Category: Open Source Software

"Designing Digital Discovery and Access Systems for Archival Description"


Archival description is often misunderstood by librarians, administrators, and technologists in ways that have seriously hindered the development of access and discovery systems. It is not widely understood that there is currently no off-the-shelf system that provides discovery and access to digital materials using archival methods. This article is an overview of the core differences between archival and bibliographic description, and discusses how to design access systems for born-digital and digitized materials using the affordances of archival metadata. It offers a custom indexer as a working example that adds the full text of digital content to an Arclight instance and argues that the extensibility of archival description makes it a perfect match for automated description. Finally, it argues that building archives-first discovery systems allows us to use our descriptive labor more thoughtfully, better enable digitization on demand, and overall make a larger volume of cultural heritage materials available online.

bit.ly/3DhKmcC

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

"European Commission Grants Substantial Funding to Improve Institutional Publishing for Science"


The project "Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access (CRAFT-OA), carried out by 23 experienced partners from 14 European countries, coordinated by the University of Gättingen, Germany will start in January 2023 and run for 36 months. . . . The project focuses on four strands of action to improve the Diamond OA model: (1) Provide technical improvements for journal platforms and journal software (2) Build communities of practice to foster overall infrastructure improvement (3) Increase visibility, discoverability and recognition for Diamond OA publishing (4) Integrate Diamond OA publishing with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and other large-scale data aggregators.

https://operas.hypotheses.org/6016

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

"Recalibrating the Scope of Scholarly Publishing: A Modest Step in a Vast Decolonization Process"


By analyzing 25,671 journals largely absent from common journal counts, as well as Web of Science and Scopus, this study demonstrates that scholarly communication is more of a global endeavor than is commonly credited. These journals, employing the open source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS), have published 5.8 million items; they are in 136 countries, with 79.9% in the Global South and 84.2% following the OA diamond model (charging neither reader nor author). A substantial proportion of journals operate in more than one language (48.3%), with research published in a total of 60 languages (led by English, Indonesian, Spanish, and Portuguese). The journals are distributed across the social sciences (45.9%), STEM (40.3%), and the humanities (13.8%). For all their geographic, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity, 1.2% are indexed in the Web of Science and 5.7% in Scopus. On the other hand, 1.0% are found in Cabells Predatory Reports, while 1.4% show up in Beall’s questionable list. This paper seeks to both contribute and historically situate expanded scale and diversity of scholarly publishing in the hope that this recognition may assist humankind in taking full advantage of what is increasingly a global research enterprise.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00228

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

"Why We Need Open-Source Science Innovation — Not Patents and Paywalls"


The results of a survey study of university professors in Canada found 81.1 percent of Canadian faculty would trade all IP for an open-source endowed chair and 34.4 percent of these faculty would require no additional compensation. Surprisingly, even more American faculty (86.7 percent) are willing to accept an open-source endowed professorship.

https://cutt.ly/x190Hso

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

"A Guide to Potential Liability Pitfalls for People Running a Mastodon Instance"


The absolute safest thing to do, to shield your own personal assets, is register a LLC (limited liability company), get a separate bank account in the name of the LLC, transfer any assets and liabilities (donations you receive / bills you pay) to the LLC, and get insurance in the name of the LLC. This is obviously complete overkill for anyone who’s running a really small server, especially because the annual fees for LLC registration are likely to exceed whatever amount your users chip in, but if you’re running an open-registration server or you exceed 20-30k users, or you have a lot of personal assets, you should think hard about it and talk to a lawyer.

https://cutt.ly/iM2aXNd

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

Open Source "Academic Tracker: Software for Tracking and Reporting Publications Associated with Authors and Grants"


In recent years, United States federal funding agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), have implemented public access policies to make research supported by funding from these federal agencies freely available to the public. Enforcement is primarily through annual and final reports submitted to these funding agencies, where all peer-reviewed publications must be registered through the appropriate mechanism as required by the specific federal funding agency. Unreported and/or incorrectly reported papers can result in delayed acceptance of annual and final reports and even funding delays for current and new research grants. So, it’s important to make sure every peer-reviewed publication is reported properly and in a timely manner. For large collaborative research efforts, the tracking and proper registration of peer-reviewed publications along with generation of accurate annual and final reports can create a large administrative burden. With large collaborative teams, it is easy for these administrative tasks to be overlooked, forgotten, or lost in the shuffle. In order to help with this reporting burden, we have developed the Academic Tracker software package, implemented in the Python 3 programming language and supporting Linux, Windows, and Mac operating systems. Academic Tracker helps with publication tracking and reporting by comprehensively searching major peer-reviewed publication tracking web portals, including PubMed, Crossref, ORCID, and Google Scholar, given a list of authors. Academic Tracker provides highly customizable reporting templates so information about the resulting publications is easily transformed into appropriate formats for tracking and reporting purposes. The source code and extensive documentation is hosted on GitHub (https://moseleybioinformaticslab.github.io/academic_tracker/) and is also available on the Python Package Index (https://pypi.org/project/academic_tracker) for easy installation.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277834

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

"Who Writes Scholarly Code?"


This paper presents original research about the behaviours, histories, demographics, and motivations of scholars who code, specifically how they interact with version control systems locally and on the Web. By understanding patrons through multiple lenses—daily productivity habits, motivations, and scholarly needs—librarians and archivists can tailor services for software management, curation, and long-term reuse, raising the possibility for long-term reproducibility of a multitude of scholarship.

http://www.ijdc.net/article/view/839

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

"Introducing the FAIR Principles for Research Software"


The FAIR for Research Software (FAIR4RS) Working Group has adapted the FAIR Guiding Principles to create the FAIR Principles for Research Software (FAIR4RS Principles). The contents and context of the FAIR4RS Principles are summarised here to provide the basis for discussion of their adoption. Examples of implementation by organisations are provided to share information on how to maximise the value of research outputs, and to encourage others to amplify the importance and impact of this work.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01710-x

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

It’s Déjà VU All over Again: Artificial Intelligence in Libraries

No doubt you have noticed the increasing number of articles that talk about AI and libraries. You might be tempted to think that this is a new idea. You would be wrong. Gaining stream in the mid-1980s, peaking around 1990, and declining significantly by the late 1990s, libraries experimented with the application of expert systems in a number of functional areas, including abstracting, acquisitions, cataloging, collection development, document delivery, indexing, bibliographic search, and reference.

An expert system is: "a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert." During the period in question, they were typically developed by libraries using expert system shells. Less frequently, an AI programming language, such as Prolog, was used.

Sharon Manel De Silva’s "A Review of Expert Systems in Library and Information Science" (1977) surveys over 400 papers on this topic.

An example of expert system development during this period was the University of Houston Libraries’ Intelligent Reference Information System project, which produced the Index Expert (expert system shell) and the Reference Expert (Prolog) systems. Reference Expert’s open source code was distributed at no charge to over 500 libraries at their request. The project also conducted a survey of ARL libraries’ expert system activity, which was published as a SPEC Kit.

Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, Version 2 | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap