Charles W. Bailey, Jr. – Page 4

"Implementing Free Persistent Identifiers in a Scientific Journal Management System Alternatively to DOI "

The use and assignment of most persistent identifiers have an associated cost. Journals sometimes have difficulty covering this cost or transferring it to the authors of the articles, causing barriers to publishing scientific articles. This work aims to implement free persistent identifiers in a scientific journal management system. To accomplish this, software components for managing the persistent identifiers Archival Resource Key and Persistent Uniform Resource Locator are implemented for the Open Journal System. The results of implementing these persistent identifiers in a scientific journal are analyzed, as well as the implementation by the scientific community of 15 countries in 32 journals. Implementing free persistent identifiers in scientific journals allows for greater visibility and savings in publication costs.

https://tinyurl.com/2bsh2z6b

Heritage Science Data Service (7 Positions)

As a result of a successful £14.4m bid to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Archaeology Data Service is expanding, and leading a consortium which is setting up a new Heritage Science Data Service (HSDS). The HSDS will provide core digital services for the Research Infrastructure for Conservation and Heritage Science (RICHeS), enabling RICHeS to transform heritage science and conservation research and its capacity to advance understanding, preservation, and management of the UK’s heritage.

HSDS Collections Development Manager

Digital Archives Supervisor

Training Officer

Data Standards Officer

HSDS Systems Manager

Applications Developer

Applications Developer (Linked Open Data Specialist)

https://tinyurl.com/mr2ytxfc

"Officially Launched! The New University-Based Publishing Futures Community Is Forming."

On Monday, September 30, the University Based Publishing Futures [UBPF] community officially launched with an open virtual meeting attended by 150 colleagues. UBPF is a new, multi-community coalition made up of the professionals who work at university presses, library publishers, and other academy-affiliated programs that support the infrastructure of scholarly publishing. The purpose of this “community of communities” is to share knowledge among university-based publishers and align our outreach and advocacy efforts for maximum impact. To learn more about this new community, watch the meeting recording, or visit the UBPF website on Knowledge Commons.

https://tinyurl.com/4b9eepr8

Research Data Management Librarian at Northwestern University

The Research Data Management Librarian assists researchers with data management planning, ?nding relevant datasets, data organization, curating and sharing their research data, and complying with relevant data management requirements and policies. This individual must have a strong commitment to making data as open as possible This support consists of teaching workshops, conducting individualized consultations, and providing services that advance research at Northwestern University.

https://tinyurl.com/yc35y2nv

"Trapped in Transformative Agreements? A Multifaceted Analysis of >1,000 Contracts"

Transformative agreements between academic publishers and research institutions are ubiquitous. The ‘Efficiency and Standards for Article Charges’ (ESAC) Initiative lists more than 1,000 contracts in its database. We make use of this unique dataset by web-scraping the details of every contract to substantially expand the overview spreadsheet provided by the ESAC Initiative. Based on that hitherto unused data source, we combine qualitative and quantitative methods to conduct an in-depth analysis of the contract characteristics and the TA landscape. Our analysis demonstrates that research institutions seem to be ‘trapped’ in transformative agreements. Instead of being a bridge towards a fully Open Access world, academia is stuck in the hybrid system. This endows the legacy (non-Open Access) publishing houses with substantial market power. It raises entry barriers, lowers competition, and increases costs for libraries and universities.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.20224

"Open Access and Transparency: EDP Sciences Releases 2024 Transparency Report for Mathematics Journals"

EDP Sciences and SMAI (Société de Mathématiques Appliquées et Industrielles) have just published their latest transparency report for 2024, marking the fourth consecutive year of open access (OA) publication under the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model – and the fourth transparency report. . . .

The 2024 report highlights several key achievements and ongoing developments:

Sustained Open Access: All six journals remain open access in 2024. . .

Moderate subscription price increases: Subscription prices for the journals increased by 2% in 2023 and 2024, a modest adjustment reflecting inflation while maintaining affordability.

