Category: Research Tools

"Are Transformative Agreements Worth It? An Analysis of Open Access Publication Data at the University of Kentucky"


Open access publishing is continuing to grow as funders such as cOAlition S, National Institutes of Health, and the White House implement mandates and requirements that publicly funded research be made immediately available for public consumption. Publishers have adopted open access as a business model through transformative agreements that combine subscription and publishing fees. However, it is unclear whether these agreements are beneficial for libraries. This article discusses a project by the University of Kentucky Libraries to gather and analyze open access publication data to aid in the evaluation of transformative agreement proposals. This article also discusses how the University of Kentucky compares to peer institutions in the Southeastern Conference and other benchmark institutions regarding open access publishing output. Additionally, this article discusses downsides of transformative agreements and highlights promising alternatives.

https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.68n1.8211

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

"An Open Book: Launching a Library-Based Open Access Books Hosting Service"


Edinburgh University Library launched a journal hosting service in 2009, initially to support two journals. The service has since grown into a portfolio of 19 journals and a handful of conference proceedings. The purpose of this case study is to review the 2021 launch of our book hosting service and our service rebrand to Edinburgh Diamond, looking at the reasons for launching, the timeline and challenges, and offering recommendations for those wishing to launch their own service.

https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.13745

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

University of Hawaii at Manoa: Needs Assessment for Data Management and Sharing Training Courses


Data management is an increasingly fundamental skill for graduate students and researchers in the biomedical sciences, especially as National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other funding agencies are now beginning to require data management and sharing plans as part of research. Since the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) Library provided little support for this area and existing data management and sharing instructional content are either out of date or fail to address the unique needs of the UHM research community, the UHM Library took steps to establish data management and sharing instruction services to meet the specific needs of the UHM research community.

https://hdl.handle.net/10125/104944

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

Paywall: Digital Initiatives in Academic Libraries: Challenges and Opportunities


This article explores the discourse surrounding professional titles and responsibilities in digital initiatives within North American academic libraries between 1990 and 2020. A review of job advertisements, position descriptions, and professional activities reveals ambiguously defined responsibilities, inadequate technical education, and limited opportunities for training. Current trends suggest digital initiatives will expand from traditional digitization and digital library projects toward more diverse and flexible digital project management

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/887663

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

"Plan S Journal Comparison Service: Open for Libraries and Library Consortia to Register and Access Price and Service Data"

https://cutt.ly/3VJxuK7

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

Paywall: "Integrating Research Tools with Library Websites"

https://doi.org/10.1108/LHTN-09-2021-0059

Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography, Version 2 | Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works | Open Access Works | Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Publications

Simon Inger Consulting Ltd has released How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

This report is the output of a large-scale survey of readers of scholarly publications (n=40439) and their behaviour in the discovery of journal articles and online books. The survey was conducted during October, November, and December of 2015. While usage statistics and analytics gathered by publishers, libraries and intermediaries can give us a partial view of discovery behaviour, there are many gaps in the knowledge that these can provide which we have endeavoured to fill by aski ng readers what tools they use in discovery.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

"Crowdsourcing Metrics of Digital Collections"

LIBER Quarterly has released "Crowdsourcing Metrics of Digital Collections" by Tuula Pääkkönen.

Here's an excerpt:

In the National Library of Finland (NLF) there are millions of digitized newspaper and journal pages, which are openly available via the public website http://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi. To serve users better, last year the front end was completely overhauled with its main aim in crowdsourcing features, e.g., by giving end-users the opportunity to create digital clippings and a personal scrapbook from the digital collections. But how can you know whether crowdsourcing has had an impact? How much crowdsourcing functionalities have been used so far? Did crowdsourcing work? In this paper the statistics and metrics of a recent crowdsourcing effort are analysed across the different digitized material types (newspapers, journals, ephemera). The subjects, categories and keywords given by the users are analysed to see which topics are the most appealing. Some notable public uses of the crowdsourced article clippings are highlighted.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

Zotero Everywhere Initiative Announced

Zotero has announced its Zotero Everywhere initiative.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

We're delighted to announce Zotero Everywhere, a major new initiative generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Zotero Everywhere is aimed at dramatically increasing the accessibility of Zotero to the widest possible range of users today and in the future. Zotero Everywhere will have two main components: a standalone desktop version of Zotero with full integration into a variety of web browsers and a radically expanded application programming interface (API) to provide web and mobile access to Zotero libraries. . . .

