July 2023 – Page 3 – DigitalKoans

Head of Legal Technology & Instructional Services at George Washington University

As a member of the library’s dynamic, collaborative Instructional Technology Services team, the librarian in this position has primary oversight for the Office of Legal Technology & Instructional Services. This position leads the development and delivery of services supporting the integration of library resources into the curriculum, the curation and use of the library’s growing electronic resources collection, the use of scholarly communication technologies and services, and the undertaking of digital initiatives.

https://www.gwu.jobs/postings/103978

"Rebranding of Predatory Journals and Conferences: Understanding Its Implication and Prevention Strategy"

There are several ways in which publishing groups can manipulate early career researchers. The first way is by creating "sister pirate websites" or "hijacked websites" through which low-budgeted conferences in developing nations and even branded conferences can be easily replicated [3]. This has led to huge issues wherein search results are manipulated and boosted, creating dilemmas and confusion between fake and real conferences [3]. Thus, many established conferences have now started to provide a disclaimer claiming authenticity. . . The second way is through “rebranding,” wherein some of the established, but poorly funded publishing groups, are bought by predatory publishing groups, for instance, the takeover of the Pulsus Publishing Group by OMICS [7]. Now, this takeover is neither represented in the official site for Pulsus conferences (publicizes itself as a legal and popular entity, utilizing its previous track record) which continues to operate despite legal brandishing of OMICS group nor on the OMICS website [7].

https://tinyurl.com/383mfndc

Open Science and Collections Librarian at UCLA

Reporting to the Director of Sciences User Engagement, the Open Science and Collections Librarian provides support to faculty, researchers, students, and other stakeholders in making their research outputs more open, findable, and sustainable. In addition, the incumbents will collaborate with colleagues across the Library in developing and maintaining diverse and accessible collections in either engineering and physical sciences or life and health sciences.

https://recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF08672

"Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth"

The new A.I. chatbots have typically swallowed Wikipedia’s corpus. . . . While estimates of its influence can vary, Wikipedia is probably the most important single source in the training of A.I. models. "Without Wikipedia, generative A.I. wouldn’t exist," says Nicholas Vincent, Yet as bots like ChatGPT become increasingly popular and sophisticated, Vincent and some of his colleagues wonder what will happen if Wikipedia, outflanked by A.I. that has cannibalized it, suffers from disuse and dereliction.

https://tinyurl.com/bdbxrdbk

Digital Projects Coordinator at University of Pennsylvania

Reporting to the Digital Projects Manager, the Digital Projects Coordinator will assist with all of the interrelated digital projects at the Kelly Writers House, including editorial support for multiple digital literary projects; AV production, editing, presentation, and archiving; support for online courses and reading groups; and digital asset collection development and maintenance. The Digital Projects Coordinator will work collaboratively on several major KWH digital projects, including ModPo (a massive open online course), Jacket2 (an online magazine), and PennSound, and will also support the in-person technical and AV work of the Kelly Writers House, assisting with web sites, databases, and recordings produced by and for the KWH, including in the main events space and in the Wexler Studio.

https://tinyurl.com/33xdy8pf

"Over 1000 Institutions Now Covered by RSC (Royal Society of Chemistry) Read & Publish Agreements"

The Royal Society of Chemistry has signed a Read & Publish agreement with CRUE (Conferencia de Rectores de las Universidades Españolas, the national consortium of Spanish Universities), taking the number of institutions in the RSC’s R&P community to more than one thousand covering 32 countries.

https://tinyurl.com/3jc9juus

Director of Digital Publishing, University of Virginia Press

The primary responsibility of this position is to manage all aspects of the Press’s Rotunda digital imprint, including technical development, ongoing infrastructure operations (both hardware and software), acquisition of new content (in collaboration with colleagues), and supervision and/or creation of workflows for adding and updating content. Secondarily, the incumbent serves as manager, primary contact, and/or major contributor to non-Rotunda digital publications and technical infrastructure of the Press and supervises or performs IT work handled by designated Local Service Providers (LSPs).

https://tinyurl.com/yjb76szc

"Meta Is Expanding Its Generative A.I. Arsenal with a New Tool It’s Touting as a ‘State-of-the-Art’ Breakthrough"

Currently, there is a divide between A.I. image generators and A.I. text generators, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.. . . Meta’s tool breaks down that divide with a model that allows for the input and generation of text and images, and allows for the creation of captions (or image-to-text generation) and images with "super-resolution."

https://tinyurl.com/mr25z6zd

Associate Director, Library Technology & Digital Strategies at at University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This individual will envision a new digital strategy and library technology model for the UMBC faculty, staff, and students. As a member of the Library Executive Council, the Associate Director and Head of Library Technology & Digital Strategies is expected to have knowledge of trends in research and learning in the academic library setting. This individual collaborates with university colleagues to determine how the library can best support emerging research initiatives. The position does not include budgetary responsibility.

https://tinyurl.com/2jzxt7ws

"Prevalence and Predictors of Data and Code Sharing in the Medical and Health Sciences: Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis of Individual Participant Data"

The review found that public code sharing was persistently low across medical research. Declarations of data sharing were also low, increasing over time, but did not always correspond to actual sharing of data. The effectiveness of mandatory data sharing policies varied substantially by journal and type of data, a finding that might be informative for policy makers when designing policies and allocating resources to audit compliance.

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2023-075767

Web and Digital User Experience Librarian at University of Notre Dame

The Web and Digital User Experience Librarian works in a cooperative team environment, leading efforts to design user-focused, accessible, and data-informed digital services and to develop, support, and manage the Hesburgh Libraries’ continuously evolving web presence. This position works collaboratively with internal and external stakeholders to improve and enhance access to library services and resources across the Libraries’ websites. The Web and Digital User Experience Librarian designs and coordinates user testing and assessment of web-based services features.

https://apply.interfolio.com/127442

"The Future of Academic Publishing"

Ultimately, we might be forced to rethink publication. If scientific research is mostly read by machines, the question arises of whether it is relevant to package it into a single coherent narrative that is adapted to the limitations of human cognition. This seems like a lot of busywork for scientists. We could unbundle scientific research from the constraints of journal formatting, as suggested by Neuromatch Open Publishing. In this view, research will be a living compendium of code, datasets, graphs and narrative content remixable and always up to date. Open and freely accessible research will be more valuable and influential because it will be seen by LLMs.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01637-2

Electronic Resources Librarian at Rice University

Working within a team, the Electronic Resources Librarian is responsible for the acquisition, receipt, maintenance, and renewal of electronic resources for the library. The Electronic Resources Librarian resolves electronic access problems, performs regular cleanup of data, and maintains records related to the library’s e-resources.

https://tinyurl.com/34jpxph2

"Authors Join the Brewing Legal Battle over AI"

Neither Meta nor OpenAI has yet responded to the author suits. But multiple copyright lawyers told PW on background that the claims likely face an uphill battle in court. Even if the suits get past the threshold issues associated with the alleged copying at issue and how AI training actually works—which is no sure thing—lawyers say there is ample case law to suggest fair use. For example, a recent case against plagiarism detector TurnItIn.com held that works could be ingested to create a database used to expose plagiarism by students. The landmark Kelly v. Arriba Soft case held that the reproduction and display of photos as thumbnails was fair use.

https://tinyurl.com/bddvrykh

Statewide Digitization Assistant & Project Archivist at Boston Public Library

Under direction by the Statewide Digital Projects Supervisor, the Statewide Digitization Assistant and Project Archivist will be the primary logistics and communications coordinator for the precise delivery, scheduling, documentation, processing, and quality control of collections into the BPL digitization facilities and digital object files out to Digital Commonwealth partners.

https://tinyurl.com/52z96mbm

"Read Your Open Access Publishing Agreements, Or: How You Might Accidentally Give Elsevier or Wiley the Exclusive Right to Profit from Your OA Article"

Those publishing agreements do provide what many authors want in OA publishing—free online access and broad reuse rights to users. But, if authors select the wrong option, they are also giving away their own residual rights while granting Elsevier or Wiley the exclusive right to commercially exploit their work. That includes the right for those publishers to exclude the author herself from making or authorizing even the most basic of commercial uses, such as posting the article to a for-profit repository like Researchgate or even SSRN. This is not a result I think most authors intend, but it’s hard to spot the problem unless you read these publication agreements carefully.

https://tinyurl.com/mrytecfk

"Writing with CHATGPT: An Illustration of Its Capacity, Limitations & Implications for Academic Writers"

Rather than being alarmed or anxious, writers need to understand ChatGPT’s strengths and weaknesses. It is better at structure than it is at content. It is a good brainstorming tool (think titles, outlines, counter-arguments), but you must double check everything it tells you, especially if you’re outside your domain of expertise. It can provide summaries of complex ideas, and connect them with other ideas, but only if you have put a lot of thought into the incremental prompting needed to shift it from its generic default and train it to focus on what you care about. Its access to information is limited to what it was originally trained on, therefore your own training phase is essential to identify gaps and inaccuracies. It can be used for labor, such as reformatting abstracts or reducing the length of sections, but it can’t replace the thinking a writer does to determine why some paragraphs or ideas deserve more words and others can be cut back. It can be inaccurate: in fact, rather stubbornly so, persisting with inaccuracies even after they are pointed out, while at the same time presenting its next attempt as corrected.

https://doi.org/10.5334/pme.1072

Librarian (Digitization) at Department of Defense

Serves as project leader in the development and implementation of short- and long-range digital collections and archival planning to support the DEOMI Digital Clearinghouse/Institutional Repository (IR) initiative. Serves as the digital content manager Librarian (Digitization) and will manage content for the DEOMI’s digital collections and publications, which include DEOMI publications, the DEOMI Press, white papers and grey literature, digital objects, archival documents, and other physical and digital materials/objects used to support the institute’s customers.

