DigitalKoans – What Is the Sound of One E-Print Downloading?

Paywall: “An AI Is Going to Art School — and Might Earn a Diploma. Meet Flynn.”

The AI program, which is attending classes ahead of its enrollment in the fall [at the University of Applied Arts Vienna], is treated like any other student, university instructors said. It attends lectures, collaborates with classmates and will receive grades on submitted work. Flynn could, in theory, progress toward a diploma.

https://tinyurl.com/4wyz345u

Scholarly Communications Librarian at University of Cincinnati

Reporting to the Associate Dean for Research & Instruction, the Scholarly Communications Librarian is responsible for leading library publishing services and developing scholarly communication programs and services to advance open access through sustainable publishing models. This role requires an energetic professional with expertise in scholarly communications, a strong commitment to access to knowledge, and the ability to foster collaborations across stakeholders.

https://rb.gy/47ss6r

“Navigating the Introduction of Rights Retention: Lessons From Leeds Beckett University”

We, as many other institutions did, expected backlash. This has included:

Refusal to accept our prior notification as a blanket declaration and an expectation that we will inform them every time we submit something which falls under rights retention.

A publisher stating that papers with rights retention language won’t be rejected. However, no author manuscripts may be placed under a Creative Commons license, according to the terms of their journal policies. Any authors who wish to do so can only publish under the immediate gold open access route. Authors are asked to agree to this when signing their standard subscription licensing terms.

Another publisher asks authors to agree, as part of their author contract, that their publishing terms take precedence over any other terms authors assert during the publishing process. Authors must also sign that they haven’t assigned rights to any other third party for the article or content that will conflict with rights granted in the publishing terms.

One publisher has gone even further: due to the widespread adoption of rights retention in the UK, they now require all papers authored by someone from a UK institution to be published open access.

https://tinyurl.com/yau3x6te

Digital Scholarship Developer at University of Texas at San Antonio

Uses technical knowledge and skills around digital scholarship methods and technologies to achieve Libraries digital scholarship goals, foregrounding technical praxis, co-creation, and community engagement.

Oversees the digital scholarship project lab and staff.

Develops and maintains applications, platforms, and tools that support digital scholarship projects and initiatives using extensive technical skills and knowledge of digital scholarship best practices.

Supports and advances the work of the Community-Engaged Digital Scholarship Hub, a collaborative effort between librarians, faculty, or community members.

https://tinyurl.com/2a6hdsbc

“Geographical and Disciplinary Coverage of Open Access Journals: OpenAlex, Scopus, and WoS”

This study aims to compare the geographical and disciplinary coverage of OA journals in three databases: OpenAlex, Scopus and the Web of Science (WoS). We used the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (ROAD), provided by the ISSN International Centre, as a reference to identify OA active journals (as of May 2024). Among the 62,701 active OA journals listed in ROAD, the WoS indexes 6,157 journals, Scopus indexes 7,351, while OpenAlex indexes 34,217. A striking observation is the presence of 24,976 OA journals exclusively in OpenAlex, whereas only 182 journals are exclusively present in the WoS and 373 in Scopus. The geographical analysis focuses on two levels: continents and countries. As for disciplinary comparison, we use the ten disciplinary levels of the ROAD database. Moreover, our findings reveal a similarity in OA journal coverage between the WoS and Scopus. However, while OpenAlex offers better inclusivity and indexing, it is not without biases. The WoS and Scopus predictably favor journals from Europe, North America and Oceania. Although OpenAlex presents a much more balanced indexing, certain regions and countries remain relatively underrepresented. Typically, Africa is proportionally as under-represented in OpenAlex as it is in Scopus, and some emerging countries are proportionally less represented in OpenAlex than in the WoS and Scopus. These results underscore a marked similarity in OA journal indexing between WoS and Scopus, while OpenAlex aligns more closely with the distribution observed in the ROAD database, although it also exhibits some representational biases.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320347

Digital Archivist at University of Kansas

This position plays a critical role in developing and implementing workflows, policies, and standards that ensure the integrity, accessibility, and sustainability of digital archives. The Digital Archivist will oversee the appraisal and description, processing, preservation of, and access to these materials, utilizing tools such as ArchivesSpace, Archivematica, DuraCloud, TreeSize, and Archive-It. Additionally, preservation assessments and format migrations will be conducted to maintain the usability of these digital assets over time.

https://tinyurl.com/24m2env7

“Charting Open Science Landscapes: A Systematized Review of Us Academic Libraries’ Engagement in Open Research Practices”

