At last month’s CHORUS Forum: 12 Best Practices for Research Data Sharing speakers addressed the Joint Statement on Research Data Sharing by STM, DataCite and Crossref. The forum was moderated by Howard Ratner, Executive Director, CHORUS and sponsored by AIP Publishing, Association of American Publishers, Crossref, GeoScienceWorld, and STM.
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The Digital Collections Manager is responsible for digitization of archival materials, metadata creation, and quality control of the University Library’s digital assets. The Manager produces, adds and updates materials in the digital asset management system and other platforms. Reporting to the Digital Scholarship Librarian, the Digital Collections Manager works collaboratively with the Digital Information Management and Education (DIME) team to evaluate and improve workflows, policies, and guidelines related to digitization, digital preservation, and digital collection creation. As the subject area expert for digital collection management, the position also supervises student workers and reviews their work, providing quality assurance of all materials existing in the digital collections.
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The amount of data generated across various disciplines has been steadily increasing and is projected to experience exponential growth in the foreseeable future. This underscores the pressing need for proficient and streamlined data management. Data has proven to be a crucial tool in addressing complex societal challenges on a global scale. However, the challenge of producing and openly disseminating data that are easily discoverable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) has emerged as a significant concern for policymakers. The potential for data to be repurposed for advancing scientific research and innovation across different disciplines is contingent on its willingness to be shared. This paper employs a systematic literature review to investigate the motivating factors, advantages, and obstacles associated with open data sharing. Additionally, it explores governance frameworks that can create unique opportunities for implementing FAIR principles in real-time scientific research.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jafr.2024.101157
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We are looking for someone who will help students and scholars become more confident and critical users of digital technologies in public-facing scholarship, such as digital collections, interactive data visualizations, collections-as-data strategies, community archives, and other emerging forms of digital scholarly publishing. We want you to have some technical experience, and enthusiasm for building more experience on the job. But most importantly, we want you to bring a wide-ranging curiosity, a dedication to helping varied learners develop and grow, and a desire to help build an equitable and interdisciplinary collective for applied information science within the Library.
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StockCake is a new platform by AI startup Imaginary Machines. The site currently hosts more than a million pre-generated images. These images can be downloaded, used, and shared for free. There are no strings attached as all photos are in the public domain.
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The Electronic Resources Librarian/Specialist, as part of the Discovery Unit within the Collection Services department, leads the effort to provide continual, reliable, and seamless access to the Libraries’ electronic resources. The successful candidate will be responsible for the lifecycle of the Libraries’ licensed electronic resources including onboarding, maintenance, troubleshooting, and offboarding. Additionally, in collaboration with the Libraries’ IT and Discovery Unit team members, the Electronic Resources Librarian/Specialist handles Tier 1 support for the authentication, including EZProxy and SSO.
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Today, COMMUNIA is releasing Policy Paper #17 on access to publicly funded research (also available as a PDF file), in which we propose a targeted intervention in European copyright law to improve access to publicly funded research. . ..
We recommend a three-tiered approach to open publicly funded research outputs to the public, immediately upon publication, where a secondary publication obligation co-exists with a secondary publication right. We consider that an obligation by the funding recipients to republish is a more consequential approach to protect the public interest, as it makes Open Access (OA) mandatory, ultimately ensuring that publicly funded research outputs are republished in OA repositories. A right is, however, necessary to ensure that the authors, and subsequently the funding recipients, retain the rights necessary to comply with the obligation. A right also provides a legal framework for the dissemination in OA repositories of publicly funded research outputs published before the entry into force of a secondary publication obligation.
In addition, we recommend the introduction of a copyright exception for the benefit of knowledge institutions, such as libraries and archives, to further support the task of making available research outputs published before the entry into force of secondary publication rights and obligations.
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The Metadata Technologies Librarian participates in describing and providing access to electronic, print, and manuscript resources, with focus on user discovery systems. They are significantly involved in database maintenance operations in the Libraries’ integrated library system/library services platform (ILS/LSP) and discovery layers. They also contribute to data control activities, including data quality, standardization, batch loading, and data transfer. The position provides metadata consulting and project analysis services for patrons and colleagues. . . . The position will contribute to the planning and implementation of future ILS/LSP, discovery, and retrieval services, including the department’s and Libraries’ anticipated 2026-2027 ILS migration.
