"Fostering Undergraduate Academic Research: Rolling out a Tech Stack with AI-Powered Tools in a Library"


With the increasing integration of AI tools like Yewno Discover, Scholarcy, and Grammarly in academic libraries, undergraduate research has witnessed transformative changes. These tools, while elevating the research process, also bring forth challenges rooted in ethics and application. . . . This paper underscores the need for proactive measures in academic settings, including specialized training and policy development, to ensure that undergraduate researchers harness the power of AI responsibly and efficiently.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2024.2316523

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| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

Research Data Librarian at Cornell University


Reporting to the Director, Research Data and Open Scholarship (RDOS), the Research Data Librarian helps support Cornell University researchers throughout the research data lifecycle to meet their planning, management, analysis, sharing and archival needs. The Research Data Librarian collaborates with peers in RDOS, the Digital Scholarship Services group, and other library and disciplinary units to provide a suite of services related to the stewardship of findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable data. This may include advising researchers on the use of disciplinary repositories, Cornell’s eCommons Institutional Repository, and other data sharing and preservation platforms to facilitate discovery, reproducibility and long-term access.

https://tinyurl.com/ycy2xwhc

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"Are Price, Value, and Openness the Most Important Scholarly Communication Priorities?"


Specifically, academia has an enormous stake in imperatives like ensuring the trustworthiness of the scholarly record, providing for the platforms through which humans and machines will engage with scholarship, and addressing the atomization of the scholarly article. These topics demand collaboration by academia and research publishers. The current investments in developing AI-powered tools that support scholarly communication — and in resisting some of the challenges posed by the use of AI — makes these kinds of partnerships only more important and urgent. But how can academia and publishers build the basis for stronger collaboration when so much of the relationship in recent decades has been adversarial?

https://tinyurl.com/ppmucwn5

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| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

"Citation Amnesia: NLP and Other Academic Fields Are in a Citation Age Recession"


This study examines the tendency to cite older work across 20 fields of study over 43 years (1980–2023). . . . Our analysis, based on a dataset of approximately 240 million papers, reveals a broader scientific trend: many fields have markedly declined in citing older works (e.g., psychology, computer science). . . . Our results suggest that citing more recent works is not directly driven by the growth in publication rates. . . even when controlling for an increase in the volume of papers. Our findings raise questions about the scientific community’s engagement with past literature, particularly for NLP, and the potential consequences of neglecting older but relevant research.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12046

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| Digital Scholarship |

"Additional Experiments Required: A Scoping Review of Recent Evidence on Key Aspects of Open Peer Review"


Diverse efforts are underway to reform the journal peer review system. Combined with growing interest in Open Science practices, Open Peer Review (OPR) has become of central concern to the scholarly community. However, what OPR is understood to encompass and how effective some of its elements are in meeting the expectations of diverse communities, are uncertain. This scoping review updates previous efforts to summarize research on OPR to May 2022. Following the PRISMA methodological framework, it addresses the question: "What evidence has been reported in the scientific literature from 2017 to May 2022 regarding uptake, attitudes, and efficacy of two key aspects of OPR (Open Identities and Open Reports)?" The review identifies, analyses and synthesizes 52 studies matching inclusion criteria, finding that OPR is growing, but still far from common practice. Our findings indicate positive attitudes towards Open Reports and more sceptical approaches to Open Identities. Changes in reviewer behaviour seem limited and no evidence for lower acceptance rates of review invitations or slower turnaround times is reported in those studies examining those issues. Concerns about power dynamics and potential backfiring on critical reviews are in need of further experimentation. We conclude with an overview of evidence gaps and suggestions for future research. Also, we discuss implications for policy and practice, both in the scholarly communications community and the research evaluation community more broadly.Diverse efforts are underway to reform the journal peer review system. Combined with growing interest in Open Science practices, Open Peer Review (OPR) has become of central concern to the scholarly community. However, what OPR is understood to encompass and how effective some of its elements are in meeting the expectations of diverse communities, are uncertain. This scoping review updates previous efforts to summarize research on OPR to May 2022. Following the PRISMA methodological framework, it addresses the question: "What evidence has been reported in the scientific literature from 2017 to May 2022 regarding uptake, attitudes, and efficacy of two key aspects of OPR (Open Identities and Open Reports)?" The review identifies, analyses and synthesizes 52 studies matching inclusion criteria, finding that OPR is growing, but still far from common practice. Our findings indicate positive attitudes towards Open Reports and more sceptical approaches to Open Identities. Changes in reviewer behaviour seem limited and no evidence for lower acceptance rates of review invitations or slower turnaround times is reported in those studies examining those issues. Concerns about power dynamics and potential backfiring on critical reviews are in need of further experimentation. We conclude with an overview of evidence gaps and suggestions for future research. Also, we discuss implications for policy and practice, both in the scholarly communications community and the research evaluation community more broadly.