Today we are announcing support for Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Internet Explorer, which account for 98% of the web's usage share. Plugins for these browsers will soon allow users to add anything they find on the web to their Zotero libraries with a single click, regardless of the their browser preferences. Rather than use the Zotero pane in Firefox, users will have the new option of accessing their libraries via a standalone desktop version of Zotero, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Zotero's web API offers any application developer the ability to access individual and group libraries via a simple, human-readable programming interface. Until now, this API has been “read-only”—users could view their libraries but they could not change them via the web or via the API. Today we're announcing the opening of Zotero's write API to the public over the coming months.

NIH Awards $12.2 Million Grant for VIVOweb, Social Networking Software for Scientists

The National Institutes of Health have awarded the University of Florida a $12.2 million grant to develop VIVOweb. The Cornell University Library and Indiana University are grant partners.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

By fostering alliances, it is hoped that biomedical research and discovery will move faster. The project will rest on VIVO, a technology developed at Cornell since 2003. It built a comprehensive network of scientists that identified existing projects and initiated new cooperation.

"Before VIVO, the Cornell librarians heard a lot of frustration from faculty members who couldn't find collaborators from different disciplines across campus,” Medha Devare, Cornell librarian for bioinformatics and life sciences. "The idea of VIVO was to transcend administrative divisions and create a single point of access for scholarly interaction. Now that VIVO is expanding across institutions, the biomedical community will be able to benefit from that bird's eye perspective of their research."

Money for the new grant, awarded through NIH's National Center for Research Resources, originated from American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding. This has already opened eight positions at Cornell and more jobs at the other partners.

Cornell will spearhead the development of the multi-institutional functionality of the VIVO technology; the University of Florida will focus on developing technology for keeping each site's data current; and Indiana University Bloomington will develop social networking tools to enable researchers to find others with similar interests. Four other institutions — Scripps Research Institute, Juniper, Fla.; Ponce School of Medicine, Ponce, P.R.; Washington University of St. Louis; and the Weill Cornell Medical College, New York City—will serve as implementation sites.

Jon Corson-Rikert, head of Information Technology Services at Cornell's Mann Library, initially developed VIVO in 2003. As researchers and administrators embraced the newly created network, a team of programmers, designers and librarians expanded the project to all other disciplines at Cornell.

Other universities began to explore the open-source, free software. VIVO has been adopted for local networks at other universities and institutions in the United States, Australia and China. This new project will follow VIVO's original model and build a multi-institutional platform for the biomedical community.

The Cornell effort to develop VIVOweb will be led by Dean Krafft, the Library's chief technology strategist, Corson-Rikert and Devare. VIVOweb's open Semantic Web/Linked Data approach will empower researchers to extend their research communities—not just via prior knowledge or serendipity, but through recommendation or suggestion networks based on common traits described in the VIVOweb researcher profiles.

Open Annotation Collaboration Funded

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $362,000 to the Open Annotation Collaboration to "build new digital annotation tools and define and demonstrate a framework for sharing annotations of digital content across the World Wide Web."

Here's an excerpt from the press release on JESSE:

The OAC includes humanities scholars, librarians, and information scientists from four universities—George Mason University, the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland, and the University of Queensland (Australia)—from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, and from the Office of Advanced Technology Research at JSTOR, an integrated online archive of over five million items digitized from scholarly journals and primary source archives. . . .

The OAC effort will focus on annotation interoperability, creating data models, standards, and tools that allow scholars working in disparate locations to share and leverage annotations of digital resources across the boundaries of individual annotation applications and content collections.

