Research Libraries – DigitalKoans

Paywall: "The Organization of Information Technology Activities in North American Research Libraries"

This study presents the results of an online survey that benchmarked the organization of information technology (IT) functions in academic library members of the Association of Research Libraries. The survey investigated whether responsibility for 14 key areas resided in the libraries or in an institution-level information technology department, whether responsibilities have shifted over the past 20 years, satisfaction with services provided, assessment methods used to evaluate information technology services, and top challenges facing library IT.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2022.2146441

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"Institute of Physics Publishing Strikes Unlimited Publishing Deal with Big Ten Academic Alliance"

Strengthening the commitment to opening research, IOP Publishing (IOPP) has agreed to a three-year unlimited open publishing agreement with the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) consortium in the United States (US). Beginning January 2023, the agreement enables affiliated researchers to publish unlimited Open Access (OA) papers at no cost to them. . . . During the agreement, authors affiliated with Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions will be able to make their research openly accessible to the global community immediately after publication while retaining their copyright.

https://cutt.ly/u19NN2u

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Dean and University Librarian at University of Cincinnati

The Dean will serve a critical role in supporting the university’s strategic direction Next Lives Here and its growth as a premier public research university. Within the University, the Dean operates as a thought leader who partners with other deans, senior administration, faculty, staff, and students to ensure that the Libraries elevate all aspects of UC’s core educational and research enterprise, whether it be in the classroom, in community partnerships, or in creative endeavors. As such, the Dean coordinates the daily operations of 10 different library locations.

https://cutt.ly/h19X1sJ

"Big Data-Driven Investigation into the Maturity of Library Research Data Services (RDS)"

The creation of library research data services (RDS) requires assessment of their maturity, i.e., the primary objective of this study. Its authors have set out to probe the nationwide level of library RDS maturity, based on the RDS maturity model, as proposed by Cox et al. (2019), while making use of natural language processing (NLP) tools, typical for big data analysis. The secondary objective consisted in determining the actual suitability of the above-referenced tools for this particular type of assessment.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2022.102646

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"Free and Open-Source Automated Open Access Preprint Harvesting"

Universities are attempting to ensure that all of their research is publicly accessible because of funding mandates. Many universities have established campus open access (OA) repositories but are struggling with how to upload millions of manuscripts under numerous license agreements while also linking metadata to make them discoverable. To do this manually requires around 15 minutes per manuscript from an experienced librarian. The time and cost to do this campus-wide is prohibitive. To radically reduce the time and costs of this process and to harvest all past work, this article reports on the development and testing of a free and open source (FOSS) JavaScript-based application, aperta-accessum, which does the following: 1) harvests names and emails from a department’s faculty webpage; 2) identifies scholars’ Open Researcher and Contributor Identifiers (ORCID iDs); 3) obtains digital object identifiers (DOIs) of publications for each scholar; 4) checks for existing copies in an institution’s OA repository; 5) identifies the legal opportunities to provide OA versions of all of the articles not already in the OA repository; 6) sends authors emails requesting a simple upload of author manuscripts; and 7) adds link-harvested metadata from DOIs with uploaded preprints into a bepress repository; the code can be modified for additional repositories. The results of this study show that, in the administrative time needed to make a single document OA manually, aperta-accessum can process approximately five entire departments worth of peer-reviewed articles. Following best practices discussed, it is clear that this open-source OA harvester enables institutional library’s stewardship of OA knowledge on a mass scale for radically reduced costs.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.14421

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Paywall: Academic Librarian Faculty Status

ACRL announces the publication of Academic Librarian Faculty Status, compiled and written by Edgar Bailey and Melissa Becher. . . This book focuses exclusively on tenure, promotion, and appointment at small to mid-sized academic libraries and provides many sample criteria and policies for librarians with and without faculty status.

https://cutt.ly/21PAadM

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Paywall: "Ratios for Evaluating Full-Text Journal Article Access: A Quantitative Study"

This article proposes a methodology for systematically assessing the cost of journal subscriptions. The authors of the paper. . . established ratios comparing the list costs of journal articles as advertised by publishers against the cost per article of journal articles available in aggregated collections in library databases. . . The researchers propose that the ratios can be used by libraries wishing to apply a standard methodology for assessing journal packages containing full-text articles.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2022.2139331