https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvae004

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| Digital Scholarship |

Open Scholarship in the Humanities


The book begins with the history of digital developments and their influence on the founding of international policies toward open scholarship. The concept of making research more freely available to the broader community, in practice, will require changes across every part of the system: government agencies, funders, university administrators, publishers, libraries, researchers and IT developers. To this end, the book sheds light on the urgent need for partnership and collaboration between diverse stakeholders to address multi-level barriers to both the policy and practical implementation of open scholarship. It also highlights the specific challenges confronted by the humanities which often makes their presentation in accessible open formats more costly and complex. Finally, the authors illustrate some promising international examples and ways forward for their implementation. The book ends by asking the reader to view their role as a researcher, university administrator, or member of government or philanthropic funding body, through new lenses. It highlights how, in our digital era, the frontiers through which knowledge is being advanced and shared can reshape the landscape for academic research to have the greatest impact for society.

http://tinyurl.com/2453s6du

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"Training Generative AI Models on Copyrighted Works Is Fair Use"


Why are scholars and librarians so invested in protecting the precedent that training AI LLMs on copyright-protected works is a transformative fair use? Rachael G. Samberg, Timothy Vollmer, and Samantha Teremi (of UC Berkeley Library) recently wrote that maintaining the continued treatment of training AI models as fair use is "essential to protecting research," including non-generative, nonprofit educational research methodologies like text and data mining (TDM). If fair use rights were overridden and licenses restricted researchers to training AI on public domain works, scholars would be limited in the scope of inquiries that can be made using AI tools. Works in the public domain are not representative of the full scope of culture, and training AI on public domain works would omit studies of contemporary history, culture, and society from the scholarly record, as Authors Alliance and LCA [Library Copyright Alliance] described in a recent petition to the US Copyright Office. Hampering researchers’ ability to interrogate modern in-copyright materials through a licensing regime would mean that research is less relevant and useful to the concerns of the day.

http://tinyurl.com/7jkyt2ae

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
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| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

Director of Digital Initiatives at University of Rochester Libraries


The Director of Digital Initiatives is responsible for the overall direction, development, and management of the River Campus Libraries’ (RCL) core and emerging digital infrastructure in support RCL’s strategic aims and the teaching, learning, and research mission of the University. Reporting to the Assistant/Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources and Curation, this position works closely with library administration, colleagues, and stakeholders to collaboratively envision and implement innovative services and technologies that underpin a wide range of programs and services. This role directs a team of nine to ensure the sustainable and effective operation of the Libraries’ core enterprise-systems, connections to/integrations with key University and vendor systems, and the development and implementation of new applications and services.

http://tinyurl.com/5zkv9esj

| Digital Library Jobs |
| Electronic Resources Jobs |
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| Digital Scholarship |

Ithaka S+R: The Second Digital Transformation of Scholarly Publishing


Today, the scholarly publishing sector is undergoing its second digital transformation. The first digital transformation saw a massive shift from paper to digital, but otherwise publishing retained many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era. A variety of shared infrastructure was developed to serve the needs of this first digital transformation. In this current second digital transformation, many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era are being revamped in favor of new approaches that bring tremendous opportunities, and also non-trivial risks, to scholarly communication. The second digital transformation requires shared infrastructure that is fit for purpose. It is our objective with this paper to examine the needs for shared infrastructure that will support this second digital transformation.

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.320210

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| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

"OASPA Members Pass the 1M Articles Annual Output Milestone for the First Time in a Calendar Year"


Members published just over 1.1m articles in 2022, passing the 1m articles annual output milestone for the first time. However, 2022 output grew by 16% over 2021, which is around one third of the long-term average. . . .

