DigitalKoans – Page 13 – What Is the Sound of One E-Print Downloading?

Associate University Librarian, Open Scholarship at Concordia University (Extended)

We are creating the new role of Associate University Librarian, Open Scholarship, to grow the open initiatives established in the Library, and to integrate and operationalize recommendations cited in Concordia’s Open Science Working Group’s report. Now is the time to make the most of the momentum towards openly accessible scholarship. As part of the Library’s senior leadership team, the AUL Open Scholarship reports directly to the University Librarian. They will lead a team focused on technology infrastructure across all Library services and on scholarly communication initiatives, many increasingly dependent on such infrastructure

https://tinyurl.com/mr23r73k

"Closing Gaps: A Model of Cumulative Curation and Preservation Levels for Trustworthy Digital Repositories "

Curation and preservation measures carried out by digital repository staff are an important building block in maintaining the accessibility and usability of digital resources over time. The measures adequate to achieve long-term usability for a given audience strongly depend on scenarios of (re)use, the (intended) users’ needs and skills, the organisational setting (e.g., mission, resources, policies), as well as the characteristics of the digital objects to be preserved. The assessment of curation and preservation measures also forms an important part of existing certification procedures for trustworthy digital repositories (TDRs) as offered, for example, by the CoreTrustSeal foundation, the nestor network, or ISO.

The digital curation community is presented with the challenge of finding community-, organisation-, and object-specific approaches to curation and preservation at the same time as defining the minimum level of curation and preservation measures expected from a TDR in sufficiently generic terms to ensure applicability to a wide array of repositories. Against this backdrop, this paper discusses the need for and benefits of community-agreed levels of curation and preservation to address this challenge, and considers the tiered model proposed by the CoreTrustSeal Board as an example.

The proposed model is then applied in an analysis of successful CoreTrustSeal applications from 2018–2022 in an effort to better understand the capacity of the curation and preservation levels to capture the respective practices of repositories and to identify potential gaps.

https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v18i1.926

Data and Visualization Librarian at Duke Kunshan University

Reporting to the University Librarian, working closely with other library staff including Data and Visualization service staff at Duke University Libraries (DUL), the Data and Visualization Librarian position provides important role in developing, designing, and implementing data and visualization resources and services to support faculty, students, and other researchers on campus. The incumbent will use a variety of technologies, along with excellent communication and interpersonal skills, to provide the best possible knowledge and experience for library patrons in data and visualization practice.

https://tinyurl.com/2cwjhtx9

"Ten Simple Rules for Recognizing Data and Software Contributions in Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure"

The ways in which promotion and tenure committees operate vary significantly across universities and departments. While committees often have the capability to evaluate the rigor and quality of articles and monographs in their scientific field, assessment with respect to practices concerning research data and software is a recent development and one that can be harder to implement, as there are few guidelines to facilitate the process. More specifically, the guidelines given to tenure and promotion committees often reference data and software in general terms, with some notable exceptions such as guidelines in [5] and are almost systematically trumped by other factors such as the number and perceived impact of journal publications. The core issue is that many colleges establish a scholarship versus service dichotomy: Peer-reviewed articles or monographs published by university presses are considered scholarship, while community service, teaching, and other categories are given less weight in the evaluation process. This dichotomy unfairly disadvantages digital scholarship and community-based scholarship, including data and software contributions [6]. In addition, there is a lack of resources for faculties to facilitate the inclusion of responsible data and software metrics into evaluation processes or to assess faculty’s expertise and competencies to create, manage, and use data and software as research objects. As a result, the outcome of the assessment by the tenure and promotion committee is as dependent on the guidelines provided as on the committee members’ background and proficiency in the data and software domains.

The presented guidelines aim to help alleviate these issues and align the academic evaluation processes to the principles of open science. We focus here on hiring, tenure, and promotion processes, but the same principles apply to other areas of academic evaluation at institutions. While these guidelines are by no means sufficient for handling the complexity of a multidimensional process that involves balancing a large set of nuanced and diverse information, we hope that they will support an increasing adoption of processes that recognize data and software as key research contributions.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012296

Library Systems Technologist at Georgia Institute of Technology

Partnering with library stakeholders and technologists, the Systems Librarian will serve as an administrator and main technical lead for the Library’s collection management and discovery systems, primarily Ex Libris’ Alma/Primo. Working both independently and collaboratively, lead projects and initiatives to improve workflows, implement integrations, assess Library tools, and find creative solutions to improve upon the management and discovery of library resources. This role has responsibility for maintaining optimal system performance for users and the development of services based on the functionality and capabilities of Alma and Primo.

https://www.library.gatech.edu/about/jobs

"Transparent Disclosure, Curation & Preservation of Dynamic Digital Resources "

This paper explores an enhanced curation lifecycle being developed at the UK Data Service (UKDS), with our Data Product Builder. Through a Graphical User Interface, we aim to provide the researcher with a tailored digital resource. We detail the threefold motivation behind this initiative: data dissemination scalability, researcher satisfaction and the reduction of nationwide duplication of research effort.