Stable article output and usage: In 2023, the six journals published 449 articles, comparable to the previous year, with full-text downloads remaining steady at 436,655. . . .

Financial sustainability: The number of subscriptions continued to increase. Revenue from traditional subscriptions covered 51% of the publication costs in 2023, with additional funding from institutions and supporters. The average publication cost across the journals is €950 per article, and a concerted effort to reduce costs is ongoing. . . .

Impact of national agreements, partnerships, and additional funding: The French National Open Access Agreement, in place until 2026, alongside a renewed partnership with Knowledge Unlatched, continues to provide crucial financial support. Further backing from the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Fonds National pour la Science Ouverte (FNSO) has played an essential role in securing the transition to open access.

https://tinyurl.com/yckm8fvz

Digital Collections Manager at Center for Puerto Rican Studies at CUNY

Oversee the development, management, and preservation of Centro’s digital archival holdings.

Provide leadership and promote innovation in the management, access, and storage of digital archival holdings.

Coordinate the archival digitization program, including overseeing selection, preparation of materials, digitization, post-processing, quality assurance, ingest, access and discovery of digital objects.

Administer CENTRO’s digital collections portal, including training staff, maintaining user documentation, performing system maintenance of metadata and user interface, encoding import and export templates, and liaising with IT staff.

Implement CENTRO’s digital preservation policy and collaborate with tech staff to enhance, improve, and scale digital preservation.

Run born-digital processing program, including producing or enhancing finding aids and developing access mechanisms for born-digital content.

https://tinyurl.com/5xttr7ys

"Taylor & Francis Announces Subscribe to Open Journals Pilot "

Taylor & Francis has today announced its first Subscribe to Open (S2O) pilot, one of several innovative options it is trialing to accelerate open access (OA) publishing. S2O enables a journal’s subscribers to support its conversion to OA, making new articles available to readers everywhere.

Taylor & Francis is inviting existing subscribers of the participating journals to renew their subscriptions for next year by March. If enough institutions support S2O in this way, all articles published in the 2025 volume will be open access. This process can then be repeated, one volume at a time, for the following years. If the required level of support is not achieved for any of the pilot titles, they will remain as subscription journals (with a hybrid OA option).

https://tinyurl.com/245857eu

User Experience Librarian at Illinois Institute of Technology

The User Experience Librarian collaborates closely with librarians and technical staff to promote new models for web development and design and implement best practices for digital content and services. As a liaison to academic units on campus, he/she also provides research and instructional services to a diverse community of faculty, staff, and student users of the Paul V. Galvin Library.

https://tinyurl.com/5n85x88x

"The Paradox of Competition: How Funding Models Could Undermine the Uptake of Data Sharing Practices"

Although beneficial to scientific development, data sharing is still uncommon in many research areas. Various organisations, including funding agencies that endorse open science, aim to increase its uptake. However, estimating the large-scale implications of different policy interventions on data sharing by funding agencies, especially in the context of intense competition among academics, is difficult empirically. Here, we built an agent-based model to simulate the effect of different funding schemes (i.e., highly competitive large grants vs. distributive small grants), and varying intensity of incentives for data sharing on the uptake of data sharing by academic teams strategically adapting to the context. Our results show that more competitive funding schemes may lead to higher rates of data sharing in the short term, but lower rates in the long-term, because the uncertainty associated with competitive funding negatively affects the cost/benefit ratio of data sharing. At the same time, more distributive grants do not allow academic teams to cover the costs and time required for data sharing, limiting uptake. Our findings suggest that without support services and infrastructure to minimise the costs of data sharing and other ancillary conditions (e.g., university policy support, reputational rewards and benefits of data sharing for academic teams), it is unlikely that funding agencies alone can play a leading role for the uptake of data sharing. Therefore, any attempt to reform reward and recognition systems towards open science principles should carefully consider the potential impact of their proposed policies and their long-term side effects.