The top 3 publishers account for 53% of OASPA members’ output, the top 5 for 73% and the top 10 for 88% of it. This shows a slightly higher degree of consolidation compared with last year. We see greater levels of consolidation for CC BY licenses overall, and greater still for CC BY licenses published in fully-OA journals.

http://tinyurl.com/4988kbny

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

"A Critical Survey of Open-Access Policies in US Land Grants"


Introduction: Land-grant universities in the United States and the international open-access (OA) movement both purport to advance public access to knowledge and assert a public benefit to doing so. The objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that land-grant universities would have a high rate of adoption of institutional OA policies. To date, no study has looked at OA approaches or policies across the land grants.

Methods: This study considers the critical literature on both land-grants and OA, surveys land-grant institutional OA policies, and analyzes relevant demographic and financial data.

Results: The study identified 15 mandates and 4 resolutions across the diverse institutional types and populations represented in the 112 land-grants. None of the 21 historically Black colleges and universities or 35 tribal colleges and universities among the land-grants have adopted OA policies.

Conclusion: Despite shared objectives, land-grant colleges and universities have not systematically embraced OA, and relatively few have adopted institutional OA policies. In the context of profound, institutionalized inequities among the land-grants, and attentive to the potential of OA to deepen existing inequities, this study considers the causes of and implications for low institutional OA policy adoption among land-grants.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.15605

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| Digital Scholarship |

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

| Artificial Intelligence and Libraries Bibliography |
Research Data Curation and Management Works |
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| Digital Scholarship |

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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| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

Richard Poynder Is "Signing Off from Reporting on Open Access"

On X, well-known independent journalist and blogger Richard Poynder said: "The movement has failed and is being rebranded in order to obscure the failure. Time to move on."

In a second post, he provided a further explanation (this is an JPEG file).

Richard Poynder has made 71,000 posts on X/Twitter.

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
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| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

"’On the Ruins of Seriality’: The Scientific Journal and the Nature of the Scientific Life"


The serialization of scientific print began around 1800 as an effort to challenge elite science and to make knowledge accessible to broader publics. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the scientific journal developed into the central institution of knowledge legitimization, bound up with discourses of objectivity, vocational dedication, and communal virtue. Since the last few decades, however, the journal has been at the heart of crisis narratives that warn of the erosion of science’s moral basis and creative capacity. Competition, careerism, and perverse incentives—reflected in and produced by the serial format—have left the scientific self without a sense of calling, the "scientific community" without a sense of community, and the general public of science without a sense of trust. Twenty-first-century science finds itself "on the ruins of seriality" (Lerner, 2015, p. 132).

Yet there have hardly been any attempts to reimagine scholarly communication without the journal in a central position.24 Notwithstanding vigorous debate on its (de)merits and intense experimentation with peer review and open publishing platforms, the scientific journal has proven to be a "sticky" institution. . . . And although in the digital world the journal’s constitutive nature as a serial format is becoming less and less relevant, it is still primarily the paper—as the base unit of scientific publication—that conditions the modalities of scientific research, writing, and reading, and orients conceptions of scholarly selfhood in both the scientific and the general culture.

The commercial publishers have also demonstrated their stickiness. The open access movement has posed a serious challenge, but all in all the publishing companies have been able to integrate demands for "openness" into their business models (just as the scientific societies were able to adapt to the rise of commercial publishing in the postwar period). . . . So, despite predictions that "networked brains" would revolutionize scientific communication and produce "an unprecedented public good" (Guédon, 2017), open access has essentially come to mean "pay to publish," that is, a return to the situation before the ascendancy of the subscription journal (see also Noel, 2020).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2023.100885

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| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

Librarian – Electronic Resources at Western New Mexico University


  1. Investigates, recommends, implements, manages, and troubleshoots access to electronic library resources, including databases, e-books, and other applications. Ensures that electronic resources maintain compatibility with existing library systems.
  2. Establishes and maintains relationships with vendors to learn about relevant new products and services.

https://wnmu.peopleadmin.com/postings/1595

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Information Specialist – Open Science at University of Texas at San Antonio


Provide research and instruction services to students and faculty in STEM areas advancing student success and research excellence at UTSA with a focus on open science, reproducible research principles, measuring, and communicating research impact

https://tinyurl.com/ynvam6zv

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| Electronic Resources Jobs |
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| Digital Scholarship |

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge


Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is an open textbook and practitioner’s guide that collects theory, practice, and case studies from nearly 80 experts in scholarly communication and open education. Divided into three parts:

