Scholarly Books – DigitalKoans

Ithaka S+R: "Generative AI and Scholarly Publishing: Announcing a New Research Project"

To help, Ithaka S+R is launching a new study of the strategic implications of generative AI for scholarly publishing, with support from STM Solutions and a group of its members. The following key questions will guide our inquiry:

Will generative AI be integrated into the existing goals, processes, and infrastructures for scholarly publishing? Or, does this represent a transformative technology that will require fundamental restructuring of those goals, processes, and infrastructures?

Could generative AI effectively render our current assumptions about the role and purpose of publishers obsolete? What new roles could publishers play in a radically transformed information environment?

Which potential transformations should publishers encourage, and which risks require immediate coordinated responses while the technology is still taking root in the sector?

What new kinds of shared technical and/or social infrastructure are needed to support the ethical adoption of generative AI in support of the goals of scholarship and scholarly publishing? What systems and structures will be necessary to balance the needs of authors, readers, rights holders, publishers, and aggregators?

https://tinyurl.com/2s432pfh

The Open Access Tracking Project Is Now 15 Years Old

Peter Suber has announced that the Open Access Tracking Project is now 15 years old. This project has made an invaluable contribution to the Open Access and Open Science movements. Readers are encouraged to considering joining it and posting new works of interest to it. Even occasional contributions are meaningful.

Here is a description of the project from its home page:

OATP is a crowd-sourced social-tagging project running on free software to capture news and comment on open access to research.

Its mission is (1) to create real-time alerts for OA-related news and comment, and (2) to organize knowledge of the field, by tag or subtopic, for easy searching and sharing.

OATP publishes a comprehensive primary feed of new OA developments, and hundreds of smaller secondary feeds on subtopics or subsets, for example, one feed for each project tag, one for each search, and one for each user-created boolean combination of its other feeds.

OATP runs on TagTeam, open-source software developed specifically for OATP and now available for open, tag-based research projects on any topic. See the OATP hub within TagTeam. TagTeam stores all OATP tag records for deduping, export, preservation, modification, and search. OATP started on Connotea and moved to TagTeam in September 2012.

Peter Suber launched OATP in April 2009, and wrote a full-length description of it in the SPARC Open Access Newsletter for May 2009. In mid-2011 OATP became part of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP).

https://tinyurl.com/m5ku5mxh

"Launch of UPLOpen.com: Revolutionizing Access to Open Knowledge and Empowering Global Sustainability Goals"

In an ambitious move to democratize access to scholarly knowledge and advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), the De Gruyter eBound Foundation is thrilled to unveil UPLOpen.com, a product of University Press Library Open (UPLO), an innovative website that curates high-quality, open access scholarship from the world’s leading university presses. . . .

At launch, UPLOpen.com proudly hosts more than 350 open access books from over thirty university presses, including two landmark collections: Luminos, from the University of California Press, and TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), a pilot project of the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of University Presses (AUPresses), which concluded in 2022 but continues to release new titles. By mid-2024, the number of titles hosted on UPLOpen.com is expected to exceed 2,500, with further plans for significant growth already in motion for 2025 and beyond.

https://tinyurl.com/5ftcmx2p

Open Access Press: "UCL [University College London] Press Downloads Hit 10 Million"

UCL Press’s pioneering Open Access (OA) programme spans many of the major academic disciplines, from history to philosophy and the sciences to anthropology. The Press has published 339 books that have been downloaded more than 8.7 million times, while its 14 journals have attracted more than 2.6 million downloads. . . .

Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost at UCL LCCOS (Library, Culture, Collections and Open Science), commented: "Started in 2015, UCL Press continues to get better and better. 10,000,000 downloads and consultations underline the transformative effect that Open Access can have, particularly in the OA monograph space. UCL is proud to be developing a sustainable model for institutional OA publishing in Europe."

https://tinyurl.com/ym76wmbh

"Towards a Books Data Commons for AI Training"

This white paper describes ways of building a books data commons: a responsibly designed, broadly accessible data set of digitized books to be used in training AI models. This report, written in partnership with Creative Commons and Proteus Strategies, is based on a series of workshops that brought together practitioners building AI models, legal and policy scholars, and experts working with collections of digitized books.