https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/gb4v2

Supervisory Digital Collections Specialist at Library of Congress

DCW is responsible for providing digital acquisitions support to the Library Collections and Services Group, and for the lifecycle management of digital collections that are not otherwise under the care of a custodial division. DCW is also responsible for the management of the Library’s crowdsourced transcription program By the People and the emergent digital scholarship program or the work of the first Library’s first Digital Collections Data Librarian. DCW staff collaborate with other Library curatorial units, technical staff, and external organizations to establish best practices, implement new and streamline existing digital workflows, identify digital content management problems, and propose solutions for the content within the scope of the section and division.

https://www.usajobs.gov/job/811164000

"Large Language Publishing: The Scholarly Publishing Oligopoly’s Bet on AI"

This article focuses on an offshoot of the big firms’ surveillance-publishing businesses: the post-ChatGPT imperative top profit from troves of proprietary “training data,” to make new AI products and—the essay predicts—to license academic papers and scholars’ tracked behavior to big technology companies.

https://tinyurl.com/ft2467my

Systems Librarian at Nevada State University

Reporting directly to the Dean of the Library, the ideal candidate will contribute to a forward-thinking team committed to redefining the role of the university library. The Systems Librarian oversees the implementation, maintenance, support, and enhancement of various library technologies, systems and integrations. This role is pivotal in delivering innovative library services and ensuring access to the Library’s comprehensive online information resources.

Virginia Tech and UC Riverside: "University Libraries Receives Grant to Create Generative Artificial Intelligence Incubator Program"

University Libraries at Virginia Tech and the University of California, Riverside, received a $115,398 Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to create a generative artificial intelligence incubator program (GenAI) to increase the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the library profession and academic libraries. . . .

[Yinlin] Chen [assistant director for the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship at Virginia Tech] will use his expertise in advanced GenAI techniques and multidisciplinary AI research in his collaboration with Edward Fox, co-principal investigator and director of the digital library research laboratory at Virginia Tech and computer science professor, and Zhiwu Xie, co-principal investigator and assistant university librarian for research and technology at the University of California, Riverside, to create the generative artificial intelligence incubator program. They will build training materials, workshops, and projects to assist librarians in becoming AI practitioners.

https://tinyurl.com/3sysn284

Online Learning Librarian at Old Dominion University

Reporting to the Head of Libraries’ Education and Assessment, the Online Learning Librarian will lead the strategic direction for the Libraries’ online learning presence and integration into ODU Global. The Online Learning Librarian is responsible for the development and assessment of the Libraries’ tutorials, videos, and guides that are aligned with the university’s information literacy and research-related learning outcomes and courses.

https://tinyurl.com/yc68cdms

"National Archives Updates Digital Preservation Framework"

Last week the National Archives released a major update to its Digital Preservation Framework, an open resource and data set on GitHub that provides guidance and risk assessments for digital file formats. refer to caption Enlarge NASA Computers, September 12, 1986. Photo by Martin Brown. National Archives, Records of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. View in National Archives Catalog The release marks a significant update to the Framework, adding new and revised questions to address additional risk factors to digital formats that have emerged since its initial release four years ago. The updated Framework is more user friendly and more transparent about the National Archives’ digital preservation process and its electronic holdings. . . .

The update comes after months of collaborative work with other digital formats specialists. The National Archives shared a draft of the updated Framework for public comment this past May, and this latest release incorporates feedback from colleagues throughout the agency and federal government, as well as international colleagues.

Since its debut, the Framework has become a widely consulted resource for the digital preservation community around the globe. The Framework was additionally released as Linked Open Data in 2022.

https://tinyurl.com/bdehy8yj

Emerging Technologies Librarian at Howard University

Oversee the organization, maintenance, and accessibility of the library’s digital resources through Digital Howard and future HUL digital platforms. . . .

Serves as the open access liaison librarian and leads and promotes and supports HUL’s open access. . . .