https://tinyurl.com/2p99fy4j

"Unreviewed Science in the News: The Evolution of Preprint Media Coverage from 2014-2021"

It has been argued that preprint coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a paradigm shift in journalism norms and practices. This study examines whether, in what ways, and to what extent this is the case using a sample of 11,538 preprints posted on four preprint servers—bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and SSRN—that received coverage in 94 English-language media outlets between 2014-2021. We compared mentions of these preprints with mentions of a comparison sample of 397,446 peer reviewed research articles indexed in the Web of Science to identify changes in the share of media coverage that mentioned preprints before and during the pandemic. We found that preprint media coverage increased at a slow but steady rate pre-pandemic, then spiked dramatically. This increase applied only to COVID-19-related preprints, with minimal or no change in coverage of preprints on other topics. In addition, the rise in preprint coverage was most pronounced among health and medicine-focused media outlets, which barely covered preprints before the pandemic but mentioned more COVID-19 preprints than outlets focused on any other topic. These results suggest that the growth in coverage of preprints seen during the pandemic period may imply a shift in journalistic norms, including a changing outlook on reporting preliminary, unvetted research.

https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.07.10.548392

Research Data Management Librarian at University of Waterloo (Term)

The University of Waterloo Library seeks a Research Data Management Librarian to support the university’s research data management strategy by providing consultation for researchers who are working with research data, including advice on data discovery, data management plans, data deposit and preservation, creating training materials, presentations and workshops, and communications and outreach on research data management. The librarian works collaboratively with colleagues in the library, especially liaison librarians with RDM specializations, and across campus who support the research lifecycle, including the Institutional Research Data Management Implementation Working Group.

https://tinyurl.com/b39676m3

"The Relationship between University Presses, E-Book Vendors, and Academic Libraries: A Platform Theory Analysis"

We investigate the relations among university presses, academic libraries, and e-book vendors, by examining university presses’ perceptions of academic libraries and e-book vendors, and presses’ perceptions of themselves and the university press community. Findings are drawn from one-on-one interviews with 19 participants from 18 different university presses in the United States during 2020–2021. We observe a market structure for HSS e-books where most presses were satisfied with Big Four e-book vendors, including Project MUSE, EBSCO, ProQuest, and JSTOR, and lacked strong incentives to search for new e-book vendors. We find that most presses often treat libraries, including the one from the same institution, as their customers with limited interactions; findings also show university presses’ varied self-imaging, along with a shared perception about the collegiality of the university press community.

https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006231185883

Director, Digital Libraries and Preservation at Virginia Tech

Under the general direction of the Associate Dean & Executive Director of IT, the Director of Digital Libraries and Preservation is responsible for the strategic management and development of Virginia Tech’s comprehensive digital libraries and preservation program. They work collaboratively with stakeholders to plan and design the future of digital libraries and preservation services. The Director ensures efficient execution of technology-based projects, considering emerging trends and advancements, including the impact of AI, to advance cutting-edge digital libraries and preservation services.

https://tinyurl.com/pmbctfwh

"CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access Research and Large Language Models for Credible, Trustworthy Question Answering"

In this paper, we present CORE-GPT, a novel question-answering platform that combines GPT-based language models and more than 32 million full-text open access scientific articles from CORE. We first demonstrate that GPT3.5 and GPT4 cannot be relied upon to provide references or citations for generated text. We then introduce CORE-GPT which delivers evidence-based answers to questions, along with citations and links to the cited papers, greatly increasing the trustworthiness of the answers and reducing the risk of hallucinations. CORE-GPT’s performance was evaluated on a dataset of 100 questions covering the top 20 scientific domains in CORE, resulting in 100 answers and links to 500 relevant articles. The quality of the provided answers and and relevance of the links were assessed by two annotators. Our results demonstrate that CORE-GPT can produce comprehensive and trustworthy answers across the majority of scientific domains, complete with links to genuine, relevant scientific articles.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04683

Research & Electronic Resources Librarian at Virginia Wesleyan University

VIRGINIA WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY (www.vwu.edu) invites applications for the position of Research & Electronic Resources with primary responsibilities for electronic resources management, acquisitions and collection management, and research and information literacy instruction.

https://tinyurl.com/ye279v7v

"Claude 2: ChatGPT Rival Launches Chatbot That Can Summarise a Novel"

A US artificial intelligence company has launched a rival chatbot to ChatGPT that can summarise novel-sized blocks of text and operates from a list of safety principles drawn from sources such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. . . .

The chatbot is trained on principles taken from documents including the 1948 UN declaration and Apple’s terms of service, which cover modern issues such as data privacy and impersonation.

https://tinyurl.com/ms44eccd