"ACS, Elsevier, and Researchgate Resolve Litigation, with Solution to Support Researchers"


ACS and Elsevier, members of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing, have agreed to a legal settlement with ResearchGate that ensures copyright-compliant sharing of research articles published with ACS or Elsevier on the ResearchGate site. The lawsuits pending against ResearchGate in Germany and the United States are now resolved. The specific terms of the parties’ settlement are confidential.

Background: "Munich Court Ruling Sides with Elsevier, ACS over ResearchGate."

https://tinyurl.com/mrr9xywj

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

"The Status of Open Access Repositories in the Field of Technology: Insights from OpenDOAR"


The study found that 125 nations contributed a total of 4,045 repositories in the field of research, with the USA leading the list with the most repositories. Maximum repositories were operated by institutions having multidisciplinary approaches. The DSpace and Eprints were the preferred software types for repositories. The preferred upload content by contributors was "research articles" and "electronic thesis and dissertations."

https://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-11-2022-0119

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

Paywall: "Comparison of COVID-19 Preprint and Peer-Reviewed Versions of Studies on Therapies for Critically Ill Patients"


One article (4.8%, 95% CI 0.12%-23.8%) had a change in the primary outcome. Seven articles (33.3%, 95% CI 14.6%-57.0%) had a change in the primary outcome’s effect measure. Five studies (23.8%, 95% CI 8.2%-47.2%) had changes in statistical significance of at least one secondary outcome. Four studies (19.0%, 95% CI 5.4%-41.9%) had a change in study conclusion.

https://doi.org/10.1177/08850666231182563

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

"arXiv Announces New Policy on ChatGPT and Similar Tools"

In view of this, we

  1. continue to require authors to report in their work any significant use of sophisticated tools, such as instruments and software; we now include in particular text-to-text generative AI among those that should be reported consistent with subject standards for methodology.
  2. remind all colleagues that by signing their name as an author of a paper, they each individually take full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. If generative AI language tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s).
  3. generative AI language tools should not be listed as an author; instead authors should refer to (1).

bit.ly/3wKlx5J

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Impact of the 2022 OSTP Memo: A Bibliometric Analysis of U.S. Federally Funded Publications, 2017-2021"


Therefore, this study seeks to more deeply investigate the characteristics of U.S. federally funded research over a 5-year period from 2017-2021 to better understand the updated guidance’s impact. It uses a manually created custom filter in the Dimensions database to return only publications that arise from U.S. federal funding. Results show that an average of 265,000 articles were published each year that acknowledge U.S. federal funding agencies, and these research outputs are further examined by publisher, journal title, institutions, and Open Access status.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14871

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"How Green Is Our Valley?: Five-Year Study of Selected LIS Journals from Taylor & Francis for Green Deposit of Articles"

Jill Emery has published "How Green Is Our Valley?: Five-Year Study of Selected LIS Journals from Taylor & Francis for Green Deposit of Articles" in Insights.

Here's an excerpt:

This study reviews content from five different library and information science journals: Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian, Collection Management, College & Undergraduate Libraries, Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship and Journal of Library Administration over a five-year period from 2012–2016 to investigate the green deposit rate. Starting in 2011, Taylor & Francis, the publisher of these journals, waived the green deposit embargo for library and information science, heritage and archival content, which allows for immediate deposit of articles in these fields. The review looks at research articles and standing columns over the five years from these five journals to see if any articles were retrieved using the OA Button or through institutional repositories. Results indicate that less than a quarter of writers have chosen to make a green deposit of their articles in local or subject repositories. The discussion outlines some best practices to be undertaken by librarians, editors and Taylor & Francis to make this program more successful.

Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 9 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

ACS Launches ChemRxiv

ACS has launched ChemRxiv.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

ChemRxiv, a new chemistry preprint server for the global chemistry community, is now available in a fully functioning Beta version for use and feedback by researchers. The Beta launch has been undertaken with initial strategic input from the American Chemical Society (ACS), Royal Society of Chemistry, German Chemical Society and other not-for profit organizations, as well as other scientific publishers and preprint services. The free-of-charge service, originally announced late last year, is managed on behalf of the chemical science community by ACS and is powered by Figshare, an online digital repository for academic research.

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

"ADS: The Next Generation Search Platform"

Alberto Accomazzi et al. have self-archived "ADS: The Next Generation Search Platform."

Here's an excerpt:

Starting in 2011, the ADS started to systematically collect, parse and index full-text documents for all the major publications in Physics and Astronomy as well as many smaller Astronomy journals and arXiv e-prints, for a total of over 3.5 million papers. Our citation coverage has doubled since 2010 and now consists of over 70 million citations. We are normalizing the affiliation information in our records and, in collaboration with the CfA library and NASA, we have started collecting and linking funding sources with papers in our system. . . . We have rolled out and are now enhancing a new high-performance search engine capable of performing full-text as well as metadata searches using an intuitive query language which supports fielded, unfielded and functional searches. We are currently able to index acknowledgments, affiliations, citations, funding sources, and to the extent that these metadata are available to us they are now searchable under our new platform. The ADS private library system is being enhanced to support reading groups, collaborative editing of lists of papers, tagging, and a variety of privacy settings when managing one's paper collection.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

Repositories for Visual Arts Research Data: Kaptur Technical Report

The KAPTUR project has released the Kaptur Technical Report.

Here's an excerpt:

This report is framed around the research question: which technical system is most suitable for managing visual arts research data? . . . .

The Technical Manager selected 17 systems to compare with the user requirement document (Appendix B). Five of the systems had similar scores so these were short-listed. The Technical Manager created an online form into which the Project Officers entered priority scores for each of the user requirements in order to calculate a more accurate score for each of the five short-listed systems (Appendix C) and this resulted in the choice of EPrints as the software for the KAPTUR project.

| Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works | Digital Scholarship |

"ArXiv at 20"

ArXiv founder Paul Ginsparg discusses the pioneering twenty-year-old disciplinary archive in "ArXiv at 20."

Here's an excerpt:

On arXiv, we have seen some of the unintended effects of an entire global research community ingesting the same information from the same interface on a daily basis. The order in which new preprint submissions are displayed in the daily alert, if only for a single day, strongly affects the readership on that day and leaves a measurable trace in the citation record fully six years later.

| Digital Scholarship |

"Eprints Institutional Repository Software: A Review"

Mike Beazley has published "Eprints Institutional Repository Software: A Review" in latest issue of Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research.

Here's an excerpt:

Setting up an institutional repository (IR) can be a daunting task. There are many software packages out there, some commercial, some open source, all of which offer different features and functionality. This article will provide some thoughts about one of these software packages: Eprints. Eprints is open-source, and the software is easy to modify. This presents clear advantages for institutions will smaller budgets and that have programmers on staff.

Installation and initial configuration are straightforward and once the IR is up and running, users can easily upload documents by filling out a simple web form. Eprints is an excellent choice for any institution looking to get an IR up and running quickly and easily, although it is less clear that an institution with an existing IR based on another software package should migrate to Eprints.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview |

"MePrints: Building User Centred Repositories"

David E. Millard et al. have self-archived "MePrints: Building User Centred Repositories" in the ECS EPrints Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

Teaching and Learning Repositories learning from the best practices of Web 2.0. Over this time we have successfully deployed a number of innovative repositories, including Southampton University EdShare, The Language Box, The HumBox, Open University’s LORO and Worcester Learning Box. A key part of this work has been the development of an extension for the EPrints repository platform, called MePrints, that enables configurable profile pages, and works alongside existing extensions such as IRStats and SNEEP in order to give users live feeds about repository events that matter to them. Through these deployments we have discovered that more sophisticated profile pages give users a home within a repository, act as a focus for their work, and help them feel more ownership of the work that they deposit. This increases the visibility of the repository and encourages more deposits.

| Digital Scholarship |

Preservation and Curation in Institutional Repositories

The Digital Curation Centre has released Preservation and Curation in Institutional Repositories.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The DCC has produced a report that provides a snapshot of the state of the art of preservation and curation in an institutional repository context in early 2010, noting areas of recent and current research and development. It should be of interest principally to institutional repository managers and others concerned with the strategic planning for these services. The report begins with a brief introduction to preservation and curation, followed in chapter 3 by a summary of the current provision for these activities in EPrints, DSpace and Fedora. Some repository models and architectures relevant to preservation and curation are presented in chapter 4 and chapter 5 respectively, while a selection of preservation planning tools of possible use in a repository context are described in chapter 6. Pertinent developments in metadata are reviewed in chapter 7, while tools for working with such metadata are presented in chapter 8. Technologies that assist in performing emulation, reverse engineering and migration are described in chapter 9. The issue of identifiers for repository materials is tackled in chapter 10. A selection of guidelines and tools for auditing curatorial aspects of institutional repositories is presented in chapter 11, and a selection of tools for calculating the costs and benefits of curation is presented in chapter 12. Finally, some conclusions are drawn in chapter 13.

Towards Repository Preservation Services. Final Report from the JISC Preserv 2 Project

Steve Hitchcock, David Tarrant, and Les Carr have self-archived Towards Repository Preservation Services. Final Report from the JISC Preserv 2 Project in the ECS EPrints Repository.

Here's the abstract:

Preserv 2 investigated the preservation of data in digital institutional repositories, focussing in particular on managing storage, data and file formats. Preserv 2 developed the first repository storage controller, which will be a feature of EPrints version 3.2 software (due 2009). Plugin applications that use the controller have been written for Amazon S3 and Sun cloud services among others, as well as for local disk storage. In a breakthrough application Preserv 2 used OAI-ORE to show how data can be moved between two repository softwares with quite distinct data models, from an EPrints repository to a Fedora repository. The largest area of work in Preserv 2 was on file format management and an 'active' preservation approach. This involves identifying file formats, assessing the risks posed by those formats and taking action to obviate the risks where that could be justified. These processes were implemented with reference to a technical registry, PRONOM from The National Archives (TNA), and DROID (digital record object identification service), also produced by TNA. Preserv 2 showed we can invoke a current registry to classify the digital objects and present a hierarchy of risk scores for a repository. Classification was performed using the Preserv2 EPrints preservation toolkit. This 'wraps' DROID in an EPrints repository environment. This toolkit will be another feature available for EPrints v3.2 software. The result of file format identification can indicate a file is at risk of becoming inaccessible or corrupted. Preserv 2 developed a repository interface to present formats by risk category. Providing risk scores through the live PRONOM service was shown to be feasible. Spin-off work is ongoing to develop format risk scores by compiling data from multiple sources in a new linked data registry.

ETD Self-Archiving Tools: ICE-TheOREM Final Report

JISC has released the ICE-TheOREM Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

ICE-TheOREM was a project which made several important contributions to the repository domain, promoting deposit by integrating the repository with authoring workflows and enhancing open access by prototyping new infrastructure to allow fine-grained embargo management within an institution without impacting on existing open access repository infrastructure.

In the area of scholarly communications workflows, the project produced a complete end-to-end demonstration of eScholarship for word processor users, with tools for authoring, managing and disseminating semantically-rich ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) documents fully integrated with supporting data. This work is focused on theses, as it is well understood that early career researchers are the most likely to lead the charge in new innovations in scholarly publishing and dissemination models.

The authoring tools are built on the ICE content management system, which allows authors to work within a word processing system (as most authors do) with easy-to-use toolbars to structure and format their documents. The ICE system manages both small data files and links to larger data sets. The result is research publications which are available not just as paper-ready PDF files but as fully interactive semantically aware web documents which can be disseminated via repository software such as ePrints, DSpace and Fedora as complete supported web-native and PDF publications.