Open Science aims to make research publicly accessible, transparent, and reusable, promoting collaboration across disciplines and fostering relationships among government, academia, industry, and society. International and regional reviews have explored the roles of academic libraries in promoting open science on both global and local scales. However, practices within U.S. academic libraries have not been examined comprehensively. This study addresses this gap. We employ a systematized literature review methodology to map U.S. academic library engagement in key areas of open science (e.g., open access, open data, open educational resources) and overlap analysis is used to assess shifts from discrete initiatives (e.g., open access, research data management) to holistic, integrated services that span the research lifecycle. Using a comprehensive search strategy, we identified 3752 publications for inclusion in the study. We find that U.S. academic libraries are actively engaged in open science practices, with the most extensive involvement in open access and the provision of infrastructure to support open science. However, engagement in activities related to citizen science remains limited. Through thematic overlap analysis, we find that ~50 % of publications report activities across two or more themes of open science, suggesting a possible shift toward more comprehensive practices. A key challenge reported by libraries is the need for continuous professional development to address technical skills gaps. As research needs and corresponding librarian responsibilities continue to evolve, maintaining librarian professional development opportunities will remain crucial for equipping librarians with the skills necessary to continue supporting and advancing open science initiatives.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2025.103054

Director of Digital Scholarship and Scholarly Communication at Ball State University

The director will be responsible for developing and growing the suite of services around open access publishing, scholarly communication, digital scholarship projects, and open educational resources.

https://bsu.peopleadmin.com/postings/47418

“Rethinking How We Publish to Support Open Science”

The problems we outline are systemic in nature and solving them is a long-term multi-stakeholder challenge. But at PLOS, our vision is that we can contribute essential elements of the solution and start effecting change from within publishing. We have embarked on a Research and Design project (PLOS 2024, October) to define the key elements of a new publishing model, anchored in open science principles with an accompanying business model to sustain it that can broaden access and participation.

We started the strategic development leading to this project by considering the roles and functions of publishers as outlined above, to identify which parts to keep, which to evolve, and which to “re-invent” in order to support open science. This is particularly important given the emergence of new ways to openly disseminate research: preprint servers, specialised repositories for various research outputs, journal-independent peer review, etc. We also carried out a scan of the landscape and a series of structured interviews with representatives of stakeholder groups to test and clarify our initial hypotheses (Mudditt 2022).

As much as possible, we want to work with the non-profit organisations that provide new open services and functionalities. Our intention is not to usurp their role but to integrate effectively with them and identify the changes that PLOS, as a publisher, can make to support the principles of open science more effectively.

Our ambition is to design solutions that will help catalyse systemic change and we acknowledge the complexity of the change required. To be successful, the solutions we develop must not only inspire researchers and be supported by librarians, but also integrate with the systems of the stakeholders who provide both funding and recognition. Furthermore, a diversity of perspectives is essential. Solutions to open science challenges developed for social psychologists do not necessarily translate for biologists. Interventions designed for the Global North can be counter-productive in the Global South. Teaching institutions cannot necessarily adopt the solutions designed for research-intensive universities. Therefore, a key component of this project is a broad community consultation and communications programme. We will engage with stakeholders across sectors, disciplines, regions, and institution types to test our solution designs with as wide a range of actors as possible to avoid creating or reinforcing inequities.

https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.2006

Software Engineer at West Virginia University

The Software Engineer maintains and upgrades existing software applications and develops new software solutions in Ruby/Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Stimulus, PHP, Git, Github, HTML, and CSS/SCSS. This position will support open-source software applications hosted by WVU Libraries for internal and external stakeholders.

https://tinyurl.com/4v2tb456

“Research Data Governance. The Need for a System of Cross-Organisational Responsibility for the Researcher’s Data Domain”

The integration of research data management into academic workflows presents significant challenges for researchers, resulting in fragmented responsibility and accountability. This essay delves into the complexities surrounding the research data life cycle, revealing gaps in the existing governance systems. Researchers often encounter obstacles such as missing ethical approvals, inadequate data hosting solutions, and inconsistent data transfer regulations, all of which hinder their progress. These issues stem from a disconnection between the institutional governance structures and the practical needs of individual researchers. Current data policies in academic institutions place an overwhelming responsibility on researchers to manage the entire data life cycle, while leaving support frameworks ambiguous. This lack of coordinated responsibility structures hinders effective data management and governance. To address these challenges, the article proposes the development of a research-centric data governance system. This system aims to bridge the gap between institutional policies and discipline-specific requirements. By implementing a research data governance system, researchers can gain control over data ownership and align it with their research objectives.

