May 2023 – Page 6 – DigitalKoans

Scholarly Communication and Copyright Librarian at Georgetown University Library

The Scholarly Communication and Copyright Librarian develops, coordinates and promotes the growth of the Library’s scholarly communications programs and services, including outreach, training and support to faculty, students, and staff on copyright, fair use, open access, open education and scholarly publishing. The incumbent also provides specialized research consultations and instruction services in these areas. The Scholarly Communication and Copyright Librarian supports digital scholarship by promoting the use of DigitalGeorgetown (DG), the Library’s institutional repository, as well as other scholarly communication tools provided by the Library.

https://bit.ly/3ANtTeP

Good, Better, Best: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs

Good, Better, Best: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs brings together the project’s growing knowledge and understanding around this community of practice, as well as reports on the Work Package’s research and development over the course of the project.

Following an introduction chapter giving a brief background landscape summary alongside employed methodologies, Chapter 2, "A basic guidebook for the small and scholar-led press" considers good, better, and best practices around file formats, metadata, content packaging, existing routes to digital publication archives, archiving and preservation workflows, and challenges surrounding copyright, reuse, and licensing. Additional chapters detail the repository workflow experimentations, both manual and automated, as well as successful proof-of-concept archiving in two online repositories: one, and institutional repository, and the other, the Internet Archive. Along with a chapter (Chapter 6) that explores the current understanding around implications for archiving and preserving complex and experimental monographs, two further chapters (7 and 8) look at future work: the expansion and development of the Thoth Archiving Network and the new Open Book Futures project, beginning May 2023. Appendices include signposting to toolkits, guides, and resources, as well as a brief glossary that provides links to more comprehensive archiving and preservation glossaries already in existence. We hope this will be a useful resource for the small and scholar-led press community and beyond.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7876047

UX/UI Designer at University of Maryland College Park

he UX/UI Designer will provide primary expertise in building wireframes and static mockups as part of a user-centered design process, refining designs based on user testing and feedback, and implementing them with HTML and CSS elements in web frameworks. . . . The UX/UI Designer will work closely with the Web Services Librarian, web developers and all library divisions to improve the Libraries’ web presence, and will participate in the Online User Interfaces (OUI) Committee meetings to facilitate communication, content creation and maintenance, and coordination of web-related needs and functions.

https://ejobs.umd.edu/postings/106860

"30 Years Ago, One Decision Altered the Course of Our Connected World"

CERN owned Berners-Lee’s invention, and the lab had the option to license out the World Wide Web for profit. But Berners-Lee believed that keeping the web as open as possible would help it grow. . . .

Berners-Lee eventually convinced CERN to release the World Wide Web into the public domain without any patents or fees. He has since attributed the runaway success of the web to that single decision.

https://bit.ly/41VrXN6

Library Systems Analyst at University of Chicago

The Library Systems Analyst (LSA) is a member of Integrated Library Systems (ILS) at the University of Chicago Library. ILS performs operational support, programming, and systems analysis for library systems used by library staff and the public, with particular responsibility for the FOLIO library services platform (LSP) and ancillary systems.

https://apply.interfolio.com/124567

Paywall: "’The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead"

Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.

"The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that," he said. "But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that."

https://bit.ly/3VoA9Dh

Associate Dean, Library Collections and Scholarly Communications at California State University, Fullerton

Reporting to the Dean of the Pollak Library, the Associate Dean (AD) for Collections and Scholarly Communications (C&SC) provides leadership and collaborative expertise for developing, sustaining, and delivering the collections of the Pollak Library. In collaboration with the Dean, collections librarian, subject liaisons, and campus faculty, the Associate Dean works across programmatic lines to build and maintain vital collections, and to participate in emerging content management workflows. Analyzes qualitative and quantitative data; contributes to the strategic allocation of resources for collections in traditional and emergent formats; and designs interpretive reports for collection management in an environment of change in scholarly communication and publishing. Strategic directions include but are not limited to integrating developments in scholarly publishing and communications and open content, balancing commercial/commodity collection building, and obtaining and exposing unique scholarly content and CSUF research.

https://bit.ly/41STeA1

"2023 Library Systems Report: The Advance of Open Systems"

Interest in open systems has been growing within the library world for at least 15 years, and recent procurements reflect important breakthroughs. The selection of the open source library services platform (LSP) FOLIO by Library of Congress (LC), the MOBIUS consortium, the National Library of Australia, and others has solidified FOLIO’s position as a major competitor in the market. . . .

