November 2023 – Page 4

maDMP [Machine-Actionable Data Management Plans] Project Manager at ARL (Term)

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) seeks an exceptional colleague to advance institutional coordination around machine-actionable data management plans. This is a two-year, full-time, grant-funded position in collaboration with the California Digital Library (CDL). It is a remote position. The project manager will be a member of ARL’s Scholars and Scholarship team, which advances a portfolio of science policy and institutional initiatives to achieve equitable and barrier-free access to information and support new forms of scholarship. . . . The project manager, working closely with colleagues at CDL, will coordinate a cohort of four institutions exploring the adoption and institutional integration of machine-actionable data management plans (maDMP). The project manager will report to the ARL Director of Science Policy and Scholarship, and will work closely with ARL committees and CDL team members.

https://tinyurl.com/32n3jhc9

"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

"Dissemination Effect of Data Papers on Scientific Datasets"

This study aims to investigate the citation practices associated with data papers and to explore the role of data papers in disseminating scientific datasets. . . . The findings indicate a consistent growth in the number of biomedical data journals published in recent years, with data papers gaining attention and recognition as both publications and data sources. Although the use of data papers as citation sources for data remains relatively rare, there has been a steady increase in data paper citations for data utilization through formal data citations.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24843

Discovery Services Librarian at Texas A&M University

As the Discovery Services Librarian you will be responsible for the Libraries’ discovery systems, ensuring open and equitable access to the Libraries’ collections and services. You will collaborate with Digital Initiatives, TAMU Technology Services, Digital Collection Services, and other key stakeholders to ensure the continuous improvement of the Libraries’ Discovery Layers and Libraries’ Discovery Technology Portfolio. We need you to provide services in usability and user experience testing to provide feedback to the design and development of the Libraries’ discovery layers and search strategies.

https://tinyurl.com/56jhteen

"Repository Staff Perspectives on the Benefits Of Trustworthy Digital Repository Certification"

This paper reports on the results from a qualitative study that asks whether and how staff members from TRAC certified repositories find value in the audit and certification process. While some interviewees found certification valuable, others argued that the costs outweighed the benefits or expressed ambivalence towards certification. Findings indicate that TRAC certification offered both internal and external benefits, such as improved documentation, accountability, transparency, communication, and standards, but there were concerns about high costs, implementation problems, and lack of objective evaluation criteria.

https://tinyurl.com/bddmuwjy

Digital Projects Coordinator at Library of Congress

The incumbent coordinates and facilitates activities relating to the Library Services information technology (IT) goals through implementation of projects involving the Library’s integrated library system, other enterprise systems, and web enabled applications. Individually, and in collaboration with IT and user organization experts. The incumbent develops and coordinates major program components that include IT support for acquisitions, circulation, cataloging, online public catalogs, inventory, and serials control.

https://www.usajobs.gov/job/759449100

"FAIR EVA: Bringing Institutional Multidisciplinary Repositories into the FAIR Picture"

The FAIR Principles are a set of good practices to improve the reproducibility and quality of data in an Open Science context. Different sets of indicators have been proposed to evaluate the FAIRness of digital objects, including datasets that are usually stored in repositories or data portals. However, indicators like those proposed by the Research Data Alliance are provided from a high-level perspective that can be interpreted and they are not always realistic to particular environments like multidisciplinary repositories. This paper describes FAIR EVA, a new tool developed within the European Open Science Cloud context that is oriented to particular data management systems like open repositories, which can be customized to a specific case in a scalable and automatic environment. It aims to be adaptive enough to work for different environments, repository software and disciplines, taking into account the flexibility of the FAIR Principles. As an example, we present DIGITAL.CSIC repository as the first target of the tool, gathering the particular needs of a multidisciplinary institution as well as its institutional repository.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02652-8

Institutional Repository & Digital Scholarship Coordinator at San José State University

The purpose of this position is to coordinate the planning, development and technical operations of San José State University Library’s Institutional Repository (ScholarWorks) and Digital Scholarship Services. The Coordinator oversees decisions regarding copyright permissions for publications; maintains submissions from contributors; provides expertise to campus faculty; promotes and publicizes the repository and digital scholarship services; creates and uploads digital files; maintains and enhances related systems and integrations, and creates metadata in approved formats. The incumbent will consult with SJSU scholars on digital scholarship projects; learn and teach digital scholarship tools; and work to establish policies, procedures and service levels for digital scholarship support in King Library.

https://tinyurl.com/5f4ac4xc

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

Digital Scholarship Librarian at Ramapo College of New Jersey

Under the general supervision of the Library Dean, the Digital Scholarship Librarian provides leadership, program management, and development of the College’s digital humanities and scholarship programs and support for digital scholarship to the larger College community.

https://tinyurl.com/y944ky46

"Reclaiming (Parts of) Scholarly Communication"

