Category Archives: oa.workflows

‘Scholarly Book Publishing Workflows and Implications for RIM Systems’ | Jeff Pooley

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Rebecca Bryant, Charles Watkinson, and Rebecca Welzenbach, writing for the Scholarly Kitchen on a science-humanities gap in metadata retrieval:

The ability to harvest accurate and mostly complete metadata for researchers in STEM disciplines is quite good in all of these examples. However, metadata harvesting from any of these sources provides disappointing results for humanities and some social science scholars.  When we look at a researcher’s profile, we may notice that a book (or more than one) is missing.

They’re writing about the brave new world of RIM. Short for “Research Information Management,” RIM software is mainly used by universities and other research entities to measure and predict scholars’ productivity.

Point taken: The humanities, and social science book disciplines too, have some metadata problems. But I’m not sure we want to oil the metric gears, given the way that quantified measures of “impact” have distorted scholars’ truth-seeking commitments for decades. Worse still is the fact that the major players in the RIM market are Elsevier (Pure) and Springer Nature parent Holtzbrinck (Elements). In both cases, the publishing oligopolists are harvesting academics’ behavior and re-selling them as prediction products—on top of their windfall subscription-and-APC profits.

Yes, metadata resiliency is a good thing. But let’s not inadvertently build the road to surveillance publishing.

OA Switchboard one year live: Community, collaboration, and delivering on the promise of PIDs

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“Day-to-day, the OA Switchboard is enabling the neutral exchange of OA-related publication level information. In terms of developing and maintaining our central information exchange hub as an operational solution, this is all about shared infrastructure, standardised messaging protocol, and integration with existing systems, powered by Persistent Identifiers (PIDs).

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The vital contribution that PIDs can make to systemic efficiencies was highlighted in a recent UK Government’s policy paper on reducing bureaucratic burdens on research, innovation and higher education. Commissioned by Jisc, the UK PID Consortium published a cost-benefit analysis in June 2021, which identified cost savings associated with rekeying grant, project, and article metadata. Other savings, in the form of automation and aggregation/analysis were reported as likely to be significant. Economic benefits of better data for decision-making by both public and private sector bodies was reported to have even more potential. Other tangible benefits reported included consistency of approach, portability of metadata and workflows, and increased ease of collaboration.

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The OA Switchboard is contributing to the potential of PIDs by providing a solution for a real pain point shared by research funders, institutions and publishers: the fulfilment of OA publication-level arrangements (policies, mandates, agreements, etc). To address the use cases via the OA Switchboard community and realise practical solutions via the ‘hub’, PIDs are indispensable. Participants in the OA Switchboard are collaborating to share best practices and implement these existing identifiers in their workflows and systems. This will bring direct, indirect and community benefits that will extend way beyond OA Switchboard supported use cases….”

New ESAC Resources on Transformative Agreements

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The open access transition underway in scholarly journal publishing is transforming library services, workflows, financial streams and, naturally, library relationships with publishers. With the growth rate of open access publishing far outpacing that of the underlying scholarly journal market, there is increasing awareness that libraries cannot afford not to have an open access transition strategy.

Whether assessing a publisher “read and publish” offer for the first time or developing a strategic plan to navigate the open access transition, adapting to the evolution of scholarly publishing is a challenge that librarians everywhere are facing.  Some first movers have already worked through the transition locally and are looking at what comes after their transformative agreement phase, while many others are just starting out on their transformation pathway.

To support the global library and library consortium community in this process, the ESAC Initiative is excited to introduce three incredibly rich and authoritative resources:

The ESAC Reference Guide to Transformative Agreements
Threading together and contextualizing the many local guidelines, recommendations, toolkits, templates and data openly available, the reference guide serves as an authoritative and essential orientation on preparing, negotiating and implementing transformative agreements for librarians and consortium staff just starting out or looking to update their strategies based on the latest benchmarks.

How Transformative Is It
This spectrum illustrates the array of transformation drivers that characterize transformative agreements (TAs), to help institutions evaluate publisher proposals during the negotiation process, assess the progress of their current TAs, and define their next negotiation objectives, mapping out how successive transformative agreement iterations depart from the limitations of the subscription paradigm and lead, progressively and concretely, to an open and diverse scholarly communication environment.

