Research Libraries – Page 9

"Research Productivity Among Scholarly Communication Librarians"

Introduction: A growing number of academic libraries have specialized their support for scholarly communication by creating new positions or by expanding units with a focus on providing relevant services. This study was undertaken to explore the extent to which librarians with scholarly communication responsibilities produce research and scholarship, their motivations for doing so, the nature of that productivity, and the perceived impact of that activity on their professional responsibilities. Methods: The authors administered a survey of librarians who identified as having their primary job responsibilities in scholarly communication. Results: Almost all study participants produced their own scholarly work. However, a high percentage indicated that they received no relevant training in their library degree programs, and the majority experienced imposter syndrome pertaining to their own scholarship. Although most respondents were motivated to produce research by institutional expectations for promotion and tenure, greater percentages were driven by personal or professional interests. In addition, participants indicated a strong correlation between producing their own scholarship and their ability to effectively carry out their professional responsibilities. Discussion: There may be an emerging convention for scholarly communication librarianship, i.e., one that includes open education services. Findings suggest a need for scholarly communication training to be more prominent in library degree programs. They also point to the utility of making research production a job requirement, regardless of institutional expectations for professional advancement. Conclusion: The authors argue for adjustments in library education curricula and the inclusion of research production in the portfolios of scholarly communication librarians. Future research directions are proposed.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.15621

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"From Knowledge Curator to Knowledge Creator: Academic Libraries and Open Access Textbook Publishing"

Introduction: Access to learning resources is not always affordable or equitable for students in higher education, and high-cost resources, which are commonly prescribed in course reading lists, create barriers for learning. Incorporating open access textbooks in reading lists responds to these issues. Academic librarians’ expertise in curating, organizing, and disseminating knowledge coupled with a long-held passion for open access means that they are well positioned to drive partnerships with academic colleagues that prioritize the use and creation of open educational resources resulting in resources that are accessible, high quality, flexible, and appropriate to support learning in all modes (online, blended, face-to-face). Description of program/service: At La Trobe University Library, a commitment to openness provided a starting point for rethinking the role of the library as a publisher of open educational resources. The La Trobe eBureau is an Australian academic library publishing initiative designed to produce high-quality, peer-reviewed open textbooks by La Trobe University authors for La Trobe University courses. Situating the library as an open textbook publisher in partnership with academics improves the affordability of course resources, the student online learning experience, and the visibility of academic outputs and, importantly, has impact and value across higher education institutions. Next steps: This article shares reflections and challenges from the perspective of eBureau authors and library staff. The Library will continue to build on the success of eBureau collaborations and look more broadly to enact the future role of academic libraries in sustainable open textbook publishing within La Trobe University and across the higher education sector.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.14074

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"A Free Toolkit to Foster Open Access Agreements"

In November 2021, with the support of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) and cOAlition S, four ‘task and finish’ working groups were established. The authors facilitated and supported these groups. Each group was responsible for producing tools that will enable library consortia and small independent publishers to negotiate transformative agreements, which is to say, agreements that will enable the publisher to fully transition to open access. The first task and finish group developed shared principles for transformative agreements. The second developed a data template to enable smaller independent publishers to reach agreements with library consortia and libraries, while the third developed example licence agreements. These groups recognized that the implementation of a transformative agreement crosses a complex ecosystem of technology, processes, policies, automated functions and manual functions that relate to contract management, article submission and peer review, content hosting and dissemination as well as financial management. For this reason, a fourth group produced a workflow framework that describes the process in all its phases. The members of these four groups were volunteers from stakeholder communities including libraries, library consortia, smaller independent publishers and intermediaries. This article explains why these tools are needed and the process behind their creation. The authors have combined these tools into a freely available toolkit, available under a CC BY licence.

http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.585

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Dean of the USC Libraries at University of Southern California

President Carol Folt has outlined a bold set of moonshot initiatives that include a dramatic investment in the "Frontiers of Computing" and an expansion of the university’s health science efforts, and the next Dean will ensure the USC Libraries are aligned with these strategic initiatives while continuing to serve the expansive needs of USC’s equally expansive academic community. The Dean must recognize the Libraries’ existing strengths while building on its success, further elevating its national and international profile. With the strong support of the university administration, the next Dean will lead the USC Libraries into an exciting new era, in which traditional resources remain vital while digital technologies are re-defining the role of academic libraries.

bit.ly/3RjL1Ab

UNC-CH "María Estorino Named Vice Provost for University Libraries and University Librarian"

We are excited to share that María R. Estorino has been appointed vice provost for University Libraries and university librarian, effective Jan. 30. She has held this role in an interim capacity since May and will continue to provide collaborative and community-focused leadership on our campus.