Most libraries still use proprietary software for their core systems. In the US, about 10% of academic libraries and 17% of public libraries use an open source integrated library system (ILS). But the barriers to these products—real and perceived—have largely collapsed. Functionality gaps have narrowed across major open source products like Koha, Evergreen, and now FOLIO, after long periods of development.

https://bit.ly/3nh8Tdl

Associate Director for Systems and Web Development at Saint Michael’s College

Reporting to the Library Director, this individual supports and oversees library systems and the digital infrastructure that forms the foundation for all library services, including the library management system, discovery system, and website. The Associate Director for Systems and Web Development ensures optimal performance of the library’s integrated, cloud-based management platform, works closely with other members of the library staff on a range of technical and systems related tasks, and manages and supports the Library’s Discovery layer, link resolver, and single-sign-on authentication system.

https://bit.ly/40NCHvH

"Wiley Removes Goodin as Editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy (Updated)"

[Comments by Anna Stilz, Princeton] Wiley has recently signed a number of major open-access agreements: this means that increasingly, they get their revenue through author fees for each article they publish (often covered now by public grant agencies), rather than library subscriptions. Their current company-wide strategy for maximizing revenue is to force the journals they own to publish as many articles as possible to generate maximum author fees. . . .

Wiley is not asking that we consider publishing a few more pieces that fall at the borderline and are tough judgment calls. They are asking that we increase the number of articles we publish by a factor of 10, and that we continue increasing that number year after year.

https://bit.ly/42co3zq

Applications Programmer/Analyst at University of Michigan

You will be a programmer developing large-scale digital library systems as a part of a team of programmers, librarians, and designers working on major projects including development of an overall architecture to serve the U-M Library and campus. You will have opportunities to gain experience with modern technologies that support research, digital preservation, publishing, archives and broad public access.

https://bit.ly/41SbGsg

"To Preprint or Not to Preprint: Experience and Attitudes of Researchers Worldwide"

The pandemic has underlined the significance of open science and spurred further growth of preprinting. Nevertheless, preprinting has been adopted at varying rates across different countries/regions. To investigate researchers’ experience with and attitudes toward preprinting, we conducted a survey of authors of research papers published in 2021 or 2022. We find that respondents in the US and Europe had a higher level of familiarity with and adoption of preprinting than those in China and the rest of the world. Respondents in China were most worried about the lack of recognition for preprinting and the risk of getting scooped. US respondents were very concerned about premature media coverage of preprints, the reliability and credibility of preprints, and public sharing of information before peer review. Respondents identified integration of preprinting in journal submission processes as the most important way to promote preprinting.

https://doi.org/10.55835/6442f782b2b5580ba561406b

Information Technology Specialist at Library of Congress

The position serves as a technical expert in the design, development, testing, implementation and support of Library platforms and applications for the Library of Congress, including support for the FOLIO Library platform. This position is located in the IT Design and Development Directorate. The work of this position involves analysis, design, programming, testing, implementation and support of Web-based applications supporting the FOLIO-based Library Collections Access Platform (LCAP), and integrated applications supporting acquisitions, authentication, cataloging, digital collections, and more.

https://bit.ly/3LJkco6

"The Scholarly Fingerprinting Industry"

Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, Wiley, and SAGE: Many researchers know that the five giant firms publish most of the world’s scholarship. Fifty years of acquisitions and journal launches have yielded a stunningly profitable oligopoly, built up from academics’ unpaid writing-and-editing labor. Their business is a form of IP rentiership—collections of title-by-title prestige monopolies that, in the case of Nature or The Lancet, underwrite a stable of spinoff journals on the logic of the Hollywood franchise. Less well-known is that Elsevier and its peers are layering a second business on top of their legacy publishing operations, fueled by data extraction. They are packaging researcher behavior, gleaned from their digital platforms, into prediction products, which they sell back to universities and other clients. Their raw material is scholars’ citations, abstracts, downloads, and reading habits, repurposed into dashboard services that, for example, track researcher productivity. Elsevier and the other oligopolist firms are fast becoming, in other words, surveillance publishers. And they are using the windfall profits from their existing APC-and-subscription business to finance their moves into predictive analytics.

https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/yu34t