DigitalKoans – Page 30 – What Is the Sound of One E-Print Downloading?

Ithaka S+R: Print Revenue and Open Access Monographs: A University Press Study

Key Insights

OA titles can generate significant print revenue. While there may be some tradeoff between OA editions and print sales, publishers can produce print sales revenue from their OA lists. Publishers may wish to take such revenue into account in considering business models for OA publication today.

OA titles can generate meaningful digital revenue. When made available through consumer channels such as Kindle, ebooks that are available openly on other platforms can in parallel generate meaningful consumer sales. Publishers may benefit from giving focused consideration specific to OA monographs to their pricing and windowing tactics for such channels.

Outliers are essential. A small number of OA titles sell particularly well, just as is historically the case in traditional monograph sales models. Publishers bearing this in mind will be thinking in terms of the sustainability and growth of their lists overall rather than each title individually.

Titles with both hard and soft cover formats generate the most revenue. This may be the result of format choices publishers based on market forecasting, so from our data we cannot be sure that there is a causal relationship. Still, publishers may wish to give additional attention to their format strategy for OA books.

Sales vary widely by field. History, arts, and humanities saw lower unit sales while social sciences saw higher unit sales and STEM fields saw the greatest. Publishers may need to pursue different sustainability models for OA books based on their field.

An opportunity to increase print sales? There is currently significant friction for users in navigating from digital to print editions. Publishers and digital distribution platforms should work together to create a more seamless reader experience from digital discoverability of and engagement with the OA version to potential print sales.

https://doi.org/10.18665/sr.319642

Institutional Repository Librarian at Montclair State University

The Institutional Repository Librarian has primary responsibility for guiding the development of a successful system of tools to support and showcase Montclair scholarship and unique local collections. This position works in close collaboration with other library units to administer and develop the university’s Digital Commons presence (digitalcommons.montclair.edu) and integrations, including Research with Montclair/Research with NJ and PlumX Metrics. The Institutional Repository Librarian contributes to library research data support efforts.

https://tinyurl.com/72d22762

"You Do Not Receive Enough Recognition for Your Influential Science"

During career advancement and funding allocation decisions in biomedicine, reviewers have traditionally depended on journal-level measures of scientific influence like the impact factor. Prestigious journals are thought to pursue a reputation of exclusivity by rejecting large quantities of papers, many of which may be meritorious. It is possible that this process could create a system whereby some influential articles are prospectively identified and recognized by journal brands but most influential articles are overlooked. Here, we measure the degree to which journal prestige hierarchies capture or overlook influential science. We quantify the fraction of scientists’ articles that would receive recognition because (a) they are published in journals above a chosen impact factor threshold, or (b) are at least as well-cited as articles appearing in such journals. We find that the number of papers cited at least as well as those appearing in high-impact factor journals vastly exceeds the number of papers published in such venues. At the investigator level, this phenomenon extends across gender, racial, and career stage groupings of scientists. We also find that approximately half of researchers never publish in a venue with an impact factor above 15, which under journal-level evaluation regimes may exclude them from consideration for opportunities. Many of these researchers publish equally influential work, however, raising the possibility that the traditionally chosen journal-level measures that are routinely considered under decision-making norms, policy, or law, may recognize as little as 10-20% of the work that warrants recognition.

https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.09.07.556750

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

Electronic Resources Librarian/Specialist at University of Arizona

The successful candidate will be responsible for the lifecycle of the Libraries’ licensed electronic resources including onboarding, maintenance, troubleshooting, and offboarding. Additionally, in collaboration with the Libraries’ IT and Discovery Unit team members, the Electronic Resources Librarian/Specialist handles Tier 1 support for the authentication, including EZProxy and SSO.

https://tinyurl.com/mt3zfd3h

"Guest Post — Reputation and Publication Volume at MDPI and Frontiers"

Until recently, MDPI and Frontiers were known for their meteoric rise. At one point, powered by the Guest Editor model, the two publishers combined for about 500,000 papers (annualized), which translated into nearly USD $1,000,000,000 annual revenue. Their growth was extraordinary, but so has been their contraction. MDPI has declined by 27% and Frontiers by 36% in comparison to their peak.

https://tinyurl.com/ysn26san

Business and Data Services Librarian at University of Texas at El Paso

Reporting to the Head of the Research and Instruction Department, as part of the Library’s Scholarly Communication team, this position will develop and maintain data-related services and instruction to meet the needs of an R1 university. Position will provide consultative and instructional services for faculty, students, and staff in quantitative and qualitative data access, storage, analysis, management, and sharing.

https://tinyurl.com/2nnr5wjc

"An Investigation in the Interdisciplinary Nature of Digital Humanities: A Bibliometric Analysis"

The current study is an endeavor to understand the linkage of the digital humanities with other disciplines in the universe of knowledge so that researchers from multiple subject backgrounds can carry out research on digital humanities in a more vivid manner. . . . The results infer that the highest number of authors active in research activities in the digital humanities belong to computer science followed by art and humanities and library and information science disciplines. The journals preferred for publication of research on digital humanities are also analysed, and it is found that the highest number of journals are from the literature discipline, followed by art & humanities, computer science, history, and library and information science. The publication productivity of journals is also studied, and it is found that "Digital Scholarship in the Humanities" is the most productive journal and that it belongs to the humanities discipline. In the list of the top ten most productive journals, five belong to the discipline of Library and information science. The study of citation and bibliographic coupling displays that the journals "Journal of Documentation" and "Digital Scholarship in the Humanities" are the most cited journals.

https://tinyurl.com/2p9s3wbr

Applications Administrator – Library at University of Texas at Arlington

The Application Administrator would be responsible for implementing, managing, and integrating applications on the Libraries’ servers. They would also be responsible for collecting and preserving the data generated by Libraries’ applications.

https://tinyurl.com/3t5juawt

"A Compendium of Data Sources for Data Science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence"

Recent advances in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, such as the emergence of large language models, are leading to an increasing demand for data that can be processed by such models. While data sources are application-specific, and it is impossible to produce an exhaustive list of such data sources, it seems that a comprehensive, rather than complete, list would still benefit data scientists and machine learning experts of all levels of seniority. The goal of this publication is to provide just such an (inevitably incomplete) list — or compendium — of data sources across multiple areas of applications, including finance and economics, legal (laws and regulations), life sciences (medicine and drug discovery), news sentiment and social media, retail and ecommerce, satellite imagery, and shipping and logistics, and sports.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.05682

Unit Manager – Digital Archives at Texas Tech University

Creating digital archiving workflows, procedures, and policies.

Arranging, describing, and providing access to born-digital archival collections and describing them into finding aids.

Collaborating on the acquisition and accessioning of born-digital materials.

Ingesting and migrating digital items from a variety of current and legacy media formats.

Providing training and guidance to SWC/SCL staff on preserving and migrating born-digital materials.

https://tinyurl.com/yrypzxta

"ACS, Elsevier, and Researchgate Resolve Litigation, with Solution to Support Researchers"

ACS and Elsevier, members of the Coalition for Responsible Sharing, have agreed to a legal settlement with ResearchGate that ensures copyright-compliant sharing of research articles published with ACS or Elsevier on the ResearchGate site. The lawsuits pending against ResearchGate in Germany and the United States are now resolved. The specific terms of the parties’ settlement are confidential.

Background: "Munich Court Ruling Sides with Elsevier, ACS over ResearchGate."

https://tinyurl.com/mrr9xywj

Head, Digitization Services (Media Preservation Leader) at Indiana University Bloomington

This position will manage a newly created Digitization Services department that will oversee image- and time-based digitization following digital preservation best practices for IU Libraries, as part of Digital Collections Services.

https://tinyurl.com/a5v3j5rb

"Understanding Barriers Affecting the Adoption and Usage of Open Access Data in the Context of Organizations"

Although the benefits of organizational adoption are significant, most OAD-related projects fail because of organizational barriers and resistance to adoption. This study first aims to find these organizational barriers to adopting OAD to raise awareness of the obstacles organizations must overcome. Towards this aim, after conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) and an expert panel, a research model based on the Technology – Organization – Environment (TOE) framework is proposed in this study. As a result of SLR, 97 barriers were identified from ten primary studies. After critically examining these barriers, a research model classifying 22 crucial barriers to organizational OAD adoption based on the TOE framework is proposed.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dim.2023.100049

Creative & Instructional Technologies Librarian at University of Texas

The University of Texas Libraries seeks a Creative & Instructional Technologies Librarian to advance the mission of UT Libraries’ inclusive makerspace, The Foundry, located in the Fine Arts Library. This position will primarily work with faculty and students from across campus and disciplines to advance creative inquiry through workshops, interdisciplinary course-integrated instruction, and point of need consultations. This position will partner with Foundry staff to identify outreach opportunities and contribute to day-to-day operations of the Foundry. This position will also support adjacent instructional technologies within the library.

https://tinyurl.com/2964cdww

"Scopus Introduces the Author Position Metric — A New Researcher Signal"

Most publications are created with the input from multiple co-authors. Traditional citation metrics give each co-author the same citation impact, even though the actual contribution of each researcher will not have been even. . . .

We have now added a new feature to capture the following authorship positions or types:

First author: The first author mentioned in the publication

Last author: The last author mentioned in the publication

Corresponding author: An author is marked as the corresponding author in the publication. Since June 2020, newly released documents in Scopus can contain more than one corresponding author. . .

Co-author: For documents with more than one author, co-authors are any author that is not a first, last or corresponding author

Single author: An author is the only author of a publication

https://tinyurl.com/45ynjmr7

Digital Scholarship Librarian at Michigan State University

The Digital Scholarship Librarian is a member of a team of professionals who support the services and operations of the MSU Libraries Digital Scholarship Lab. This position will be a key contributor to the ongoing visioning and evolution of the MSU Libraries digital scholarship program. They will provide consultations and workshops, and participate in transformative projects that leverage digital tools for engaged scholarship. In addition, the Digital Scholarship Librarian will participate in and engage with a rich, well-developed community of digital scholarship and digital humanities practitioners across the MSU campus. The position reports to the Head of Digital Scholarship Services.

https://tinyurl.com/2s3b5zy9

Paywall: "Images as Metadata: A New Perspective for Describing Research Data"

Abstract Through studies and work developed over the last few years, we propose a new approach to description, where images can have a preponderant role in the description of data, assuming the role of metadata. We present several pieces of evidence, point out their challenges and determine the opportunities this new perspective can have in the research. Images have specific characteristics that can be leveraged in improving data description. Historical evidence establish that images have always been used and produced in research, yet their representational ability has never been harnessed to describe data and give more context to the scientific process.

https://doi.org/10.1080/19386389.2023.2252722

Data Services Librarian at Middlebury College

Develop strong working relationships with faculty, staff, and students who use (or support the use of) quantitative and qualitative data in their research, teaching, and scholarship. Provide expert instruction to students, faculty, and staff regarding the discovery, acquisition, management, manipulation, interpretation, analysis, and visualization of data (e.g. infographics, charts, maps, and interactive media) using specialty software and coding languages (e.g. R, Python, Stata, ArcGIS, QGIS); provide expert instruction in specialized methods (e.g. statistical techniques, text/data mining, sentiment analysis, network analysis, GIS). Provide proactive leadership, direction, and vision for the support of digital scholarship and data science research and teaching in the libraries; collaborate with faculty and staff from all Middlebury campuses.

https://tinyurl.com/6m8n8ava

"Tracing Data: A Survey Investigating Disciplinary Differences in Data Citation"

Data citations, or citations in reference lists to data, are increasingly seen as an important means to trace data reuse and incentivize data sharing. Although disciplinary differences in data citation practices have been well documented via scientometric approaches, we do not yet know how representative these practices are within disciplines. Nor do we yet have insight into researchers’ motivations for citing — or not citing — data in their academic work. Here, we present the results of the largest known survey (n = 2,492) to explicitly investigate data citation practices, preferences, and motivations, using a representative sample of academic authors by discipline, as represented in the Web of Science (WoS). We present findings about researchers’ current practices and motivations for reusing and citing data and also examine their preferences for how they would like their own data to be cited. We conclude by discussing disciplinary patterns in two broad clusters, focusing on patterns in the social sciences and humanities, and consider the implications of our results for tracing and rewarding data sharing and reuse.

