Category Archives: oa.preservation

David Roskies’ Yiddish literature archive now online – The Forward

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“This week marked the official unveiling of a new, freely accessible Yiddish archive composed of previously unpublished teaching materials, scholarship, literature, notes and ephemera from the collections of Yiddish literature scholar David G. Roskies.

All Things Yiddish: The Lerer Roskes Archive is named after the affectionate Yiddish title given to Roskies by his students, Lerer Roskes, or “Teacher” Roskies. Sponsored by the Naomi Foundation, the online launch event was a chance for Roskies, alongside a panel of his peers, to introduce the archive and offer a digital tour of some of its contents. The event was moderated by the executive director of the Naomi Foundation, Lindsey Bodner….”

‘Good, Better, Best’: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs | Zenodo

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Barnes, Miranda, Cole, Gareth, Fry, Jenny, Gatti, Rupert, & Higman, Ross. (2023). ‘Good, Better, Best’: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7876048

Good, Better, Best: Practices in Archiving & Preserving Open Access Monographs brings together the project’s growing knowledge and understanding around this community of practice, as well as reports on the Work Package’s research and development over the course of the project.

Following an introduction chapter giving a brief background landscape summary alongside employed methodologies, Chapter 2, ‘A basic guidebook for the small and scholar-led press’ considers good, better, and best practices around file formats, metadata, content packaging, existing routes to digital publication archives, archiving and preservation workflows, and challenges surrounding copyright, reuse, and licensing. Additional chapters detail the repository workflow experimentations, both manual and automated, as well as successful proof-of-concept archiving in two online repositories: one, and institutional repository, and the other, the Internet Archive. Along with a chapter (Chapter 6) that explores the current understanding around implications for archiving and preserving complex and experimental monographs, two further chapters (7 and 8) look at future work: the expansion and development of the Thoth Archiving Network and the new Open Book Futures project, beginning May 2023. Appendices include signposting to toolkits, guides, and resources, as well as a brief glossary that provides links to more comprehensive archiving and preservation glossaries already in existence. We hope this will be a useful resource for the small and scholar-led press community and beyond.

This is the final output of the Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project’s Work Package 7.

 

A thriving international community of digital preservation services built around LOCKSS open-source software – Digital Preservation Coalition

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“LOCKSS stands for “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”. Many people in the international digital preservation community will recognize this as the name of the open source preservation software developed at Stanford University Library.

But did you know that LOCKSS is also shorthand for a community of varied distributed preservation services all operating on LOCKSS software? Sometimes called Private LOCKSS Networks or PLNs, these preservation services are: the Alabama Digital Preservation Network (ADPNet), Cariniana in Brazil, CLOCKSS, the MetaArchive Cooperative, the Michigan Digital Preservation Network (MDPN), the SAFE Archive Federation serving 7 universities in Europe and Canada, the US Digital Federal Depository Library Program which preserves government documents published on the US govinfo site (USDOCS), the CGI Preservation Network in Canada, Perma.cc, the Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network (PKP PN), and COPPUL’s WestVault. And just to make things a bit more confusing, it is also shorthand for the Global LOCKSS network which provides digital preservation services and a mechanism for building local collections of web-based scholarly open access publications in a wide array of academic libraries.

The general model is the same for each service in this community of preservation: multiple geographically distributed preservation nodes run the LOCKSS software, each uses a crawler to obtain a copy of the target content for preservation, then these are stored on servers participating in the LOCKSS polling and voting protocol to establish consensus on the authenticity and integrity of that content. When one of these servers detects damage to its preserved copy, it fetches repairs from the original source or from a proven peer.  

What varies greatly from one PLN to another are governance and policy matters: the users of the preservation network, the content that is in scope, who operates the service, who has access to the preserved content and under what circumstances, who provides financial backing for various kinds of costs, what services beyond preservation are provided (e.g. bibliographic metadata, usage reports, etc.)…”

Common Scholarly Communication Infrastructure Landscape Review – Ithaka S+R

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“Scholarly communication is a complicated sector, with numerous participants and multiple mechanisms for communicating and reviewing materials created in an increasing variety of formats by researchers across the globe.[1] In turn, the researcher who seeks to use the products of this system wishes to discover, access, and use relevant and trustworthy materials as effortlessly as possible. The work of driving efficiency into this complex sector while bringing its multiple strands together seamlessly for the reader (or, increasingly, for a computational user) rests on a foundation of infrastructure, much of it shared across multiple publishers. In this landscape review, we seek to provide a high-level overview of the shared infrastructure that supports scholarly communication. The purpose of this landscape review is to provide scoping for the array of shared infrastructure that we intend to examine in a larger project about the strategic context that has driven and will continue to drive the development of this infrastructure. That project will include a needs analysis on what parts of the shared scholarly communication infrastructure are working well and where they can be improved, culminating in recommendations for where additional or revised collective action and community investment is indicated….”

Why journal papers are like cemetery plots | Scientist Sees Squirrel

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“A few weeks ago I annoyed a lot of people by explaining how I think for-profit journals are like salmon. That post had a line suggesting that there are ways to make publishing cheaper – but not free (or close to it) because “publishing well costs money”. Today I’m going to pick up on that thought a little bit, and annoy a bunch more people by suggesting that journal papers are like cemetery plots.*

 

You see, there’s a subgenre of outraged objections to the cost of publishing that involves claims that publishing papers should be very close to free, because it costs almost nothing to take a manuscript, typeset it nicely, and post it on the web for all to read. And that’s true, but (I claim) irrelevant, and that’s where cemetery plots come in.

Cemetery plots are shockingly expensive. Per square metre, they’re one of the most expensive kinds of real estate one can buy. That’s because you aren’t just buying a very small piece of land (with a hole in it): you’re buying a small piece of a system that ensures the land is maintained and accessible in perpetuity. That involves property upkeep, not just this year and next but forever; it involves staff to arrange that; and staff to keep records; and much more….”

News article: For democracy, libraries and the right to knowledge* – Knowledge Rights 21

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“In 2016, the Court of Justice of the European Union issued an important ruling, Judgment C-174/15, in response to a question from the Court of First Instance of The Hague on the use of e-books by libraries. The judgment, among other things, states: “There is no decisive reason to exclude, in any event, the lending of digital copies and intangible objects from the scope of Directive 2006/115 [the Rental and Lending Directive].“

Especially in the proposals of Advocate General Maciej Szpunar, we find an excellent rationale: “Without the privileges which flow from a derogation from the exclusive lending right, libraries are therefore in danger of no longer being able to perpetuate, in the digital environment, the role which was always theirs in the era of printed books.“

As this shows, in the legal world, researchers, educators, and citizens recognize that the models for publishing and making knowledge and culture available in the new digital environment are problematic and systematically hinder people’s access to knowledge. Ultimately we are heading toward an luxury model of access to knowledge, which only those who can pay will access. For many, the only way out risks being either to give up, or less legitimate means. 

This should be a political priority. There’s a great debate about fake news, misinformation, and manipulation and how these issues can be addressed. But at the same time, the sources that can be used by public institutions (such as libraries) come with prohibitive cost and technological limitations. And herein lie crucial issues of democracy that politicians often overlook. During the pandemic, the need for scientists to immediately access data and information, studies, and research, to better address the situation and ultimately save more lives became apparent. The need for democratic participation in knowledge and culture becomes imperative.

Policymakers must move immediately towards adopting rules and practices that ensure that libraries can purchase, preserve and lend electronic and digital books while respecting authors’ rights, as they do for print publications. We need to create a democratic model of access to knowledge that serves people and societies.”

We need a plan D | Nature Methods

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“Ensuring data are archived and open thus seems a no-brainer. Several funders and journals now require authors to make their data public, and a recent White House mandate that data from federally funded research must be made available immediately on publication is a welcome stimulus. Various data repositories exist to support these requirements, and journals and preprint servers also provide storage options. Consequently, publications now often include various accession numbers, stand-alone data citations and/or supplementary files.

But as the director of the National Library of Medicine, Patti Brennan, once noted, “data are like pictures of children: the people who created them think they’re beautiful, but they’re not always useful”. So, although the above trends are to be applauded, we should think carefully about that word ‘useful’ and ask what exactly we mean by ‘the data’, how and where they should be archived, and whether some data should be kept at all….

Researchers, institutions and funders should collaborate to develop an overarching strategy for data preservation — a plan D. There will doubtless be calls for a ‘PubMed Central for data’. But what we really need is a federated system of repositories with functionality tailored to the information that they archive. This will require domain experts to agree standards for different types of data from different fields: what should be archived and when, which format, where, and for how long. We can learn from the genomics, structural biology and astronomy communities, and funding agencies should cooperate to define subdisciplines and establish surveys of them to ensure comprehensive coverage of the data landscape, from astronomy to zoology….”

Register now! COPIM “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books” conference, April 20 & 21, 2023 @ online | Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

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Save the date & register now! The Community-Led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs project (COPIM) is happy to announce its Final Conference,“Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”, to take place online on April 20, 3.30-8.15pm (BST), and April 21, 3-7pm (BST).

Full programme online at: https://scalingsmall.pubpub.org/programme-overview

 

The Scaling Small philosophy (see e.g. Adema & Moore, 2021) that COPIM has been following is explicitly and intentionally an alternative to large-scale, commercial approaches to academic publishing. This principle has guided COPIM’s main outcomes and objectives, and has supported us in building various models, systems, and platforms as part of our work to start removing the hurdles preventing new and existing open access book initiatives from adopting open access workflows. In addition to creating the community-led governance structures, archiving and preservation best practices, and experimental book pilots and resources to support this, Scaling Small comes to the fore very clearly in three of COPIM’s main outputs: the Open Book Collective (OBC), a UK charity governed by its members that brings together open access publishers, libraries, and publishing service providers to enable sustainable collective funding for open access books without charging authors; ‘Opening the Future’ (OtF), a revenue model which enables the transition of legacy publishers to OA by offering their closed access backlist to libraries via a subscription scheme, and using the revenue to fund new OA books; and Thoth, an open dissemination system that enables publishers to share their open access books much more widely, by easily creating high quality open metadata in a wide variety of formats.

As COPIM concludes, we hope to discuss and extend the organisational principle of Scaling Small in several ways, and with a variety of collaborators, while also thinking ahead about what our next steps will be in the future.

 

Press conference statement: Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive – Internet Archive Blogs

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“The Internet Archive is a library I founded 26 years ago. This library has brought hundreds of years of books to the wikipedia generation, and now 4 massive publishers are suing to stop us….

Here’s what’s at stake in this case: hundreds of libraries contributed millions of books to the Internet Archive for preservation in addition to those books we have purchased. Thousands of donors provided the funds to digitize them.   

The publishers are now demanding that those millions of digitized books, not only be made inaccessible, but be destroyed.

This is horrendous.   Let me say it again– the publishers are demanding that millions of digitized books be destroyed.

And if they succeed in destroying our books or even making many of them inaccessible, there will be a chilling effect on the hundreds of other libraries that lend digitized books as we do….”

Event: COPIM End-of-project conference “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”, April 20 & 21, 2023 @ online. Full programme now live! | Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs

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The Community-Led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs project (COPIM) is happy to announce its Final Conference,

“Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”,

which will take place online on April 20, 3.30-8.15pm (BST), and April 21, 3-7pm (BST).

 

The Scaling Small philosophy (see e.g. Adema & Moore, 2021) that COPIM has been following is explicitly and intentionally an alternative to large-scale, commercial approaches to academic publishing. This principle has guided COPIM’s main outcomes and objectives, and has supported us in building various models, systems, and platforms as part of our work to start removing the hurdles preventing new and existing open access book initiatives from adopting open access workflows. In addition to creating the community-led governance structures, archiving and preservation best practices, and experimental book pilots and resources to support this, Scaling Small comes to the fore very clearly in three of COPIM’s main outputs: the Open Book Collective (OBC), a UK charity governed by its members that brings together open access publishers, libraries, and publishing service providers to enable sustainable collective funding for open access books without charging authors; ‘Opening the Future’ (OtF), a revenue model which enables the transition of legacy publishers to OA by offering their closed access backlist to libraries via a subscription scheme, and using the revenue to fund new OA books; and Thoth, an open dissemination system that enables publishers to share their open access books much more widely, by easily creating high quality open metadata in a wide variety of formats.

As COPIM concludes, we hope to discuss and extend the organisational principle of Scaling Small in several ways, and with a variety of collaborators, while also thinking ahead about what our next steps will be in the future.