SWORD2 Project Final Report

JISC has released SWORD2 Project Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The SWORD vision is about 'lowering the barriers to deposit', primarily for depositing content into repositories, and additionally, for depositing into any system which may wish to receive content from remote sources. The SWORD protocol defines a standard mechanism for depositing into repositories and other systems. The project and protocol were developed because there was previously no standardised way of doing this. A standard deposit interface allows repository services to be built that can offer functionality such as deposit from multiple locations, e.g. disparate repositories, desktop drag'n'drop tools, or from within standard office applications. SWORD can also facilitate deposit to multiple repositories, increasingly important for depositors who wish to deposit to funder, institutional or subject repositories. There are many other possibilities, including migration of content between repositories and transfer to preservation services. In addition to refining the existing SWORD application profile, the SWORD2 project has developed a number of tools and services to demonstrate these possibilities. It has also been pro-active in promoting SWORD and encouraging uptake within other repositories, services and tools, notably with its adoption into the Microsoft Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 and with the new Microsoft Zentity repository system .

The core aims of the project were to update the SWORD Protocol, the SWORD repository code libraries in the DSpace, Fedora, EPrints and Intrallect repositories, and the existing reference demonstrators. A Facebook application and validator have also been developed. Advocacy efforts include an e-learning case study, a briefing paper, a new SWORD website, and a range of additional dissemination activities, including conference papers, presentations, demonstrations and workshops at a number of national and international conferences and meetings.

"Digital Preservation: Logical and Bit-Stream Preservation Using Plato, EPrints and the Cloud"

Adam Field, David Tarrant, Andreas Rauber, and Hannes Kulovits have self-archived their "Digital Preservation: Logical and Bit-Stream Preservation Using Plato, EPrints and the Cloud" presentation on the ECS EPrints Repository.

Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

This tutorial shows attendees the latest facilities in the EPrints open source repository platform for dealing with preservation tasks in a practical and achievable way, and new mechanisms for integrating the repository with the cloud and the user desktop, in order to be able to offer a trusted and managed storage solution to end users. . . .

The benefit of this tutorial is the grounding of digital curation advice and theory into achievable good practice that delivers helpful services to end users for their familiar personal desktop environments and new cloud services.

EdSpace: An Educationally Focussed Repository for the University of Southampton. Final Report.

JISC has released EdSpace: An Educationally Focussed Repository for the University of Southampton. Final Report..

Here's an excerpt:

For some years, digital content has been stored in our VLE, but the VLE does not encourage sharing or re-use. EdShare is intended to act as the storage for the VLE, storing our everyday teaching materials such as presentations, hand-outs, reading lists, assignments etc., so that they can easily be viewed by others and re-used in whole or part as appropriate.

Important design principles of this share were:

  • Ease of use The share should be open to anyone to access, whether logged-in or not; any logged in member of the university can upload resources and comment on others. The user interface should be simple to use and fully accessible
  • Minimal metadata We acknowledge that requiring metadata is a barrier to use, and that search engines do a large part of the job based on free text. Web 2.0 style recommendations complement the search engines
  • Permanent URLs Every share entered in EdShare, and the description of the resource, are allocated unique and permanent URLs, which can be used to refer to them from external programs – for example VLEs such as Blackboard
  • Open Access to the descriptions, but user controlled access to the content. Anyone in the world can browse or search to discover what items are in EdShare (i.e. they can see the description), but the depositing user can control the visibility of the actual resource. The default is to allow visibility within the university, but it is possible to make the visibility wider (the whole world) or narrower (only my school, or even only the depositor and named collaborators). . . .

EdShare has been implemented as open source software on top of E-Prints, and the team are committed to working with others in supporting other institutions, or cross-institutional disciplinary consortia, to make both the technical and educational changes that we have benefited from.

EMBRACE—EMBedding Repositories And Consortial Enhancement—Final Report

JISC has released EMBRACE—EMBedding Repositories And Consortial Enhancement—Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

EMBRACE (EMBedding Repositories And Consortial Enhancement) was an 18-month project led by UCL on behalf of the SHERPA-LEAP (London Eprints Access Project) Consortium, a group of 13 University of London institutions with institutional repositories.

The project had two strands, technical and strategic. In its technical strand, EMBRACE aimed to implement a number of technical improvements to enhance the functionality of the SHERPA-LEAP repositories. In a concurrent strategic strand, EMBRACE set out to investigate the challenges of embedding repositories of digital assets in institutional strategy to ensure repository sustainability.