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"Texas Universities Reach Historic Deal with Elsevier: TLCUA Saves Texas Universities Millions Collectively"

All TLCUA members will receive a discount on journal subscriptions—some as high as 30%—while still maintaining significant amounts of access to journals and combined, will realize a savings of over $4.75M annually. Beyond initial cost savings, Elsevier agreed to a maximum annual increase of 2% over the course of the license agreement, with some years as low as 0%, which is significantly lower than industry standard. . . . TLCUA and Elsevier have agreed to partner on a pilot project to revert ownership of journal articles back to original authors—and not just those at TLCUA-member institutions. Currently, authors transfer copyright of their work in exchange for that work being published. This pilot will provide for rights to go back to authors after a period of time that will be collaboratively determined with Elsevier. . . . Further, all TLCUA-member authors who choose to publish their work under an open access license will have access to discounted author publication charges (APCs). TLCUA also negotiated a license template that removed non-disclosure terms, restrictions on sharing usage data, and 44-year-old limitations on interlibrary loans (i.e., CONTU Guidelines) to expand library collaboration and improve how libraries can share information on journal usage.

https://cutt.ly/G1Yu8IU

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"Accountability in the Knowledge Commons: Lessons from Next Generation Library Publishing and the 2022 Values and Principles Summit"

Values and principles provide a scaffold for community governance of the knowledge commons, engaging stakeholders in the construction of a system that encourages participants to adhere to a shared set of ethical and functional practices. This article introduces the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication, a toolkit and approach developed by the Next Generation Library Publishing project to assess a community or organization’s alignment with scholarly values and principles. The article situates the FOREST Framework within the context of other initiatives advancing values-based scholarly communication and explains the importance of assessment mechanisms as a core element in governing an equitable and sustainable knowledge commons. It also synthesizes the findings of a half-day summit hosted in February 2022 that convened representatives of values-and-principles-based frameworks and initiatives in scholarly communication to strategize a collective future for these efforts.

http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.588

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"Recommendations for Transformative Journal Agreements with Providers of Publishing Services Published"

These formulated criteria will serve as a common, action-guiding framework for actors from all science organizations—that is, higher education institutions as well as non-university research institutions—for negotiations with providers of publishing services. . . .The criteria are organized into the following aspects: journal transformation, pricing; transparency, workflow, preprints, metadata and interfaces, statistics, tracking, and waivers.

https://cutt.ly/z1zjc9H

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Oregon State University: "Elsevier Negotiations Suspended — Library Plans and Alternative Ways to Access Articles"

You have probably just read the Provost’s announcement that we are suspending our negotiations with Elsevier for the remainder of this year. We did not make this decision lightly. Our Elsevier contract represents more than one-fifth of our entire collections budget at OSU, and we know that this decision will be disruptive. . . .Our primary strategy will be article-level fulfillment. We will build on our already outstanding Interlibrary Loan service (ILL), and add some additional tools that should improve those workflows and provide a more seamless user experience. . . . In the summer of 2023 we will develop a timeline and goals for access to Elsevier content in 2024. At that point, we will be looking to secure access to a curated list of titles, informed by the assessment I described above, and by the ongoing conversations we have been having with our OSU community about open and sustainable scholarly communication.

https://cutt.ly/sMZWsgs

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University of Washington: "Elsevier Negotiation Update 11/2/2022"

At $2.6M per year and an annual 2.5% increase, the Elsevier journal package is the most expensive annual expenditure for the University of Washington (UW) Libraries. For context, the total UW Libraries collections budget for the Seattle campus is approximately $16 million, and we spend about $13 million on ongoing subscriptions. Immediate access to 2,500 Elsevier journal titles published in the current year represent about 15% of the Libraries annual collections budget. . . .The Elsevier journal package reinforces the scholarly publishing model based on paywalls and rationing of access, inequitable opportunities for publishing, and excessive pricing and annual price increases that undermines a scholarly ecosystem where the open sharing of knowledge is critical to accelerating change for the public good. . . .As a result, the Libraries will be unable to maintain immediate access for all titles in our current list of 2,500 Elsevier journal titles on ScienceDirect. There is no choice but to begin identifying which journals need to be available for immediate access to meet patient care needs as well as long term use for research, teaching, and learning. The Libraries will continue to provide faculty, students and staff access to published articles through alternative access options such as PubMed Central, Google Scholar, and interlibrary loan — most requested articles are delivered within a few hours or business days.

