August 2024 – Page 2 – DigitalKoans

Germany: "Achievements of the First DEAL Agreement Phase"

In a new publication, the German-wide DEAL consortium presents the key achievements of its first contract phase with the publishers Wiley and Springer Nature. The newly published infographic brochure provides a comprehensive insight into the background, objectives and results of the DEAL initiative. . . .

A particular focus is on the enormous increase in Open Access publications. Between 2019 and 2023, more than 105,000 publications from German scientific institutions were published under the DEAL agreements, 97 percent of which are Open Access. This remarkable success means that two-thirds of all research output from Germany is now freely accessible worldwide — a significant increase from the 30% before the DEAL initiative began.

https://tinyurl.com/mu99w2kz

“The First DEAL Agreements 2019-2023: Setting the Path for Open Access and Transparency“

Reformatting Projects Librarian at University of Houston

Reporting to the Head of Preservation and Reformatting, the person in this position will support the development and implementation of the Libraries’ digital access and preservation services. The successful candidate will provide project management across departments for the overall digital projects pipeline, including creating project plans, scheduling and facilitating project meetings, and setting milestones and deadlines. The position will supervise a team of student workers, providing training on digitization activities and delegating project tasks to PARD staff and student workers. The position also will lead the maintenance and troubleshooting of digital reformatting equipment and software. At a broader level, the successful candidate is expected to evaluate the department’s reformatting workflows and develop strategies and automation to maximize digitization efficiency for all material formats. The position will be responsible for implementing UH Libraries’ digital preservation policies, and will ensure best practice approaches to sustainably store and manage files created through all PARD digitization services, including on-demand digitization.

https://tinyurl.com/yz7y6t7a

Oxford University Press: "Commit to Open: A New Initiative to Support Open Access for Books"

We are pleased to announce a new initiative to support open access for books, Oxford Scholarship Online: Commit to Open. . . .

Commit to Open aims to secure funding from libraries and institutions for 30 monographs to be published open access, ensuring that their digital editions are freely available, globally and in perpetuity.

There are three collections of 10 books available for libraries to support:

Support new voices: The landscape of academic publishing can often present particular challenges for those just starting their career. To nurture this community, we have a collection available where every book is written by an early career researcher. The titles in this collection are diverse, feature several titles on topics relating to under-represented groups, and cover eight different academic disciplines.

Humanities: This showcases the vitality and variety of our publishing across the Humanities. These books cover topics including the cross-pollination of ideas via missionaries, the cultural influences on music and music genres, and the flow of religious ideas and identities around the Mediterranean in both the ancient and modern worlds.

Law & Social Sciences: This collection has a strong focus on marginalized groups, with books on current controversies in development studies, incarceration systems, and voters from ethnic minorities and the LGBT community. It also features titles on radical ideas such as what we owe to animals and how states can exist without armed forces. If we reach our funding targets by March 2025, we will publish all 30 titles open access. If we receive a proportion of our target, we will make the corresponding proportion of the titles open access, with the remaining titles made available for purchase.

Pricing:

The price for a single collection is £2,500 / $3,500. If you commit financially to all three collections, you will receive a 10% discount.

The goal for our two subject-based collections is to reach a total of £122,500 (the equivalent to 10x our standard book processing charge). For our collection of books supporting authors who are Early Career Researchers we have a smaller goal of £73,500 (the equivalent to 6x our standard book processing charge).

Books that publish open access within this pilot will be excluded from any of our Oxford Scholarship Online purchasable collections and subscriptions — meaning you won’t be paying twice.

https://tinyurl.com/3jbvem2y

Digital Archives Relocation (DAR) Project Support Officer at Parliamentary Archives (Term)

The scope of DAR includes the migration of collections data and digital collections to The National Archives (TNA) systems, the transfer of web archiving collections and functions to TNA, the review and transfer of Parliamentary Archives’ web content, and the establishment of future processes to enable the continuing transfer of digital records from Parliament to TNA.

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"The State of Open Infrastructure Funding: A Recap of IOI’s Community Conversation "

In July, IOI hosted its second State of Open Infrastructure Community Conversation — this time, exploring the state of open infrastructure grant funding.

