Category Archives: oa.standards

Beyond compliance: Curation as essential open science infrastructure – Data Curation Network

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“However, when that open data is misorganized, appears sloppy, or is poorly documented, this doesn’t inspire the confidence that we want; this isn’t really open science. It’s not just about openly sharing data, it’s about sharing data that is well-organized, well-documented, interpretable, and re-usable. We saw both sides of this so clearly during the pandemic: sharing data, especially genetic data about the virus, accelerated our response to the pandemic — but we also saw high-profile cases that centered on the challenges of data that can’t or won’t be shared. 

Federal and private funders are increasingly requiring data sharing. Merely “open” data isn’t enough to combat misinformation or the rising mistrust of research, however. So how do we move from a compliance mindset, which promotes a minimalist approach in which researchers might only put in the minimum amount of effort and thus potentially share poorly documented or disorganized data, to an ecosystem that actually enables and rewards open, equitable, and accessible scholarship? It’s important to note that a key part of this conversation requires nuance. It is not enough to share or not share data — we have to think of what data can be shared, in what forms, and with what documentation. We have to consider all of the potential outputs of a research project, including how best to organize distinct yet interrelated components and how to document these decisions clearly….”

OASIS Mobilizes Open Source Community to Combat the Spread of Disinformation and Online Harms from Foreign State Actors – OASIS Open

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“OASIS Open, the international open source and standards consortium, launched the DAD-CDM project, an open source initiative to develop data exchange standards for normalizing and sharing disinformation and influence campaigns. DAD-CDM will serve as a valuable resource, particularly in the identification and alerting of AI-empowered attacks….”

From MeSH Keywords to Biomedical Knowledge in Wikidata: The giant move – Diff

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“Since October 2012, Wikidata has evolved a lot to become one of the most important open knowledge graphs, providing semantic knowledge about various topics in multiple languages. This effort includes the development of quality information for Biomedicine that can be reused for clinical decision support among other very important tasks.

In 2019, we conducted a research study to assess the coverage of health-related information in Wikidata and we found that it lacks support of various important types of information and that a significant set of biomedical relations has a limited precision and is not linked to references. Despite the use of crowdsourcing and human editing, the situation does not evolve as it should be. We needed a hack to change all the game.

MeSH Keywords as a valuable resource

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) keywords play a pivotal role in the realm of biomedical knowledge representation, making them a valuable resource in various aspects of healthcare research and practice. It is composed of a heading providing the main topic of a research paper and a qualifier identifying the facet of the topic that is discussed by the paper….”

Research Organization Registry (ROR) | Help Us Test v2 of the ROR API!

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“After nearly a year of planning and community input, we are thrilled to release a beta version of ROR’s first major schema and API update, which is open to the public for testing through October 16, 2023. Please visit our v2 beta test documentation for detailed information on what’s new and how to participate in the beta test….”

Making IIIF Official at the Internet Archive | Internet Archive Blogs

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“After eight years hosting an experimental IIIF service for public benefit, the Internet Archive is moving forward with important steps to make its International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) service official. Each year, the Internet Archive receives feedback from friends and partners asking about our long-term plans for supporting IIIF. In response, the Internet Archive is announcing an official IIIF service which aims to increase the resourcing and reliability of the Internet Archive’s IIIF service, upgrade the service to utilize the latest version 3.0 of the IIIF specification, and graduate the service from the iiif.archivelab.org domain to iiif.archive.org. The upgrade also expands the Internet Archive’s IIIF support beyond images to also include audio, movies, and collections — enabling deep zoom on high-resolution images, comparative item analysis, portability across media players, annotation support, and more….”

Open Funder Registry to transition into Research Organization Registry (ROR) – Crossref

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“Today, we are announcing a long-term plan to deprecate the Open Funder Registry. For some time, we have understood that there is significant overlap between the Funder Registry and the Research Organization Registry (ROR), and funders and publishers have been asking us whether they should use Funder IDs or ROR IDs to identify funders. It has therefore become clear that merging the two registries will make workflows more efficient and less confusing for all concerned. Crossref and ROR are therefore working together to ensure that Crossref members and funders can use ROR to simplify persistent identifier integrations, to register better metadata, and to help connect research outputs to research funders.

