Author Archives: peter.suber's bookmarks

Library launches future with FOLIO | Cornell University Library

Posted on by
Reply

“At the start of July, Cornell University Library made a giant leap to the future by implementing an innovative integrated library system (ILS) called FOLIO, becoming the first large research library in the world to migrate to the platform. 

Since 2016, Cornell University Library has been collaborating with institutions around the world to develop the new ILS, which is a complex suite of software for running services and operations—from ordering, paying for, cataloging, and lending out materials to analyzing resource use across physical, digital, local, and remote collections. An acronym for “The Future of Libraries Is Open,” FOLIO is envisioned as a sustainable, community-driven alternative to proprietary ILS products that are costly to purchase and maintain and are subject to vendor control. 

The open source and collaborative nature of FOLIO aligns with Cornell University Library’s commitment to open access and the wide sharing of knowledge …”

Which aspects of the Open Science agenda are most relevant to scientometric research and publishing? An opinion paper | Quantitative Science Studies | MIT Press

Posted on by
Reply

Abstract:  Open Science is an umbrella term that encompasses many recommendations for possible changes in research practices, management, and publishing with the objective to increase transparency and accessibility. This has become an important science policy issue that all disciplines should consider. Many Open Science recommendations may be valuable for the further development of research and publishing, but not all are relevant to all fields. This opinion paper considers the aspects of Open Science that are most relevant for scientometricians, discussing how they can be usefully applied.

 

In the Netherlands: The 100% open access ambition

Posted on by
Reply

[Undated] “The Dutch government is of the opinion that publicly funded research should be freely accessible. This was the position outlined by State Secretary Sander Dekker in a letter (in Dutch) to the Dutch House of Representatives already in November 2013. He was deliberately opting for the golden route. He aimed to have 60 percent of Dutch academic publication available through open access within five years (2019) and 100 percent within ten years (2024). If not enough progress is made, proposals will follow in 2016 to make open access publication mandatory.

In 2016, the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science was drawn up at an Open Science meeting organized by the Dutch Presidency of the Council of the European Union on 4 and 5 April 2016 in Amsterdam. The ambition of 100% open access was further strengthened and the date was also adjusted to 100% open access at the end of 2020. The results and actions are formulated in the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science. See the summary and comments on the Call for Action.

The government sets the priotity for the golden route because this is most sustainable in the long term. In addition, the publishers’ business model will change and this route provides the best guarantee that publications are immediately available. The green route often means lengthy embargo periods. …”

Why Do We Need to Change Research Evaluation Systems? — Observatory | Institute for the Future of Education

Posted on by
Reply

“Can we break out of this vicious cycle? Are there alternatives? Yes, there are. For some years now, various movements worldwide have sought to change the system for evaluating research. In 2012, the “San Francisco Declaration” proposed eliminating metrics based on the impact factor. There was also the Charte de la désexcellence  (“Letter of Dis-Excellence”) mentioned above. In 2015, a group of academicians signed the Leiden Manifesto, which warned of the “widespread misuse of indicators in evaluating scientific performance.” Since 2013, the group Science in Transition has sought to reform the science evaluation system. Finally, since 2016, the Collectiu InDocentia, created at the University of Valencia (Spain), has also been doing its part. …”

LIBER 2021 Session #5: How Can Open Infrastructures Support the Role of Research Libraries? – YouTube

Posted on by
Reply

“Please find here the recording of the LIBER 2021 Session #5: How Can Open Infrastructures Support the Role of Research Libraries? The slides can be accessed through the following link: https://zenodo.org/record/5044765#.YO…

Description: In the first presentation, Fidan Limani explores the integration of scholarly artifacts from the domain of economics using Knowledge Graphs (KG). An initial version of the KG is presented and discussed, all the while keeping a library perspective on the process. Use cases enabled by this approach are also deliberated on, such as opportunities for researchers to interact with multiple facets of a research endeavour (in terms of research deliverables), cases that involve resource complementarity, or those that involve certain research deliverables across providers or collection origin. A final item to discuss includes the methodology used to design, develop, and maintain the current KG and its future extension. In the second presentation, James MacGregor, Niels Stern, Silvio Peroni and Joanna Ball discuss the benefits of Open Infrastructure for libraries. Libraries benefit from Open Infrastructure, including projects such as the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), OAPEN, OpenCitations, and Open Journal Systems (OJS), by receiving access to free content and services that help in establishing quality and discoverability. However, they offer libraries much more than just cost-free alternatives to commercial infrastructures. They are also Open in the sense that they have community-based governance models and opportunities for community input into their future developments and directions. In this presentation , we will hear from three Open Infrastructures currently supported by the SCOSS program – discussing how they involve contributing libraries in their governance. In the third and final presentation, Emilie Blotière and Tiziana Lombardo address two services provided by OPERAS and funded by the European Commission – the Research for Society service, under the COESO project (Swafs call) and the Discovery platform for Social Science and Humanities resources (data and publications, profiles and projects), under the TRIPLE project (INFRAEOSC call). The talk will include an introduction of OPERAS and the two services, a discussion on the interoperability and complementarity between these platforms, and an explanation on how the complementarity facilitates institutional funding….”

IBM, MIT and Harvard release DARPA “Common Sense AI” dataset at ICML 2021 | IBM Research Blog

Posted on by
Reply

“Before we can build machines that make decisions based on common sense, the AI powering those machines must be capable of more than simply finding patterns in data. It must also consider the intentions, beliefs, and desires of others that people use to intuitively make decisions.

At the 2021 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), we are releasing a new dataset for benchmarking AI intuition, along with two machine learning models representing different approaches to the problem. The research has been done with our colleagues at MIT and Harvard University to accelerate the development of AI that exhibits common sense. These tools rely on testing techniques that psychologists use to study the behavior of infants….”

