Charles W. Bailey, Jr. – DigitalKoans

Scholarly Communications and OER Librarian at Florida Atlantic University

Reporting directly to the Assistant Dean for Access, Research, and Learning Services, the successful candidate will provide leadership, direct outreach, and support to the University Community on issues related to scholarly communications, copyright, open access, and open education, delivering focused services to promote faculty, student, and staff engagement with Open Educational Resources, Scholarly Publishing, and Open Pedagogy. This position provides expertise in alternative publishing models, open scholarship, author rights, copyright, and compliance with public-access requirements for federally funded research, ORCID ID usage, and is responsible for tracking trends such as predatory publishing that affect access to scholarly information.

https://tinyurl.com/3zxvafhk

“Frontiers introduces FAIR² Data Management”

FAIR² Data Management leverages AI-assisted curation to structure research data for publication, making it easier to find, reuse, and analyze—both by humans and machines—so researchers can focus on discovery rather than data preparation. By making datasets shareable and optimized for reuse, FAIR² Data Management enhances research efficiency and reproducibility, accelerating breakthroughs in global health, planetary sustainability, and scientific innovation. . . .

FAIR² (FAIR Squared) extends the FAIR principles by defining a formal specification that makes research data AI-ready, aligned with Responsible AI principles, and structured for deep scientific reuse. Compatible with MLCommons Croissant’s AI-ready format, it integrates essential elements for scientific rigor, reproducibility, and interoperability. FAIR² ensures data is richly documented and linked to provenance, methodology, and a detailed data dictionary, creating a context-rich representation of each dataset. It also integrates with TensorFlow, JAX, and PyTorch, enabling AI-driven analysis and easy sharing on Kaggle and Hugging Face, amplifying its impact across disciplines.

https://tinyurl.com/3bwjbsw6

Open Access Manager at University of Liverpool

Reporting to the Head of Open Research, you’ll take the lead on LMG’s support for scholarly publishing and open access to research publications. You will be managing and monitoring our open access budgets, delivering training and advocacy, responding to queries while building strong relationships with academic and Professional Service colleagues, developing our services, and providing line management for our wonderful team of Open Access Principal Library Assistants.

https://tinyurl.com/2vbtp3c8

User Experience Strategist at Princeton University

Princeton University Library (PUL) seeks a knowledgeable, collaborative, and curious individual to join the Assessment and User Experience department who will focus on the use and usability of the Library’s website. Reporting to the Assistant Director for Library Assessment and User Experience, and working in close collaboration with the Office of Library Communications and Library IT, this position emphasizes user-centered design and supports the ongoing enhancement of the Library’s web platforms. The User Experience Strategist will implement the Library’s web content strategy; collaborate with stakeholders to ensure platforms are useful, usable, and accessible; and align design efforts with user experience and visual identity.

https://tinyurl.com/7wa3fkr4

“Decoding Virtual Chats: NLP Insights Into Academic Library Services.”

This research applies a machine learning (ML) tool to the complete set of transcripts from a research university’s chat reference service (2017–2022) to examine evolving trends and patron needs in the library reference service. The study has two key objectives: 1) demonstrating ML’s effectiveness in the academic library setting, and 2) assessing the impact of COVID-19 on chat reference needs. A text classification model, trained on 1.5 % of the sample, achieves a 75 % accuracy match with human annotations

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2025.101344

“Project Alexandria: Towards Freeing Scientific Knowledge from Copyright Burdens via LLMs”

Paywalls, licenses and copyright rules often restrict the broad dissemination and reuse of scientific knowledge. We take the position that it is both legally and technically feasible to extract the scientific knowledge in scholarly texts. Current methods, like text embeddings, fail to reliably preserve factual content, and simple paraphrasing may not be legally sound. We urge the community to adopt a new idea: convert scholarly documents into Knowledge Units using LLMs. These units use structured data capturing entities, attributes and relationships without stylistic content. We provide evidence that Knowledge Units: (1) form a legally defensible framework for sharing knowledge from copyrighted research texts, based on legal analyses of German copyright law and U.S. Fair Use doctrine, and (2) preserve most (~95%) factual knowledge from original text, measured by MCQ performance on facts from the original copyrighted text across four research domains. Freeing scientific knowledge from copyright promises transformative benefits for scientific research and education by allowing language models to reuse important facts from copyrighted text. To support this, we share open-source tools for converting research documents into Knowledge Units. Overall, our work posits the feasibility of democratizing access to scientific knowledge while respecting copyright.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19413