 

The chasm between the scholarly record and grey literature | Research Information

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“In January, nine organisations timed the release of new research with the specific aim of impacting the discussions of political and business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Three of the nine, sharing findings about global risks, tax, and trust, attracted significant media attention. None of the reports are available via a publisher. They matter not just because of their impact but because they are but the tip of a growing mountain of valuable research that is being posted, not published. And, because it is posted, not published, it’s a growing mountain of vital research that’s missing from the scholarly record….”

Chefs de Cuisine: Perspectives from Publishing’s Top Table – Charles Watkinson – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“In developing services, our philosophy is “first of a kind, not one of a kind.” A good example is the Fulcrum publishing platform, developed with support from the Mellon Foundation and now self-sustaining. Fulcrum shares an open-source backend with the Deep Blue data repository. That means every type of output is a first-class publication: A Fulcrum-hosted monograph with integrated multimedia gets the same stewardship commitment that Deep Blue applies to health sciences research data. And the creator of a research dataset gets the same rich metrics (e.g., citations, altmetrics, downloads) that we would deliver to a monograph author….

I think we’re at the “so now what” stage of open access (OA). With a critical mass of freely-available, reusable literature and data, what tangible benefits can publishers offer society? And how should publishers format and distribute the outputs of open scholarship to turn free access into valuable access? With this question in mind, we’re doing several things at Michigan: expanding discovery networks (e.g., creating best practices for research data through the Data Curation Network, delivering OA books to public libraries via the Palace project, highlighting quality certification via the DOAB PRISM service), making sure our platforms and content are accessible (staying current with Benetech Certified Global Accessible audits, making monographs available as audiobooks through the Google Text-to-Speech program) and scoping open source integrations with partners that complement Fulcrum’s functionality (working with Mellon and the Big Collection initiative to integrate Fulcrum, Manifold, and Humanities Commons, and integrating Fulcrum repository functionality into the Janeway journals platform). 

We’re also focused on how to measure and communicate the greater reach and engagement OA enables. We’re working with Curtin University to refine a publicly-accessible Books Analytics Dashboard and partnering with Jisc and Lyrasis to expand US participation in IRUS repository statistics. The IP Registry is developing a product with us to identify the institutional use of OA books, and we’re supporting the OAeBU project to build a trusted framework for publishers to exchange OA usage metrics. We recorded at least 12 million Total Item Requests in 2022 for Michigan Publishing publications. But that’s a meaningless number unless put in context.

 

Authors should never be required to pay to publish open works. Let’s try and avoid perpetuating or creating a new inequity of access. The Fund to Mission program, supported by our parent institution and more than 100 libraries, enables this for U-M Press. We also partner with a consortium of over 50 liberal arts colleges to run Lever Press as a truly diamond open-access book publisher. The capacity to do such work is building. I particularly credit Lyrasis Open Programs, the BTAA Big Collection academy-led publishing program, the American Council of Learned Societies Publishing Initiatives, the S2O community of practice, and the Open Access Books Network….

I worry that larger publishers with better resources to handle complexities like transformative agreements are sucking away the resources to support open-access books and journals. Small, independent publishers (barely for-profit, if commercial) face similar challenges to university presses. We must ensure that funder and library policies don’t accidentally erase the bibliodiversity that independent and institutional presses have brought to their regions and disciplines for decades. I am particularly excited by the potential that Path to Open (JSTOR) and the 

Supporting Shared Infrastructure for Scholarly Communication – Ithaka S+R, March 1, 2023

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“Developing, maintaining, and sustaining fit-for-purpose community infrastructure is a challenge in the higher education and research sectors, particularly when the technology and policy environments are in flux. Ithaka S+R has conducted a variety of projects and studies touching on these issues over several years. Today, I’m pleased to share that we are launching a new study focusing on shared infrastructure in support of scholarly communication, with support from STM Solutions. The Project For some time, shared infrastructure has been a key enabler for delivering the services that authors and readers need from scholarly communication. Services like reference linking, repositories, identifiers, single sign-on, and digital preservation have supported the digital transformation of scholarly publishing, enabling new and improved services and achieving real efficiencies for all stakeholder communities. Looking ahead, it is necessary to sustain and in some cases improve existing shared infrastructure, even as next generation shared infrastructure must be developed to support the research community…. As part of this project, we will be conducting interviews this spring with individuals from major stakeholder groups, including infrastructure providers, researchers, open science community members, publishers, and librarians, among others. This spring, we will publish a landscape overview of shared infrastructure for scholarly communication. Over the summer, we will issue a draft report of our findings to allow for broad input. We expect to publish the final report in the fall….

