“Africa PID Alliance is a project by Helix Analytics Africa and Training Centre in Communication (TCC-AFRICA), which, encompasses a community of PID enthusiasts in and from Africa aiming to lead and realize a FAIR sharing of access to data using Persistent Identifiers in innovation, research, and technology within the cultural, scientific and cross-industry ecosystems. We provide the following solutions to achieve robust PIDs Digital Object Identifiers (DOI); Personal Data Protection (Control & Compliance); Data Auditing & Reporting…”
Category Archives: oa.standards
Africa PID Alliance Digital Object Identifiers Registration Concept Note | May 11, 2023
Abstract: “Persistent Identifiers are the pillars of an interoperable, persistent and reliable Open Research Infrastructure. This is the reason why a lot of countries/regions and organizations took the initiative to contribute to this network and help promote the use of PIDs through their academic and publishing ecosystems. The objective of this document is to structure the feasibility, implementation and manageability of the project. A survey on the African continental level will shed light on or provide insights on the need of a DOI Registration Agency tailored to the continental context. One of the innovations that this agency will bring is a specific prefix for Africa that will provide; Ownership to African researcher over their content…”
Nabil Ksibi, Joy Owango, & Sara. (2023). Africa PID Alliance Digital Object Identifiers Registration Concept Note (Version 1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7924069
Principles of Diamond Open Access Publishing: a draft proposal | Plan S
“The Action Plan for Diamond Open Access outlines a set of priorities to develop sustainable, community-driven, academic-led and -owned scholarly communication. Its goal is to create a global federation of Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) journals and platforms around shared principles, guidelines, and quality standards while respecting their cultural, multilingual and disciplinary diversity. It proposes a definition of Diamond OA as a scholarly publication model in which journals and platforms do not charge fees to either authors or readers. Diamond OA is community-driven, academic-led and -owned, and serves a wide variety of generally small-scale, multilingual, and multicultural scholarly communities.
Still, Diamond OA is often seen as a mere business model for scholarly publishing: no fees for authors or readers. However, Diamond OA can be better characterized by a shared set of values and principles that go well beyond the business aspect. These distinguish Diamond OA communities from other approaches to scholarly publishing. It is therefore worthwhile to spell out these values and principles, so they may serve as elements of identification for Diamond OA communities.
The principles formulated below are intended as a first draft. They are not cast in stone, and meant to inspire discussion and evolve as a living document that will crystallize over the coming months. Many of these principles are not exclusive to Diamond OA communities. Some are borrowed or adapted from the more general 2019 Good Practice Principles for scholarly communication services defined by Sparc and COAR1, or go back to the 2016 Vienna Principles. Others have been carefully worked out in more detail by the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication in a self-assessment format for scholarly communities. Additional references can be added in the discussion.
The formulation of these principles has benefited from many conversations over the years with various members of the Diamond community now working together in the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, cOAlition S, the CRAFT-OA and DIAMAS projects, the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA), Linguistics in Open Access (LingOA), the Open Library of Humanities, OPERAS, SciELO, Science Europe, and Redalyc-Amelica. This document attempts to embed these valuable contributions into principles defining the ethos of Diamond OA publishing….”
Data Rivers: Carving Out the Public Domain in the Age of Generative AI by Sylvie Delacroix :: SSRN
Abstract: The salient question, today, is not whether ‘copyright law [will] allow robots to learn’. The pressing question is whether the fragile data ecosystem that makes generative AI possible can be re-balanced through intervention that is timely enough. The threats to this ecosystem come from multiple fronts. They are comparable in kind to the threats currently affecting ‘water rivers’ across the globe.
First, just as the fundamental human right to water is only possible if ‘reasonable use’ and reciprocity constraints are imposed on the economic exploitation of rivers, so is the fundamental right to access culture, learn and build upon it. It is that right -and the moral aspirations underlying it- that has led millions to share their creative works under ‘open’ licenses. Generative AI tools would not have been possible without access to that rich, high-quality content. Yet few of those tools respect the reciprocity expectations without which the Creative Commons and Open-Source movements cease to be sustainable. The absence of internationally coordinated standards to systematically identify AI-generated content also threatens our ‘data rivers’ with irreversible pollution.
Second, the process that has allowed large corporations to seize control of data and its definition as an asset subject to property rights has effectively enabled the construction of hard structures -canals or dams- that has led to the rights of many of those lying up-or downstream of such structures to be ignored. While data protection laws seek to address those power imbalances by granting ‘personal’ data rights, the exercise of those rights remains demanding, just as it is challenging for artists to defend their IP rights in the face of AI-generated works that threaten them with redundancy.
To tackle the above threats, the long overdue reform of copyright can only be part of the required intervention. Equally important is the construction of bottom-up empowerment infrastructure that gives long term agency to those wishing to share their data and/or creative works. This infrastructure would also play a central role in reviving much-needed democratic engagement. Data not only carries traces of our past. It is also a powerful tool to envisage different futures. There is no doubt that tools such as GPT4 will change us. We would be fools to believe we may leverage those tools at the service of a variety of futures by merely imposing sets of ‘post-hoc’ regulatory constraints.
A Semi-Automated Workflow for FAIR Maturity Indicators in the Life Sciences
Abstract: Data sharing and reuse are crucial to enhance scientific progress and maximize return of investments in science. Although attitudes are increasingly favorable, data reuse remains difficult due to lack of infrastructures, standards, and policies. The FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principles aim to provide recommendations to increase data reuse. Because of the broad interpretation of the FAIR principles, maturity indicators are necessary to determine the FAIRness of a dataset. In this work, we propose a reproducible computational workflow to assess data FAIRness in the life sciences. Our implementation follows principles and guidelines recommended by the maturity indicator authoring group and integrates concepts from the literature. In addition, we propose a FAIR balloon plot to summarize and compare dataset FAIRness. We evaluated the feasibility of our method on three real use cases where researchers looked for six datasets to answer their scientific questions. We retrieved information from repositories (ArrayExpress, Gene Expression Omnibus, eNanoMapper, caNanoLab, NanoCommons and ChEMBL), a registry of repositories, and a searchable resource (Google Dataset Search) via application program interfaces (API) wherever possible. With our analysis, we found that the six datasets met the majority of the criteria defined by the maturity indicators, and we showed areas where improvements can easily be reached. We suggest that use of standard schema for metadata and the presence of specific attributes in registries of repositories could increase FAIRness of datasets.
Principles of Diamond Open Access Publishing: a draft proposal – the diamond papers
Introduction
The Action Plan for Diamond Open Access outlines a set of priorities to develop sustainable, community-driven, academic-led and -owned scholarly communication. Its goal is to create a global federation of Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) journals and platforms around shared principles, guidelines, and quality standards while respecting their cultural, multilingual and disciplinary diversity. It proposes a definition of Diamond OA as a scholarly publication model in which journals and platforms do not charge fees to either authors or readers. Diamond OA is community-driven, academic-led and -owned, and serves a wide variety of generally small-scale, multilingual, and multicultural scholarly communities.
Still, Diamond OA is often seen as a mere business model for scholarly publishing: no fees for authors or readers. However, Diamond OA can be better characterized by a shared set of values and principles that go well beyond the business aspect. These distinguish Diamond OA communities from other approaches to scholarly publishing. It is therefore worthwhile to spell out these values and principles, so they may serve as elements of identification for Diamond OA communities.
The principles formulated below are intended as a first draft. They are not cast in stone, and meant to inspire discussion and evolve as a living document that will crystallize over the coming months. Many of these principles are not exclusive to Diamond OA communities. Some are borrowed or adapted from the more general 2019 Good Practice Principles for scholarly communication services defined by Sparc and COAR1, or go back to the 2016 Vienna Principles. Others have been carefully worked out in more detail by the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication in a self-assessment format for scholarly communities. Additional references can be added in the discussion.
The formulation of these principles has benefited from many conversations over the years with various members of the Diamond community now working together in the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, cOAlition S, the CRAFT-OA and DIAMAS projects, the Fair Open Access Alliance (FOAA), Linguistics in Open Access (LingOA), the Open Library of Humanities, OPERAS, SciELO, Science Europe, and Redalyc-Amelica. This document attempts to embed these valuable contributions into principles defining the ethos of Diamond OA publishing.
We need a plan D | Nature Methods
“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….”
Data sharing is the future | Nature Methods
“In late 2022, the US government mandated open-access publication of scholarly research and free and immediate sharing of data underlying those publications for federally funded research beginning no later than 2025. For some fields the necessary standards and infrastructure are largely in place to support these policies. For others, however, many questions remain as to how these mandates can best be met.
In this issue, we feature a Correspondence from Richard Sever that was inspired by the government mandate and the increasing demand for open science. In it, he raises important topics, including deciding which data must be shared, standardizing file formats and developing community guidelines. He also calls for a “federated system of repositories with functionality tailored to the information that they archive,” to meet the needs of many distinct fields….”
Open science and data sharing in cognitive neuroscience with MouseBytes and MouseBytes+ | Scientific Data
Abstract: Open access to rodent cognitive data has lagged behind the rapid generation of large open-access datasets in other areas of neuroscience, such as neuroimaging and genomics. One contributing factor has been the absence of uniform standardization in experiments and data output, an issue that has particularly plagued studies in animal models. Touchscreen-automated cognitive testing of animal models allows standardized outputs that are compatible with open-access sharing. Touchscreen datasets can be combined with different neuro-technologies such as fiber photometry, miniscopes, optogenetics, and MRI to evaluate the relationship between neural activity and behavior. Here we describe a platform that allows deposition of these data into an open-access repository. This platform, called MouseBytes, is a web-based repository that enables researchers to store, share, visualize, and analyze cognitive data. Here we present the architecture, structure, and the essential infrastructure behind MouseBytes. In addition, we describe MouseBytes+, a database that allows data from complementary neuro-technologies such as imaging and photometry to be easily integrated with behavioral data in MouseBytes to support multi-modal behavioral analysis.
Guest Post – Open Access for Monographs is Here. But Are we Ready for It? – The Scholarly Kitchen
“At the University of North Carolina Press, we recently completed a four-year initiative to support the publication of open access (OA) monographs by university presses in the discipline of history. Through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot (SHMP)—generously funded by the Mellon Foundation — we published fifty-nine titles with nineteen different presses. SHMP was unique among OA initiatives in that it did more than simply provide offset funding. It required an intervention in publication workflows where university presses and their authors had to submit to a standardized process with templated outputs that aligned with the requirements of digital platforms. The pilot recorded successes and challenges indicative of ongoing and future needs, some of them general to all OA publishing and some specific to OA monograph publishing.
There were several areas of encouraging news. The titles we published are being accessed and used exponentially more than digital editions that are behind paywalls. And standardization significantly reduced the costs required to create a high-quality university press monograph. But there were also discouraging results. Authors and presses remain deeply cautious about OA as a legitimate, sustainable mode of publishing. They are even more skeptical about the trade-offs associated with standardization. And we learned that there are serious gaps in the infrastructure needed to disseminate open scholarship efficiently and measure its impact….”
Land Ownership and the State of Open Data
“Key Points
The links between the open data and land communities have matured over the last four years alongside a recognition of the centrality of land governance for sustainable development.
Benchmarking and measuring open land data is a key area of progress since 2018, but more needs to be done to refine the global benchmarks such as the Global Data Barometer.
Open data initiatives need to carefully consider their social, political, and economic objectives due to the different needs and interests of land data producers and users….
The perspective of land data is changing from being primarily about the cadastre17,18 (the official register showing details of ownership, boundaries, and value of property) to increasingly being rooted in land management functions19 and services within the context of sustainable development. This approach, in which open data is not the goal but rather a service-enabling tool,20 is also reflected in the research on Open Data Products (ODPs).21 Since 2018, the Open Data Charter has moved its strategic focus from an “Open by Default” to a “Publishing with a Purpose”22 paradigm. The paradigm shift was also reflected in the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly high-level event on “Data With a Purpose”23held on 22 September 2022. This is a much-needed approach as research suggests that open geospatial data portals are significantly underutilised globally24 and that public and private organisations that invest in open data do so in order to seem transparent, rather than to create or add value to it.25 Adding value to open data and focussing on data services is a means to spur innovation and increase the uptake of data, while lowering barriers for a wider audience to access and benefit from the data revolution….”
How open access diamond journals comply with industry standards exemplified by Plan S technical requirements
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
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.
PLOS Adopts CCC Ringgold Identify Database as its PID Solution – The Official PLOS Blog
“CCC, a leader in advancing copyright, accelerating knowledge, and powering innovation, today announced The Public Library of Science (PLOS) has adopted the industry-leading Ringgold Identify Database as its Persistent Identifier (PID) solution to streamline organizational data, helping power its Open Access (OA) publishing process with reliability and inclusivity.
A critical aspect leading to the decision was the precision with which PLOS could match accepted papers to institutional funding under its Community Action Publishing (CAP) program….
With over 600,000 Ringgold PIDs and metadata records, Ringgold Identify Database provides a curated view of organization data to help stakeholders improve data quality, drive strategic decision-making, and support data interoperability across the scholarly communications ecosystem. Used by intermediaries, funders, and a growing list of leading publishers, Ringgold Identify Database is the only solution to offer structured organizational hierarchies and consortia connections to help stakeholders quickly understand complex relationships. The database also includes rich metadata and additional identifiers, including the ISNI ID, an ISO Standard open ID to support wider interoperability….”
PLOS Adopts CCC Ringgold Identify Database as its PID Solution – The Official PLOS Blog
“CCC, a leader in advancing copyright, accelerating knowledge, and powering innovation, today announced The Public Library of Science (PLOS) has adopted the industry-leading Ringgold Identify Database as its Persistent Identifier (PID) solution to streamline organizational data, helping power its Open Access (OA) publishing process with reliability and inclusivity.
A critical aspect leading to the decision was the precision with which PLOS could match accepted papers to institutional funding under its Community Action Publishing (CAP) program….
With over 600,000 Ringgold PIDs and metadata records, Ringgold Identify Database provides a curated view of organization data to help stakeholders improve data quality, drive strategic decision-making, and support data interoperability across the scholarly communications ecosystem. Used by intermediaries, funders, and a growing list of leading publishers, Ringgold Identify Database is the only solution to offer structured organizational hierarchies and consortia connections to help stakeholders quickly understand complex relationships. The database also includes rich metadata and additional identifiers, including the ISNI ID, an ISO Standard open ID to support wider interoperability….”