  • What is Scholarly Communication?
  • Scholarly Communication and Open Culture
  • Voices from the Field: Perspectives, Intersections, and Case Studies

The book delves into the economic, social, policy, and legal aspects of scholarly communication as well as open access, open data, open education, and open science and infrastructure. Practitioners provide insight into the relationship between university presses and academic libraries, defining collection development as operational scholarly communication, and promotion and tenure and the challenge for open access.

https://bit.ly/SCLAOK

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"AI Will Lead Us to Need More Garbage-subtraction"


If submission rates increase because more papers are being written with the support of generative AI systems, then the problems of editorial review will only multiply. Probably, these new papers will find some publication home in some journal or find their way into some pre-print repository. This increase in the average amount of content produced per researcher could increase the potential of having some great new discovery. Unfortunately, it will probably just be more content overall. The act of selection and curation will be increasingly more valuable, because the volume of content will overwhelm practically every field and every subdomain.

https://tinyurl.com/2rxah6x7

| Artificial Intelligence and Libraries Bibliography |
Research Data Curation and Management Works |
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"Where Is All the Research Software? An Analysis of Software in UK Academic Repositories"


This research examines the prevalence of research software as independent records of output within UK academic institutional repositories (IRs). There has been a steep decline in numbers of research software submissions to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework from 2008 to 2021, but there has been no investigation into whether and how the official academic IRs have affected the low return rates. In what we believe to be the first such census of its kind, we queried the 182 online repositories of 157 UK universities. Our findings show that the prevalence of software within UK Academic IRs is incredibly low. Fewer than 28% contain software as recognised academic output. Of greater concern, we found that over 63% of repositories do not currently record software as a type of research output and that several Universities appeared to have removed software as a defined type from default settings of their repository. We also explored potential correlations, such as being a member of the Russell group, but found no correlation between these metadata and prevalence of records of software. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings with regards to the lack of recognition of software as a discrete research output in institutions, despite the opposite being mandated by funders, and we make recommendations for changes in policies and operating procedures.

https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.1546

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Zenodo Mandates Document Submission to a Community and Peer Review


What’s more, content submitted to Zenodo would be published automatically within the repository before and whether or not it was accepted into a community. Now, when a researcher goes to publish their outputs, they must select their community and submit their work for peer review, before it is made public. Community curators will then review the content to see if it fits within the community even have the capability to improve and correct the metadata to ensure that it meets quality standards. Once the metadata is approved, it will then be published in Zenodo and, consequently, integrated into the OpenAIRE Graph.

https://tinyurl.com/5y79y2nb

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| Digital Scholarship |

Paywall: "Trends in Research Impact Librarianship: Developing a New Program and Services"


Research impact librarianship is an area within the profession that continues to grow out of need for dedicated expertise of bibliometrics and other various assessment measures.. . . The Libraries at the University of Houston is in the midst of creating a research visibility and impact program born out of an initiative to elevate the university’s level of prestige and impact by developing personnel, programs, and practices to support research visibility and impact across the institution. This article discusses the University of Houston Libraries’ process and progress toward formalizing research impact services.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2023.2262364

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Digital Library Developer at University of Kentucky


The University of Kentucky Libraries seeks applications for a Digital Library Developer. As a member of Web Technologies and Development, a unit of Digital Strategies and Technology, this position directly supports applications and services relating to the discovery, delivery, storage, and preservation of the University’s digital collections. Development duties relate to the creation, implementation, and support of software applications comprising the Libraries’ web applications, including software to assist in internal workflow and operations.

https://ukjobs.uky.edu/postings/495295

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Octopus Publishing Platform: A Snapshot of the Academic Research Culture in 2023 and How It Might Be Improved


Our evaluation revealed a wide variety of barriers to more open sharing of research. While some are related to perceived or experienced biases based on personal characteristics such as gender or inequitable access to support, most result from a research culture that primarily assesses achievement and quality through traditional, peer-reviewed papers. This focus, and the resulting competition, encourages researchers to hide their work at least until a traditional journal paper is published. In some situations, these pressures lead to questionable research practices, such as data manipulation to achieve an "interesting" or statistically significant result more likely to appeal to a journal with higher impact metrics or perceived "impact". In general, open research practices are viewed as not beneficial, or even detrimental, to job security and career advancement. This is especially true given competing demands and the need for academics to prioritise their time on outputs that count in assessments that they are subject to.

https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.8165703

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