Category Archives: oa.base

Metadata on open access books in BASE – ScienceOpen

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Abstract:  BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is one of the world’s largest search engines for academic documents on the web, with references to around 310 million documents. Cross-system metadata communication and standardization are fundamental prerequisites for the development of BASE and comparable information systems. The presentation focuses on the metadata of open access books and book chapters in BASE, whose share of the total index has increased significantly in recent years, and illustrates the challenge of further dissemination of open access book metadata.

 

Open search tools need sustainable funding – Research Professional News

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“The Covid-19 pandemic has triggered an explosion of knowledge, with more than 200,000 papers published to date. At one point last year, scientific output on the topic was doubling every 20 days. This huge growth poses big challenges for researchers, many of whom have pivoted to coronavirus research without experience or preparation.

Mainstream academic search engines are not built for such a situation. Tools such as Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science provide long, unstructured lists of results with little context.

These work well if you know what you are looking for. But for anyone diving into an unknown field, it can take weeks, even months, to identify the most important topics, publication venues and authors. This is far too long in a public health emergency.

The result has been delays, duplicated work, and problems with identifying reliable findings. This lack of tools to provide a quick overview of research results and evaluate them correctly has created a crisis in discoverability itself. …

Building on these, meta-aggregators such as Base, Core and OpenAIRE have begun to rival and in some cases outperform the proprietary search engines. …”

Good Practice Exchange at Bielefeld University – People of OpenAIRE – OpenAIRE Blog

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The “Good Practice Exchange” (GPE) program of OpenAIRE is aimed to support National Open Access Desks colleagues (NOADs) and consortium members in 2020 to visit another consortium partner to exchange and learn about Open Science aspects, such as “Embedding Open Science Practices”, “Open Science Policy and its Practical Alignment in an Institutional Context”, “National Coordination of Open Science and Research Data Management”, and “Repository Operation and Metadata Management Best Practices”.?

Bielefeld University Library in Germany (UNIBI) was the first of four partners to host a GPE workshop from 4 – 5 February 2020. Because of UNIBIs role in OpenAIRE regarding the aggregation management of metadata from data sources and its transformation into the OpenAIRE research graph UNIBI was predestinated for the topic ”Repository operation and metadata management best practices”.?

Where Can I Publish? Part 2: Is there a definitive list? – Delta Think

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“We set out to examine whether there is a definitive, curated list of journals that researchers can use when deciding on their publication venue. While some offer very good coverage, the short answer appears to be that no one index offers a definitive list.

Across all journals, there seems to be overlap of significant proportions of the mainstream indexes. However, fully OA journals present a more varied landscape. You need to combine multiple lists to round up a comprehensive list of curated fully OA journals.

Our analysis has combined over 100,000 ISSNs across over 65,000 titles and, we think it represents one of the most comprehensive round ups of the coverage of curated lists available….”

2018: best year yet for net growth of open access

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“Highlights: this edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access features charts that illustrate that 2018 showed the strongest growth to date for open access by number of documents searchable through BASE, PubMedCentral, arXiv, DOAJ, texts added to Internet Archive, and journals added to DOAJ….”

Alternative routes to scholarly articles and research outputs

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“Many scholarly and peer-reviewed articles can be read open access today on the web. A number of free services and archives have developed tools and services helping users to discover research output in an easy and simple way: through installing a browser extension or plug-in; by using academic search engines and archives, or, by contacting the author directly. In the following text, we list a selection of services and ways to find scientific articles. The choice is yours….”

All about that BASE

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Slides: “This conversation will be about how DOIs and ORCID iDs only recently entered BASE, one of the largest academic search engines, which happens to be non-commercial. BASE harvests bibliographic metadata via OAI-PMH from thousands of publication repositories – each of which has its own idea about Dublin Core, the lowest common denominator of metadata formats. So we normalize the data from each repository. Authors have been able to claim their own publications in BASE since mid-2017 by connecting them to their ORCID iD. It is an open research question how this linkage information could percolate back to the source repositories.”

Golden Rules for Repository Managers

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“We are indexing all kinds of academically relevant resources – journals, institutional repositories, digital collections etc. – which provide an OAI interface and use OAI-PMH for providing their contents (learn more about OAI at the Open Archives Initiative or Wikipedia). In case your source does not provide an OAI interface, upload your documents to aggregators like DataCite or Zenodo, to subject repositories like RePEC or add your open access journal to DOAJ. We are indexing these sources regularly.

However, the best way to get your documents indexed by BASE is to provide an OAI interface. We have compiled some golden rules that might be helpful to optimize your OAI interface. If your OAI interface complies with these rules, we can assure fast and smooth indexing of your source. Data from your source will be presented completely and in the best possible way….”

Golden Rules for Repository Managers | BASE – Bielefeld Academic Search Engine | FAQ

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“We are indexing all kinds of academically relevant resources – journals, institutional repositories, digital collections etc. – which provide an OAI interface and use OAI-PMH for providing their contents (learn more about OAI at the Open Archives Initiative or Wikipedia). In case your source does not provide an OAI interface, upload your documents to aggregators like DataCite or Zenodo, to subject repositories like RePEC or add your open access journal to DOAJ. We are indexing these sources regularly.