Just yesterday, we published a summary of a recent workshop between funders and publishers on funding metadata workflows that we convened with the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and Sesame Open Science. As the report notes, “open funding metadata is arguably the next big thing” [in Open Science]. That being the case, we think this is the ideal time to strengthen our support of open funding metadata by beginning this transition to ROR….”

Who’s afraid of open infrastructures? | Research Information

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“Joanna Ball, Yvonne Campfens and Tasha Mellins-Cohen underline the importance of non-profit infrastructure and standards bodies…

both COUNTER and DOAJ are essential components of the knowledge ecosystem – but new challenges arise and new organisations are needed to help meet them. In 2018 the idea for the OA Switchboard (https://www.oaswitchboard.org/) was conceived to allow publishers, libraries and research funders to easily share information about OA publications throughout the publication journey, synchronising data from a multitude of systems and processes that would otherwise have to be manually connected within each separate organisation.

What do these organisations have in common? We are all owned and led by our community, and we’re not for sale or for profit. We are foundational open infrastructure and standards bodies, operating behind the scenes with low budgets and limited staffing – none of us have salespeople, marketing teams, exhibition budgets or in-house technology support. We collaborate with one another and with bigger bodies like Crossref, ORCID and NISO to create the foundations on which much scholarly infrastructure relies.

 

And foundations is absolutely the right word: scholarly communications is an exciting and innovative space with new commercial and non-commercial services springing up almost daily. We deliver value through open infrastructure, data and standards, and naturally services and tools have been built by commercial and not-for-profit groups that capitalise on our open, interoperable data and services – many of which you are likely to recognise and may use on a regular basis….”

Research Organization Registry (ROR) | Case Study: Why ResearchEquals Integrated ROR and Live Streamed It

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“Chris Hartgerink, the founder of Liberate Science, discusses why and how they integrated ROR into the modular publishing platform ResearchEquals for author affiliations in user profiles and Crossref DOIs and explains why they live streamed all eight hours of the work….”

Open Standards, Open Infrastructures, and Author Inclusion: Transitioning to Open eBook Usage Data · punctum books

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by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

Providing open and trustworthy usage data on open access (OA) publications remains a challenge as the scholarly publication market continues its general shift toward forms of publishing that keep publicly funded knowledge in the public domain, even though the economic models behind them often remain questionable.

At punctum books, we believe that every aspect of the scholarly book production chain should be open — built on open infrastructures, following open standards, made available in open formats, and, most importantly, co-governed by a community of authors, institutions, funders, and publishers. The existence of any proprietary link in this chain constitutes a potential point of profit extraction and is as such vulnerable to corporate capture. This has become very clear from the way in which giant commercial publishing-turned-data-analytics companies embrace OA only to move their shareholder profit extraction from the public purse further upstream to research environments and datasets. Downstream usage data provide another such potential point of capture and monetization.

There are currently two large-scale projects involved in developing platforms for providing harmonized usage data for open access books.

In 2021, the stakeholders in the OA Book Usage Data Trust, funded by the Mellon Foundation, developed their initial governance principles and are now working toward the launch of a technical pilot for an “international data space for open access book usage data between 2022 and 2025.” While the results of this technical pilot are not yet public, the organization mentions in its prospectus that “there is not currently a trusted book usage data exchange infrastructure neutrally operated by a consortium of book-publishing stakeholders to facilitate the aggregation and benchmarking of both open and controlled usage data for specified uses by trusted partners” (my emphasis). Considering the commercial partners in this project and the contradiction between the professed openness of the data trust and the gatekeeping signal words “specified” and “trusted,” it appears unlikely that the data trust itself will eventually be truly, fully open, even if built on open infrastructures.

Another pilot is the Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) Project, also running from 2022 to 2025, coordinated by the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) and again funded by the Mellon Foundation. BAD has already launched an initial proof of concept dashboard showing data from the University of Michigan Press (which is also involved in the OA Book Usage Data Trust project). Importantly, these data are indeed open to anyone and directly downloadable from the dashboard under an open license. COKI’s initial findings from focus groups run in the first quarter of 2023 are also publicly available. This in itself is a hopeful sign that the project is moving in a fully open direction.

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NISO Approves Working Group to Develop Recommended Practice for Operationalizing Open Access Business Processes | NISO website

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“Voting members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved the formation of a Working Group to develop a Recommended Practice for operationalizing open access (OA) business processes. NISO is seeking members from across the information community to join the Working Group, which will address the lack of infrastructure supporting OA content by helping stakeholders in scholarly communications to track, assess, and report on OA publications, authors, and funding more easily. 

The volume of OA content has proliferated in recent years, but the systems and workflows currently used by publishers and librarians were designed for traditional, pay-to-read models. Business processes are currently inadequate to address the requirements of—for example—transformative agreements, which require complex financial management and the tracking of authors and publishing outputs across large institutions. Libraries face challenges in managing micropayments and assessing the financial impact of such agreements, and authors often have difficulty determining whether their manuscript is eligible for OA publication under agreement terms. These complexities also impact publisher editorial and financial systems. As a result, organizations often adopt manual processes for managing these agreements, giving rise to inefficiencies across the ecosystem.

NISO’s Working Group will address the problem by identifying gaps in the infrastructure for OA publications and agreements, developing terminology to describe the surrounding processes, and outlining best practices for exchanging data and analytics and metrics. The work will focus first on the metadata required for exchange prior to publication as well as for article-level financial transactions, and then address reporting following publication. As the new Recommended Practice will be of interest to publishers, libraries, authors, funders, and OA advocates and community initiatives, the group is seeking volunteers representing a range of stakeholder groups from across the scholarly communications industry….”

CRAFT-OA Deliverable 3.1 Report on Standards for Best Publishing Practices and Basic Technical Requirements in the Light of FAIR Principles | Zenodo

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Armengou, Clara, Edig, Xenia van, Laakso, Mikael, & Umerle, Tomasz. (2023). CRAFT-OA Deliverable 3.1 Report on Standards for Best Publishing Practices and Basic Technical Requirements in the Light of FAIR Principles (Draft). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8112662

“Diamond OA Journals have an enormous potential to establish and sustain an open scholarly communication. This is uncovered by the “Open Access Diamond Journals Study” (OADJS).” From 17 000 to 29 000 Open Access Diamond Journals (OADJ) published worldwide are responsible for publishing 8-9% of the world’s scientific articles. This makes up 45% of Open Access (OA) publishing in general.
To develop this potential serious challenges need to be overcome, mastered and robust support needs to be provided to the Diamond OA Journals community. In 2022 the broadly supported “Action Plan for Diamond Open Access” (APDOA) was published as the follow up to the OADJS to outline the most pressing issues demanding swift action from the community. APDOA argues that the Diamond Open Access “is held back by challenges related to the technical capacity, management, visibility, and sustainability of journals and platforms”.
Associated projects Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication (DIAMAS) and CRAFT-OA embody this action to support institutional Diamond OA publishing. While DIAMAS focusses on developing non-technical standards and best practices, CRAFT-OA specifically targets the OADJ technology development. CRAFT-OA’s Work Package 3  (WP3) is responsible for Task 3.1 providing a technical standards’ and best publishing practices overview, Task 3.2 preparing a gap  analysis to understand the challenges that OADJ’s face when aiming to comply with the standards and best practices and with/in Task 3.3 offering targeted training to narrow this gap.
This deliverable is related to the Task 3.1 and offers an overview of the technical standards and best publishing practices which is intended to be reused by the community and also to guide the gap analysis and training to be offered through WP3.
We argue that the OADJs find the current dispersion and multiplicity of requirements and standards particularly difficult both to monitor and adhere to due to the OADJs’ insufficient resources and lack of collaborative workflows. This deliverable aims to alleviate this burden through identifying key requirements and policy documents (see 2. Definition and scope), organising the standards they mention (see 4. Technical standards for each of the FAIR principles and 5. Other recommended technical standards) and showcasing best publishing practices exemplifying the implementation of standards or adherence to the requirements (see 6. Examples illustrating several or all of the basic technical standards and best publishing practices).

The scope of this deliverable is impacted by the source documents we decided to concentrate on. We focus on two policy documents: a key, widely supported OA publishing policy paper Plan S and the Extensible Quality Standard in Institutional Publishing (EQSIP) compiled in DIAMAS, and two documents originating from key service providers in the OA publishing (IPSPs): the DOAJ Seal from the Directory of Open Access Journals and the OpenAIRE Guidelines for Literature Repository Managers v4. As this report aims to contribute to the interoperability of Diamond Open Access publishing, especially in the context of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the EOSC interoperability framework was reviewed, but no concrete standards above those mentioned in the other documents were extracted. Chapter 4. Technical standards for each of the FAIR principles represents the overview of technical standards. These documents identify in the view of how they contribute to the OADJ’s findability, accessibility, interoperability or reusability (as defined by the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) principles). The standards expected or recommended by these documents serve as a good representation of what is now considered quality OA publishing by the community.
However, there are also other standards worth mentioning (see and 5. Other recommended technical standards) which are better suited to be discussed outside of the FAIR principles framework. We especially recognise that the larger context for OADJs is the EOSC which is developing its interoperability framework . It is important to be mindful of the interoperability challenges as they are stated in the EOSC ecosystem as onboarding of OADJ in EOSC is recognised by CRAFT-OA as the key factor for their visibility and sustainability. Additionally, as we use the FAIR principles as an important framework structuring this report we need to recognise that the FAIR principles development and implementation have their own dynamic that in some respects may not correspond to the standards development specific for the Diamond publishing. This is because while some OA publishing standards

Top EU Court Advisor Says Technical Standards, Like Laws, Should Not Be Locked Down By Copyright

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One of the most pernicious ideas that copyright maximalism has spread is that preventing people from freely accessing creative material is not just a good thing to do, but should be the natural state of affairs. This has made questioning whether copyright is really the best way to support artists and promote creativity hard. Against that background, there’s an interesting opinion from one of the top EU court’s special advisers, known as advocates general, suggesting a situation in which copyright definitely should not be applied. The Court of Justice of the European Union’s press release explains the background:

Public.Resource.Org Inc. and Right to Know CLG are two non-profit organisations whose focus is to make the law freely accessible to all citizens. The organisations had challenged before the [EU] General Court a Commission Decision refusing to grant them access to four harmonised technical standards (HTS) adopted by the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN) with respect to the safety of toys in particular. As their challenge was unsuccessful, they appealed the General Court judgment before the Court of Justice.

In today’s Opinion, Advocate General Laila Medina looks into the question whether the rule of law as well as the principle of transparency and the right of access to documents of EU institutions require that HTS are freely available without charge.

The conclusion reached by Advocate General Laila Medina is straightforward:

for the purposes of EU law in general and for the access to EU law in particular, and, given HTS indispensable role in the implementation of EU secondary legislation and their legal effects, they should, in principle, not benefit from copyright protection.

Moreover:

even if HTS could be protected by copyright, free access to the law has priority over copyright protection.

The basic idea is simple: people can’t be expected to follow a law (or technical standard) if they don’t have ready access to it. Copyright is a barrier to access, and therefore should not be allowed for harmonized technical standards (HTS), just as it is not permitted for EU laws. And even if for some reason HTS were subject to copyright, free access must be granted anyway, blunting its negative impact.

It’s worth emphasizing that the Advocate General’s opinion is only advisory, and may be ignored by the main court when the latter issues its final judgment on the case. Nonetheless, it’s great to see one of the EU’s top legal authorities dare to go against today’s orthodoxy that copyright is so wonderful it should be applied to everything, no exceptions.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally published to WalledCulture.

Guest Post – Towards Global Equity for Open Access Books  – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“Today’s guest post is by Niels Stern, managing director, OAPEN Foundation and co-director, DOAB, and Ronald Snijder, CTO, OAPEN Foundation. OAPEN was founded as a not-for-profit foundation in 2010 to promote and support the transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication. In 2013 DOAB was launched to help publishers increase the discoverability of their open access books and to enable libraries to freely integrate a large collection of peer-reviewed books into their catalogues.

NISO Approves Working Group to Develop Standard Metadata for Remediation of Content for Accessibility | NISO website

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“Voting members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved the formation of a Working Group to refine and extend the metadata model developed in the Federating Repositories of Accessible Material for Education (FRAME) project, which will enable it to meet broader accessibility needs. NISO is currently seeking members from across the information community to join the resulting Accessibility Remediation Metadata (ARM) Working Group….”