Digital Preservation Specialist (UChicago Node) at University of Chicago

Reporting to the Director, Digital Library Development Center, and under the direction of the Head of Digitization, the UChicagoNode Digital Preservation Specialist specializes in preserving the Library’s digital collections and preparing them for delivery by UChicagoNode, a partnership between the University of Chicago Library and the Humanities Division of the University of Chicago. This role involves designing workflows following digital preservation standards and best practices, managing data, optimizing data processing workflows, and ensuring the integrity of digital assets for long-term access.

https://tinyurl.com/fu7swfk7

“Streamlining Electronic Theses and Dissertations Processing Procedures at the University of Alabama Libraries”

This article provides a brief history of the ETD processing procedures at The University of Alabama from 2010 to 2021, a detailed description of the revised workflow, and a discussion of the improvements made. The workflow utilizes Python scripts and MarcEdit mapping and task files. All scripts and files are available in a GitHub repository for anyone to use and modify at https://github.com/bpclark2/UA_ETD.

https://doi.org/10.1080/07317131.2025.2467571

Community Engagement, Systems and Digital Scholarship Librarian at Harvard University

The Center for Hellenic Studies and its library are actively expanding their activities to include digitization of rare materials, text mining and other digital humanities activities such as open data initiatives, in addition to programming, and collection development. We are also managing many tasks within the integrated library system ALMA which this position would oversee for the CHS and together with local and Cambridge IT services analyze and manage changing and evolving technologies. The library is further poised to engage in community outreach efforts through various kinds of programming, and to expand the physical and digital collection in places and deepen it in other areas, in which this position would take an active role. These added and expanded efforts require an individual dedicated to often complex and challenging responsibilities.

https://tinyurl.com/fz62mfan

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“Developing Practices for FAIR and Linked Data in Heritage Science”

Heritage Science has a lot to gain from the Open Science movement but faces major challenges due to the interdisciplinary nature of the field, as a vast array of technological and scientific methods can be applied to any imaginable material. Historical and cultural contexts are as significant as the methods and material properties, which is something the scientific templates for research data management rarely take into account. While the FAIR data principles are a good foundation, they do not offer enough practical help to researchers facing increasing demands from funders and collaborators. In order to identify the issues and needs that arise “on the ground floor”, the staff at the Heritage Laboratory at the Swedish National Heritage Board took part in a series of workshops with case studies. The results were used to develop guides for good data practices and a list of recommended online vocabularies for standardised descriptions, necessary for findable and interoperable data. However, the project also identified areas where there is a lack of useful vocabularies and the consequences this could have for discoverability of heritage studies on materials from areas of the world that have historically been marginalised by Western culture. If Heritage Science as a global field of study is to reach its full potential this must be addressed.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-025-01598-x

Digital Preservation Librarian at Iowa State University

[T]he Digital Preservation Librarian coordinates the planning and implementation of digital preservation strategies to conduct effective digital records management and collections care. They will have the opportunity to develop and refine policies, procedures, and workflows for collection management and preservation, and influence the ongoing implementation of our digital preservation platform, Libnova.

https://tinyurl.com/3d9a2j5y

Clarivate: “Our Letter to the Library Community”

After receiving feedback and guidance from our customers and partners, we would like to further clarify our intentions moving forward:

We remain unequivocally committed to preserving perpetual access to previously purchased Ebook Central titles.

We are committed to increased investment in Rialto as an ebook marketplace, enabling title-by-title ebook purchasing from publishers and other vendors.

We will work with vendors, such as EBSCO, to integrate with their book and purchasing platforms, to maximize choice and workflow efficiency for customers.

We will expand benchmark and collection development tools in Rialto, providing you with insights to more efficiently make book selection, purchase and access decisions.

To further support the changes announced:

We will extend the ability for customers to make perpetual purchases for both print and ebooks on all platforms, including Ebook Central, OASIS, Rialto and GOBI through June 30, 2026.

We reaffirm our commitment to always facilitate title-by-title perpetual access purchasing through the Rialto marketplace of ebooks from publishers and aggregators.