https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2025-012

Open Education and Scholarly Communications Librarian at Grand Valley State University

The Open Education and Scholarly Communications Librarian leads the University Libraries’ support for open access publishing, open educational resources (OER), affordable course materials, and related initiatives. They manage, promote, and report on the Libraries’ services for faculty using, creating, and publishing OER, and serve as a subject expert on scholarly communications topics. This role works closely with library colleagues and university partners to advocate and work for more open, equitable, and sustainable practices in research and education.

https://tinyurl.com/36756yc7

“The Argument for Near-Term Human Disempowerment through AI”

Many researchers and intellectuals warn about extreme risks from artificial intelligence. However, these warnings typically came without systematic arguments in support. This paper provides an argument that AI will lead to the permanent disempowerment of humanity, e.g. human extinction, by 2100. It rests on four substantive premises which it motivates and defends: first, the speed of advances in AI capability, as well as the capability level current systems have already reached, suggest that it is practically possible to build AI systems capable of disempowering humanity by 2100. Second, due to incentives and coordination problems, if it is possible to build such AI, it will be built. Third, since it appears to be a hard technical problem to build AI which is aligned with the goals of its designers, and many actors might build powerful AI, misaligned powerful AI will be built. Fourth, because disempowering humanity is useful for a large range of misaligned goals, such AI will try to disempower humanity. If AI is capable of disempowering humanity and tries to disempower humanity by 2100, then humanity will be disempowered by 2100. This conclusion has immense moral and prudential significance.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-01930-2

DigitalKoans Posts Resume on 4/16/2025

DigitalKoans posts will resume on 4/16/2025.

Senior Software Developer (Digital Preservation) at University of Cambridge (Term)

Based within the Digital Innovation and Software Development team and working with the Programme’s Technical Lead, the role will focus on implementing systems and tools for digital preservation, including a cloud-native, open-source repository and preservation system with serverless workflows, and enabling and ensuring ongoing access and supporting tools for the deposit, search, discovery, and use of digital materials in the Library’s collections.

https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/50773/

“OpenAI’s New Image Generator Aims to Be Practical Enough for Designers and Advertisers”

Example images from OpenAI show progress here. The model is able to generate 12 discrete graphics within a single image—like a cat emoji or a lightning bolt—and place them in proper order. Another shows four cocktails accompanied by recipe cards with accurate, legible text. More images show comic strips with text bubbles, mock advertisements, and instructional diagrams. The model also allows you to upload images to be modified, and it will be available in the video generator Sora as well as in GPT-4o.

https://tinyurl.com/msnch7z5

Metadata Operations Specialist at Yale University

In this role, the Metadata Operations Specialist will leverage technical expertise to develop and execute automated solutions for metadata transformation and reconciliation. Usage of scripting languages such as Python and query languages such as SQL, SPARQL, or XQuery, as well as metadata tools and APIs, will be important for optimizing workflows and driving efficiency in metadata operations. The incumbent will also explore and recommend innovative technologies, including artificial intelligence and machine learning methods, to advance metadata processes and support the library’s evolving metadata ecosystem.

https://tinyurl.com/y3errrax

Vice-Provost (Libraries) and University Librarian at University of Manitoba

The University of Manitoba is the province’s only medical doctoral institution and is a member of Canada’s U15 group of research-intensive universities. The University offers a robust and diverse suite of over 100 graduate programs taught by award-winning professors and in partnerships with over 40 research centres and institutes. The University generates more than $1.7 billion in annual economic activity and attracts 200 million dollars annually in sponsored research income. The University’s culturally diverse community is home to over 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students, of which 21.3% are international students representing over 122 countries. . . .

In this role, the Vice-Provost (Libraries) serves as the principal expert on libraries, archives, and digital technologies, ensuring UML remains a dynamic hub of knowledge, discovery, and academic support.

https://tinyurl.com/4yt8bt27

“What’s in a Name? Exploring How Voluntary Library Data Literacy Workshop Titles and Descriptions Affect Learner Motivations to Enroll”

This study examined a large teaching and research-intensive university’s data library that offers several data literacy workshops. Although the data library’s voluntary data literacy workshops can be popular, with some workshops waitlisted, interest ebbs and flows. One way to improve the situation is to better market library workshops through effectively crafting workshop titles and descriptions that encourage engagement. Duke and Tucker (2007) state that it is important to market academic library services to increase service use and meet the needs of its users. Understanding marketing barriers is essential to improving workshop engagement.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2025.103045

Instructional Services Librarian & Coordinator of Digital Experience at Lycoming College

Design and teach inclusive information literacy sessions for academic departments based on the candidate’s experience and interests as well as campus needs. . . .

Support the maintenance and updates of the library’s website.

Manage project-based improvements to digital services, such as the library’s website, by conducting usability studies. . . .

Oversee uploads and troubleshoot issues related to the Institutional Repository, ensuring accurate metadata, proper file formatting, and seamless access for users.

https://tinyurl.com/5yujhx7h

“Evaluating AI Language Models for Reference Services: A Comparative Study of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot”

The descriptive statistics indicate that Google Gemini outperformed the other GenAI chatbots, by scoring high on “accuracy,” relevancy,” “friendliness” and “instruction” resulting in a higher mean score followed by public ChatGPT, commercial ChatGPT-4.0, and Microsoft Copilot.

https://doi.org/10.1080/10875301.2025.2478861

“Enhancing FAIR Data Practices in the Norwegian Research Data Archive: Towards Research Objects and Improved Interoperability”

The increasing volume and complexity of research data necessitate robust data management practices to ensure data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). The Norwegian Research Data Archive (NRDA) is at the forefront of efforts to create a comprehensive platform for researchers to share and archive their data. This paper discusses NRDA’s ongoing initiatives to enhance its infrastructure in alignment with FAIR principles, emphasizing the integration of Research Objects (ROs) and RO-Crate technologies. These improvements aim to facilitate better data discoverability, accessibility, and interoperability, thereby fostering a more integrated and sustainable data ecosystem. The paper also highlights NRDA’s collaborative efforts with other platforms via the use of Research Objects to support data sharing and reuse across repositories. By focusing on standardized metadata, persistent identifiers, and interoperability, NRDA is advancing Open Science practices, ultimately contributing to a more transparent, efficient, and collaborative research environment. The challenges and future directions of these initiatives are also explored, providing insights into the ongoing efforts to create a more open and interconnected scientific landscape.

https://doi.org/10.52825/ocp.v5i.1202

“Scaffolding AI Literacy: An Instructional Model for Academic Librarianship”

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes integral to academic, professional, and societal contexts, the demand for AI literacy in higher education is growing. Academic librarians, with their expertise in information literacy and critical pedagogy, are well-equipped to address this need. This article introduces a scaffolded model to advance AI literacy through progressive skill development across four tiers: foundational awareness, applied problem-solving, critical evaluation, and ethical advocacy. Each tier builds on the previous, fostering a comprehensive understanding of AI concepts, tools, and societal implications. Adapted from traditional information literacy workshops, this instructional model empowers students to navigate, critique, and responsibly engage with AI technologies. Tier 1 introduces basic AI concepts and tools. Tier 2 examines AI’s role in research and problem-solving, addressing practical applications and limitations. Tier 3 emphasizes the critical evaluation of AI-generated content and tools. Tier 4 focuses on ethical decision-making and advocacy, encouraging students to consider AI’s broader societal impacts. This article discusses the proposed model’s pedagogical design, details its application through workshop plans, and explores its implications for academic librarians’ roles in fostering AI literacy. By implementing this approach, librarians can equip students to become critical consumers of AI technologies.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2025.103041

“Portico to Preserve Clarivate’s Ebook Central”

Portico has signed an agreement with Clarivate to preserve books available to academic libraries through Ebook Central. This agreement ensures the long-term preservation of this expansive collection. Portico will also receive new books added to Ebook Central in the future.

https://librarytechnology.org/pr/31206

Senior Digital Collections Specialist at Library of Congress

This position serves as the Senior Digital Collections Specialist and is located within the Technology Policy Directorate in Library Services. The position reports to the Head, Digital Content Management Section of the Digital Collections Management & Services Division. The Digital Content Management Section is responsible for providing digital acquisitions support to Library Services, and for the lifecycle management of digital collections that are not otherwise under the care of a custodial division. The section also is responsible for managing the Library’s web archiving program and collections, and provides advice and assistance to the Law Library as needed. Digital Content Management Section staff collaborates with other Library curatorial units, technical staff, and external organizations to establish best practices, implement new and streamline existing digital workflows, identify digital content management problems, and propose solutions for the content within the scope of the section.

https://tinyurl.com/8wyu6yhr