Category Archives: oa.awareness

Keeping up with Open Access – News – Illinois State

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“As the fall semester begins and we welcome our students and faculty back to classes, we hope you’re excited about scholarly communications and Open Access too. Exciting projects to make scholarship and creative output more accessible for users seem to be announced every day, and it can become difficult to keep track of everything going on in the Open Access world. To help our readers, we’re offering three resources which can be used to track developments and projects that may be of interest.

The first resource is the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP). The OATP is crowd-sourced project that seeks “(1) to create real-time alerts for OA-related news and comment, and (2) to organize knowledge of the field, by tag or subtopic, for easy searching and sharing.” The project maintains a variety of feeds, from the general, comprehensive feed for all Open Access topics and news to feeds related to individual or specific topics or projects. The feed can be followed through an RSS reader, or it has a Twitter account.

The OATP is a part of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP), which can be a valuable resource itself. Although it is no longer grant funded, the project is still active and does free consultations and maintains a webpage of useful resources. These resources cover a variety of topics, including best practices for universities drafting OA policies, books about OA and making work OA, and reference pages on federal legislation.

Finally it may come as no surprise that social media can be a place to learn about OA projects and developments, although the sheer number of results can be daunting and the source should always be considered when reading an announcement. The Open Access Directory maintains a list of social media sites about OA. The list includes links to groups and feeds on major social media platforms and in a variety of languages….”

Open Research Knowledge Graph

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“The Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) aims to describe research papers in a structured manner. With the ORKG, papers are easier to find and compare….

Research is a fundamental pillar of societal progress. Yet, scientific communities face great difficulties in sharing their findings. With approximately 2.5 million newly published scientific articles per year, it is impossible to keep track of all relevant knowledge. Even in small fields, researchers often find themselves drowning in a publication flood, contributing to major scientific crises such as the reproducibility crisis, the deficiency of peer-review and ultimately the loss of knowledge.

The underlying problem is that we never updated our methods of scholarly communication to exploit the possibilities of digitalization. This is where the Open Research Knowledge Graph comes into play!

The ORKG makes scientific knowledge human- and machine-actionable and thus enables completely new ways of machine assistance. This will help researchers find relevant contributions to their field and create state-of-the-art comparisons and reviews. With the ORKG, scientists can explore knowledge in entirely new ways and share results even across different disciplines….”

Researching the researcher – responding to Open Access and publishing needs

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In July 2021 Cambridge University Press worked with an external research agency to explore a number of key areas around researcher awareness and needs in open access (OA), impact and pain points.

In total over 4,000 Academics from around the world responded, of mixed career stages and spanning over 20 subjects in the Humanities, Social Sciences and STM.

 

iPhylo: Revisiting RSS to monitor the latest taxonomic research

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“Over a decade ago RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) was attracting a lot of interest as a way to integrate data across various websites. Many science publishers would provide a list of their latest articles in XML in one of three flavours of RSS (RDF, RSS, Atom). This led to tools such as uBioRSS [1] and my own e-Biosphere Challenge: visualising biodiversity digitisation in real time. It was a time of enthusiasm for aggregating lots of data, such as the ill-fated PLoS Biodiversity Hub [2].

Since I seem to be condemned to revisit old ideas rather than come up with anything new, I’ve been looking at providing a tool like the now defunct uBioRSS. The idea is to harvest RSS feeds from journals (with an emphasis on taxonomic and systematic journals), aggregate the results, and make them browsable by taxon and geography. Here’s a sneak peak: …”

Following Preprints

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“An important part of our mission at bioRxiv is to alert readers when new preprints that might interest them are posted. You can already sign up for personalized alerts on the bioRxiv Alerts/RSS page (see figure below) to get automatic notifications when papers that satisfy your search criteria are posted. We also provide dedicated RSS feeds and twitter accounts for certain subject categories (Cell Biology, Neuroscience, Genetics, etc.). 

But preprints can be revised, people comment on them, and ultimately most end up being published in journals. Since these are all events readers might also want to know about, we have now added an exciting new feature that allows you to Follow a preprint so that you get notified when someone comments on it, the authors post a new version, or the paper is published as a version of record in a journal.

 

To follow a paper, simply click on ‘Follow this preprint’ above the title, enter your email address, and choose which events you’d like to be notified about. We’ll then send you an email when the events occur – summary emails are sent once a day so you are not bombarded! …”

Tackling information overload: identifying relevant preprints and reviewers – ASAPbio

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“Christine Ferguson and Martin Fenner outlined their proposal to develop ways for researchers to find preprints relevant to their research immediately after the preprints appear. They propose an automated system that would identify preprints posted in the previous few days that had received attention via Twitter (i.e. based on the preprint receiving a minimal number of tweets).

During the discussion, the session attendees mentioned a number of currently-available tools that collect reactions and attention on preprints and/or allow researchers to discover the latest preprints:

CrossRef collects Event Data for individual preprints, including social media mentions, Hypothes.is annotations and more.
The Rxivist.org tool allows searching for bioRxiv and medRxiv preprints based on Twitter activity.
The search.bioPreprint tool developed by the University of PIttsburgh Medical Library allows searching preprints from different servers based on keywords or topics.
bioRxiv provides search options based on discipline and also has a dashboard that collects reactions and reviews on individual preprints, including Twitter comments.
EMBO has developed the Early Evidence Base platform which allows searching for refereed preprints.
Google Scholar indexes preprints and provides some filtering tools.

The attendees raised some questions about the use of Twitter as a filter and the risks for a metric based on tweets. How can we account for the risk of social media users gaming the system by artificially boosting attention on Twitter? How can we normalize for the fact that methods papers tend to receive more attention? Is there a risk that this system will be focused on papers from high-income countries that already receive a disproportionate share of attention?…”

Ivissem | Information Visualization & Social Scholarly Metric

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“The mere identification of the most relevant Scientific Knowledge Objects (SKOs) in a particular topic is increasingly difficult due to the existing interfaces, returning massive lists of results. It is recognized that researchers are not merely producers of knowledge. Instead they are social actors who play a preponderant role in the discovery and filtering of scientific knowledge. The data that results from this social interaction provides an important basis for the design of various usage metrics, also known as aka altmetrics.

Access to the right and relevant information is paramount for scientific discoveries. IViSSEM aims to develop and test a new altmetric, called Social Scholarly Experience Metric. This metric will result from the application of Machine Learning techniques to different combinations of altmetrics and profiles of researchers. Its application will reflect the individual preferences in the process of finding a specific topic. The current massive lists of results will be replaced by an innovative interface based on advanced visualization techniques.

 

Objectives…

To design and develop a Linked Open Data based solution architecture that ensures data interoperability, data accessibility, data integration and data analytics with full aligned with international best practices.
To dynamicaly relate SKOs and researchers with knowledge organizations systems.
To clean, transform, store and give access to collected data in a triplestore….”

 

 

Elsevier metadata feed via Publications Router is now live | Jisc scholarly communications

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“Jisc’s Publications Router is now distributing Elsevier metadata to participating institutions, notifying them of their researchers’ articles published by the world’s largest publisher of scholarly journals.

Elsevier’s agreement to work with Publications Router was announced previously. The resulting feed from its Science Direct platform via the Router is now live….

Router sends the metadata notifications at two stages in the article lifecycle. The first will normally be within four weeks of acceptance, alerting institutions in time to capture the accepted manuscript from the authors within the REF deadline of three months from acceptance.

The final publication details and, where applicable, embargo end date are not known at that stage; the metadata includes a note that an embargo nonetheless applies, together with a comment that its end date will be updated later….”

Knowledge is Global: Expanding the Awareness and Impact of Research from the Global South

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“As we move toward a more openly accessible research environment, progress is often framed in terms of increasing access to original studies and associated data published in peer reviewed scholarly journals indexed in databases like Web of Science and Scopus. However, there is a growing awareness that a large body of high quality research from the Global South (aka developing countries in Latin America, Africa, & much of Asia) is not part of that scholarly communications environment. Much of this research is already open access, but because major western databases don’t index most of those journals, it does not register in terms of traditional bibliometrics that use citation counts to measure the impact of authors, their articles and the journals they publish in. For example, just 4% of Latin American peer reviewed journals are included in Web of Science. What can libraries do to help increase the visibility and impact of this large and growing body of research from the Global South? This panel gathers researchers, librarians and policy experts to explore new and innovative ways to change the ways we both access and assess research outputs, and why that is important….”

Release of the FOSTER Open Science toolkit | FOSTER

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“FOSTER Plus developed a set of ten free online courses covering key topics of Open Science. Each course takes about one hour to complete and a badge is awarded after successful completion. You will need to create a free account on the FOSTER portal if you wish to claim your badge but the courses can also be accessed without registration if no badge is desired. The order you take the courses in is not important, the system tracks your progress regardless and you can claim the badge as soon you completed each of the suggested courses. However, we recommend starting with “What is Open Science?” as an introduction. The draft courses were released for public consultation during the summer and have been refined based on community feedback. …”

Open Access Africa

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“Open Access Africa offers you the possibility to personalize the interface, to set up your own personal library of documents, or to set up an automatic alert query that would run periodically and would notify you of search results by email….

Collections are a different way to discover content. Instead of searching, you can browse different categories and sub-categories. Curators of this repository have carefully put together content in a meaningful way. Enjoy!….”

Finding Open Access Articles – Tools & Tips – LITA Blog

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“You know you have access and you have access now. However, the discovery process for open access articles isn’t necessarily the same as subscription searching. Especially if you do not have access to specific subscription databases.

This guide is meant to help individuals, of any background, search more easily for open access articles….”

Trends for open access to publications | European Commission

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“On this page you will find indicators on how the policies of journals and funding agencies favour open access, and the percentage of publications (green and gold) actually available through open access.

The indicators cover bibliometric data on publications, as well as data on funders’ and journals’ policies. Indicators and case studies will be updated over time.”

Want to Support Open Access? Volunteer for the Open Access Tracking Project

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“The Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) provides a constant stream of up-to-date information about open access issues in a primary feed and in a number of secondary feeds that focus on specialized OA subtopics. It offers the primary feed in a variety of distribution options, including email, Google+, HTML, RSS, Twitter, and others. It is an invaluable source of information for open access advocates, research data specialists, and scholarly communication specialists, and it provides important support for the open access movement as a whole.

Based at the Harvard Open Access Project, the OATP was launched by Peter Suber. Suber’s SPARC Open Access Newsletter and his Free Online Scholarship Newsletter played an important part in getting the open access movement off the ground. The OATP continues the mission of those groundbreaking publications using the open source TagTeam software, which was developed for the OATP.

Launched with the help of grant funding, the OATP will enter a new an all-volunteer phase at the end of August 2018. To continue this crowd-sourced project, new volunteers are needed. You can help move the OA agenda forward by being one of them. This wiki page explains how you can join the team and start tagging.

By volunteering just a bit of time to the OATP, you can make a significant difference.”

Get the research

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“Our plan: provide access to both content and context, for free, in one place. To do that, we’re going to bring together an open a database of OA papers with a suite AI-powered support tools we’re calling an Explanation Engine. We’ve already finished the database of OA papers. So that’s good. With the free Unpaywall database, we’ve now got 20 million OA articles from 50k sources, built on open source, available as open data, and with a working nonprofit sustainability model….”