Survey Report Now Available"


The Web Archiving Survey Working Group is excited to announce the publication of the results of the 2022 Web Archiving Survey. The 2022 survey builds upon surveys previously conducted in 2017, 2016, 2013, and 2011 — and though previous surveys were focused on the United States, the 2022 survey was open to international audiences as well. The 26-question survey was completed by 190 respondents over a 10-day period. This report details the outcomes of the web archiving survey that was distributed to various local, national, and international professional organizations and topical groups in October 2022. Topics discussed included archiving policies, tools and services, and access and discovery.

https://tinyurl.com/mpjjdfse

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Delta Think Open Access Journals Report: "Market Sizing Update 2023"


  • 2022’s OA market grew by a little over 24% from 2021. This is around two thirds of the growth we saw in 2021. . . .
  • Given the exceptionally high growth in 2020 and 2021, a correction in 2022 was expected. . . .
  • Growth in hybrid revenues was a major factor driving growth in OA, although all types of OA saw improved revenues per article, which helped to drive growth.
  • Currency effects contributed to reduced growth. Many publishers operate in non-USD currencies, which lost value against the US dollar in 2022. . . .
  • Just over 49% of all scholarly articles were published as paid-for open access in 2022, accounting for just under 20% of the total journal publishing market value.
  • We anticipate a 2022-2025 CAGR (average growth each year) of 13% in OA output and 13% in OA market value.

https://tinyurl.com/5n7m6n5k

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Access to Science and Scholarship: Key Questions about the Future of Research Publishing


The health of the research enterprise is closely tied to the effectiveness of the scientific and scholarly publishing ecosystem. Policy-, technology-, and market-driven changes in publishing models over the last two decades have triggered a number of disruptions within this ecosystem:

  • Ongoing increases in the cost of journal publishing, with dominant open access models shifting costs from subscribers to authors
  • Significant consolidation and vertical (supply chain) integration in the publishing industry, and a decline in society-owned subscription journals that have long subsidized scientific and scholarly societies
  • A dramatic increase in the number of "predatory" journals with substandard peer review
  • Decline in the purchasing power of academic libraries relative to the quantity and cost of published research

To illustrate how researcher behavior, funder policies, and publisher business models and incentives interact, this report presents an historical overview of open access publishing. The report also provides a list of key questions for further investigation to understand, measure, and best prepare for the impact of new policies related to open access in research publishing, categorized into six general areas: access and business models, research data, preprint publishing, peer review, costs to researchers and universities, and infrastructure.

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/152414

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"2024 EBSCO Serials Price Projection Report"


Each year, EBSCO strives to help its academic and academic medical library customers plan their library budgets by projecting publisher price increases for the upcoming year. We use recent information received from publishers, as well as historical price data to calculate these projections. As of now, we expect the overall effective publisher price increases for academic and academic medical libraries in 2024 to be in the range of three to four percent for individual titles and two to three percent for e-journal packages.

https://tinyurl.com/2s3akjmw

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Looking Towards a Brighter Future: The Potentiality of AI and Digital Transformations to Library Spaces


At the University of Leeds, we have developed an ambitious, bold vision for our libraries called Knowledge for all. Knowledge for all sets out the libraries’ direction for 2030, and digital transformation is critical in making our vision a reality. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Libraries Project forms the basis of this report and it is one of the steps the library is taking to achieve its bold vision. This vision is fully embraced by the University of Leeds as part of the university’s development strategy.

https://tinyurl.com/44v2c5w8

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"Indeed’s ‘AI at Work Report’ Finds GenAI will Impact Almost Every Job in America"


Indeed’s AI at Work Report analyzed more than 55 million job postings on Indeed and 2,600 job skills to identify the exposure level (low/moderate/high) GenAI will have on jobs and the skills required to perform them. . . .

Software development jobs face the highest potential exposure, with GenAI "good" or "excellent" at 95% of the skills mentioned in Indeed job postings. Driving jobs, like truck and taxi drivers, face the lowest potential exposure, with GenAI proficient at less than a third (29%) of the skills mentioned. Retail jobs fell in the middle with GenAI being effective at 57.6% of the skills.

https://tinyurl.com/5y8j7a7y

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Knowledge Exchange Report: "Alternative Publishing Platforms. What Have We Learnt?"


  • From our sample, no pattern emerged of any discipline appearing to be more innovative than any others, and indeed most alternative platforms seemed to be open to use by all fields.
  • Most platforms within this survey were replacing the function of existing publishers in publishing research articles, books and conference proceedings. There was some innovation around peer review. Considering both of these aspects, only a small group of fewer than 10 of the 45 platforms should probably be described as truly exploring "alternative ways" of doing things.
  • Only 11 of the platforms said that they solely concentrated on the methodological quality of the work, 2 solely on the impact of the work. Most said it was up to the editors to decide on criteria for assessment — the platforms themselves were agnostic. This is an area where further work might help elucidate the philosophies of different platforms when it comes to research assessment.

https://tinyurl.com/59eknvy6

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"Meta Sets GPT-4 as the Bar for Its Next AI Model, Says a New Report"


The company reportedly plans to begin training the new large language model early in 2024, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg evidently pushing for it to once again be free for companies to create AI tools with. . . .

OpenAI said in April that it wasn’t training a GPT-5 and "won’t for some time," but Apple has reportedly been dumping millions of dollars daily into its own "Ajax" AI model that it apparently thinks is more powerful than even GPT-4.

https://tinyurl.com/5e85vyu6

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Pew Research Center: What Americans Know About AI, Cybersecurity and Big Tech


Overall, Americans answer a median of five out of nine questions correctly on a digital knowledge survey that Pew Research Center conducted among 5,101 U.S. adults from May 15 to May 21, 2023. The questions span a range of topics, including cybersecurity practices, facts about major technology companies, artificial intelligence and federal online privacy laws.

Some 26% of U.S. adults can answer at least seven of the nine questions accurately, but just 4% can correctly answer all nine.

https://tinyurl.com/582bwmf3

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Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) Project: TOME Stakeholder Value Assessment: Final Report


The Association of American Universities, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Association of University Presses published a final report assessing the success of the Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) project. The five-year pilot project engaged with more than 60 university presses and more than 150 open access scholarly works to encourage sustainable digital publication of and public access to scholarly books. The Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) project was launched in 2018 to publish humanities and social science scholarship on the internet, where these peer-reviewed works can be fully integrated into the larger network of scholarly and scientific research. The final report examines whether the pilot’s community of writers, institutions, libraries, and presses found it useful.

https://tinyurl.com/3wr7wv37

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Generative AI and the Future of Work in America


By 2030, activities that account for up to 30 percent of hours currently worked across the US economy could be automated—a trend accelerated by generative AI. However, we see generative AI enhancing the way STEM, creative, and business and legal professionals work rather than eliminating a significant number of jobs outright. Automation’s biggest effects are likely to hit other job categories. Office support, customer service, and food service employment could continue to decline. . . .

An additional 12 million occupational transitions may be needed by 2030. As people leave shrinking occupations, the economy could reweight toward higher-wage jobs. Workers in lower-wage jobs are up to 14 times more likely to need to change occupations than those in highest-wage positions, and most will need additional skills to do so successfully. Women are 1.5 times more likely to need to move into new occupations than men.

https://tinyurl.com/yn2xdt7p

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Report on Standards for Best Publishing Practices and Technical Requirements in Light of the FAIR Principles


This report has provided an overview of the current state of scholarly publishing practices and technical requirements in the context of FAIR principles. The report highlights the importance of interoperability to enable discoverability, reuse, and reproducibility of research outputs. In addition to creating an initial connection between scholarly publishing practices and the technical requirements of the FAIR principles, this is (as far as we know) the first attempt to systematically collect and compare the different requirements set by the selected policies and services with each other. From the perspective of a publisher, it would be desirable for the requirements set by different actors to be aligned (so as not to be incompatible with each other), and offer some degree of progression in compliance and implementation so that it is not a matter of all or nothing. This is particularly relevant for the requirements set by DOAJ and cOAlition S, which are essential for most OA journals to fulfil. The requirements criteria set by both of these organisations include both basic and recommended levels. Based on our review, we found that they are well-aligned. If a journal fulfils the requirements of one, it will fulfil a number of requirements of the other.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8112661

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Opening Knowledge: Retaining Rights and Open Licensing in Europe


This report investigates the current landscape of non-legislative policy practices affecting researchers and authors in the authors’ rights and licensing domain. It is an outcome of research conducted by Project Retain led by SPARC Europe, as part of the Knowledge Rights 21 programme. The report concludes with a set of recommendations for institutional policymakers, funders and legislators, and publishers. It is accompanied by the study dataset.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8084050

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Open Science Services by Research Libraries: Organisational Perspectives — A LIBER and ADBU Report


Many research libraries in Europe deliver Open Science services in the field of RDM and OA. However, it is estimated that up to half of European research libraries deliver only limited services in these domains. LIBER and ADBU conducted a study to understand the organisational structures and competences needed to create, and sustain, these services.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8060242

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Plan S: "Transformative Journals: Analysis from the 2022 Reports"


However, despite these positive developments, it is clearly disappointing that over two thirds (68%) of the journals in the TJ programme failed to meet their OA growth targets. And, as made clear last year, titles which do not meet their targets will be removed from the TJ programme. . . .Looking at the performance of individual publishers, the data shows that some 77% (1329) of titles published by Springer Nature — by far the largest publisher in the programme with some 1721 TJ titles — failed to meet their TJ targets. For Elsevier and the America Chemical Society (ACS) the figures were 63% (115 titles) and 56% (36 titles), respectively.

https://tinyurl.com/yh8rhyex

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What Direct Support Is Available for Open-Access Diamond Journals? Funding Models and Arrangements For Implementation


The author-pays model for open-access journals is increasingly criticised because of the inequalities it generates and its unsustainability due to a lack of cost control. In this context, our study examines the funding models for Diamond journals — academic journals which are published with no direct payment made by the readers (unlike the subscription model) nor by the authors (author pays model). The aim of this work is to test the feasibility, as well as the desirability of a direct or explicit funding model for Diamond journals, something which is almost non-existent at present. We have two objectives here: on one hand, to understand the current Diamond journal funding arrangements and constraints, and on the other hand to propose specific arrangements for funding Diamond journals by research funders.

https://hal.science/hal-04133000v1

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ARL and CARL: Observations on Research Libraries’ Alignment with Institutional STEM Priorities


This report synthesizes the two associations’ joint exploration of the need for, and nature of, alignment of research libraries with their universities’ STEM priorities. The report notes the challenges to be overcome, and provides examples of the ways libraries are already working to strengthen and support STEM at their institutions. The report includes a summary of common themes as well as observations of each institution visited.

https://bit.ly/3qaF9Qq

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WorldFAIR Project (D13.2) Cultural Heritage Image Sharing Recommendations Report


Deliverable 13.2 aims to build on our understanding of what it means to support FAIR in the sharing of image data derived from GLAM collections. This report looks at previous efforts by the sector towards FAIR alignment and presents 5 recommendations designed to be implemented and tested at the DRI that are also broadly applicable to the work of the GLAMs. The recommendations are ultimately a roadmap for the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) to follow in improving repository services, as well as a call for continued dialogue around "what is FAIR?" within the cultural heritage research data landscape.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7897243

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