Develops, implements, and manages an institutional repository that collects, preserves, and provides access to the research output of Howard University faculty.

Maintains, envisions, and implements services aligned with the research and scholarship lifecycle, supporting digital humanities, data management, geospatial information, and other related areas.

https://tinyurl.com/38dwhcf7

2024 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report: Cybersecurity and Privacy Edition

These are, in many ways, tumultuous times. Global political movements and ideologies continue to erode social ties and disrupt state and national legislative processes. Wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East threaten to destabilize the global order. And new AI-powered technologies are evolving at breakneck speed, offering the world both the promise of new utopian capabilities and the threat of dystopian collapse. Against this backdrop of seismic change, higher education cybersecurity and privacy professionals must navigate new questions around what needs to be done to keep our institutions and our students safe and secure. This report summarizes expert panelist discussions on these and other emerging trends and offers reflections on where the future of higher education may be headed.

https://tinyurl.com/3ynda58w

"Changes to Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Plan Progress Reporting and the Submission of Revised DMS Plans Are Coming on October 1"

On October 1, NIH is adding several new Data Management and Sharing (DMS) questions to Research Performance Progress Reports (RPPRs) and updating the process for submitting revised DMS Plans to NIH for review. In brief:

As mentioned in a May 2024 Guide Notice, NIH is including several new questions about DMS activities in RPPRs submitted on or after October 1, 2024 (See Guide Notice NOT-OD-24-175). For awards for which the NIH DMS Policy applies, recipients will now be asked:

Whether data has been generated or shared to date

What repositories any data was shared to and under what unique digital identifier

If data has not been generated and/or shared per the award’s DMS Plan, why and what corrective actions have or will be taken to comply with the plan

If significant changes to the DMS Plan are anticipated in the coming year, recipients will be asked to explain them and provide a revised DMS Plan for approval.

NIH is updating the processes for submitting requests to revise a DMS Plan through the Just in Time (JIT) Module, the Prior Approval Module, and the RPPR Module in eRA Commons (See Guide Notice NOT-OD-24-176).

https://tinyurl.com/4mxwtn8k

Audio & Moving Image Digitization Librarian at University of Michigan

The Audio & Moving Image Digitization Librarian is a full-time Librarian position versed in A/MI digitization and metadata standards. This position will expand our audio and moving image preservation program by providing technical expertise to an expanding roster of formats, update our metadata practices, overhaul our workflows, and work closely with stakeholders to support their preservation and access needs. This position will also organize and guide the work of the A/MI technician, oversee the work of interns or other temporary staff, and provide training and project management for specific projects as needed.

https://tinyurl.com/ybzmrk9u

"Enabling Preprint Discovery, Evaluation, and Analysis with Europe PMC"

Preprints provide an indispensable tool for rapid and open communication of early research findings. Preprints can also be revised and improved based on scientific commentary uncoupled from journal-organised peer review. The uptake of preprints in the life sciences has increased significantly in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when immediate access to research findings became crucial to address the global health emergency. With ongoing expansion of new preprint servers, improving discoverability of preprints is a necessary step to facilitate wider sharing of the science reported in preprints. To address the challenges of preprint visibility and reuse, Europe PMC, an open database of life science literature, began indexing preprint abstracts and metadata from several platforms in July 2018. Since then, Europe PMC has continued to increase coverage through addition of new servers, and expanded its preprint initiative to include the full text of preprints related to COVID-19 in July 2020 and then the full text of preprints supported by the Europe PMC funder consortium in April 2022. The preprint collection can be searched via the website and programmatically, with abstracts and the open access full text of COVID-19 and Europe PMC funder preprint subsets available for bulk download in a standard machine-readable JATS XML format. This enables automated information extraction for large-scale analyses of the preprint corpus, accelerating scientific research of the preprint literature itself. This publication describes steps taken to build trust, improve discoverability, and support reuse of life science preprints in Europe PMC. Here we discuss the benefits of indexing preprints alongside peer-reviewed publications, and challenges associated with this process.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303005

Copyright and Scholarly Communications Librarian at University of Florida

The George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida seek a collaborative and engaging Copyright & Scholarly Communications Librarian to provide leadership and direct outreach and support to the University community on issues related to scholarly communications, intellectual property law and policy, and open scholarship.