As part of the OAC Phase I work funded by the Mellon Foundation, a new annotation tool, leveraging ongoing work at the Maryland Institute for the Humanities (MITH) that was initiated previously with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, will be integrated into the popular Zotero Firefox Web browser extension. Created by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, Zotero helps users collect, manage, and cite research sources found on the World Wide Web.

In parallel with this work, researchers at the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the eResearch Lab of the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE) at The University of Queensland in Australia will examine the breadth and diversity of current annotation models and system architectures in the context of scholarly practices and scholarly-focused use cases involving annotations in both online and traditional settings. . . .

The co-Principal Investigators for the OAC Phase I project are Timothy W. Cole of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Neil Fraistat of the University of Maryland, Jane Hunter of the University of Queensland, and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

All work produced as part of the OAC Phase I project will be made available under open source license for the free use and exploitation by other scholars and non-profit educational, scholarly and charitable institutions.

EndNote X3 Will Be Compatible with OpenOffice.org Writer

The forthcoming EndNote X3 will be compatible with OpenOffice.org Writer.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Healthcare and Science business of Thomson Reuters today announced compatibility between EndNote®—the bibliographic management software used by millions of researchers, librarians and students—and OpenOffice.org Writer. The new EndNote X3 for Windows, which will be released in June, introduces the patent pending Cite While You Write™ technology to OpenOffice.org Writer, an open-source word processor popular among academics.

OpenOffice.org Writer support in EndNote X3 enables users to format in-text citations and the bibliography instantly as required by publishers. Users can search EndNote libraries within OpenOffice.org Writer and select references to cite. The OpenOffice.org Writer formats a paper automatically upon inserting an EndNote citation and can revise an entire paper using more than 3,300 different styles with no additional typing required.

Microsoft Releases Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007

Microsoft has released the open source Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Addressing this critical challenge for researchers, Microsoft Corp. and Creative Commons announced today, before an industry panel at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech 2009, http://en.oreilly.com/et2009/), the release of the Ontology Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 that will enable authors to easily add scientific hyperlinks as semantic annotations, drawn from ontologies, to their documents and research papers. Ontologies are shared vocabularies created and maintained by different academic domains to model their fields of study.

This Add-in will make it easier for scientists to link their documents to the Web in a meaningful way. Deployed on a wide scale, ontology-enabled scientific publishing will provide a Web boost to scientific discovery.

Science Commons, a division of Creative Commons, is incubating the adoption of semantic scientific publishing through creation of a robust database of ontologies (http://neurocommons.org) and development of supporting technical standards and code. Microsoft Research has built a technology bridge to enable the link between Microsoft Office Word 2007 and these ontologies.

"The Web is broken for scientific researchers—full of hyperlinks of scholarly articles, but it is nearly impossible for us to find what we need," said John Wilbanks, vice president for Science at Creative Commons. "The semantic Web tool will help bridge the gap between basic research and meaningful discovery, unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing."

Now Available: Zotero 1.5 Beta

The Center for History and New Media has released Zotero 1.5 Beta.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Zotero 1.5 Features

  • Automatic synchronization of collections across multiple computers. For example, sync your PC at work with your Mac laptop and your Linux desktop at home.
  • Free automatic backup of your library data at Zotero.org.
  • Automatic synchronization of your attachment files to a server of your choice (e.g. iDisk, Jungle Disk, or university-provided web storage).
  • Recover recently deleted items with Zotero’s trash can.
  • Rich-text notes
  • New style manager allowing you to add and delete CSLs and legacy style formats
  • Automatic detection of PDF metadata (author, title, etc.)
  • Automatic detection and support for proxy servers

CHNM and Emory University Libraries Establish Zotero Software Development Partnership

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Emory University Libraries have announced the formation of a Zotero software development partnership.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

A team of librarians, information technologists and faculty members led by Connie Moon Sehat, Emory Libraries' new director of digital scholarship initiatives, will extend research capabilities of the software in collaboration with Zotero's main development team. Sehat is a former co-director of Zotero and CHNM.