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00264

Data Services Specialist at Georgia State University

This position is part of the growing Research Data Services (RDS) Department of professionals with expertise in supporting data analysis tools & methods, data visualization, finding data & statistics, data collection, and data cleaning & management across academic disciplines (details at lib.gsu.edu/data). . . .

Assist university students, staff, and faculty in the use of data software, coding languages, and tools (most needed: R and Python)

Support campus researchers in finding, evaluating, wrangling, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data

Provide individual and small-group consultations, live workshops, and course-embedded instruction in
data resources, tools, and methods

https://tinyurl.com/4jyubnju

"USC Press and University Libraries Launch Open-Access Publishing Platform"

The University of South Carolina Press and University Libraries are embarking on a new collaborative venture: Open Carolina, an open-access publishing platform. . . .

Many ventures into open scholarly resources are planned as temporary pilot operations because they are funded by time-limited grant pools. Thanks to consistent funding from the Libraries, Open Carolina has a sustainable model that will allow scholars with limited publishing funds to share their research via the platform, partially or totally foregoing associated fees. In its inaugural year, the Libraries aim to fund four full-length books and support is in place to make the program sustainable for years to come and allow Open Carolina to grow steadily.

Open Carolina will offer opportunities to a wide range of scholars and researchers regardless of university affiliation.

https://tinyurl.com/yn7zd3ta

Digital Library Services Librarian at University of Pittsburgh

This position is charged with leading three high-impact digital library services within HSLS. First, as HSLS’s digital accessibility expert, this position leads efforts to create an inclusive and accessible online environment, ensuring that digital content and technologies are usable by all individuals, including but not limited to: the HSLS website and other public-facing web technologies, online instruction and marketing materials, public and classroom technology initiatives, HSLS licensed resources, online special collections galleries, and multimodal technology accessibility across HSLS collections, resources and services.

https://tinyurl.com/3xyasukh

Paywall: "Impact of Conversational and Generative AI Systems on Libraries: A Use Case Large Language Model (LLM)"

The study aims to examine how artificial intelligence (AI) could potentially affect specific services provided by academic libraries in the near future. To achieve this, the study uses three different Generative AI systems: ChatGPT, Perplexity, and iAsk.Ai. . . . The three AI systems selected for this study represent different AI approaches that can be used in academic libraries. ChatGPT, for example, is a conversational AI system that can provide quick answers to patrons’ queries, while Perplexity is a language model that can assist with tasks such as cataloging and content classification. iAsk.Ai is a natural language processing (NLP) system that can assist with research and reference inquiries.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0194262X.2023.2254814

Research Data Services Librarian at Carnegie Mellon University

In this role, you will be a lead research data resource for the CMU community and a key partner in crafting and delivering library services in response to demand and interest from the research community and data access expectations from research funders. You will be expected to provide best-in-class research data management and open data services to researchers, research teams, and major research initiatives. Both technically and socially savvy, you will be able to provide assistance and guidance with data collection; data preparation for analysis; developing schema and standards; meeting institutional, funder, and federal requirements; creating data management and sharing plans; selecting data repositories; and data curation.

https://apply.interfolio.com/131324

"Expanding the Data Ark: An Attempt to Make the Data from Highly Cited Social Science Papers Publicly Available"

Access to scientific data can enable independent reuse and verification; however, most data are not available and become increasingly irrecoverable over time. This study aimed to retrieve and preserve important datasets from 160 of the most highly-cited social science articles published between 2008-2013 and 2015-2018. We asked authors if they would share data in a public repository — the Data Ark — or provide reasons if data could not be shared. Of the 160 articles, data for 117 (73%, 95% CI [67% – 80%]) were not available and data for 7 (4%, 95% CI [0% – 12%]) were available with restrictions. Data for 36 (22%, 95% CI [16% – 30%]) articles were available in unrestricted form: 29 of these datasets were already available and 7 datasets were made available in the Data Ark. Most authors did not respond to our data requests and a minority shared reasons for not sharing, such as legal or ethical constraints. These findings highlight an unresolved need to preserve important scientific datasets and increase their accessibility to the scientific community.

https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/w9crz