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This article showcases the evolution of digital collections and their metadata at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library in the last 20 years. It discusses the growth of its collections and their characteristics, examines historical changes in the use of metadata elements, and explores responses to the changing nature of digitized and born-digital materials. Based on a large-scale data analysis of the digital collections and their metadata housed in UIUC Digital Library, the paper also examines the challenges and opportunities of the curation and management of digital collections and digital libraries in the future.
https://doi.org/10.1080/19386389.2024.2338015
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Reporting to the Director of Research Data and Digital Scholarship (RDDS), the Head of Digital Scholarship is responsible for the administrative management of libraries’ digital scholarship initiatives including those related to digital projects, digital humanities, public digital scholarship, and affiliated areas.
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Whether a more decoupled ecosystem emerges will depend on other funders. Will key funders like Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and Wellcome Trust follow Gates? Up until now they have made supportive noises about preprints but stopped short of mandates. Both are supporters of Plan S though, and frankly Plan S 2.0 looks a lot like Plan U. And what of the elephant in the room, National Institutes of Health (NIH)? The recent OSTP memo requires US-government-funded articles to be made free, but does not provide additional funds. If government agencies like NIH were to decide preprints qualify, as bioRxiv and arXiv have suggested, authors would have an easy path to making articles free that doesn’t require them to find an extra $5-10K behind the couch to cover APCs.
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Reporting to the Associate University Librarian for Discovery & Access, the Electronic & Continuing Resources Librarian is responsible for providing leadership and coordination of the overall lifecycle of electronic and continuing resources, including both the day-to-day work surrounding these resources and the conceptualization of how this work is done.
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Dozens of people have now had their memories turned into images in this way via Synthetic Memories, a project run by Domestic Data Streamers. The studio uses generative image models, such as OpenAI’s DALL-E, to bring people’s memories to life. Since 2022, the studio, which has received funding from the UN and Google, has been working with immigrant and refugee communities around the world to create images of scenes that have never been photographed, or to re-create photos that were lost when families left their previous homes.
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The Electronic Resources Librarian (Assistant Librarian) will manage, maintain, and evaluate the Libraries’ electronic resources access and management systems. The selected candidate will set up and maintain access records for existing, new, and trial electronic resources, including updates to the systems’ knowledge bases. This position will be responsible for resolving electronic resources access issues and communicating with patrons, vendors, publishers, and library staff regarding such issues. The Electronic Resources Librarian will also collaborate with staff members responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the Libraries’ link resolver and will review, negotiate and process contracts and licenses for electronic resources.
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A study that identified buzzword adjectives that could be hallmarks of AI-written text in peer-review reports suggests that researchers are turning to ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools to evaluate others’ work. . . .
Their analysis suggests that up to 17% of the peer-review reports have been substantially modified by chatbots — although it’s unclear whether researchers used the tools to construct reviews from scratch or just to edit and improve written drafts.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01051-2
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Reporting to the Director of ReADS [Department of Resource Acquisition and Discovery Service], the successful candidate will provide leadership in planning and implementing the library’s collection-related technology needs and will be responsible for the integrated use of library technical services tools and cloud-based applications, acquisition platforms, and related systems and resources. . . . .Reporting to the Director of ReADS, the successful candidate will provide leadership in planning and implementing the library’s collection-related technology needs and will be responsible for the integrated use of library technical services tools and cloud-based applications, acquisition platforms, and related systems and resources.
https://recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF02640
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OpenAI, Google, and the French artificial intelligence startup Mistral have all released new versions of their frontier AI models within 12 hours of one another, as the industry prepares for a burst of activity over the summer.
The unprecedented flurry of releases come as the sector readies for the expected launch of the next major version of GPT, the system that underpins OpenAI’s hit chatbot Chat-GPT.
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The Senior Applications Developer is responsible for the end-to-end development and delivery of specialized library and administrative systems that enable the libraries to share knowledge and culture with the people of Ohio, the nation, and the world. The Senior Applications Developer collaborates with product owners, project managers, and team members on the specification of business and technical requirements and proposes and implements solutions that adhere to standards for data security, code quality, test coverage, digital accessibility, and architecture. Duties also include providing technical support; maintaining existing open-source and custom applications; collaborating in the investigation of problems, conducting root-cause analyses, and recommending fixes; and participating in weekly maintenance windows.