This position provides expertise in alternative publishing models, open scholarship, author rights, copyright, and compliance with public-access requirements for federally funded research and is responsible for tracking trends that affect access to scholarly information. This position also supports and informs policies for the UF Author Rights Policy, LibraryPress@UF, Affordable UF, the Institutional Repository at the University of Florida (IR@UF), and other campus support programs and initiatives.

https://tinyurl.com/yeykxwkx

"Mapping Research Data Landscape in Africa Using the re3data and Data Citation Index"

Despite the efforts made by most African countries in incubating the practice of research data sharing, little is known on the status of the research data sphere in the African landscape. This study was conducted to establish the status of research data and research data repositories (RDRs) in Africa. Specifically, the study intended to identify the country-wise contributions in terms of research data and research data repositories, trends of publication of research data by African countries, content type and the nature of research data repositories hosted by African countries. The study applied the quantitative research approach. The registry of research data repositories (re3data), which is the prominent worldwide registry for the research data repository, and the data citation index (DCI) hosted by the Web of Science were used in this study. Re3data and DCI index research data repositories and datasets respectively, from almost all the countries around the world. The study identified parameters that were extracted from re3data and DCI using the browse and search facilities. The extracted data were recorded into Google Sheets, refined, and analysed using MS Office Excel. The study found little contribution from the African countries regarding research data and research data repositories to re3data and DCI. The study found further that, despite the presence of a few repositories, most of them had restricted access to external users. This study concludes that African countries are still having a lot to do for the research data practices to be fully incubated. The study suggests that governments and other stakeholders should improve the facilitating conditions, including establishing relevant policies and infrastructures for the practice to be fully embraced.

https://doi.org/10.1177/02666669241284239

Head of Digital Scholarship Services at University of Texas Austin

The Head of Digital Scholarship Services leads the Digital Scholarship (DS) Team in support of evolving campus research needs around digital scholarship services. The team manages the Scholars Lab, a digital scholarship center that provides researchers with infrastructure, access to subject librarian and domain-situated expertise, and opportunities for learning, collaboration, and presentation. . . . Within the Scholars Lab, the DS Team supports campus research and digital scholarship needs and collaborates with other teams to provide related services around open scholarship, research data, the digital humanities, and other evolving aspects of research support.

https://tinyurl.com/5ya3uwm2

"Knowledge Infrastructures are Growing Up: The Case for Institutional (Data) Repositories 10 Years After the Holdren Memo"

Institutional data repositories are uniquely positioned to support researchers in sharing scholarly outputs. As funding agencies develop and institute policies for research data access and sharing, institutional data repositories have emerged as a critical feature in ecosystems for data stewardship and sharing. We show that institutional data repositories can meet and exceed the requirements and recommendations of federal data policy, thereby maximizing the benefits of data sharing. We present results of a mixed-method study which explores the adoption and usage of institutional repositories to share data from 2017 to 2023. Data from two previous studies were combined with data collected in 2023 on the data sharing solutions of Association of Research Libraries member institutions in the United States and Canada. The analysis of the aggregated data indicates that data stewardship has increased in both institutional repositories and institutional data repositories with an increase in complementary infrastructure to support data sharing. We then conduct an “infrastructural inversion” (Bowker & Star, 1999) to ‘surface invisible work’ of making data repositories function well, and demonstrate that institutional data repositories have advantages for providing sustainable stewardship, curation, and sharing of research data. Finally, we show that institutional data repositories may produce additional benefits through established infrastructure, local interoperability, and control.

https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2024-046