And, with respect to shared infrastructure, we have just launched a project with the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and other partners to design and prototype a shared community infrastructure that will support collections and collecting, with our work focused on governance and sustainability issues for this collaboration….”

How open access diamond journals comply with industry standards exemplified by Plan S technical requirements

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Abstract:  Purpose: This study investigated how well current open access (OA) diamond journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and a survey conform to Plan S requirements, including licenses, peer review, author copyright, unique article identifiers, digital archiving, and machine-readable licenses.

Method: Data obtained from DOAJ journals and surveyed journals from mid-June to mid-July 2020 were analyzed for a variety of Plan S requirements. The results were presented using descriptive statistics.

Results: Out of 1,465 journals that answered, 1,137 (77.0%) reported compliance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) principles. The peer review types used by OA diamond journals were double-blind (6,339), blind (2,070), peer review (not otherwise specified, 1,879), open peer review (42), and editorial review (118) out of 10,449 DOAJ journals. An author copyright retention policy was adopted by 5,090 out of 10,448 OA diamond journals (48.7%) in DOAJ. Of the unique article identifiers, 5,702 (54.6%) were digital object identifiers, 58 (0.6%) were handles, and 14 (0.1%) were uniform resource names, while 4,675 (44.7%) used none. Out of 1,619 surveyed journals, the archiving solutions were national libraries (n=170, 10.5%), Portico (n=67, 4.1%), PubMed Central (n=15, 0.9%), PKP PN (n=91, 5.6%), LOCKSS (n=136, 8.4%), CLOCKSS (n=87, 5.4%), the National Computing Center for Higher Education (n=6, 0.3%), others (n=69, 4.3%), no policy (n=855, 52.8%), and no reply (n=123, 7.6%). Article-level metadata deposition was done by 8,145 out of 10,449 OA diamond journals (78.0%) in DOAJ.

Conclusion: OA diamond journals’ compliance with industry standards exemplified by the Plan S technical requirements was insufficient, except for the peer review type.

How open access diamond journals comply with industry standards exemplified by Plan S technical requirements

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Purpose:
This study investigated how well current open access (OA) diamond journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and a survey conform to Plan S requirements, including licenses, peer review, author copyright, unique article identifiers, digital archiving, and machine-readable licenses.
Method:
Data obtained from DOAJ journals and surveyed journals from mid-June to mid-July 2020 were analyzed for a variety of Plan S requirements. The results were presented using descriptive statistics.
Results:
Out of 1,465 journals that answered, 1,137 (77.0%) reported compliance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) principles. The peer review types used by OA diamond journals were double-blind (6,339), blind (2,070), peer review (not otherwise specified, 1,879), open peer review (42), and editorial review (118) out of 10,449 DOAJ journals. An author copyright retention policy was adopted by 5,090 out of 10,448 OA diamond journals (48.7%) in DOAJ. Of the unique article identifiers, 5,702 (54.6%) were digital object identifiers, 58 (0.6%) were handles, and 14 (0.1%) were uniform resource names, while 4,675 (44.7%) used none. Out of 1,619 surveyed journals, the archiving solutions were national libraries (n=170, 10.5%), Portico (n=67, 4.1%), PubMed Central (n=15, 0.9%), PKP PN (n=91, 5.6%), LOCKSS (n=136, 8.4%), CLOCKSS (n=87, 5.4%), the National Computing Center for Higher Education (n=6, 0.3%), others (n=69, 4.3%), no policy (n=855, 52.8%), and no reply (n=123, 7.6%). Article-level metadata deposition was done by 8,145 out of 10,449 OA diamond journals (78.0%) in DOAJ.
Conclusion:
OA diamond journals’ compliance with industry standards exemplified by the Plan S technical requirements was insufficient, except for the peer review type.