https://cutt.ly/bMZQwIf

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"Guest Post – Charleston 2022 – Finding Paths to Open Access Book Publishing"

So just to summarize, there are two facts that are often overlooked when we discuss how university presses generally recover the costs of publishing their frontlist of new titles and how they might finance open access for monographs:

A very large portion of a university press’s sales are not to academic libraries. Libraries are key to a university press’s overall success, and our model doesn’t work without them, but our model also depends on other revenue sources;

Most of a university press’s annual revenues derive not from sales of new books, but from sales of previously published titles collectively known as the "backlist," which are generally those titles that were published more than twelve months ago. The sales of these titles may adversely be impacted by the availability of open access formats as readers transition to digital.

https://cutt.ly/gMPfZB7

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"Readers Have Borrowed over 3 Billion Digital Books through Overdrive"

From the very first library checkout of an ebook through OverDrive back in 2003, we have had one vision: to create a world enlightened by reading. . . . It took us four years to reach the first 1 million checkouts in 2007 and another five to reach 100 million in 2012. In 2018, our all-time checkouts reached one billion. And now, twenty years after that very first ebook checkout, thanks to readers, librarians, and booklovers like you, we have reached three billion checkouts.

https://cutt.ly/5MTS5N8

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"Elsevier and Council of Australian University Librarians Sign Agreement to Support Transition to Open Access Publishing Alongside Continued Research Access for Australia and New Zealand Researchers"

The three-year agreement addresses CAUL’s goals for a rapid and sustainable transition to open access publishing and represents the largest transformative agreement for both countries.

Under the agreement, which takes effect from January 2023, ANZ researchers at CAUL-affiliated academic institutions that participate in the agreement can make their research articles immediately available via open access publishing in Elsevier’s journals.

https://cutt.ly/BMQRgeL

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"Perspectives on E-books and Digital Textbooks and the Way Ahead"

This article presents a range of perspectives on current issues around e-book and textbook supply and consumption in libraries and universities. It is an attempt to provide an analysis of the often-contentious issues arising and also offers an insight into the positions of all the various parties involved. Whilst there might not be agreement or consensus on the causes of issues and the way to proceed, the article attempts to coalesce various perspectives, in the hope of achieving a greater understanding of different stakeholders. Much of the debate in recent years has focused on the situation in the United Kingdom, but similar issues exist in many other countries and an insight into the international perspective is provided. We also offer some commentary on ways forward for both the short and longer term.

http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.599

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"Research Data Management Needs Assessment of Clemson University"

The faculty, staff, and graduate students at Clemson University were surveyed by the library about their RDM needs in the spring of 2021. The survey was based on previous surveys from 2012 and 2016 to allow for comparison, but language was updated, and additional questions were added because the field of RDM has evolved. Survey findings indicated that researchers are overall more likely to back up and share their data, but the process of cleaning and preparing the data for sharing was an obstacle. Few researchers reported including metadata when sharing or consulting the library for help with writing a Data Management Plan (DMP). Researchers want RDM resources; offering and effectively marketing those resources will enable libraries to both support researchers and encourage best practices. Understanding researcher needs and offering time-saving services and convenient training options makes following RDM best practices easier for researchers. Outreach and integrated partnerships that support the research life cycle are crucial next steps for ensuring effective data management.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.13970

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Paywall: The Data Literacy Cookbook

The Data Literacy Cookbook includes a variety of approaches to and lesson plans for teaching data literacy, from simple activities to self-paced learning modules to for-credit and discipline-specific courses. . . . Many sections have overlapping learning outcomes, so you can combine recipes from multiple sections to whip up a scaffolded curriculum. The Data Literacy Cookbook provides librarians with lesson plans, strategies, and activities to help guide students as both consumers and producers in the data life cycle.