To set the stage,, IOI’s senior researcher Gail Steinhart provided an overview of the methods that were used to gather over $415M USD in grant funding data for open infrastructures (OIs) and broke down some of the key findings from the analysis. To dive further into the topic of funding data, IOI Executive Director Kaitlin Thaney facilitated a panel conversation that featured Steinhart, collaborators Cameron Neylon and Karl Huang from the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), and John Mohr, CIO of Information Technology for theMacArthur Foundation and co-founder of the Philanthropy Data Commons. With their extensive experience in grant funding from diverse perspectives of the scholarly ecosystem, the panel shed light on the trends, impact, and limitations of grant funding for OIs. . . . .

Across the grants the team mapped for the 36 open infrastructures represented in this dataset, awards were categorized to reflect whether they provide direct support to an OI, indirect support (meaning the OI is referenced in the award title or abstract, but the funding does not directly support the OI though it may provide some indication of on OI’s broader impact), adoption support (funding that supports the implementation of an instance of an OI at a local or community scale), and grants we were unable to classify (unknown). While a significant amount (42%) of funding goes to direct support, the majority of the funding (52%) goes to indirect support.

https://tinyurl.com/ye2yfzsr

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Dataset

Digital Project Librarian at NC State University (Term)

The Digital Project Librarian will manage a grant-funded project to create digital surrogates of unique and rare primary source materials. The position manages production workflows, trains and supervises student assistants, oversees digital image production and quality control, creates and reviews metadata, coordinates work between partners, and collaborates with technology partners in the Libraries to support application development. The Digital Project Librarian develops the project’s website, explores evaluative methods to assess reach and impact of the digital collection, prepares promotional materials, and supports the project’s outreach efforts. The position will work in a highly collaborative environment with colleagues in the SCRC, throughout the NC State University Libraries, and with project partners to create an innovative, sustainable, and accessible online resource.

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"The OpenCitations Index"

This article presents the OpenCitations Index, a collection of open citation data maintained by OpenCitations, an independent, not-for-profit infrastructure organisation for open scholarship dedicated to publishing open bibliographic and citation data using Semantic Web and Linked Open Data technologies. The collection involves citation data harvested from multiple sources. To address the possibility of different sources providing citation data for bibliographic entities represented with different identifiers, therefore potentially representing same citation, a deduplication mechanism has been implemented. This ensures that citations integrated into OpenCitations Index are accurately identified uniquely, even when different identifiers are used. This mechanism follows a specific workflow, which encompasses a preprocessing of the original source data, a management of the provided bibliographic metadata, and the generation of new citation data to be integrated into the OpenCitations Index. The process relies on another data collection: OpenCitations Meta, and on the use of a new globally persistent identifier, namely OMID (OpenCitations Meta Identifier). As of July 2024, OpenCitations Index stores over 2 billion unique citation links, harvest from Crossref, the National Institute of Heath Open Citation Collection (NIH-OCC), DataCite, OpenAIRE, and the Japan Link Center (JaLC). OpenCitations Index can be systematically accessed and queried through several services, including SPARQL endpoint, REST APIs, and web interfaces. Additionally, dataset dumps are available for free download and reuse (under CC0 waiver) in various formats (CSV, N-Triples, and Scholix), including provenance and change tracking information.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.02321

Digital Content and Experiences Librarian at Cedar Crest College

Technology Leadership and Oversight: Lead the exploration, adoption, and integration of emerging technologies to support information discovery and access, library technology for teaching and learning, web services architecture and integration, digital humanities, and college archives.

· Digital Collections Management: Oversee all aspects of the electronic resource lifecycle, including acquisition, licensing, discovery, access, maintenance, and evaluation, employing creative solutions to maximize the impact and accessibility of online resources.

· User Experience and Accessibility: Champion the development and management of user-centered designs and practices across the library’s digital platforms, ensuring a seamless and accessible digital experience for all users.

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"Court Blocks Net Neutrality, Says ISPs Are Likely to Win Case against FCC"

Net neutrality, the judges wrote, “is likely a major question requiring clear congressional authorization,” and the “Communications Act likely does not plainly authorize the Commission to resolve this signal question. Nowhere does Congress clearly grant the Commission the discretion to classify broadband providers as common carriers. To the contrary, Congress specifically empowered the Commission to define certain categories of communications services—and never did so with respect to broadband providers specifically or the Internet more generally.” . . .