In the paper, we first explain why books matter for AI training and how broader access could be beneficial. We then summarize two tracks that might be considered for developing such a resource, highlighting existing projects that help foreground the potential challenges. One track relies on public domain and permissively licensed books, while the other depends on exceptions to copyright to enable training on in-copyright books. The report also presents several key design choices and next steps that could advance further development of this approach.

https://tinyurl.com/2fu47552

"Guest Post: FoSci — The Emerging Field of Forensic Scientometrics"

The complexity of maintaining research integrity is driving the development of a new disciplinary field dedicated to the study of research integrity forensics. Currently, efforts to uphold the integrity of scientific activities are dispersed across various stakeholders, including researchers, librarians, independent scholars, research institutions, journalists, government officials, funders, and lawyers. These efforts, while valuable, are often siloed within their respective disciplines, leading to a fragmented approach to addressing lapses in research integrity. By establishing a specialized field focused on the forensics of research integrity, we can foster a multidisciplinary collaboration that leverages the expertise of all relevant actors.

https://tinyurl.com/5b8t54eb

"Supporting Open Access Monographs: Penn State University Libraries’ Participation in the TOME Initiative"

In 2017, Penn State pledged to participate in the then newly established Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) Initiative. TOME was launched by the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) as a five-year pilot with two main types of participants: colleges and universities and university presses. Penn State was one of the first universities to commit funds to participate in TOME, which was designed to support peer-reviewed, open access monographs in the humanities and social sciences. Each participating university committed $225,000 total for the five-year pilot, split out into $45,000 per academic year to support three grants of $15,000 per monograph. This number was established based on the recommendation from the Ithaka S+R Report "The Costs of Publishing Monographs."

https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.85.3.66

"Guest Post — There is More to Reliable Chatbots than Providing Scientific References: The Case of ScopusAI"

In October, my institution was granted access to the Beta version of ScopusAI. I have tested it using a concept connected to my PhD dissertation in physics, an "electromagnon". In this post, I want to share my experience and use it to illustrate the many dimensions the design and assessment of such tools need to consider. . . .

[The author provides an extensive description and analysis of the performed tests as well as their broader implications.]

And if AI is only as good as its underlying data, let’s not forget who owns the scholarly data and regulates access to it. Big scholarly publishers have long been using content as a resource to capitalize on. AI tools amplify existing imbalances in access to scholarly text: if a publisher owns the exclusive right to a text, they can train their own AI on it and make this content unavailable to competing AI projects, profiting from the copyright yet again. Currently, most AI research assistants are grounded with abstracts, but the real value is contained in the full text of articles, and accessing them remains very difficult.

"E-book Acceptance by First-Year Undergraduate Students: A Longitudinal Examination and Implications for Library Researchers"

The frequency of electronic book usage by students, according to the research described here, appears fairly positive. On a six-level scale, ranging from 1 (I don’t use it at all) to 6 (I use it several times a week), the average score was 3.27, and the most frequent response, was "Use several times a month" (n = 84, 28 %). This suggests that, on average, students tend to use e-books approximately once or twice a month.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102847

Open Scholarship in the Humanities

The book begins with the history of digital developments and their influence on the founding of international policies toward open scholarship. The concept of making research more freely available to the broader community, in practice, will require changes across every part of the system: government agencies, funders, university administrators, publishers, libraries, researchers and IT developers. To this end, the book sheds light on the urgent need for partnership and collaboration between diverse stakeholders to address multi-level barriers to both the policy and practical implementation of open scholarship. It also highlights the specific challenges confronted by the humanities which often makes their presentation in accessible open formats more costly and complex. Finally, the authors illustrate some promising international examples and ways forward for their implementation. The book ends by asking the reader to view their role as a researcher, university administrator, or member of government or philanthropic funding body, through new lenses. It highlights how, in our digital era, the frontiers through which knowledge is being advanced and shared can reshape the landscape for academic research to have the greatest impact for society.

http://tinyurl.com/2453s6du

"Could AI Change the Scientific Publishing Market Once and for All?"

