Category Archives: oa.metadata

The Holy Grail does not exist: OPERAS-P and OASPA’s workshops for publishers on innovative business models for books – OAPEN – supporting the transition to open access for academic books

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By Agata Morka & Tom Mosterd

In May 2021, together with the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA), OPERAS hosted a series of three European workshops on business models for open access books targeted specifically at small and medium-sized academic book publishers1. As part of the OPERAS-P project work package 6 (Innovation) OPERAS was looking into innovative, non-BPC business models. The feedback gathered in the course of these three workshops informed a report The Future of scholarly communications, published at the end of June 2021 as an OPERAS-P project deliverable.

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Citizen Archivist Contributions Push Catalog Enhancements Past 2 Million | National Archives

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“The National Archives Catalog recently surpassed two million pages of records enhanced with tags, transcriptions, and comments, thanks to the record-breaking efforts of citizen archivists, as well as agency employees working from home.

This was the second major milestone in a year for the Citizen Archivist project, which began in 2014. Enhancements reached one million on August 10, 2020, and two million on June 1, 2021.

“After pursuing and achieving the goal of enhancing one million records over several years, we were stunned to surpass the two million records enhanced mark in only 10 months,” said Pamela Wright, the agency’s Chief Innovation Officer. “Citizen archivists and NARA staff have been working hard to make the public’s records more accessible to users, and achieving this milestone so quickly is a testament to their dedication.”

Citizen Archivists contribute to records by tagging them, making comments, or transcribing documents to make searching easier and allow more members of the public to find documents relevant to their research. (Read more about how keywords help researchers in the NARAtions blog.) The Citizen Archivist team prepares “missions” for contributors to work on, focusing the momentum on particular groups of records at one time….”

FAIR chemical structures in the Journal of Cheminformatics | Journal of Cheminformatics | Full Text

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Abstract:  The ability to access chemical information openly is an essential part of many scientific disciplines. The Journal of Cheminformatics is leading the way for rigorous, open cheminformatics in many ways, but there remains room for improvement in primary areas. This letter discusses how both authors and the journal alike can help increase the FAIRness (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability) of the chemical structural information in the journal. A proposed chemical structure template can serve as an interoperable Additional File format (already accessible), made more findable by linking the DOI of this data file to the article DOI metadata, supporting further reuse.

 

4 Best Practices for Open Access (OA) Journal Publishing

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“1) The Fundamental One?—?Implement Open Access (OA) Metadata for Interoperability…

2) The Essential One?—?Add Your Journals To Scholarly Indexes…

3) Midway To Success?—?Archive Your Open Access Journal…

4) The Never-Ending Cycle?—?Promote and Distribute Your Research Like Your Life Depends On It! …”

NISO Announces Publication of Updated Journal Article Tag Suite—Version 1.3 | NISO website

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“The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) today publishes the latest update to the JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2021), Version 1.3. JATS provides a common XML format in which publishers and archives can exchange journal content—both articles (text and graphics) and non-article material such as letters, editorials, and book and product reviews. The Tag Suite is the complete set of elements and attributes described in the standard. Along with these descriptions, the standard includes three implementations of the suite, called Tag Sets, which are intended to provide models for archiving, publishing, and authoring journal article content.

Version 1.3 of the standard incorporates public comments made through October 2020. The main update is the inclusion of metadata to describe the XML artifact (as opposed to the content of the article). Other changes to the standard include the addition of models for new information types, questions and answers (adopted from the Book Interchange Tag Set—BITS), new ways of describing awards and grants, and more. All changes are backward compatible with JATS 1.0. …”

Beyond VIAF: Wikidata as a Complementary Tool for Authority Control in Libraries

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Abstract:  This paper aims to investigate the reciprocal relationship between VIAF® and Wikidata and their possible roles in the semantic web environment. It deals with their data, their approach, their domain, and their stakeholders, with particular attention to identification as a fundamental goal of Universal Bibliographic Control. After examining interrelationships among VIAF, Wikidata, libraries and other GLAM institutions, a double approach is used to compare VIAF and Wikidata: first, a quantitative analysis of VIAF and Wikidata data on personal entities, presented in eight tables; and second, a qualitative comparison of several general characteristics, such as purpose, scope, organizational and theoretical approach, data harvesting and management (shown in table 9). Quantitative data and qualitative comparison show that VIAF and Wikidata are quite different in their purpose, scope, organizational and theoretical approach, data harvesting, and management. The study highlights the reciprocal role of VIAF and Wikidata and its helpfulness in the worldwide bibliographical context and in the semantic web environment and outlines new perspectives for research and cooperation.

 

Advancing open access in the Netherlands after 2020: from quantity to quality

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The purpose of this article is to explore options to further open access in the Netherlands from 2021. Its premise is that there is a need to look at the qualitative aspects of open access, alongside quantitative ones. The article first takes stock of progress that has been made. Next, we suggest broadening the agenda by involving more types of actors and other scholarly formats (like books, chapters, proceedings, preprints and textbooks). At the same time we suggest deepening the open access agenda by including several open access dimensions: immediacy, diamond open access, open metadata, open peer review and open licences. To facilitate discussion, a framework is proposed that allows specifying these actions by the a) aspects of open access they address (what is made open access, how, when and where it is made open access, and copyright and rights retention), b) the actors that play a role (government, research institutions, funders) and c) the various levels at which these actions can be taken: state as goal, set as policy, legalize and promote, recognize and reward, finance, support with infrastructure. A template is provided to ease the use of the framework.

PIDapa-party-pooper: PIDs are a dead end; long live open infrastructure – YouTube

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“PIDapa-party-pooper: PIDs are a dead end; long live open infrastructure” was presented by Ed Pentz. As a community, we have started so many initiatives centered around the need for PIDs, or how PIDs should be connected or governed, that PIDs are presented as ends in themselves. As a co-founder of PIDapalooza, these were important discussions back in 2016. But the message simply has to move on. PIDs are pointless without accompanying metadata, assertions, relationships, and associated services – at a minimum, robust APIs for getting the metadata. By talking exclusively about PIDs, and “minting” PIDs, we have inadvertently imbued the identifier strings themselves with talismanic, magical properties – an elixir that cures all. We need to re-focus our attention and talk about how open scholarly infrastructure enables open research and human knowledge….”

Why Publishers Should Care About Persistent Identifiers – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“Publishers have also been less involved in the development of other PIDs and (likely related!) appear to be using them less than organizations in other sectors of the research community. For example, just six of the 60+ ROR community advisors are publishers. 

However, the use of PIDs in open access publishing does appear to be of interest to publishers, and open access (OA) publishers are also more likely to have a clear PID strategy (F1000 and Hindawi are good examples). This may be because functionally, attaching accurate grant information to open access articles is critical for accurate billing and (where applicable) for demonstrating compliance with transformative publishing agreements. We’d like to see all publishers embrace the use of PIDs — above and beyond simply collecting ORCID IDs and registering DOIs for publications — to help improve the user experience for their authors and reviewers, and enable accurate recognition for their contributions; to increase discoverability and, therefore, use of their publications; to ensure compliance with an increasing number of policies, including Plan S; and to facilitate better analysis and reporting. …

With governments, funders, and institutions all working towards PID-optimized open infrastructure to reduce burden on researchers and increase transparency, publishers must be prepared to follow….”

Certification Service | Directory of Open Access Books

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“The OPERAS Certification Service is offered to publishers who have registered with Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), and is provided by DOAB Foundation on behalf of the OPERAS community. The Certification Service is currently operating in beta phase and will move into production in 2022.

The Certification Service aims to certify open access (OA) book publishers, based on their publishing practices, in particular their peer review procedure and their licensing policy. The service is intended to certify publishers at both publisher level and individual publication level. The goal of the service is to support trust in OA book publishing, by improving transparency around quality assurance of OA book publishers and their publications.

When partner platforms conform to certain specified requirements, they will be able to provide the service to the publishers that use their platforms. Each of the publishing platforms has to be reviewed to become a certified partner….”

Final Report of the Canadian BIBFRAME Readiness Task Force

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“In 2012, Philip Schreur, Associate University Librarian for Technical and Access Services at Stanford Libraries, stated that the “conversion of our bibliographic records from MARC to linked open data will become one of the most powerful drivers in the transformation to the Semantic Web, placing our data and resources where people are searching, and tying them intelligently to the wealth of the Web.” Now in 2020, with the goal to enable library metadata to interact with the ever-growing network of linked data on the Web, the U.S. Library of Congress (LC) is nearing full implementation of the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME) as its replacement for the MARC record format. It is anticipated that in 2021, LC will move to cataloguing solely within the BIBFRAME format, and will rely on its BIBFRAME2MARC and MARC2BIBFRAME converters to share MARC records with the rest of the library community. Although many of us will not be ready to transition to BIBFRAME for some time, we will increasingly see the effects of BIBFRAME within the MARC record ecosystem….

Behind the Canadian BIBFRAME Readiness Task Force mandate is the idea that the Canadian library community will be more successful in adapting to BIBFRAME and a linked data environment by coming together and moving forward together. As a community, what do we already know about BIBFRAME and linked data? And what are the foundations we all need to learn so that we are each prepared to make decisions about when, how, and if each of our institutions will make the transition from MARC to the BIBFRAME format? …”

 

A Tipping Point For Open Citation Data

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Abstract:  Open citation data can improve the transparency and robustness of scientific portfolio analysis, improve science policy decision-making, stimulate downstream commercial activity, and increase the discoverability of scientific articles. Once sparsely populated, public-domain citation databases crossed a threshold of one billion citations in February 2021. Shortly thereafter, the threshold of one billion public domain citations from the Crossref database alone was crossed. As the relative advantage of withholding data in closed databases has diminished with the flood of public domain data, this likely constitutes an irreversible change in the citation data ecosystem. The successes of this movement can guide future open data efforts.

 

 

From indexation policies through citation networks to normalized citation impacts: Web of Science, Scopus, and Dimensions as varying resonance chambers

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Abstract:  Dimensions was introduced as an alternative bibliometric database to the well-established Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus, however all three databases have fundamental differences in coverage and content, resultant from their owners’ indexation philosophies. In light of these differences, we explore here, using a citation network analysis and assessment of normalised citation impact of “duplicate” publications, whether the three databases offer structurally different perspectives of the bibliometric landscape or if they are essentially homogenous substitutes. Our citation network analysis of core and exclusive 2016-2018 publications revealed a large set of core publications indexed in all three databases that are highly self-referential. In comparison, each database selected a set of exclusive publications that appeared to hold similarly low levels of relevance to the core set and to one another, with slightly more internal communication between exclusive publications in Scopus and Dimensions than WoS. Our comparison of normalised citations for 41,848 publications indexed in all three databases found that German sectors were valuated as more impactful in Scopus and Dimensions compared to WoS, particularly for sectors with an applied research focus. We conclude that the databases do present structurally different perspectives, although Scopus and Dimensions with their additional circle of applied research vary more from the more base research-focused WoS than they do from one another.

 

New patch enables Publications Router to supply RIOXX metadata to latest versions of DSpace – Research

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“Jisc’s Publications Router can now populate RIOXX metadata fields in repositories using recent versions of DSpace, thanks to a new patch developed in collaboration with 4Science.

For UK institutions, the Router service works with publishers to capture articles, match them to their authors’ institutions and deliver them directly into the relevant repositories….”