We will work with you and your vendors of choice to create migration toolkits, to make transitioning your workflows and profiles as efficient and seamless as possible.

We will provide the data and analytics you need, as well as regular updates and close communication with your local team.

https://tinyurl.com/9hbuheru

Assistant Vice President, Collections and Digital Strategies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Supported by a team of 7 faculty and 2 staff members the Assistant Vice President for Collections and Digital Strategies (AVP-CDS) allocates and oversees the Libraries’ collections budget of over $13 million for acquisitions, licensing, and digital strategies that expand access to information resources. The AVP-CDS is the primary advocate and strategist for building, refining, and preserving collections and resources in print and digital format and ensuring their discoverability and accessibility.

https://tinyurl.com/5yxyk7bf

John Unsworth to Retire: “After Managing UVA’s Biggest Library Challenges, Dean Turns Final Page”

When Unsworth accepted the dean position at UVA, he knew the main library on Grounds would close for a nearly four-year renovation. What he didn’t know is that the COVID-19 pandemic would shutter the facility – and all of Grounds – even earlier.

When the virus was thought to spread through touch, he oversaw a book quarantine where recently handled volumes were kept out of circulation long enough to let any viral remnants die. As the understanding of the virus evolved, Unsworth’s staff began separating students in the then-Alderman Library’s spaces, a challenging task in a space where Hoos like to study together.

Finally, when the University switched to online learning, more than 50 members of the library staff volunteered to ensure the technology worked correctly. The staff also ramped up its plans to digitize library resources to assist remote professors and students.

https://tinyurl.com/2msyecpv

Digital Special Collections Librarian at University of Nevada Las Vegas

As a member of the Digital Collections Department, lead the development, use, promotion, and support of the Special Collection and Archives’ repository (Special Collections and Archives Portal) and the digital materials hosted there. The individual in this role will provide support to enhance discovery, access, management, and preservation of Special Collections and Archives assets within the Special Collections and Archives Portal and serves as the product manager for the repository software.

https://tinyurl.com/2wyzjt8c

“An APC Trap?: Privilege and the Perception of Reasonableness in Open Access Publishing”

Four institutions from the U.S. participated in this research: The University of Colorado Boulder (CUB), the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass), the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), and the University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK). . . .

Grants were the largest source of APC funding across all institutions, with well over half (56%)of respondents who paid an APC using grant funding to pay for at least part of their APC (Figure 2). Eighty-six percent of respondents used grants, departments, and/or other university funding towards their APC. Overall, libraries were not a significant source of funding for paying these fees. In fact, fees were just as likely to be waived than to come from library funding sources 10% of respondents, each), and the library was ranked 5th overall out of 8 funding source options. . . .

Overall, more than two-thirds of respondents across institutions thought that fees less than or equal to US$1.5K were reasonable, with an additional 16% responding that no fees were reasonable (Figure 6).

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/55542

Head of Open Scholarship at Columbia University

Reporting to the Director, Digital Scholarship, the Head of Open Scholarship provides leadership and expertise in the evolution and expansion of Columbia University Libraries’ open and public scholarship initiatives. This position will be part of the leadership team of the Digital Scholarship department in the Research & Learning Division of the Columbia University Libraries (CUL). The Open Scholarship unit at CUL includes services such as the Academic Commons institutional repository, the Columbia Journals program, Columbia Podcasting Partnerships, Digital Pedagogy, and emerging research impact initiatives. In partnership with colleagues across the organization, this position also provides supervision and leadership for Open Scholarship’s training and educational programs, including its support for research and scholarship in the digital humanities.

https://tinyurl.com/2ab2byus

“The Economic Impact of Open Science: A Scoping Review”

This paper summarised a comprehensive scoping review of the economic impact of Open Science (OS), examining empirical evidence from 2000 to 2023. It focuses on Open Access (OA), Open/FAIR Data (OFD), Open Source Software (OSS), and Open Methods, assessing their contributions to efficiency gains in research production, innovation enhancement, and economic growth. Evidence, although limited, indicates that OS accelerates research processes, reduces the related costs, fosters innovation by improving access to data and resources and this ultimately generates economic growth. Specific sectors, such as life sciences, are researched more and the literature exhibits substantial gains, mainly thanks to OFD and OA. OSS supports productivity, while the very limited studies on Open Methods indicate benefits in terms of productivity gains and innovation enhancement. However, gaps persist in the literature, particularly in fields like Citizen Science and Open Evaluation, for which no empirical findings on economic impact could be detected. Despite limitations, empirical evidence on specific cases highlight economic benefits. This review underscores the need for further metrics and studies across diverse sectors and regions to fully capture OS’s economic potential.