Artificial-intelligence tools in research like ChatGPT are playing an increasingly transformative role in revolutionizing scientific publishing and re-shaping its economic background. They can help academics to tackle such issues as limited space in academic journals, accessibility of knowledge, delayed dissemination, or the exponential growth of academic output. Moreover, AI tools could potentially change scientific communication and academic publishing market as we know them. They can help to promote Open Access (OA) in the form of preprints, dethrone the entrenched journals and publishers, as well as introduce novel approaches to the assessment of research output. It is also imperative that they should do just that, once and for all.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.14952

"Librarians as Agents of Change: New Sparc Europe Strategy for Open Education 2024-2026"

We are pleased to announce a new Open Education strategy for 2024-2026, Librarians as Agents of Change. We will support Higher Education policymakers, librarians, ambassadors and facilitators of OE in Europe to implement the UNESCO OER Recommendations using a targeted and action-oriented approach. With this strategy, we aim to make the many connections between Open Science policy and Open Education ever clearer to both policymakers and academic institutions.

http://tinyurl.com/mr45cv3f

Ithaka S+R: The Second Digital Transformation of Scholarly Publishing

Today, the scholarly publishing sector is undergoing its second digital transformation. The first digital transformation saw a massive shift from paper to digital, but otherwise publishing retained many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era. A variety of shared infrastructure was developed to serve the needs of this first digital transformation. In this current second digital transformation, many of the structures, workflows, incentives, and outputs that characterized the print era are being revamped in favor of new approaches that bring tremendous opportunities, and also non-trivial risks, to scholarly communication. The second digital transformation requires shared infrastructure that is fit for purpose. It is our objective with this paper to examine the needs for shared infrastructure that will support this second digital transformation.

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.320210

"MIT Press’s Direct to Open Reaches Annual Funding Goal, Opens Access to Full List of 2024 Monographs"

Now in its third year of operation, Direct to Open (D2O) is proud to announce that it has reached its full funding goal in 2024 and will open access to 79 new monographs and edited book collections this year. What makes this year noteworthy is that this is the first year in which D2O has been fully funded by its November 30 deadline and will not require an extension through the end of the fiscal year.

http://tinyurl.com/4phkat8x

STM: "New White Paper Launch: Generative AI in Scholarly Communications"

The paper looks at the ethical, legal, and practical aspects of GenAI, highlighting its potential to transform scholarly communications, and covers a range of topics from intellectual property rights to the challenges of maintaining integrity in the digital age. The paper provides best-practice principles and recommendations for authors, editorial teams, reviewers, and vendors, ensuring a responsible and ethical approach to the use of GenAI tools.

https://tinyurl.com/4m6m8n9j

"UKRI [UK Research and Innovation] Monograph Open Access Policy Coming Soon: Here’s What You Need to Know"

The core requirements are:

The final Version of Record or Author’s Accepted Manuscript must be free to view and download via an online publication platform, publisher’s website, or institutional or subject repository within a maximum of 12 months of publication

The OA version of the publication must have a Creative Commons licence, with an Open Government Licence (OGL) also permitted.

Images, illustrations, tables and other supporting content should be included in the OA version where possible (third-party materials DO NOT require a CC licence)….

The UKRI allocates £8 billion of taxpayers’ money annually to support research and innovation.

https://tinyurl.com/mrxrna84

Richard Poynder Is "Signing Off from Reporting on Open Access"

On X, well-known independent journalist and blogger Richard Poynder said: "The movement has failed and is being rebranded in order to obscure the failure. Time to move on."

In a second post, he provided a further explanation (this is an JPEG file).

Richard Poynder has made 71,000 posts on X/Twitter.

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is an open textbook and practitioner’s guide that collects theory, practice, and case studies from nearly 80 experts in scholarly communication and open education. Divided into three parts:

What is Scholarly Communication?

Scholarly Communication and Open Culture

Voices from the Field: Perspectives, Intersections, and Case Studies

The book delves into the economic, social, policy, and legal aspects of scholarly communication as well as open access, open data, open education, and open science and infrastructure. Practitioners provide insight into the relationship between university presses and academic libraries, defining collection development as operational scholarly communication, and promotion and tenure and the challenge for open access.

https://bit.ly/SCLAOK

"Approaching Artificial Intelligence and Open Research in Sync: Opportunities and Challenges"

AI can generate more complete and disambiguated metadata to enhance discovery and move search from the traditional keyword-based model to semantic and conversation-based searches.

AI can also help publishers improve accessibility, to make content available to a broader audience.

AI as a reader and consumer will become as important a consideration as the human reader and consumer. Publications should consider machines as consumer and provide machine readable and consumable formats.

AI can create personalized recommendations and news feeds, simultaneously helping researchers find the answers they need and allowing publishers to target specific audiences for specific publications.

Even better, AI can perform reverse engineering to measure the contribution of each source to the final answers. And publishers can charge based on the contribution. This could be new business model in the future. Many AI researchers are currently working on enabling explainable and transparent AI, but this research will take time.

https://tinyurl.com/uu4dhs9y

Walt Crawford: "Cites & Insights: Use It or Lose It?"