Growth of OASPA members book output: We see different patterns between books and journals – OASPA

Posted on by
Reply

“Patterns in license usage have changed over time. Figure 1, above, shows how CC BY has become the most popular license in recent years, accounting for just over 65% of books published by OASPA members in 2020. CC BY-NC-ND was the next most commonly-used license, accounting for around 25% of books published in 2020….

5 publishers account for around 71% of OASPA members’ book output. This represents a similar level of consolidation to journals, although the top publishers are different between the two (with the exception of Springer Nature, T&F and De Gruyter). The next 5 publishers account for a further 18% of books; 12 publishers account for the remaining 11%. Full details of these additional publishers, together with the numbers of books for all publishers, can again be found in the downloadable data linked to above….”

Supporting Impactful Publications (SIP) Program | provost

Posted on by
Reply

“The Tulane Supporting Impactful Publications (SIP) assists in covering fees to support open access options for high impact peer-reviewed publications for Tulane scholars serving as corresponding authors who do not have grant or other funds available to cover them. This program is funded and coordinated by the Office of Academic Affairs and Provost and co-funded by the Office of Academic Affairs and Tulane Libraries and Academic Information Resources. …

Eligible applicants may apply for funds once a peer reviewed journal article has been accepted for publication in a journal with impact factor of 8 or above. Applications for journals with impact factors <8 will also be considered for funding when the corresponding author provides a compelling case to do so. One application may be submitted per eligible publication….”

BTAA Joins Open Library of Humanities | Big Ten Academic Alliance

Posted on by
Reply

“The Big Ten Academic Alliance and the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) have signed a three-year collective agreement that provides multi-year support for OLH from all of the BTAA’s fifteen member libraries. This move was made possible thanks to the OLH Open Consortial Offer, an initiative that offers consortia, societies, networks and scholarly projects the opportunity to join the Open Library of Humanities Library Partnership Subsidy system as a bloc, enabling each institution to benefit from a discount….”

Highlights from the SSHOC Open Science and Research Data Management Train-the-Trainer Bootcamp | SSHOPENCLOUD

Posted on by
Reply

“Do you deliver Open Science and Research Data Management (RDM) training? Are you interested in integrating tools and creating engaging training sessions? Are you looking to prepare in-depth sessions and avoid any disasters? The SSHOC Open Science and Research Data Management Train-the-Trainer Bootcamp held on Monday 10th of May and Wednesday 12th of May 2021 was set to aid trainers in finding resources and tools they can re-use in their training planning and activities. This blogpost reviews the highlights of the bootcamp….”

Did You Ask for Citations? An Insight into Preprint Citations en route to Open Science

Posted on by
Reply

Abstract:  This study investigates citation patterns between 2017 and 2020 for preprints published in three preprint servers, one specializing in biology (bioRxiv), one in chemistry (ChemRxiv), and another hosting preprints in all disciplines (Research Square). Showing evidence that preprints are now regularly cited in peer reviewed journal articles, books, and conference papers, the outcomes of this investigation further substantiate the value of open science also in relation to citation-based metrics on which the evaluation of scholarship continues to rely on. This analysis will be useful to inform new research-based education in today’s scholarly communication. View Full-Text

 

National Library signs ‘historic’ agreement to donate 600,000 books to online archive | Stuff.co.nz

Posted on by
Reply

“The National Library will donate 600,000 books that it was planning to cull from its overseas collection to a United States-based internet archive that will make digital copies of the works freely available online.

National Librarian Rachel Esson announced the “historic” agreement on Monday, saying books left at the end of the library’s review process would be donated to the Internet Archive, a digital library with the self-stated mission of universal access to all knowledge….”

Google Scholar – Public Access Tracker, Open Access, and eScholarship – Library Matters

Posted on by
Reply

“A few months ago, Google Scholar launched a Public Access Tracker. This is a tool embedded in Google Scholar profiles that shows if a researcher’s work is compliant with their funding agencies’ open access mandates: …

A few things to note:

Not every source is picked up

i.e. Researchers may have made works open but Google Scholar didn’t find it.

Not all funded research is captured
Uploading a PDF to your Google Drive (as Google recommends) would NOT meet open access requirements of funding agencies.
Some of the sources Google Scholar recognizes as ‘open’ are not in fact (e.g. ResearchGate). 

 

Although the tracker is not without its bugs (see above), it has spurred some researchers to make more of their work open access….”

NLP needs to be open. 500+ researchers are trying to make it happen | VentureBeat

Posted on by
Reply

“A group of more than 500 researchers from 45 different countries — from France, the US, and Japan to Indonesia, Ghana, and Ethiopia — has come together to work towards tackling some of these problems. The project, which the authors of this article are all involved in, is called Big Science, and our goal is to improve the scientific understanding of the capabilities and limitations of large-scale neural network models in NLP and to create a diverse and multilingual dataset and a large-scale language model as research artifacts, open to the scientific community.

BigScience was inspired by scientific creation schemes existing in other scientific fields, such as CERN and the LHC in particle physics, in which open scientific collaborations facilitate the creation of large-scale artifacts useful for the entire research community. So far, a broad range of institutions and disciplines have joined the project in its year-long effort that started in May 2021….

Our effort keeps evolving and growing, with more researchers joining every day, making it already the biggest open science contribution in artificial intelligence to date.

Much like the tensions between proprietary and open-source software in the early 2000s, AI is at a turning point where it can either go in a proprietary direction, where large-scale state-of-the-art models are increasingly developed internally in companies and kept private, or in an open, collaborative, community-oriented direction, marrying the best aspects of open-source and open-science. It’s essential that we make the most of this current opportunity to push AI onto that community-oriented path so that it can benefit society as a whole.”