https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/kqse5_v1

Sr. Innovation Specialist at Library of Congress

This position serves as a Senior Innovation Specialist in the Digital Innovation Division within the Office of the Chief Information Officer. The Digital Innovation Division’s mission is to broaden awareness of the Library’s digital innovation, expand the use of the Library’s digital resources, and to participate in community efforts to develop the use and preservation of our nation’s cultural heritage material.

https://tinyurl.com/4jfdfp7s

“Opinion: A Librarian’s Summary Of, and Response to, the Clarivate Announcement”

Furthermore, the transition to subscription-only access represents more than a change in purchasing models – it fundamentally undermines the ability of academic libraries to build collections that serve their specific institutional needs. . . . As the existing ProQuest One collections have demonstrated (causing great frustration), content can be removed without library input or prior announcement. Clarivate states: “We will continue our bi-annual schedule of title removals from subscriptions in June and December. There may be occasional off-cycle removals due to legal reasons or loss of publisher rights.” . . . The loss of Evidence-Based Acquisition (EBA) and Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) is also likely to be another blow to institutions whose budgets do not allow for the up-front purchase of all texts on lists.

https://tinyurl.com/4wy3eyc9

Research Data Curation Specialist at Purdue University

In this position, the research data curation specialist will engage in curation, archiving, preservation, and sharing of research data across disciplines and data formats. The specialist will provide support for campus researchers throughout their use of the system to publish and share data and work closely with the team members on metadata management, data analysis, and strategic initiatives to sustain and grow the system and services.

https://tinyurl.com/2mmyxtmd

“Academic Databases and the Art of the Overcharge”

To help libraries avoid price discrimination, we gathered research library pricing for three popular academic databases: SciFinder from Chemical Abstract Services (a division of the American Chemical Society); Scopus from Elsevier; and Clarivate’s Web of Science. . . .

Using this data, we will examine a selection of pricing that demonstrates the range of prices paid by libraries and compare pricing across different institutional factors. We will conclude with tips on how to use pricing data in your library’s next negotiation.

https://tinyurl.com/ycyyyhuf

Digital Preservation Librarian at Tulane University

The Digital Preservation Librarian leads the development of the cohesive digital preservation program ensuring the long-term access and preservation of digital assets under Tulane University Libraries'(TUL) stewardship. In collaboration with other library units In collaboration with other library units, the Digital Preservation Librarian maintains and updates TUL Digital Preservation Framework, policies and practices. . . . The position also works closely with campus Information Technology to ensure long-term storage availability and with students and faculty with respect to data stewardship, and digital preservation issues.

https://apply.interfolio.com/161582

“AI Is Reigniting Decades-Old Questions Over Digital Rights, but Fair Use Prevails”

A publisher recently provided UC Berkeley’s Library with an elusive explanation for their AI ban on a subset of their licensed materials, claiming that they would “require new and different AI terms [that] would be significantly higher in price,” and that “individual client requests [would] need to be evaluated [to] determine whether or not they will be permitted.” However, when prompted to provide said new terms and price, the publisher was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to provide any additional information, noting that there is “no set pricing model or terms to share.” . . .

Charging extra to secure AI rights is likely to be cost-prohibitive due to increased financial burdens on libraries and institutions of higher education; if publishers are successful, it could lead to less academic output as researchers may have to independently foot the bill for the right to conduct research using AI.

https://tinyurl.com/42nmfwm2

Linked Data Librarian at Middle Tennessee State University

Reporting to the Chair of the CDM department, the Linked Data Librarian will respond to the rapid developments in metadata and web technologies and the transition to the semantic web through linked data. The successful candidate will work to leverage the potential of linked data to expand web-based discovery of the library’s resources and address the conceptual, technical, creative, and management aspects of linked data.

https://tinyurl.com/4r26ahy8