EPrints + Web 2.0: SNEEP 0.3.2 Released

SNEEP 0.3.2 has been released. (See the project page for more information on the Social Networking Extensions for EPrints.)

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

SNEEP is a set of EPrints plugins that provide "Web 2.0-ish" features such as the ability for users to annotate eprint abstracts with shared Comments or personal Notes, and to categorise them with Tags.

SNEEP 0.3.2 adds out-of-the-box support for version 3.1.2.1 of EPrints, but the main change is that, for the first time, SNEEP is now distributed with an automagic install script. Where previous releases required a rather lengthy manual process, in the majority of cases installation should now be quick and painless.

DISC-UK DataShare Project: Final Report

JISC has released DISC-UK DataShare Project: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The DISC-UK DataShare Project was funded from March 2007-March 2009 as part of JISC's Repositories and Preservation programme, Repositories Enhancement strand. It was led by EDINA and Edinburgh University Data Library in partnership with the University of Oxford and the University of Southampton. The project built on the existing informal collaboration of UK data librarians and data managers who formed DISC-UK (Data Information Specialists Committee–UK).

This project has brought together the distinct communities of data support staff in universities and institutional repository managers in order to bridge gaps and exploit the expertise of both to advance the current provision of repository services for accommodating datasets, and thus to explore new pathways to assist academics at our institutions who wish to share their data over the Internet. The project's overall aim was to contribute to new models, workflows and tools for academic data sharing within a complex and dynamic information environment which includes increased emphasis on stewardship of institutional knowledge assets of all types; new technologies to enhance e- Research; new research council policies and mandates; and the growth of the Open Access / Open Data movement.

With three institutions taking part plus the London School of Economics as an associate partner, a range of exemplars have emerged from the establishment of institutional data repositories and related services. Part of the variety in the exemplars is a result of the different repository platforms used by the three project partners: DSpace (Edinburgh DataShare), ePrints (e-Prints Soton) and Fedora (Oxford University Research Archive, ORA)–all open source software. LSE took another route and is using the distributed Dataverse repository network for data, linking to publications in LSE Research Online. Also, different approaches were taken in setting up the repositories. All three institutions had an existing, well-used institutional repository, but two chose to incorporate datasets within the same system as the publications, and one (Edinburgh DataShare) was a paired repository exclusively for datasets, designed to interoperate with the publications repository (Edinburgh Research Archive). The approach took a major turn midway through the project when an apparent solution to the problem of lack of voluntary deposits arose, in the form of the advent of the Data Audit Framework. Edinburgh participated as a partner in the DAF Development project which created the methodology for the framework, and also won a bid to carry out its own DAF Implementation project. Later, the other two partners conducted their own versions of the data audit framework under the auspices of the DataShare project.

A number of scoping activities were carried about by the partners with the goal of informing repository enhancement as well as broader dissemination. These included a State-of-the-Art-Review to determine what had been learned by previous repository projects in the UK that had forayed into the data arena. This resulted in a list of benefits and barriers to deposit of datasets by researchers to inform our outreach activities. A Data Sharing Continuum diagram was developed to illustrate where the projects were aiming to fit into the curation landscape, and the range of curation steps that could be taken, from simple backup to online visualization. Later on, a specialized metadata schema was explored (Data Documentation Initiative or DDI) in terms of how it might be incorporated into repository systems, though repository development in this area was not taken up. Instead, a dataset application profile was developed based on qualified Dublin Core (dcterms). This was implemented in the Edinburgh DataShare repository and adapted by Southampton for their next release. The project wished to explore wider issues with open data and web publishing, and therefore produced two briefing papers to do with data mashups–on numeric data and geospatial data. Finally, the project staff and consultant distilled what it had learned in terms of policy development for data repositories in a training guide. A number of peer reviewed posters, papers, and articles were written by DISC-UK members about various aspects of the project during the period.

Key conclusions were that 1) Data management motivation is a better bottom-up driver for researchers than data sharing but is not sufficient to create culture change, 2) Data librarians, data managers and data scientists can help bridge communication between repository managers & researchers, and 3) IRs can improve impact of sharing data over the internet.