However, the best way to get your documents indexed by BASE is to provide an OAI interface. We have compiled some golden rules that might be helpful to optimize your OAI interface. If your OAI interface complies with these rules, we can assure fast and smooth indexing of your source. Data from your source will be presented completely and in the best possible way.

You can check some of the following items using our OAI-PMH validator OVAL….”

Open Knowledge Maps – Working Groups / Open Science – Open Knowledge Forums

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We have now connected Open Knowledge Maps to one of the largest academic search engines in the world: BASE. This means, you are able to visualize a research topic from 100+ million documents. And for the first time, you can search within different types of resources, including datasets and software. We would like to thank our collaborators BASE and rOpenSci for their outstanding support in making this happen!

We have also spent a lot of time improving the naming of the sub-areas to make the concepts in a field more visible – which means that this update improves our existing PubMed integration too.

Open Knowledge Maps follows the motto “open science, all the way”. From our roadmap to our source code and our data, we publish everything under an open license that is compatible to the Open Definition. As always, we welcome any feedback you may have!

FASTR to be Considered by Senate Committee | SPARC

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“After a month of intense conversations and negotiations, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) will bring the ‘Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act’ up for mark-up on Wednesday, July 29th. The language that will be considered is an amended version of FASTR, officially known as the ‘Johnson-Carper Substitute Amendment,’  which was officially filed by the HSGAC leadership late on Friday afternoon, per committee rules. There are two major changes from the original bill language to be particularly aware of. Specifically, the amendment Replaces the six month embargo period with ‘no later than 12 months, but preferably sooner’ as anticipated; and Provides a mechanism for stakeholders to petition federal agencies to ‘adjust’ the embargo period if the12 months does not serve ‘the public, industries, and the scientific community.’ We understand that these modifications were made in order accomplish a number of things: Satisfy the requirement of a number of Members of HSGAC that the language more closely track that of the OSTP Directive; Meet the preference of the major U.S. higher education associations for a maximum 12 month embargo; Ensure that, for the first time, a number of scientific societies will drop their opposition for the bill; and  Ensure that any petition process an agency may enable is focused on serving the interests of the public and the scientific community …”

Impact of Social Sciences – Rather than narrow our definition of impact, we should use metrics to explore richness and diversity of outcomes.

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“Impact is multi-dimensional, the routes by which impact occur are different across disciplines and sectors, and impact changes over time. Jane Tinkler argues that if institutions like HEFCE specify a narrow set of impact metrics, more harm than good would come to universities forced to limit their understanding of how research is making a difference. But qualitative and quantitative indicators continue to be an incredible source of learning for how impact works in each of our disciplines, locations or sectors.”

Wellcome Trust Launches Guide for Publishing Open Access Monographs and Book Chapters – OASPA

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“Open access for monographs and book chapters is a relatively new area of publishing, and there are many ways of approaching it.   With this in mind, a recent publication from the Wellcome Trust aims to provide some guidance for publishers to consider when developing policies and processes for open access books. The Wellcome Trust recognises that implementation around publishing monographs and book chapters open access is in flux, and invites publishers to email Cecy Marden at c.marden@wellcome.ac.uk with any suggestions for further guidance that would be useful to include in this document. ‘Open Access Monographs and Book Chapters: A practical guide for publishers’ is available to download as a pdf from the Wellcome Trust website.”

Library support in the transition to open access: membership cancellations | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs

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“The purpose of this post is to shed some light on a specific issue in the transition to open access that particularly affects small and low-cost publishers and to suggest one strategy to address this issue. In the words of one Resource Requirements interviewee: ‘So the other set of members that we used to have about forty library members , but when we went to open access online, we lost the whole bunch of libraries. Yeah, so basically we sent everybody ,you know, a letter saying we are going to open access online, the annual membership is only $30, we hope you will continue to support us even though there are no longer print journals, and then a whole flu of cancellations came in from a whole bunch of libraries, which we had kind of thought might happen but given how cheap we are, I have to say I was really disappointed when it indeed did happen especially from whole bunch of [deleted] libraries [for which our journal is extremely relevant]. I was going, seriously $30?’ Comments: for a university library, a society membership fee, when not required for journal subscriptions, may be difficult to justify from an accounting perspective. $30 is a small cost; however, for a university the administrative work of tracking such memberships and cutting a check every year likely exceeds the $30 cost. With 40 library members at a cost of $30, the total revenue for this journal from this source was $1,200. A university or university library could sponsor this amount at less than the cost of many an article processing charge. The university and library where the faculty member is located have a support program for open access journals; clearly the will, and some funding, is there. One of the challenges is transitioning subscription dollars to support for open access, as I address in my 2013 First Monday article. Following is one suggestion for libraries, or for faculty to suggest to their libraries: why not engage your faculty who are independent or society publishers to gain support for cancellations or tough negotiations and lower prices for the big deals of large, highly profitable commercial publishers that I argue are critical to redirect funding to our own publishing activities? Here is one scenario that may help to explain the potential …”