Estorino has been a leader in academic libraries for more than 20 years. She joined the University Libraries in 2017 as associate university librarian for special collections and director of the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library.

https://www.unc.edu/posts/2023/01/26/maria-estorino/

"cOAlition S Confirms the End of Its Financial Support for Open Access Publishing under Transformative Arrangements after 2024"

Plan S was launched in 2018. At that time, cOAlition S recognised that transformative arrangements would provide a useful means to repurpose funds for journal subscriptions to publication fees, thus supporting legacy publishers in transforming paywalled to Open Access publication models. It was, however, also clear that the transformation would have to be completed at a definite point in time, by the end of 2024 at the latest. We maintain this timeline. We believe that the strategy of providing financial support for these arrangements—endorsed by many cOAlition S members—beyond 2024 would significantly increase the risk that these arrangements will become permanent and perpetuate hybrid Open Access, which cOAlition S has always firmly opposed.

bit.ly/3Y2l8He

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"Faculty Perceptions of Open Access Publishing: Investigating Faculty Publishing Habits to Evaluate Library Collection Alignment"

Introduction: This investigation, originally conceived as a method for informing Albertsons Library on creative solutions to the collections budget shortfall, sought to determine an institution’s faculty perceptions of publishing and/or using open access (OA) materials, as well as to identify future mechanisms that would shift perceptions of OA publishing to a more favorable light, thereby fostering adoption of OA materials in faculty research and teaching. Methods: The study used an anonymous electronic survey of 468 faculty members, with a response rate of nearly 34%. Results and Discussion: Respondents indicated a mixed set of adoption, with equal distribution in willingness to engage with OA journals and publications. Quality of OA publications, combined with concerns for tenure and promotion, holds faculty back from utilizing OA journals and publications in their own research and in the classroom. Conclusion: The data collected through the course of this perceptions survey provide important insight into the perceptions of faculty at this point in time, laying the groundwork for future surveys to evaluate growth in engagement with OA publishing. Though the data provided do not immediately alleviate collections budget constraints at Albertsons Library, the survey contributed to a more holistic understanding of faculty publishing behavior in OA journals.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.13216

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TRLN Guide to Negotiating Accessibility in E-Resource Licenses

This resource is meant to serve as a reference tool for library staff involved in licensing and e-resources management as they advocate for strong accessibility assurances in their formal contracts with service and content providers. Each component of TRLN’s preferred accessibility language has been broken down into various components and discussed. The components include: a reference to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a reference to Section 508, a reference to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the provision of a VPAT, the institution’s right to modify content to make it accessible for end users, and the provider’s responsibility to respond to and remedy accessibility-related complaints and issues

http://bit.ly/trln-a11y-eresource-license

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"Columbia University Joins the Palace Project Platform and App"

The Palace Project ("Palace"), the nonprofit library-centered platform and e-reader app for digital content and services, announced today that the Columbia University Library has adopted its platform. The Palace Project is an easy-to-use platform for the management and delivery of ebooks, audiobooks, and other e-content and puts libraries at the center of their communities’ digital experience. . . . The Palace App is available for iOS and Android. . . . In addition to Columbia University, New York University (NYU) and the University of California are academic library partners.

https://librarytechnology.org/pr/28210

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Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: "[Christopher] Prom Named Interim Dean of Libraries and University Librarian"

Christoper J. Prom is a Professor in the University Library and currently serves in two administrative roles: Acting Associate Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation — Humanities, Arts and Related Fields (May 2022 – ) and Associate Dean for Digital Strategies — University Library (2018 – ). From 2000 to 2018, he served as Assistant University Archivist in the University of Illinois Archives.

bit.ly/3BNwNRR

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"Adding Equity to Transformative Agreements and Journal Subscriptions — The Read & Let Read Model"

Not only should libraries pay for access to that number of articles in the next year, they should multiply it by two. This will mean that likely about half the prepaid article uses will go unclaimed by a libraries’ community during the coverage year. To justify the "double" payment, these unclaimed uses shall be made available for any online reader during the following year. . . . I call this plan Read & Let Read (R&LR).

bit.ly/3iGSgoz

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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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