Subsequent sections detail the technical components and challenges involved. In addition to more standard data subsetting, filtering and linking components, this data dissemination platform offers dynamic disclosure assessments – identifying combinations of variables that present a potential disclosure risk. All components are underpinned by the Data Documentation Initiative’s new Cross-Domain Integration standard (DDI-CDI), designed to handle the many structures in which data may be organised.

Ever conscious of the scale of the task we are embarking on, we remain motivated by the need for such advances in data dissemination and optimistic of the feasibility of such a system to meet the needs of the researcher while balancing the data disclosivity concerns of the data depositor.

https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v18i1.937

Electronic Resources Licensing Librarian at Indiana University Bloomington

Reporting to the Head of Acquisitions in the Technical Services Division, the Electronic Resources Licensing Librarian will provide leadership and expertise in managing all aspects of library electronic resources licensing. They will play a pivotal role in the IU Libraries’ efforts to meet current and emerging information needs and provide access to a broad and diverse collection of scholarly content. The successful candidate will collaborate with colleagues across the Libraries, the Bloomington campus, and the Indiana University system of campuses to support the IU Libraries licensed electronic resources program. The successful candidate will also be a primary liaison with publishers, content providers, and consortia to support electronic resources licensing and management for Indiana University Libraries.

https://indiana.peopleadmin.com/postings/25404

"Artists Claim ‘Big’ Win in Copyright Suit Fighting AI Image Generators"

In an order on Monday, US district judge William Orrick denied key parts of motions to dismiss from Stability AI, Midjourney, Runway AI, and DeviantArt. The court will now allow artists to proceed with discovery on claims that AI image generators relying on Stable Diffusion violate both the Copyright Act and the Lanham Act, which protects artists from commercial misuse of their names and unique styles. . . .

While Orrick agreed with Midjourney that “plaintiffs have no protection over ‘simple, cartoony drawings’ or ‘gritty fantasy paintings,'” artists were able to advance a “trade dress” claim under the Lanham Act, too.

https://tinyurl.com/yd27cvar

"Trade Dress Infringement"

"Linked Data Editors: Where Are We Now, Challenges and Considerations"

With the growing recognition of the advantages offered by linked data within the library community, libraries have made a lot of effort to support cataloging and metadata professionals in transitioning to linked data, which has led to the development of linked data editors. Although the available editors facilitate linked data-based input templates and output formats, these tools nonetheless have room for improvement. In this Communication on Practice, the authors compare two notable linked data editors based on their supported features and functions. They then delve into considerations when designing user-friendly and ontology-agnostic linked data editors. Finally, the authors address the challenges encountered by libraries during the transition to linked data production and examine the broader implications of this transition for information organization professionals.

https://doi.org/10.5860/lrts.68n3.8226

Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Columbia University Libraries

The Digital Scholarship Coordinator supports digital scholarship activities and library spaces and is engaged in the work of programming, space planning, and outreach. Reporting to the Director of Digital Scholarship the position also closely collaborates with colleagues in Access Services, Communications, and other parts of the library. The position manages the day-to-day operations of the Digital Humanities Center and Butler Studio and works with the team to coordinate the logistics of Digital Scholarship (DS) activities such as Foundations for Research Computing, Open Access Week, open workshops, and other events.

https://tinyurl.com/2cvnzz7k

"The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery"

One of the grand challenges of artificial general intelligence is developing agents capable of conducting scientific research and discovering new knowledge. While frontier models have already been used as aids to human scientists, e.g. for brainstorming ideas, writing code, or prediction tasks, they still conduct only a small part of the scientific process. This paper presents the first comprehensive framework for fully automatic scientific discovery, enabling frontier large language models to perform research independently and communicate their findings. We introduce The AI Scientist, which generates novel research ideas, writes code, executes experiments, visualizes results, describes its findings by writing a full scientific paper, and then runs a simulated review process for evaluation. In principle, this process can be repeated to iteratively develop ideas in an open-ended fashion, acting like the human scientific community. We demonstrate its versatility by applying it to three distinct subfields of machine learning: diffusion modeling, transformer-based language modeling, and learning dynamics. Each idea is implemented and developed into a full paper at a cost of less than $15 per paper. To evaluate the generated papers, we design and validate an automated reviewer, which we show achieves near-human performance in evaluating paper scores. The AI Scientist can produce papers that exceed the acceptance threshold at a top machine learning conference as judged by our automated reviewer. This approach signifies the beginning of a new era in scientific discovery in machine learning: bringing the transformative benefits of AI agents to the entire research process of AI itself, and taking us closer to a world where endless affordable creativity and innovation can be unleashed on the world’s most challenging problems.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06292

