Category Archives: oa.discoverability

Increasing access to open access books: SPARC Europe joins Open Book Futures (OBF) project | STM Publishing News

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We are pleased to announce our participation in the recently launched Open Book Futures (OBF) project, funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development (RED) Fund.

Open Access (OA) publishing has transformed how scholars and the wider public access academic content. However, despite the many benefits of OA, the number of OA books published each year is still relatively low compared to OA journal articles. In response to this challenge, the OBF project was launched with the intention of significantly increasing and improving the quantity, discoverability, and accessibility of academic content, ensuring it is freely and easily available to not only scholars but also the general public. The intention is to build on the pioneering work conducted within the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project. 

SPARC Europe’s role in OBF

SPARC Europe will contribute to the OBF project in various ways: 

We bring our experience establishing and running The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) and our connections to Invest in Open Infrastructure to advise the project. The Open Book Collective Development Fund’s grant allocation work will address a gap in the funding landscape by offering financial support to smaller and newer OA book initiatives, and we look forward to supporting this effort.
We will contribute directly to the outreach work being conducted by Work Package 2, on behalf of the Open Book Collective, and Work Package 3, on behalf of the Opening the Future revenue model. 
Specifically, we will raise awareness of this important initiative and explore new opportunities for OA books to build a more sustainable infrastructure for OA books.

We are excited about the challenges that lie ahead for OBF. Our contribution will help initiate a step change in the ambition, scope, and impact of community-led OA book publishing. Together, we will improve the quantity, discoverability, and accessibility of long-form publications ensuring they are freely and easily available to scholars and the wider public. 

You can read more about the project here and stay informed by regularly checking our news page.

 

‘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.

 

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….”

Add Thoth Open Access collection as a Community Zone | Have an idea for Ex Libris?

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Please vote to support this request to add the collection of Diamond OA publications in Thoth (http://www.thoth.pub/) as a Community Zone collection.

Thoth contains a steadily growing collection of OA publications from scholar-led publishers such as punctum books, Open Book Publishers, meson press, mediastudies.press, and African Minds, and we have been working with UC Santa Barbara Library to make it more accessible to libraries worldwide.

Creating a dedicated Community Zone would substantially increase access to these OA publishers.

ScienceOpen and Thoth join forces on book metadata | ScienceOpen Blog

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by Nina Tscheke

To increase the discoverability and visibility for open books with richer and more interoperable metadata, ScienceOpen is happy to announce a new collaboration with Thoth, an open metadata management and dissemination platform. With this collaboration, open access book publishers and the entire book publishing ecosystem will benefit from a more interconnected digital publishing environment.

When we first started working with books and aggregating publicly available Crossref records via book DOIs to the ScienceOpen citation index, we quickly learned that the potential of Crossref records as actual metadata source was hardly recognized making for rather basic publicly availably records. Rich metadata was available mostly in ONIX , but while being the default format for distribution channels for book sellers and libraries, there tend to be data gaps in the ONIX information required for best practice usage in digital environments—speaking here esp. about persistent identifiers which are essential to keep records unified, connected and discoverable throughout the publication’s lifecycle.

Thanks to this new collaboration with Thoth, publishers will now be able to create a record on BookMetaHub, send it to Thoth for further enhancement, and then gain access to additional output formats for future export. We are also working on sending data created on Thoth to the BookMetaHub, so stay tuned!

 

ASAPbio’s response to the NIH Plan to Enhance Public Access – ASAPbio

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“ASAPbio is a 501(c)(3) organization working to promote innovation and transparency in life sciences communication. 

We are fully supportive of the 2022 OSTP directive to make all federally-funded research immediately accessible upon publication. Based on the public access plan the NIH has proposed in response to this memo, we appreciate the NIH’s desire to ensure equitable access to research for diverse stakeholders, and to ensure that this is provided at reasonable costs that do not exacerbate existing disparities. Furthermore, we support the need to ensure that research outputs are findable and discoverable through robust infrastructure and standards.

Many of these goals can be supported by moving toward a model where preprints are the primary form of sharing; this would also provide a strong foundation for aligning researchers’ incentives with the goals set out in the RFI. Many researchers now experience a disconnect between wanting to share work with the community and existing incentives for keeping data private. In a preprint-centric model, researchers would be recognized for sharing their work early and completely, which would also accelerate scientific discovery. Preprints also support rigor, reproducibility, and integrity by allowing broad engagement in public commenting and peer review. Given these benefits, we offer the following suggestions for using preprints to promote equitable, cost-effective, and discoverable publishing….”

Canadian research data repositories in re3data: A collaborative effort to increase visibility and foster community engagement | re3data COREF – project blog

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“Collaboration has always been a central principle for re3data. This is reflected in the fact that research communities, repository providers, and other relevant stakeholders contribute significantly to the completeness and accuracy of the re3data metadata as well as its further technical and conceptual development. As the world’s largest directory of research data repository, re3data currently describes over 3000 infrastructures on the basis of a comprehensive metadata schema. The service was launched in 2012 and therefore has recorded information on the repository landscape for over 10 years.

Within the international research data community, the Discovery and Metadata Expert Group (DMEG), part of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, has led by example to improve the visibility and discoverability of research data repositories. DMEG assists data creators, curators, and other professionals in the planning, creation, management, and dissemination of descriptive metadata to enable effective discovery and reuse of research data across a broad range of disciplines….”

Is writing a book chapter still a waste of time? | Impact of Social Sciences

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“How has digital open access transformed academic communication for the better? LSE Press’s Editor in Chief, Patrick Dunleavy, explores the impact of chapters in edited books. Once the Cinderella of academic publishing, doomed to obscurity under paywall books’ formal and de facto access restrictions, chapters in books are, thanks to digital open access, once again rivalling journal articles in their visibility to academic communities, their usefulness as teaching resources, and in their ability to tackle innovative and state of-the-art topics.”

Open access publication of public health research in African journals – Insights

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Abstract:  There are many claims to the benefits of open access publishing in general and for Africa in particular. This study aimed to describe the characteristics of scholarly journals expected to publish articles on public health from a number of African countries. Using African Journals Online and African Index Medicus, 174 journals from 13 African countries were identified. The six countries above the group’s median gross domestic product (GDP) published 145 journals, while the seven countries at or below the median GDP published 29 journals. Two thirds of the journals were freely available to download, but only a third had a Creative Commons licence, and most were not indexed. Around half of the journals levied full article processing charges (APCs) – journals from countries at median GDP or below were less likely to charge APCs than those from countries above the median GDP. One of the key findings is that only a few journals were indexed, limiting the ability of potential readers to find the results of research performed in local settings. The results suggest a need to assist journals and researchers to make the work they publish more accessible to the audience who might want to use the results.

 

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….”

Shutting down our preprint bots | Feb 21, 2023 | Liberate Science

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“We started running Twitter bots in 2017, when Liberate Science was only a side project. First we launched the PsyArxiv bot. Later, we launched bots for the MetaArxiv (2020) and EdArxiv (2021) preprint servers. Six years in, we are shutting down these Twitter bots. You may have already noticed they are no longer posting any new preprints since February 13th (previously 9th). There are several things that motivate us to stop the preprint bots’ operations. It includes the exodus from Twitter overall; it includes the recent announcement that Twitter API access is no longer free. It includes that the community has taken it upon itself to offer replacement bots on Mastodon.?? We offered preprint bots for free all these years, but that does not mean it was free to run this. We had to run a custom RSS feed service (based on Jeff Spies’ osfpreprints-feed; run on Glitch for $99/year). Automating a bot is free and easy if there is relatively little volume. Especially for PsyArxiv, the amount of preprints grew so rapidly that we had to upgrade our automation and costs went up to ~$600 per year (using Zapier). This is also why the 1,500 free post limit proves too uncertain in the long run….”

Tips for Improving the Visibility of Research Publications | ACS Measurement Science Au

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“A word of advice: if your article is open access (as it will be in ACS Measurement Science Au), then it might be tempting to post the full article on all these different platforms. But when it comes to collating statistics for your CV (usage, citations, etc.), it is easier if you have fewer places to check where people can access the full article. The publisher site will count usage from their site?so providing links that send people there will likely make your job easier in the long run. Similarly, Altmetric, the service that measures and monitors the reach and impact of scholarship and research through online interactions, counts only mentions of the published article, not versions posted elsewhere. Another useful byproduct of sharing links to the published article (rather than sharing PDFs) is that these are counted positively in search engine algorithms: the more traffic your links create, the more likely it is that your paper will appear in search results….”

New Focus on Open Textbooks in LIBER Educational Resources Working Group – LIBER Europe

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“Over the next two years, the LIBER Educational Resources Working Group will focus on promoting and advancing in the area of open textbooks. This is a call for new members.

Enhancing discoverability of open textbooks and collection curation,
Peer review and evaluation of open textbooks outside of publishing houses,
Measuring and assessing impact of open textbooks….”

ARIADNE PLUS – Ariadne infrastructure

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“The ARIADNEplus project is the extension of the previous ARIADNE Integrating Activity, which successfully integrated archaeological data infrastructures in Europe, indexing in its registry about 2.000.000 datasets (ARIADNE portal). ARIADNEplus will build on the ARIADNE results, extending and supporting the research community that the previous project created and further developing the relationships with key stakeholders such as the most important European archaeological associations, researchers, heritage professionals, national heritage agencies and so on. The new enlarged partnership of ARIADNEplus covers all of Europe. It now includes leaders in different archaeological domains like palaeoanthropology, bioarchaeology and environmental archaeology as well as other sectors of archaeological sciences, including all periods of human presence from the appearance of hominids to present times. Transnational Activities together with the planned training will further reinforce the presence of ARIADNEplus as a key actor.

The ARIADNEplus data infrastructure will be embedded in a cloud that will offer the availability of Virtual Research Environments where data-based archaeological research may be carried out. The project will furthermore develop a Linked Data approach to data discovery, making available to users innovative services, such as visualization, annotation, text mining and geo-temporal data management. Innovative pilots will be developed to test and demonstrate the innovation potential of the ARIADNEplus approach.

ARIADNEplus is funded by the European Commission under the H2020 Programme, contract no. H2020-INFRAIA-2018-1-823914….”

Model(s) of the future? Overlay journals as an overlooked and emerging trend in scholarly communication | The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science

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Abstract: Overlay journals, a potentially overlooked model of scholarly communication, have seen a resurgence due to the increasing number of preprint repositories and preprints on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) related topics. Overlay journals at various stages of maturity were examined for unique characteristics, including whether the authors submitted their article to the journal, whether the peer reviews of the article were published by the overlay journal, and whether the overlay journals took advantage of opportunities for increased discovery. As librarians and researchers seek new, futuristic models for publishing, overlay journals are emerging as an important contribution to scholarly communication.