Even if the FCC loses, each US state would be allowed to regulate net neutrality because the Trump-era FCC lost its attempt to preempt state laws.

https://tinyurl.com/msjabp2n

Integrated Systems Librarian at Northeastern University

The Integrated Systems Librarian will be the primary contact with our system vendor Ex Libris, coordinating the use of Alma, Primo, and Leganto platforms throughout the University Library and across our global university system. As an expert in system configurations and analytics, the Integrated Systems Librarian will provide instruction, assist in creating custom reports, and co-chair the Alma and Primo operations committees. The role involves working independently and collaboratively with library staff to implement, assess, and enhance tools and services focusing on usability, accessibility, sustainability, and performance.

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"Wiley and Oxford University Press Confirm AI Partnerships as Cambridge University Press Offers ‘Opt-In’"

Wiley and Oxford University Press (OUP) told The Bookseller they have confirmed AI partnerships, with the availability of opt-ins and remuneration for authors appearing to vary. . . .

Meanwhile, Cambridge University Press has said it is talking to authors about opt ins along with ‘fair remuneration’ before making any deals.

Hachette, HarperCollins, and Pan Macmillan have not made AI deals.

https://tinyurl.com/bdzax5sk

E-Resource Discovery and Access Librarian at Brown University

This position will be responsible for managing the Library’s enhancement and maintenance of e-resources metadata to support and maximize e-resource discovery in the Brown University Library Alma/Primo environment, and will manage and develop local workflows for providing and maintaining quality metadata for our electronic resources. In addition, the position provides leadership and expertise for establishing and maintaining stable and consistent online access to e-resources through coordination and leadership of e-resource troubleshooting, engaging subject librarians, vendors, and staff in the process.

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"Big Ten Academic Alliance welcomes UCLA, USC, Oregon, and Washington"

The Big Ten Academic Alliance is thrilled to welcome the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Southern California (USC), the University of Oregon, and the University of Washington. This expansion increases our membership to 18 institutions and includes a historic affiliation with the University of Chicago. . . .

With the new members, Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions now boast 75,000 instructional staff, 810,000 students, $17.4 billion in annual research expenditures, and 145 million library volumes—25% of all print titles in North America.

https://tinyurl.com/3re7py7s

Digital Repository Coordinator at Harvard University

The Digital Repository Coordinator serves as the front-line representative for OSRDS to help increase the awareness and visibility of DASH within and beyond the University by educating faculty; faculty assistants; graduate and undergraduate students; and library staff about DASH and its benefits through presentations, office hours, one-on-one tutorials, and printed and digital media. The Digital Repository Coordinator will assist Harvard scholars in depositing their scholarship; maintain repository communities and collections; liaise with university user groups, admins, and technical partners to maintain our repository; and continuously improve repository workflow, data quality, and reporting tools. In close partnership with the SRM, the Digital Repository Coordinator will assist with repository migration, collection, and service strategies, including electronic dissertations and theses (ETD) efforts and other repository-based collaborations within OSRDS, HL, and externally.

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"Policies on Artificial Intelligence Chatbots among Academic Publishers: A Cross-Sectional Audit"

Methods This study performed a cross-sectional audit on the publicly available policies of 163 academic publishers, indexed as members of the International Association of the Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM). . . .

Results A total of 56/163 (34.4%) STM academic publishers had a publicly available policy guiding the authors’ use of AI chatbots. No policy allowed authorship accreditations for AI chatbots (or other generative technology). Most (49/56 or 87.5%) required specific disclosure of AI chatbot use. Four policies/publishers placed a complete ban on the use of AI tools by authors.

https://tinyurl.com/y4xhwbhe

Library Web and Applications Developer at Brown University

The developer supports and enhances the Brown Digital Repository (BDR) and its ecosystem of web applications, regularly works with the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) on faculty projects, and supports the John Hay Library staff to support and enhance special collection digitization projects and web applications. This position also supports special projects affiliated with peer institutions. . . In addition, the developer meets Library project needs that arise such as developing interfaces and integrations with enterprise University systems or Library systems, as well as development projects that range from small file uploaders to larger web applications.