Research Data Management Librarian at West Virginia University

WVU Libraries is seeking a Research Data Management Librarian to join its new Research Support & Engagement (RSE) unit, which advances the library’s portfolio of activities in support of the University’s research enterprise. The Research Data Management Librarian will deliver specialized research support aimed at skill development and training, information sharing, and advocacy in research data management and sharing, locating data sources and advising on data privacy regulations and ethical considerations.

https://tinyurl.com/4r5wybpr

"Sharing Practices of Software Artefacts and Source Code for Reproducible Research"

While source code of software and algorithms depicts an essential component in all fields of modern research involving data analysis and processing steps, it is uncommonly shared upon publication of results throughout disciplines. Simple guidelines to generate reproducible source code have been published. Still, code optimization supporting its repurposing to different settings is often neglected and even less thought of to be registered in catalogues for a public reuse. Though all research output should be reasonably curated in terms of reproducibility, it has been shown that researchers are frequently non-compliant with availability statements in their publications. These do not even include the use of persistent unique identifiers that would allow referencing archives of code artefacts at certain versions and time for long-lasting links to research articles. In this work, we provide an analysis on current practices of authors in open scientific journals in regard to code availability indications, FAIR principles applied to code and algorithms. We present common repositories of choice among authors. Results further show disciplinary differences of code availability in scholarly publications over the past years. We advocate proper description, archiving and referencing of source code and methods as part of the scientific knowledge, also appealing to editorial boards and reviewers for supervision.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s41060-024-00617-7

Systems and Discovery Services Librarian at SUNY Cortland

The Systems and Discovery Services Librarian is a tenure-track, full-time academic faculty librarian reporting to the Director of Libraries. This position takes the lead in administering the library services platform, discovery system, information management systems, and digital asset management systems. The Systems and Discovery Services Librarian works in collaboration with other units of the library and Information Resources.

https://jobs.cortland.edu/postings/8991

"Toward Enhanced Reusability: A Comparative Analysis of Metadata for Machine Learning Objects and Their Characteristics in Generalist and Specialist Repositories"

Objective: The rapidly increasing prevalence and application of machine learning (ML) across disciplines creates a pressing need to establish guidance for data curation professionals. However, we must first understand the characteristics of ML-related objects shared in generalist and specialist repositories and the extent to which repository metadata fields enable findability and reuse of ML objects.

Methods: We used a combination of API queries and web scraping to retrieve metadata for ML objects in eight commonly used generalist and ML-specific data repositories. We assessed both metadata schema and characteristics of deposited ML objects, within the context of the widely adopted FAIR Principles. We also calculated summary statistics for properties of objects, including number of objects per year, dataset size, domains represented, and availability of related resources.

Results: Generalist repositories excelled at providing provenance metadata, specifically unique identifiers, unambiguous citations, clear licenses, and related resources, while specialist repositories emphasized ML-specific descriptive metadata, such as number of attributes and instances and task type. In terms of object content, we noted a wide range of file formats, as well as licenses, all of which impact reusability.

Conclusions: Generalist repositories will benefit from some of the practices adopted by specialists, and specialist repositories will benefit from adopting proven data curation practices of generalist repositories. A step forward for repositories will be to invest more into use of labels and persistent identifiers to improve workflow documentation, provenance, and related resource linking of ML objects, which will increase their findability, interoperability, and reusability.

https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.685

Senior Coordinator of Digital Archives and Digital Editing at Penn State (Term)

The Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State is seeking applications for the position of Senior Coordinator of Digital Archives and Digital Editing, at the rank of Researcher. This is a non-tenure-track, term appointment with a possibility for renewal.