Regardless of these differences, "scholar-led" and "community-driven" publishing projects are an integral part of a diverse publishing ecosystem and fulfill two main functions within academia. First, they contribute to a culture of experimental, collaborative, and community-owned approaches to disseminating knowledge. This culture facilitates, for example, the creation of new output formats that lie beyond the standardized peer-reviewed article and make the research process more transparent and participatory (Steiner, 2022b). They also take part in the ongoing publishing movement of developing and implementing more inclusive processes of quality control, paradigmatically displayed by the idea of either or both open and collaborative peer review systems (Knöchelmann, 2019). With these new forms of research assessment, it seems possible to become aware of biases while making the review process more instructive and helpful. Much of this extends to editorial work in general, with workflows digitized to meet the needs of remote work and diverse editorial teams, such as by using open-source editorial management software and collaborative editing tools. Of course, these developments are inherently connected to advancements in electronic publishing in general and are not limited to the community-driven publishing segment.

Second, community-driven publishing projects have a protective function in the sense that they enable self-determined and autonomous decision-making at a time and in an age where the "digital sovereignty" of consumers and researchers is at stake (see Pohle & Thiel, 2020). Because many such projects use open-source software and applications (see Open Journal Systems), they can control the flows of publishing (meta) data and be transparent about its usage. At the same time, many community-driven journals question the widespread and nontransparent system of assessing impact using the over-simplified interpretation of bibliometrics and instead consider other evaluation forms, such as alt metrics (Sugimoto et al., 2017). This open approach extends to the use of licensing models that are approved for the creation of "Free Cultural Works" (see Creative Commons). Acknowledging that research benefits society as a whole and must be available for reuse, we find community-driven publishing projects widely applying the most open licenses to their publications.

https://tinyurl.com/ywzcyk5n

Head, Application Development Services at University of California, Berkeley

Supervises ongoing programming applications activities:

Lead a team working to deliver multiple concurrent projects.

Establishes programming standards and program documentation requirements.

Reviews current status of system applications and prepares recommendations for application improvements.

Develops proposals to improve or streamline processes and procedures, in conjunction with industry best practices in application development.

https://tinyurl.com/mw6w58us

"The Gray Zone between Legitimate and Predatory Open Access Scientific Publishing"

Certain open access publishers based on the article processing charges model have found it highly profitable to operate within a gray zone that encompasses both legitimate and predatory publishing practices. In this context, maximum profits can be obtained by adequate combinations of journal acceptance rates and elevated article processing charges. Considering that the gray zone can be particularly challenging to identify and that it poses risks for authors aiming to establish academic careers, we believe it is important to provide a comprehensive description of it.

https://doi.org/10.24875/RIC.23000191

Head of Research Data Services at University of Chicago

The University of Chicago Library seeks a dynamic and enthusiastic individual to join our team as the Head of Research Data Services in the Center for Digital Scholarship. This position will report to the Director of Digital Scholarship and play a crucial role in supporting the University’s research community in effectively managing, preserving, and leveraging research data. They will join a team of library experts engaged in supporting open scholarship and will provide leadership in developing a research data services program. The successful candidate will collaborate with colleagues in the library to provide faculty, researchers, and students with expert guidance on data management, promote best practices, and contribute to the advancement of digital scholarship initiatives at the University of Chicago.

https://tinyurl.com/27z838v5

"Understanding the Value of Curation: A Survey of Researcher Perspectives of Data Curation Services from Six Us Institutions"

Data curation encompasses a range of actions undertaken to ensure that research data are fit for purpose and available for discovery and reuse, and can help to improve the likelihood that data is more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). The Data Curation Network (DCN) has taken a collaborative approach to data curation, sharing curation expertise across a network of partner institutions and data repositories, and enabling those member institutions to provide expert curation for a wide variety of data types and discipline-specific datasets. This study sought to assess the satisfaction of researchers who had received data curation services, and to learn more about what curation actions were most valued by researchers. By surveying researchers who had deposited data into one of six academic generalist data repositories between 2019–2021, this study set out to collect feedback on the value of curation from the researchers themselves. A total of 568 researchers were surveyed; 42% (238) responded. Respondents were positive in their evaluation of the importance and value of curation, indicating that the participants not only value curation services, but are largely satisfied with the services provided. An overwhelming majority 97% of researchers agreed that data curation adds value to the data sharing process, 96% agreed it was worth the effort, and 90% felt more confident sharing their data due to the curation process. We share these results to provide insights into researchers’ perceptions and experience of data curation, and to contribute evidence of the positive impact of curation on repository depositors. From the perspective of researchers we surveyed, curation is worth the effort, increases their comfort with data sharing, and makes data more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0293534