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Over the past ten years, Carnegie Doctoral Institutions with Very High Research Activity (R1) have received a significant portion of federal grant dollars. Although the unusual infusion of COVID research dollars will skew trends for years, on average, university revenues from all funding sources, have increased over the past ten years.. . .
During the same period of growth in university revenues, much attributed to R&D dollars, university investments in their libraries has remained around 1% of revenue. In good news, through unpredictable fluctuations in university revenues, an ARL library budget remains consistent. Unfortunately, with continuing cost increases, a flat library budget is an erosion in purchasing power. Without new investments, or substantial resource redistribution, we cannot make progress on new mandates for open data and scholarship.
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Chiefly, the position administers and maintains the library’s website and databases via EZproxy, the integrated library system (Ex Libris, Alma/Primo), Lib-Guides, SharePoint, and other services. The position includes close collaboration with other UW System libraries, campus Technology Services unit, with library colleagues to integrate and monitor library systems to improve the user experience.
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This white paper describes ways of building a books data commons: a responsibly designed, broadly accessible data set of digitized books to be used in training AI models. This report, written in partnership with Creative Commons and Proteus Strategies, is based on a series of workshops that brought together practitioners building AI models, legal and policy scholars, and experts working with collections of digitized books.
In the paper, we first explain why books matter for AI training and how broader access could be beneficial. We then summarize two tracks that might be considered for developing such a resource, highlighting existing projects that help foreground the potential challenges. One track relies on public domain and permissively licensed books, while the other depends on exceptions to copyright to enable training on in-copyright books. The report also presents several key design choices and next steps that could advance further development of this approach.
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The Senior Web Developer designs creative and usable solutions that have a significant impact on how users experience University Libraries’ discover and access interfaces for the digital library, content management systems, library catalogs, digital exhibits, learning resources and other systems. Duties also include providing technical support; maintaining existing applications; and participating in weekly maintenance windows.
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Web search is a crucial technology for the digital economy. Dominated by a few gatekeepers focused on commercial success, however, web publishers have to optimize their content for these gatekeepers, resulting in a closed ecosystem of search engines as well as the risk of publishers sacrificing quality. To encourage an open search ecosystem and offer users genuine choice among alternative search engines, we propose the development of an Open Web Index (OWI). We outline six core principles for developing and maintaining an open index, based on open data principles, legal compliance, and collaborative technology development. The combination of an open index with what we call declarative search engines will facilitate the development of vertical search engines and innovative web data products (including, e.g., large language models), enabling a fair and open information space. This framework underpins the EU-funded project OpenWebSearch.EU, marking the first step towards realizing an Open Web Index.
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24818
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The Metadata Specialist for Electronic and Visual Resources will be responsible for complex copy, derived original, and abbreviated original cataloging for online electronic monographs, electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), and physical video formats (e.g., DVD and Blu-ray) in a variety of Latin script (chiefly Western European) languages and original cataloging of non-documentary videos.
In the COVID-19 pandemic, it was much more critical for many life science researchers to rapidly disseminate research results—so they used preprints as upstream publication opportunities. This was rather new to the life sciences where preprint servers had only appeared as early as 2013. With a mixed-methods-study we examined this development and investigated whether preprint posting is a temporary phenomenon or the beginning of a cultural shift in publishing behavior in the life sciences. First, we conducted a survey of researchers who have posted COVID-19 related preprints. We investigated experiences with posting preprints during the COVID-19 pandemic, motivations for and concerns about posting preprints, the role of research institutions or funders, and the future of preprint publishing. Answers were grouped to compare differences between respondents’ gender, career stage, region of origin (global south or global north) and experience with posting preprints before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We further analyzed eight popular preprint repositories regarding the number of posted preprints and preprint characteristics, such as the number of authors and citations. Interestingly, survey and preprint server analysis have presented different, if not contradicting results: While the majority of surveyed researchers was willing to continue posting preprints, the numbers of preprints published, especially on servers for the life sciences, have stagnated or declined. Also, while certain preprints garnered substantial citations during the COVID-19 pandemic, this has not resulted in a significant shift in researchers’ publishing behavior, and the posting of preprints has not become a routine. We concluded that the sustainability of preprint publishing practices is more strongly influenced by disciplinary norms and practices than by external shocks as the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04982-9
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