For Dan Cohen, who is associate professor of history at George Mason University and director of CHNM, a relationship with Emory exemplifies the powerful opportunities for institutional cooperation offered by digital media. "The Center for History and New Media and the Zotero Project are lucky to now have the resources and experience of Emory on their side," says Cohen, "and the continued insight and direction of Connie Sehat. We look forward to what will undoubtedly be a tremendously productive collaboration." Cohen oversees Zotero with Sean Takats, assistant professor of history at George Mason and CHNM's acting director of research projects.

This relationship marks a significant step forward for the future of the Zotero project. "Partnering on the development of open source software with CHNM, an established center of excellence in the digital humanities, allows the Emory Libraries to create value for the research community while sharing the risks in developing innovative software," says Rick Luce, Emory University vice provost and director of libraries.

Already a powerful research tool, Zotero allows users to gather, organize and analyze sources such as citations, full texts, web pages, images and other objects. It meshes the functionality of older reference manager applications with modern software and web applications, such as del.icio.us and YouTube, to amass large amounts of data in easy ways.

Over the next two years, Zotero will allow researchers—and their data—to interact with one another in Web 2.0 communities, help scholars archive information with the Internet Archive and offer text-mining capabilities. Zotero also will expand educational offerings to provide more support for its growing national and international communities of users, many located in university settings. Working in conjunction with the Zotero team at CHNM, Emory's Zotero team will take advantage of local research environments and library expertise to contribute to Zotero's anticipated growth.

"Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web"

Duncan Hull, Steve R. Pettifer, and Douglas B. Kel have published "Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web" in PLoS Computational Biology.

Here's the abstract:

Many scientists now manage the bulk of their bibliographic information electronically, thereby organizing their publications and citation material from digital libraries. However, a library has been described as 'thought in cold storage,' and unfortunately many digital libraries can be cold, impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places. In this Review, we discuss the current chilly state of digital libraries for the computational biologist, including PubMed, IEEE Xplore, the ACM digital library, ISI Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Citeseer, arXiv, DBLP, and Google Scholar. We illustrate the current process of using these libraries with a typical workflow, and highlight problems with managing data and metadata using URIs. We then examine a range of new applications such as Zotero, Mendeley, Mekentosj Papers, MyNCBI, CiteULike, Connotea, and HubMed that exploit the Web to make these digital libraries more personal, sociable, integrated, and accessible places. We conclude with how these applications may begin to help achieve a digital defrost, and discuss some of the issues that will help or hinder this in terms of making libraries on the Web warmer places in the future, becoming resources that are considerably more useful to both humans and machines.

George Mason University Responds to Zotero Lawsuit

George Mason University has issued a statement regarding the Thomson Reuters Zotero lawsuit.

Here's an excerpt from the statement:

The Thomson Reuters Corporation has sued the Commonwealth of Virginia over Zotero, a project based at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). A free and open-source software initiative, Zotero aims to create the world’s best research tool and has already been adopted by hundreds of thousands of users at countless colleges and research universities. CHNM announces that it has re-released the full functionality of Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview to its users and the open source community.

As part of its formal response to this legal action, Mason will also not renew its site license for EndNote. As academics themselves, the creators of the Zotero project strive to serve the scholarly community and to respond to its needs in an age of digital research. In line with that simple goal, they maintain that anything created by users of Zotero belongs to those users, and that it should be as easy as possible for Zotero users to move to and from the software as they wish, without friction. CHNM concurs with the journal Nature, which recently editorialized about this matter: "The virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating."

CHNM remains committed to the openness it has promoted since its founding at Mason in 1994 and to the freedoms of users of its websites and software. Its ambitious development cycle and plans for Zotero’s future remain unchanged.

Read more about it at "Company's Lawsuit Over Free Scholarly Organization Tool Generates Buzz" and "Reuters Says George Mason University Is Handing Out Its Proprietary Software."