Systems and Applications Development Librarian at Boston University

They provide the technical knowledge and programming expertise needed for the development, integration, support and security of a wide array of library systems, applications and services; develop custom library applications to create efficiencies of the back-end functions for Library staff; adapt new and existing web technology and tools to improve the patrons’ experience of the Library’s online services; analyze, design and implement library systems infrastructures and user interfaces that provide a seamless discovery and access of library resources and services; explore new technologies to identify opportunities for effective application and the potential integration with other university and library systems; provide enhanced reports and data transformations related to library systems and services using various data science libraries.

https://tinyurl.com/ya5sm2vn

"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

Digital Humanities Librarian at Davidson College

Relying on your expertise in digital humanities tools, methods, and habits of mind, you will help students, faculty, and staff think critically about and with digital technologies through our robust library instruction and consultation framework. You will bring your project management experiences to bear on an impressive portfolio of projects and services that includes some directly in the purview of the Digital Learning team — e.g. Davidson Domains, digital media creation, thesis and syllabus collection management — as well as collaborations across teams — e.g. Omeka projects, our innovative student employee model, library programming, strategic projects, and instruction.

https://tinyurl.com/44szvxf9

"Google SGE [Search Generative Experience]: A New Way to Search, Teach, and Resist"

Google SGE removes many of the barriers that make us doubt our search abilities. We already know that users rarely look past the first page of results or scroll past the fold of a webpage, but with SGE you get exactly what you think is "good enough." However, the more I searched the more disappointed I was that Google continued to serve up the same kinds of sources you usually find at the top of the algorithm, such as Wikipedia pages, blog posts, news, and popular media. The only disclaimer that SGE gives is "Info quality may vary."

https://tinyurl.com/4tntbsbh

Feinstein Papers Digital Archivist at Stanford University (Term)

Stanford Libraries is seeking a full-time, 4-year term position as a Digital Archivist to join the Department of Special Collections and the Senator Dianne Feinstein papers project to process and make available the born-digital and digitized materials. They will report to the Assistant Director and Head of Collection Services in the Department of Special Collections and work primarily out of the Redwood City campus.

https://tinyurl.com/56zxk72x

"Digitization and the Market for Physical Works: Evidence from the Google Books Project"

We study the impact of the Google Books digitization project on the market for physical books. We find that digitization significantly boosts the demand for physical versions and provide evidence for the discovery channel. Moreover, digitization allows independent publishers to introduce new editions for existing books, further increasing sales.

https://tinyurl.com/2pbuzty2

Electronic Resources Coordinator at Library of Congress

This position is located in the Collection Development Office of Researcher and Collections Services, and reports to the Collection Development Officer. The incumbent of this position serves as Electronic Resources Coordinator and assumes both a leadership and liaison role in working with staff from all areas of the Library to build the collection and to enhance access to electronic resources. The coordinator provides support for the selection, acquisition, cataloging, processing, and maintenance of electronic resources, communicates with staff throughout the Library on issues related to electronic resources, and participates in Library-wide efforts to best connect users with electronic resources.

https://www.usajobs.gov/job/758416300

"How Well Does ChatGPT Handle Reference Inquiries? An Analysis Based on Question Types and Question Complexities"

To explore whether artificial intelligence can be used to enhance library services, this study used ChatGPT to answer reference questions. . . Overall ChatGPT’s performance was fair, but it did poorly in information accuracy. It scored the highest when handling facilities and equipment-related questions but the lowest when dealing with e-resources access problems. ChatGPT was weak in answering advanced research questions, complex inquiries, and known item searches relating to a specific local environment, but it could be adopted to enhance library communication with users.

https://tinyurl.com/3dabv5f8

Digital Scholarship and Technology Librarian at Governors State University

The Digital Scholarship and Technology Librarian (DSTL) manages library technology services and platforms that support discovery, learning, teaching, and research activities. This position is a strategic amalgamation of data services through effective stewardship of the library’s digital infrastructure, and support of data-intensive research and instructional projects. Specifically, managing the library’s evolving digital footprint, and serving as instructional technologist & data services librarian, this strategically blended position supports student success through scholarship discovery, production and curation.

https://employment.govst.edu/postings/9269

Paywall: Forthcoming — Digital Humanities and Laboratories Perspectives on Knowledge, Infrastructure and Culture

Digital Humanities and Laboratories explores laboratories dedicated to the study of digital humanities (DH) in a global context and contributes to the expanding body of knowledge about situated DH knowledge production.

Including contributions from a diverse, international range of scholars and practitioners, this volume examines the ways laboratories of all kinds contribute to digital research and pedagogy.. . . As a whole, the book consolidates the discussion on the role of the laboratory in DH and brings digital humanists into the interdisciplinary debate concerning the notion of a laboratory as a critical site in the generation of experimental knowledge. Positioning the discussion in relation to ongoing debates in DH, the volume argues that laboratory studies are in an excellent position to capitalize on the theories and knowledge developed in the DH field and open up new research inquiries.

https://tinyurl.com/yedy4x78