The Senior Coordinator of Digital Archives and Digital Editing plays a central role in the digital curation and digital collection building of archival material in order to bring 19th-century Black organizing to digital life.

https://tinyurl.com/5dy6jwbc

"Cost, Advocacy, and a Mechanism for Transformation: The Proposed Power of Open Access Funds"

As paid open access becomes a mainstream academic practice, stakeholders must evaluate their role in the system. While open access advocates develop new ways to support the publication process and funding structure, commercial publishers continue to pivot to maintain their profit, relevance, and power in the publication system. This article provides the details of Montana State University’s Open Access Author Fund as an evaluation of the service and its impact on the local publishing ecosystem. As stewards of publicly funded knowledge, it is essential to critically analyze each new publishing route before adopting and supporting it. Especially when models claim to transform the system, librarians need to understand how an action changes the system, for whom, and at what cost.

https://tinyurl.com/524sp3tz

Data Services Librarian at University of Nebraska Medical Center

Coordinates and delivers the library’s research services for research data management, data curation, data visualization, data literacy, and open science. Oversees the continued development of a portfolio to support UNMC researchers. The position liaises with the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, UNMC units that support researchers, and researcher teams at UNMC. Provides instruction, literature search, liaison and outreach librarian services.

https://unmc.peopleadmin.com/postings/87949

"Back to Basics: Considering Categories of Data Services Consults"

Consultations are fundamental to data librarianship, serving as a vital means of one-on-one support for researchers. However, the topics and forms of support unique to data services consults are not always carefully considered. This commentary addresses five common services offered by data librarians—dataset reference, data management support, data analysis and software support, data curation, and data management (and sharing) plan writing—and considers strategies for successful patron support within the boundaries of a consultation.

https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.931

IT Administrator at Kansas State University

Kansas State University Libraries is seeking a highly self-motivated, process-oriented, and detail-focused individual to join its Information Technology team as a Systems Administrator. In this crucial role, you will be responsible for the effective and efficient operation of the Kansas State University Library’s IT servers and systems, providing comprehensive support for the IT infrastructure.

https://tinyurl.com/43kt35u2

Paywall: "Constructing Risk in Trustworthy Digital Repositories"

This article investigates the construction of risk within trustworthy digital repository audits. It contends that risk is a social construct, and social factors influence how stakeholders in digital preservation processes comprehend and react to risk.

https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2023-0157

Head of Collections Discovery & Systems at University of Glasgow

The Head of Collections Discovery & Systems will articulate an ambitious vision for collection discovery, preservation, and access. The postholder will build capacity and capability within Library Collections to harness the potential of digital transformation and digital humanities scholarship to enhance and develop our professional practice and services. They will work closely with senior colleagues within Library Services and Library Collections to deliver an enabling technology environment meeting the needs of our collections and the expectations of our users.

https://tinyurl.com/vru7sprf

"Promoting Data Sharing: The Moral Obligations of Public Funding Agencies"

Sharing research data has great potential to benefit science and society. However, data sharing is still not common practice. Since public research funding agencies have a particular impact on research and researchers, the question arises: Are public funding agencies morally obligated to promote data sharing? We argue from a research ethics perspective that public funding agencies have several pro tanto obligations requiring them to promote data sharing. However, there are also pro tanto obligations that speak against promoting data sharing in general as well as with regard to particular instruments of such promotion. We examine and weigh these obligations and conclude that all things considered funders ought to promote the sharing of data. Even the instrument of mandatory data sharing policies can be justified under certain conditions.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-024-00491-3

Head of Digital Scholarship at University of Pennsylvania

Reporting to the Director of Research Data and Digital Scholarship (RDDS), the Head of Digital Scholarship is responsible for the administrative management of libraries’ digital scholarship initiatives including those related to digital projects, digital humanities, public digital scholarship, and affiliated areas.

https://tinyurl.com/2zd5w8bx

"Sustaining a Spatial Collaboration: Leveraging Social Infrastructure to Support Technological Advancement in Geospatial Data Discovery"

The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Geospatial Information Network (GIN) serves as a prime example of an enduring, successful collaboration across multiple institutions. The proliferation and significance of geospatial data have outpaced the development of adequate search tools and high-quality metadata, prompting the necessity for streamlined geospatial data discovery. In response, the BTAA-GIN established, maintains, and continuously enhances a geoportal that federates metadata from public geospatial data providers in addition to geospatial resources from member institutions. This article provides a reflective analysis of the evolution of the BTAA-GIN over the past nine years, an exploration of the ever-shifting open-source technology landscape, possible future directions and potential expansions of scope, and highlights key features contributing to its success. Examining the trajectory of the BTAA-GIN and the factors behind its achievements yields valuable insights for comparable large-scale, multi-institutional endeavors.

https://doi.org/10.1080/15420353.2024.2388576