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"What Happens When Your Publisher Licenses Your Work for AI Training?"

In a lot of cases, yes, publishers can license AI training rights without asking authors first. Many publishing contracts include a full and broad grant of rights–sometimes even a full transfer of copyright to the publisher for them to exploit those rights and to license the rights to third parties. . . .

Not all publishing contracts are so broad, however. For example, in the Model Publishing Contract for Digital Scholarship (which we have endorsed), the publisher’s sublicensing rights are limited and specifically defined, and profits resulting from any exploitation of a work must be shared with authors. . . .

There are lots of variations, and specific terms matter. Some publisher agreements are far more limited–transferring only limited publishing and subsidiary rights. . . .

This is further complicated by the fact that authors sometimes are entitled to reclaim their rights, such as by rights reversion clause and copyright termination. . . .

We [the Authors Alliance] think it is certainly reasonable to be skeptical about the validity of blanket licensing schemes between large corporate rights holders and AI companies, at least when they are done at very large scale. Even though in some instances publishers do hold rights to license AI training, it is dubious whether they actually hold, and sufficiently document, all of the purported rights of all works being licensed for AI training.

https://tinyurl.com/53fnj9h7

Open Scholarship Librarian at Georgia Institute of Technology

The Library at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia invites applications for an innovative librarian will lead and support Library initiatives to preserve and sustain long-term access to Georgia Tech scholarship and research outputs in digital form, furthering the Library’s mission to define excellence in the preservation, curation, and stewardship of the Institute’s unique digital assets. This position reports to the Head of the Archives, records Management, and Digital Curation Department. The Librarian will participate in library-wide committees, activities, and working groups, and in meetings, workshops and trainings, for continued professional development, to remain informed and engaged with relevant current trends.

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"AI’s Future in Grave Danger from Nvidia’s Chokehold on Chips, Groups Warn"

Nvidia is currently “the world’s most valuable public company,” their letter said, worth more than $3 trillion after taking near-total control of the high-performance AI chip market. Particularly “astonishing,” the letter said, was Nvidia’s dominance in the market for GPU accelerator chips, which are at the heart of today’s leading AI.

According to the advocacy groups that strongly oppose Big Tech monopolies, Nvidia “now holds an 80 percent overall global market share in GPU chips and a 98 percent share in the data center market.” This “puts it in a position to crowd out competitors and set global pricing and the terms of trade,” the letter warned. . . .

https://tinyurl.com/y5c769nk

Digital Publishing and Repository Librarian at Indiana University Indianapolis

The Digital Publishing and Repository Librarian reports to the Director of the Center and works closely with colleagues within the Center and across the Library to support the open dissemination of research. The Center is a highly collaborative and motivated group of individuals focused on changing IU Indianapolis’s culture to adopt more open access knowledge practices through a variety of initiatives, services, and advocacy work.

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"Trends in Information Behavior Research, 2016–2022: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology Paper"

Research on how people look for and interact with information has a long history in the information field. The current literature has been repeatedly reviewed in earlier volumes of Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. In this review, we offer an overview of the research published in this area in the years 2016–2022 with a focus on the trends that have emerged in this period. We use the term "information behavior" as an umbrella for the research area interested in how people become informed and engage with information in diverse manners acknowledging that different researchers and subfields prefer other terms and frameworks, including information practices, information experience, and health information seeking, to name a few. We reviewed 1270 articles in the field published in the years 2016–2022 and identified seven emerging trends: The CoVID-19 Pandemic, Diversity and Inclusion, Embodiment, Misinformation and Trust, Social Q&A Websites, Collaboration, and Information Creation. The reviewed literature and trends are discussed in relation to their significance for information, earlier review of information behavior research, and the long-debated issue of theory-driven versus atheoretical research in the field.

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24943

Scholarly Communications Librarian at Stanford University (Term)

The Scholarly Communications Librarian will serve as the primary point of contact for scholarly communication issues, assisting Stanford researchers in navigating publishing and open access decisions, copyright and licensing concerns, and funder access requirements (including evolving needs for open and reproducible research in many disciplines). They will conduct outreach and create documentation and training that raises awareness of open access and Stanford’s Open Access Policy, deepens campus understanding of the scholarly publishing landscape, and promotes opportunities for Stanford researchers to maximize the reach and impact of their work. They will serve as a source of scholarly communication expertise for library colleagues and engage deeply in relevant cross-library projects, including the development and enhancement of tools, platforms, and workflows that support the dissemination of Stanford research.

Job Ad

"European Artificial Intelligence Act Comes into Force"

The AI Act introduces a forward-looking definition of AI, based on a product safety and risk-based approach in the EU:

Minimal risk: Most AI systems, such as AI-enabled recommender systems and spam filters, fall into this category. These systems face no obligations under the AI Act due to their minimal risk to citizens’ rights and safety. Companies can voluntarily adopt additional codes of conduct.

Specific transparency risk: AI systems like chatbots must clearly disclose to users that they are interacting with a machine. Certain AI-generated content, including deep fakes, must be labelled as such, and users need to be informed when biometric categorisation or emotion recognition systems are being used. In addition, providers will have to design systems in a way that synthetic audio, video, text and images content is marked in a machine-readable format, and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated.

High risk: AI systems identified as high-risk will be required to comply with strict requirements, including risk-mitigation systems, high quality of data sets, logging of activity, detailed documentation, clear user information, human oversight, and a high level of robustness, accuracy, and cybersecurity. Regulatory sandboxes will facilitate responsible innovation and the development of compliant AI systems. Such high-risk AI systems include for example AI systems used for recruitment, or to assess whether somebody is entitled to get a loan, or to run autonomous robots.

Unacceptable risk: AI systems considered a clear threat to the fundamental rights of people will be banned. This includes AI systems or applications that manipulate human behaviour to circumvent users’ free will, such as toys using voice assistance encouraging dangerous behaviour of minors, systems that allow ‘social scoring’ by governments or companies, and certain applications of predictive policing. In addition, some uses of biometric systems will be prohibited, for example emotion recognition systems used at the workplace and some systems for categorising people or real time remote biometric identification for law enforcement purposes in publicly accessible spaces (with narrow exceptions).

https://tinyurl.com/32jy9pat

Assistant Director for Library Technology at Temple University

Reporting to and working with the Director of Library Technology and Knowledge Management, the Assistant Director of Library Technology coordinates the planning, implementation, and maintenance of library systems and services. Directs acquisition and maintenance of all computer hardware & software across the Temple University library system including staff & public computing, public printers & copiers, kiosks, scanners, lockers, etc. Interacts with all units in the libraries, with other departments across campus, and with vendors to gather requirements, develop specifications, test, and deploy all library systems and services. Provides leadership, oversight, and management for projects, assesses stakeholder needs and interface usability, prepares project specifications in collaboration with developer’s team and other staff.

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Ithaka S+R: Governance and Business Models for Collaborative Collection Development

This guide presents a series of takeaways and examples to illustrate the characteristics of successful collaborations as well as the potential risks they face. Rather than focusing on enabling technologies, we consider how collaborations start, evolve, function, engage members, and are sustained over time. To inform this guide we closely observed eight collaborations within the United States and Canada:

Eastern Academic Scholars’ Trust (EAST): Founded in 2015, EAST’s more than 170 members together work to secure the print scholarly record in support of teaching, learning, and research, maximize retention commitments, and facilitate access.

HathiTrust: Launched in 2008, and now with 213 supporting members, HathiTrust’s mission is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.

Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation (IPLC): IPLC is a voluntary union of 13 academic libraries with strategic priorities including collaborative collection development, resource sharing and discovery, and leadership to change the scholarly communication system.

Ontario Council of University Library (OCUL): OCUL, an academic library consortium with 21 member libraries, supports collective purchasing, shared digital information infrastructure, advocacy, assessment, and professional development.

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID): With over 1,200 members, ORCID is a global initiative to enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and affiliations.

Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN): Founded in the 1930s, TRLN is a collaboration of four research libraries from North Carolina committed to marshaling members’ financial, human, and information resources through cooperative efforts.

Virginia’s Academic Library Consortium (VIVA): Founded in 1994, VIVA, a consortium of 71 academic libraries in Virginia, supports cooperative purchasing, shared e-resources and print, and open and affordable course content initiatives.

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.321102

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| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |