Category Archives: oa.metadata

A study of the roles of metadata standard and data repository in science, technology, engineering and mathematics researchers’ data reuse | Emerald Insight

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Abstract:  Purpose

This research investigates how the availabilities of both metadata standards and data repositories influence researchers’ data reuse intentions either directly or indirectly as mediated by the norms of data reuse and their attitudes toward data reuse.

Design/methodology/approach

The theory of planned behavior (TPB) was employed to develop the research model of researchers’ data reuse intentions, focusing on the roles of metadata standards, data repositories and norms of data reuse. The proposed research model was evaluated using the structural equation modeling (SEM) method based on the survey responses received from 811 STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) researchers in the United States.

Findings

This research found that the availabilities of both metadata standards and data repositories significantly affect STEM researchers’ norm of data reuse, which influences their data reuse intentions as mediated by their attitudes toward data reuse. This research also found that both the availability of data repositories and the norm of data reuse have a direct influence on data reuse intentions and that norm of data reuse significantly increases the effect of attitude toward data reuse on data reuse intention as a moderator.

Research limitations/implications

The modified model of TPB provides a new perspective in apprehending the roles of resource facilitating conditions such as the availabilities of metadata standards and data repositories in an individual’s attitude, norm and their behavioral intention to conduct a certain behavior.

Practical implications

This study suggests that scientific communities need to develop more supportive metadata standards and data repositories by considering their roles in enhancing the community norm of data reuse, which eventually lead to data reuse behaviors.

Originality/value

This study sheds light on the mechanism of metadata standard and data repository in researchers’ data reuse behaviors through their community norm of data reuse; this can help scientific communities and academic institutions to better support researchers in their data sharing and reuse behaviors.

Introducing Figshare+

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“Figshare has been helping researchers make their data publicly available for more than 10 years, over which time we have watched data sharing grow across disciplines as funders and publishers require data sharing and researchers seek to get credit for all the products of their research. While we will continue to offer figshare.com as a freely available generalist repository for the research community, we have found that there is an increasing need for sharing larger datasets as well as to have additional flexibility to describe and organize data. We also recognize the importance of open data that is not just openly accessible but that also adheres to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). To address this, we want to offer a way for researchers to get more support during the data sharing process in making their data well documented so it can be discovered, reused, and ultimately have more impact.

That’s why we are introducing Figshare+ to offer support for sharing larger datasets in a trusted generalist repository.

We frequently get requests from researchers seeking to use figshare.com with a need for more storage space for their data or larger file size uploads. There are few options for researchers to share TBs of data in a FAIR way. There are also long term ongoing costs in ensuring the data persists.

Figshare+ offers data deposit as a one-time Data Publishing Charge (DPC) to share the datasets and materials supporting a specific publication or project. To be as transparent as possible, nearly all of the DPC cost goes towards covering our costs to host this data securely and redundantly in the cloud. Many funders allow data sharing costs to be included in grant budgets, so you may be able to use grants funds to pay for Figshare+ and can include it in data management and sharing plans in funding proposals.

Because we want researchers to get the most out of their open data, Figshare+ also offers additional license options and metadata compared to figshare.com. Personal email support is also provided during data deposit which includes the review of your dataset files and description by a Figshare data expert who can offer guidance on making your data as discoverable and reusable as possible….”

Refcat: The Internet Archive Scholar Citation Graph

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Abstract:  As part of its scholarly data efforts, the Internet Archive (IA) releases a first version of a citation graph dataset, named refcat, derived from scholarly publications and additional data sources. It is composed of data gathered by the fatcat cataloging project (the catalog that underpins IA Scholar), related web-scale crawls targeting primary and secondary scholarly outputs, as well as metadata from the Open Library project and Wikipedia. This first version of the graph consists of over 1.3B citations. We release this dataset under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication, accessible through Internet Archive. The source code used for the derivation process, including exact and fuzzy citation matching, is released under an MIT license. The goal of this report is to describe briefly the current contents and the derivation of the dataset.

 

In pursuit of rich article-level metadata: 5 elements journal publishers should prioritize

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“As noted at the start of this post, don’t be discouraged if you can’t add all of the above elements to your article-level metadata. Remember, any metadata enrichment step you take, no matter how big or small, will make a difference in your article discoverability. We recommend taking an iterative approach to metadata enrichment and, above all, focusing on quality over quantity. So be sure to first establish a means of producing clean JATS XML metadata and HTML meta tags for all of your articles and then begin layering on new metadata elements from there.

You don’t have to go the metadata enrichment journey alone either. Service providers can help you produce machine-readable metadata for all of your articles and enrich it. For example, Scholastica automatically generates machine-readable HTML and JATS XML metadata for all articles typeset by our digital-first production service, including automated citation metadata enrichment via machine learning. We also automatically produce machine-readable metadata for all articles published using our Open Access journal hosting platform. And when journals use Scholastica’s peer review management system, they can automatically apply metadata collected during peer review to articles submitted to our production service and/or published via Scholastica’s OA journal hosting platform to save even more time. You can learn more about how Scholastica is helping journals produce richer machine-readable metadata here.

Also, be sure to use the metadata checking resources available to you. For example, if you’re registering DOIs for articles via Crossref, you can use the Crossref Participation Reports tool to quickly see which elements your metadata includes and which are missing….”

The case for the Humanities Citation Index (HuCI): a citation index by the humanities, for the humanities

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Abstract:  Citation indexes are by now part of the research infrastructure in use by most scientists: a necessary tool in order to cope with the increasing amounts of scientific literature being published. Commercial citation indexes are designed for the sciences and have uneven coverage and unsatisfactory characteristics for humanities scholars, while no comprehensive citation index is published by a public organization. We argue that an open citation index for the humanities is desirable, for four reasons: it would greatly improve and accelerate the retrieval of sources, it would offer a way to interlink collections across repositories (such as archives and libraries), it would foster the adoption of metadata standards and best practices by all stakeholders (including publishers) and it would contribute research data to fields such as bibliometrics and science studies. We also suggest that the citation index should be informed by a set of requirements relevant to the humanities. We discuss four: source coverage must be comprehensive, including books and citations to primary sources; there needs to be chronological depth, as scholarship in the humanities remains relevant over time; the index should be collection-driven, leveraging the accumulated thematic collections of specialized research libraries; and it should be rich in context in order to allow for the qualification of each citation, for example by providing citation excerpts. We detail the fit-for-purpose research infrastructure which can make the humanities citation index a reality. Ultimately, we argue that a citation index for the humanities can be created by humanists, via a collaborative, distributed and open effort.

 

ScienceOpen: Publisher Services for the Digital Age

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“If you are in the midst of launching a new open access journal, consider partnering with us to solve your publishing needs. ScienceOpen provides full end-to-end open access publishing solutions – embedded within our smart interactive discovery environment. A modular approach allows open access publishers to pick and choose among a range of services and design the platform that fits their goals and budget. Book your own sub-domain powered by ScienceOpen to manage and host existing open access publications or start new journals. ScienceOpen can provide technical infrastructure for manuscript submission, peer review management, open access hosting, article versioning, distribution, analytics, and APC management for journals and (coming soon) books. The ScienceOpen platform has its own powerful citation index and is uniquely integrated with ORCID, Crossref, and Altmetric to immediately plug your publications into the infrastructure of global scholarly communication. Go here to learn more and for examples of customers utilizing this service….

When your Crossref DOI directs readers to an article landing page on ScienceOpen rich with metrics, context and interactive tools, you open up exciting new avenues of exploration and engagement. ScienceOpen can host your open access journals, conference proceedings, books, or preprints with our PDF viewer technology. Your content will also have the benefits of our interactive discovery environment with state-of-the-art SEO, long-term archiving with CLOCKSS and integration with ORCID, Crossref and more. We’ve recently greatly expanded our open access hosting options for books and can, for example, create unique landing pages for book chapter DOIs to enrich the metadata of book records. Go here to learn even more about ScienceOpen’s infrastructure for books.

By hosting on ScienceOpen, your open access research will be placed in the context of a huge and diverse database which helps you reach new authors and audiences. Additionally, we can help with the metadata side of hosting and let you focus more on important editorial tasks by automating and streamlining your metadata processes for you. See the Metadata Technical Hub directly below for more information on that topic….”

Toward transparency of hybrid open access through publisher?provided metadata: An article?level study of Elsevier – Jahn – – Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library

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Abstract:  With the growth of open access (OA), the financial flows in scholarly journal publishing have become increasingly complex, but comprehensive data on and transparency of these flows are still lacking. The opacity is especially concerning for hybrid OA, where subscription-based journals publish individual articles as OA if an optional fee is paid. This study addresses the lack of transparency by leveraging Elsevier article metadata and provides the first publisher-level study of hybrid OA uptake and invoicing. Our results show that Elsevier’s hybrid OA uptake has grown steadily but slowly from 2015 to 2019, doubling the number of hybrid OA articles published per year and increasing the share of OA articles in Elsevier’s hybrid journals from 2.6 to 3.7% of all articles. Further, we find that most hybrid OA articles were invoiced directly to authors, followed by articles invoiced through agreements with research funders, institutions, or consortia, with only a few funding bodies driving hybrid OA uptake. As such, our findings point to the role of publishing agreements and OA policies in hybrid OA publishing. Our results further demonstrate the value of publisher-provided metadata to improve the transparency in scholarly publishing.

[From the body of the text:] “The recent introduction of transformative agreements, an evolving concept describing contracts that shift library spending from subscriptions to OA (Borrego et al., 2020; Hinchliffe, 2019), might perpetuate the lack of transparency because pricing is often based on traditional subscription costs. Hence, the demand for publisher-provided data has increased. More transparency about hybrid OA uptake and funding could facilitate the assessment and adjustment of publisher contracts (Schimmer et al., 2015), enhance OA mandate compliance monitoring, and avoid double-dipping (Larivière & Sugimoto, 2018). However, previous studies have noted an absence of transparency in hybrid OA publishing and a considerable lack of publicly available and standardized data (Laakso & Björk, 2016; Lawson, 2015; Pinfield et al., 2016).”

Closing the Gap between FAIR Data Repositories and Hierarchical Data Formats

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Abstract:  Many in the scientific community, particularly in publicly funded research, are pushing to adhere to more accessible data standards to maximize the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR) of scientific data, especially with the growing prevalence of machine learning augmented research. Online FAIR data repositories, such as the Open Science Framework (OSF), help facilitate the adoption of these standards by providing frameworks for storage, access, search, APIs, and other features that create organized hubs of scientific data. However, the wider acceptance of such repositories is hindered by the lack of support of hierarchical data formats, such as Technical Data Management Streaming (TDMS) and Hierarchical Data Format 5 (HDF5), that many researchers rely on to organize their datasets. Various tools and strategies should be used to allow hierarchical data formats, FAIR data repositories, and scientific organizations to work more seamlessly together. A pilot project at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) addresses the disconnect between them by integrating the OSF FAIR data repository with hierarchical data renderers, extending support for additional file types in their framework. The multifaceted interactive renderer displays a tree of metadata alongside a table and plot of the data channels in the file. This allows users to quickly and efficiently load large and complex data files directly in the OSF webapp. Users who are browsing files can quickly and intuitively see the files in the way they or their colleagues structured the hierarchical form and immediately grasp their contents. This solution helps bridge the gap between hierarchical data storage techniques and FAIR data repositories, making both of them more viable options for scientific institutions like LANL which have been put off by the lack of integration between them.

 

Do Institutional Repository Deposit Guidelines Deter Data Discovery? | Evidence Based Library and Information Practice

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Abstract:  Objective – This study uses quantitative methods to determine if the metadata requirements of institutional repositories (IRs) promote data discovery. This question is addressed through an exploration of an international sample of university IRs, including an analysis of the required metadata elements for data deposit, with a particular focus on how these metadata support discovery of research data objects.

 

Methods – The researchers worked with an international universe of 243 IRs. A codebook of 10 variables was developed to enable analysis of the eventual randomly derived sample of 40 institutions.

 

Results – The analysis of our sample IRs revealed that most had metadata standards that offered weak support for data discovery—an unsurprising revelation in view of the fact that university IRs are meant to accommodate deposit and storage of all types of scholarly outputs, only a small percentage of which are research data objects. Most IRs seem to have adopted metadata standards based on the Dublin Core schema, while none of the IRs in our sample used the Data Documentation Initiative metadata that is better suited for deposit and discovery of research datasets.

 

Conclusion – The study demonstrates that while data deposit can be accommodated by the existing metadata requirements of multi-purpose IRs, their metadata practices do little to prioritize data deposit or to promote data discovery. Evidence indicates that data discovery will benefit from additional metadata elements.

Linked open data portals: functionalities and user experience in semantic catalogues | Emerald Insight

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Abstract:  Purpose

This study seeks to understand the current state of the development of linked open data (LOD) bibliographic portals to discuss their functionalities, contributions, value-adds and user experience.

Design/methodology/approach

A set of evaluative aspects grouped into three analysis dimensions was established: collections, tools—technologies and standards used—and web user interface. As the object of the study, four projects of diverse nature and volume were selected to help provide a better understanding of the trends in the solutions provided for the end user when accessing linked data collections.

Findings

Publishing LOD through visual interfaces maximises information enrichment, contextualisation and discovery, in addition to improving user experience, because of both increased navigation capabilities and interrelationships between data. These more flexible environments have metamorphosised the visualisation of bibliographic information. However, aspects that needed improvement were observed, primarily relating to (1) a more intuitive interaction, (2) possibilities of greater personalisation, (3) enhanced communication with the user to favour user engagement and (4) experimental spaces of data reuse.

Research limitations/implications

Further quantitative and qualitative studies should be conducted to improve these portals, assess their adaptation to the behaviour of the user and their influence on the use of library collections.

Originality/value

This article investigates the potential of semantic technologies in bibliographic data portals, proposes a methodological model for their evaluation and advances conclusions about the usability and user experience that these platforms provide, compared to classic catalogues.

Library of Congress Releases Data for Free Download and Discovery | Library of Congress

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“The Library of Congress announced today its third release of records in its online catalog for free bulk download for research and discovery. The release supports the Library’s effort to continuously expand open access to its vast collections.

This MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging Records) release surpasses previous releases and adds more than 200,000 new records to the existing 25 million record database.

Releases of MARC data uniquely exhibit the Library’s mission. They enable researchers to engage with the unparalleled and rich source metadata at the Library, inspire discovery of Library collections and provide resources to inform future discovery within the Library and data communities….”

Open research data repositories: Practices, norms, and metadata for sharing images – Hansson – – Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library

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Abstract:  Open research data repositories are promoted as one of the cornerstones in the open research paradigm, promoting collaboration, interoperability, and large-scale sharing and reuse. There is, however, a lack of research investigating what these sharing platforms actually share and a more critical interface analysis of the norms and practices embedded in this datafication of academic practice is needed. This article takes image data sharing in the humanities as a case study for investigating the possibilities and constraints in 5 open research data repositories. By analyzing the visual and textual content of the interface along with the technical means for metadata, the study shows how the platforms are differentiated in terms of signifiers of research paradigms, but that beneath the rhetoric of the interface, they are designed in a similar way, which does not correspond well with the image researchers’ need for detailed metadata. Combined with the problem of copyright limitations, these data-sharing tools are simply not sophisticated enough when it comes to sharing and reusing images. The result also corresponds with previous research showing that these tools are used not so much for sharing research data, but more for promoting researcher personas.

 

ScienceOpen Partners with Longleaf Services to feature University Presses’ Sustainable History Monograph Pilot Collection – ScienceOpen Blog

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“ScienceOpen has partnered with Longleaf Services to provide metadata and promotional services for its Mellon-funded initiative, the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot (SHMP).

The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot is an open access pilot aiming to push academic book publishing to the open model. Longleaf Services works with university presses to publish open digital editions of high-quality books in the field of history. ScienceOpen has indexed the publications from this initiative in the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot featured collection to help spread awareness of the SHMP. To read more about the open access SHMP initiative, go here….”

The Invisible Citation Commons · Business of Knowing, summer 2021

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“Despite being so crucial, citations — the pieces of metadata that serve as references to works — are often ignored in discussions of types of open knowledge. Historically, citations and their cross-references have been laboriously collected (by hand, then by computational techniques) in bibliographic indexes. These indexes, once published in serial print volumes, are today generally offered as web-based, paywalled subscription products by scholarly entities or for-profit companies. Indexing and abstracting services are big business: Web of Science, an academic journal and proceedings index that has existed since the 1960s, can cost subscribing libraries hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Web of Science is currently owned by Clarivate, which in 2020 had revenues of 1.2 billion USDundefined from its portfolio of analytics and intellectual property management tools that monetize the research process….”

JCORE upgrades to JATS 1.3  – Highwire Press

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“HighWire’s journals hosting solution JCORE can now transform XML to industry standard Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) XML version 1.3, the latest version. This means that publishers using the platform can now seamlessly comply with the specifications of this interoperable standard. 

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) is the first JCORE publisher to offer the JATS 1.3 download for all of their OA content which includes over 57,000 articles. This option may be attractive to BMJ and other publishers as the ability to download full text in a machine readable format is one of the strong recommendations made by Coalition S within the Plan S Principles and Implementation guidance for publishers. …”