https://cutt.ly/XMhHEts

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Paywall: "Expanding Your Institutional Repository: Librarians Working with Faculty"

Since a successful institutional repository will contain a higher percentage of the contributors’ materials, we implemented a system to upload faculty publications more effectively to our academic library’s institutional repository.. . . The success of this method is indicated by the increase in articles that have been uploaded to our institutional repository; as a result of the implementation of this program, the number of publications in our university’s institutional repository by these authors has increased 174 %.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2022.102628

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Investments in Open: Association of Research Libraries US University Member Expenditures on Services, Collections, Staff, and Infrastructure in Support of Open Scholarship

In total, 46 of the 102 institutions provided full or partial results. Summary results are divided into the following categories: read-and-publish or transitional agreements, article processing charges (APC) or OA funds, non-APC-based OA publishing models, institutional repository services, OA journal hosting and publishing services, and open monographs.

The survey found that the total aggregate spending on open access for all 46 responding libraries was $32 million USD, with an average expenditure per institution of $785,940. This represents an average of 2.26% of the total library budget spent on open, ranging from 0.19% to 11.02% across respondent libraries. As a portion of the total amount of expenses spent on OA infrastructure, the majority of funds are invested in read-and-publish agreements (~$20 million) followed by institutional repository infrastructure with investments of 17% of total OA expenses (~$5 million) across the 46 institutions.

https://cutt.ly/nMuAMbT

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"Scholarly Communication Competencies: An Analysis of Confidence among Australasia Library Staff"

Through a nationwide survey of universities and research organizations in Australia and New Zealand, this article investigates the level of confidence that librarians working in scholarly communication have in their current competencies. The results show that, while respondents were generally confident across seven competency areas (institutional repository management, publishing services, research practice, copyright services, open access policies and scholarly communication landscape, data management services, and assessment and impact metrics), the majority combined their scholarly communication tasks with other roles.

https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.6.966

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"Library Publishing Coalition Releases 2021-2022 Annual Report"

In addition to outlining the LPC’s finances, assets, and membership, the Annual Report highlights several programmatic milestones, including:

Deliverables from the Library Publishing Workflows project

A landscape scan undertaken by the Preservation Task Force

The launch of a joint project between LPC, ARL, and AUP to build connections between university-based publishing communities.

https://cutt.ly/eNDIWtC

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"An AI Toolkit for Libraries"

Now that artificial intelligence (AI) tools are being widely used across academic publishing, how can we make informed assessments of these utilities? There is a need for a set of skills for evaluating new tools and measuring existing ones, which should enable anyone commissioning or managing AI utilities to understand what questions to ask, what parameters to measure and possible pitfalls to avoid when introducing a new utility. The skills required are not technical. Potential problems include bias in the corpus, a poor training set or poor use of metrics for evaluation. This article gives a quick overview of some of areas where AI tools are being used and how they work. It then provides a checklist for assessment. The goal is not to discredit AI, but to make effective use of it.

http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.592

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"Just Released – New Insights into OE in European Libraries of Higher Education 2022"

The report presents the findings of the third edition of our annual survey of European academic libraries on the topic of Open Education (OE) and Open Educational Resources (OER). It explores the work being done by European academic librarians to implement the UNESCO OER Recommendation, almost three years on from its initial publication in November 2019.

https://cutt.ly/HNRUoNW

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First Issue of the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education Published

We are pleased to present the inaugural issue of the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education (JOERHE). As academic librarians, the three of us intersect with Open Educational Resources, open access, and open publishing in a variety of ways. Drawing on our past experiences with both traditional and open publishing models, we saw a need to create a dedicated, open scholarly space for those who wish to engage in community and scholarly conversation about all things open. It is exciting to see this idea come to fruition. JOERHE’s vision is to reduce the barriers to publication and create a space where authors, reviewers, and readers can build a community that supports and encourages the growth of the profession through kindness to one another as scholars. We also seek to provide transparency in our publishing practices through clear and frequent communication with our authors, reviewers, and readers.

https://cutt.ly/lNRWsd7

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