2021 Enhancement to the ESAC Workflow Recommendations
Based on the critical insights and experience accumulated in the most recent wave of transformative agreements, the 2021 Enhancement to the ESAC Workflow Recommendations (2017) comprise an updated perspective on the responsibilities of the contractual partners and the metadata necessary to optimize workflows around open access publishing.

Austrian Transition to Open Access: a collaborative approach

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This article presents a collaborative project, the ‘Austrian Transition to Open Access’ (AT2OA), initially running from 2017 to 2020, which had the overarching goal of enabling the large-scale transformation of publishing outputs from closed to open access (OA) in Austria. The initiative, which has recently secured funding for a second four-year cycle from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research, brings together all key players: universities, research institutes, the national library consortium and a cOAlition S funding member, the Austrian Science Fund. The project outcomes include a transition feasibility study that builds on the methodology of the 2015 Schimmer et al. article, the seeds of a national OA monitoring data hub and transformative agreements with major publishers. In addition, the project helped launch institutional OA Publishing Funds across the country and explored alternative publishing models. Furthermore, it saw the emergence of a nationwide network of OA experts. The authors also share their thoughts on lessons learned.

?Implementing FAIR Workflows: A Proof of Concept Study in the Field of Consciousness? | Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc.

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“Although formally published research papers remain the most important means of communicating science today, they do not provide a sufficient amount of information to fully evaluate scientific work. There is typically no mechanism to easily link to experimental design the research data or analytical tools that were used, preventing researchers from being able to fully understand the results of the research, replicate the results, or decisively evaluate and reuse existing research.

Led by project director Helena Cousijn, DataCite and its partners aim to address this problem by developing an exemplar workflow and ecosystem that will assist teams in adhering to FAIR principles for making all research outputs available. By providing a workflow that is easy to implement, the team ultimately aims to start a culture change, where it becomes a standard part of the research culture to make outputs FAIR upon inception.   

The workflow will be developed in collaboration with, and applied to, a research study in the field of consciousness. This field is a fitting proving ground for such a project, as a lack of infrastructure for meaningfully aggregating data in consciousness research has contributed to a lack of agreement about what anatomical structures and physiological processes in the human brain give rise to consciousness despite almost three decades of focused research. Developing FAIR workflows will address that need, unleashing the possibility to better understand the neural foundations of consciousness.

Through this project, DataCite and its partners will develop a proof-of-concept product in the field of consciousness that will accelerate open science. The team’s end goal is to provide researchers in all disciplines with a method for engaging in FAIR research practices that is easy to implement and follow.”

Library Publishing Workflows Project Releases Journal Workflow Documentation | Educopia Institute

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“There is no single correct way for a library to publish journals; it’s a process that often grows organically in response to local needs. However, having models to draw from when creating or updating a journal publishing workflow can result in better processes and stronger partnerships. 

To enable library publishers to build on each others’ work in this area, the Library Publishing Workflows project (IMLS 2019-2022) is excited to release a complete set of journal publishing workflow documentation for each of our twelve partner libraries.

 

The programs behind these workflows are large and small, high-touch and light-touch, and staffed and focused in a variety of ways. Individually, they offer models for similar programs. As a set, they highlight the diversity of practice in this vital area of librarianship. 

For each partner library, we have provided a program profile, one or more workflow diagrams, and accompanying detailed workflows. We are also releasing the workflow diagrams as a set, to enable quick review and comparison across all of the workflows. The documentation is the result of more than two years of interviews, revisions, group discussions, and peer reviews. Because publishing workflows are always evolving, however, this documentation represents a snapshot in time….”

Job: Project Lead – FAIR workflows project. Deadline: Aug 15, 2021 | DataCite

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DataCite is looking for a Project Lead to manage a global Open Science project with partners across Europe and the United States. The role is funded by the ??Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc.

DataCite is a leading global non-profit organisation that provides persistent identifiers (DOIs) for research. DataCite was founded in 2009 to support the research community in identifying, locating, accessing, and citing research outputs with confidence. DataCite develops services that enable easier access to research and provide a way for researchers to share and get credit for the outputs they generate.