During its peak years, C&I had quite a substantial readership–as many as 55,000 downloads for one particular essay. There were more than 600,000 downloads from 2013 through 2015 and (maybe) 800,000 downloads from 2016 through 2019. But only about 38,000 in 2019. I had sponsorship for five years, and never charged for access.

I always hoped that a few people or institutions would find C&I worth preserving—and the annual print volumes even had indexes (of a sort). No print volume has ever sold more than four copies. Four have sold none at all.

But I would like to trim my Lulu catalog. (To see the list, just go to lulu.com and search for "walt crawford." I see 51 results.) So here’s the deal: The Lulu (trade paperback) versions of any C&I volumes that have no sales between now and November 12, 2024 will be deleted.

Also see: "Essential Reading: Walt Crawford’s Books on Open Access."

https://tinyurl.com/2et9ajuh

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

Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect

Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect documents a variety of data privacy practices that directly conflict with library privacy standards, and raises important questions regarding the potential for personal data collected from academic products to be used in the data brokering and surveillance products of RELX’s LexisNexis subsidiary. By analyzing the privacy practices of the world’s largest publisher, the report describes how user tracking that would be unthinkable in a physical library setting now happens routinely through publisher platforms. The analysis underlines the concerns this tracking should raise, particularly when the same company is involved in surveillance and data brokering activities. Elsevier is a subsidiary of RELX, a leading data broker and provider of "risk" products that offer expansive databases of personal information to corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies.

https://zenodo.org/records/10078610

"Measured in a Context: Making Sense of Open Access Book Data"

Open access (OA) book platforms, such as JSTOR, OAPEN Library or Google Books, have been available for over a decade. Each platform shows usage data, but this results in confusion about how well an individual book is performing overall. Even within one platform, there are considerable usage differences between subjects and languages. Some context is therefore necessary to make sense of OA books usage data. A possible solution is a new metric — the Transparent Open Access Normalized Index (TOANI) score. It is designed to provide a simple answer to the question of how well an individual open access book or chapter is performing. The transparency is based on clear rules, and by making all of the data used visible. The data is normalized, using a common scale for the complete collection of an open access book platform and, to keep the level of complexity as low as possible, the score is based on a simple metric. As a proof of the concept, the usage of over 18,000 open access books and chapters in the OAPEN Library has been analysed, to determine whether each individual title has performed as well as can be expected compared to similar titles.

https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.627

"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

Paywall: "The Open Access Movement and its March in Africa"

While the goal of the OA movement remains good, it appears the epistemic disbalance in global knowledge creation and access has not abated. However, the promise of OA, the motivation on which it stands, its consequence and current state are reviewed in this paper with particular focus on the contribution of Africa to the global OA movement. It has been reported that the emergence of OA on the continent is albeit slow but with a mixed fortune of both progress and challenges. Notwithstanding, open access is seen as a development imperative for Africa that offers tremendous opportunities to the continent to actively contribute to global knowledge. It was reported that a number of universities and research institutions in Africa have adopted open access policies that require their researchers to publish their work in open access journals or repositories. The paper presented a number of open access initiatives and platforms that are actively being deployed to achieve OA mandate in the continent and concluded with recommendations.

https://tinyurl.com/f7zhss6m

"Springer Nature and Authors Successfully Use Generative AI to Publish Academic Book"

As part of an innovative experiment, Springer Nature has become the first publisher to create a whole new academic book by empowering authors to use GPT as part of the integrated workflow. Developed during a —Hack Day— in the Spring which brought together authors, editors and experts from across Springer Nature, the German-language book Einsatzmöglichkeiten von GPT in Finance, Compliance und Audit (Applications of GPT in finance, compliance and audit) has now been published. It took less than five months from inception to publication — about half the time normally taken. . . .

The process was as follows:

Working simultaneously on six screens, the team defined commands which GPT then executed chapter by chapter to create the first version of the manuscript

At each stage of the process, the content generated by the Large Language Model (LLM) was reviewed by the authors, who then asked the machine to adapt the text

This "prompt ping pong" ensured that the knowledge expertise of the authors renowned in their field was combined with the language expertise of the LLM

After the Hack Day, the authors and Springer Nature’s editorial team further checked, corrected and supplemented the text

The team then linked the relevant data sources to ensure proper attribution

https://tinyurl.com/4x7nvvks