DataCite and partners recently received funding from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to carry out a project on ‘Implementing FAIR Workflows: a proof of concept study in the field of consciousness’. In this role, you would be leading this exciting project, showing implementation of FAIR workflows in practice.

Formally published papers that have been through a traditional peer review and editorial process remain the most important means of communicating science today. A major obstacle is that current research articles provide only a fraction of the information required to fully evaluate a scientific study. Most of the time, there is no underlying information available and no mechanism to easily link to the experimental design, the research data, and the analytical tools that were used to generate the reported outcomes. This challenge prevents the research community from being able to fully understand the results of the research, to replicate its results, and to decisively evaluate,and reuse existing research. Availability of the different outputs of a research project would enable reuse of data and software in order to aggregate findings across studies to evaluate discoveries in the field, and ultimately to assess and accelerate progress.

As a consequence, there is currently a big push to make science Open and FAIR to increase reproducibility and reusability of scientific results. Recognizing the importance of better management of research entities has led to critical advances concerning development of infrastructure for preregistration of studies, data repository platforms, standards for data sharing and ontologies.

The project seeks to contribute to these developments by providing an exemplar workflow which will take the concept of making one’s research FAIR and open, and will provide a concrete example and implementation based on the reality of an entire research investigation lifecycle. In doing so, this will test the challenges of the research team, the time investments, the availability of the metadata and tools needed to ensure FAIR research outputs, and the ability of a dashboard to meaningfully contribute to the research workflow and the impact of research outputs. For FAIR workflows to become standard for all researchers, they will need to have examples, that are easy to implement, of how to make their research outputs FAIR and open, and this project will be impactful as a demonstration.

Your responsibilities

The Project Lead has the overall day to day responsibility of the project and reports directly to the Project Director. The core responsibilities of the Project Lead include:

Coordination between project partners
Development and documentation of the end-to-end workflow
Close alignment with research group to establish use cases
Stakeholder engagement to verify use cases and solutions
Communication of FAIR workflows and Open Science best practices
Management of grant deliverables and milestones

Required skills and qualifications

University degree, preferably a PhD degree in a field related to Neuroscience or Open Science
Experience with Open Science practices and a good understanding of research workflows
Project management skills
Interest in PIDs and metadata
Experience working in an international environment
Strong English language skills are required; it would be beneficial if the candidate also speaks one of the following languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, Russian, or Spanish
Planning and organizational skills
Comfortable working remotely
Occasional travel could be part of the job

This is a fixed-term contract for 3 years – the duration of the grant. Based on performance and upcoming projects, there may be an opportunity to transition to a permanent contract.

Why work for us

Remote position.
Competitive local salary.
30 days vacation time annually, plus 1 day paid extra for volunteer work of your choice.
Flexible working hours.
Option to work in a co-working space with a paid contribution from us.
Opportunity to learn something new every day.

To apply

Please send a resume and statement of interest to Helena Cousijn [

Generalizing FAIR – Daniel S. Katz’s blog

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“Most researchers and policymakers support the idea of making research, and specifically research outputs, findable, accessible, interoperably, and reusable (FAIR). The concept of FAIR has been well-developed for research data, but this is not the case for all research products. This blog post seeks to consider how the application of FAIR to a range of research products (beyond data) could result in the development of different sets of principles for applying FAIR to different research objects, and to ask about the implications of this….

Exploring complexity: the two sides of Open Science (II)

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“So why should this highly successful national-level policy that could effectively achieve the 100% Open Access objective be an obstacle to a pragmatic approach to Open Science? Because it’s a Green Open Access policy based on the deposit of accepted manuscripts in institutional repositories with widespread embargo periods. Because despite the current and future progresses in enhancing the visibility and discoverability of repository contents, the canonical way to reach a publication for an external stakeholder with little knowledge about the complex scholarly communications landscape (eg Industry) remains and will remain the DOI issued by the publisher. Because a Green OA-based policy does not open the publications sitting behind those DOIs. And because the amount of effort involved in the implementation of the HEFCE policy as it is designed right now is so huge that research libraries lack the physical resources to adopt any other complementary Open Access implementation policy.

Enter Plan S with its highly pragmatic approach to Open Access implementation. Originally strongly based on Gold Open Access, APC payments where needed and deals with the publishers to address the double-dipping issue around hybrid journals, it’s only after considerable pressure has been exerted by the Green Open Access lobby that the zero-embargo Green Open Access policy has found a place in the Plan S implementation guidelines. But with the current scramble for ‘transformative’ deals that will allow most hybrid journals to become eligible under Plan S requirements, the size of the institutional Gold Open Access output pie will only grow in forthcoming years….”

“Collaborating Across Campus to Advance Open Access Policy Compliance” by Andrew Johnson, Melissa Cantrell et al.

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In 2018, the Data and Scholarly Communication Services Unit (DSCS) at the University of Colorado Boulder began implementing two open access (OA) policy workflows with the aim of increasing content in the institutional repository CU Scholar, expanding awareness of the campus OA policy that was passed in 2015, and decreasing the burden on researchers for participation in the policy. DSCS leveraged collaborative relationships with other library departments and campus units in order to mobilize the data, infrastructure, procedures, and documentation to execute these workflows. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) workflow identifies existing open access publications by CU Boulder faculty and mediates deposit in order to make them available in CU Scholar. The liaison outreach workflow partners with liaison librarians to request from faculty preprints and author’s final manuscripts of publications in which the publisher version may have copyright restrictions. At present, the DOAJ workflow has resulted in 754 articles deposited in CU Scholar, and the liaison outreach workflow has resulted in 91 articles deposited. Each of these workflows pose challenges that have required flexibility, experimentation, and clear communication between stakeholders. This case study, which includes detailed descriptions of both open access policy workflows, initial results, and plans for future implementation, may serve as a guide for other institutions wishing to adopt and/or adapt institutional repository workflows and forge collaborative relationships to further open access initiatives in their local context.

Innovative workflows around APC management – Strathprints

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Abstract:  The presentation describes a number of examples of innovative workflows around the management of Article Processing Charges (APCs) as implemented at the University of Strathclyde Library. It’s argued that a certain creativity may be applied to the area of institutional APC management with the two-fold purpose of (i) extending the funding eligibility beyond the default coverage provided by the RCUK and COAF block grants and (ii) paying lower APC fees whenever possible. The background strategy is to build a relation of trust with as many researchers as possible that will make it easier for them to remain aware of the need to meet the (Green) Open Access policy requirements. It’s also argued that there could be significant benefits to be reaped from the extension into this APC management area of the current cross-institutional collaboration within the Open Access Scotland Group.

Substance Consortium

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“In 2016 the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (CoKo), SciELO and Érudit partnered to form a consortium committed to supporting and integrating Substance. In July 2017 eLife joined as well. The idea of the consortium is to create a common-pool resource whose development is driven by community needs. Everybody is invited to join! PKP’s Juan Pablo Alperin described the need for this consortium: “We recognize that web-based multi-party editing of structured documents is needed in the authoring, editing, and production workflows of knowledge creation, and believe that we can best ensure Substance serves all these needs by coming together to support them. We hope that by making this commitment, others will recognize that there is more to gain from jointly supporting Substance’s work rather than building local or custom solutions that cannot easily be used by others.” …”

CREDIT reflects Complete Workflow

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“CREDIT is a cloud-enabled SaaS tool for data management to provide an opportunity to authors to register their Additional Research Outputs(AROs) reflecting RAW, REPEAT & NULL/NEGATIVE entities generated at various stages of research workflow to ensure their reusability & gaining credit. Hence contributing towards enriching research articles & reproducible science. CREDIT framework & interface is developed on FAIR data principles….The appearance of these badges happens dynamically, hence creates a possibility that the metrics around the data, when readers engage with it would be fed back to the main published article in real-time (accessible via the badge – Enhancing Discoverability and also giving credits to Authors). And in the near-future we also have plans to roll out Badges that can be embedded in PDF articles….”