“In the past five years, the OpenCitations data has been enriched with numerous new indexes of open citation data from different sources. However, the quantity and diversification of the ingested information have raised several issues, which recently made it essential to conduct a complete revision of the ingestion workflow. The result was a revolution in the way OpenCitations data is delivered. In this blog post, we will explain the context and challenges raised by the old procedure. Then, we will present the new ingestion workflow, designed to produce just two comprehensive collections: OpenCitations Index, collecting open citation data, and OpenCitations Meta, for the open bibliographical metadata….”
Category Archives: oa.workflows
Open Access Platforms: Empowering Transparent and Efficient Publishing Workflows | Sponsored by Elsevier | 5 December
“With the advent of Open Access agreements that cover publishing costs, librarians have needed to go beyond managing traditional subscriptions to monitoring and managing publishing workflows as well. How do Open Access agreements impact library acquisitions’ workflows? What does it look like to manage, track articles activated under the agreement, and validate author processing charges (APCs)? In this session, library and industry experts will demonstrate for attendees author workflow & institutional workflow within Elsevier’s Open Access Platform and discuss how Elsevier works with researchers and librarians to improve both author and institutional journeys….”
Oable and RightsLink Partner to Support Open Access Workflows in Libraries Worldwide – Knowledge Unlatched
“Oable, Wiley’s cross-publisher payment and reporting solution for institutions, and RightsLink for Scientific Communications, the industry-trusted platform for shared Open Access (OA) management by Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), are partnering to connect libraries and publishers globally. The agreement between the two companies entails the seamless exchange of metadata between two market-leading systems with the goal of speeding up Open Access article payments and easing reporting….”
eLife introduces new process to simplify publication fee payments for authors
“eLife has introduced a system that aims to simplify the payment process for authors who submit their preprints to its new model for publishing.
The system will mean that authors can focus on the submission of their work to eLife without having to worry about handling fee invoices as part of the process. While it is currently in place for authors with a major contribution from a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) laboratory, eLife plans to open it up to those from other research institutions over the coming months….
When eligible authors send their work to eLife, they can simply declare their affiliation during the submission process, and HHMI will handle the invoice on their behalf through a centralised account if the paper is sent for review….”
The American Chemical Society acquires ChronosHub, an open access management platform – American Chemical Society
“The American Chemical Society (ACS) is proud to announce that ChronosHub is joining ACS as an independent subsidiary working alongside ACS Publications to enhance the publication experience for researchers.
As an ardent supporter of authors and open science, it was a natural fit for ACS to invest in ChronosHub — an innovative open access (OA) management platform that streamlines publishing workflows and ensures effective collaboration between all stakeholders. Together, ACS and ChronosHub will develop a new state-of-the-art, OA-friendly publishing experience that will simplify the complexities of today’s scientific publishing environment….”
Open funding metadata through Crossref; a workshop to discuss challenges and improving workflows | Crossref
by Hans de Jonge, Bianca Kramer, Fabienne Michaud, Ginny Hendricks
Ten years on from the launch of the Open Funder Registry (OFR, formerly FundRef), there is renewed interest in the potential of openly available funding metadata through Crossref. And with that: calls to improve the quality and completeness of that data. Currently, about 25% of Crossref records contain some kind of funding information. Over the years, this figure has grown steadily. A number of recent publications have shown, however, that there is considerable variation in the extent to which publishers deposit these data to Crossref. Technical but also business issues seem to lie at the root of this. Crossref – in close collaboration with the Dutch Research Council NWO and Sesame Open Science – brought together a group of 26 organizations from across the ecosystem to discuss the barriers and possible solutions. This blog presents some anonymized lessons learned.
Managing Open and FAIR Research Projects – DataCite Blog
“Implementing FAIR Workflows: A Proof of Concept Study in the Field of Consciousness is a 3-year project funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. In this project, DataCite works with a number of partners on providing an exemplar workflow that researchers can use to implement FAIR practices throughout their research lifecycle. In this blog series, the different project participants share perspectives on FAIR practices and recommendations….”
NISO Approves Working Group to Develop Recommended Practice for Operationalizing Open Access Business Processes | NISO website
“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….”
Open-Access-Tage: Call for Proposals
From Google’s English: “The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge was published 20 years ago . Since then, Open Access has increasingly become an integral part of scientific practice and research-supporting work. This was accompanied by the emergence of new job descriptions, technologies, infrastructures and business areas. However, the process of transforming academic publishing is far from over and the vision of a better, more efficient, fairer and more inclusive academic publishing system is still relevant.
The program committee of the Open Access Days 2023 cordially invites you to submit contributions on the topic of shaping visions .
Submissions on all topics related to Open Access are welcome. In particular, we would like to encourage submissions on the following topics, which are currently of great relevance for shaping the future of Open Access: …”
ORFG Advances Efforts to Improve Research Output Tracking — Open Research Funders Group
“In June of 2022, the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) launched a public effort to improve research output tracking. We began by publishing an open letter to the community, outlining priority areas such as persistent identifiers (PIDs) and machine readable metadata, and recommended actions for funders, publishers, infrastructure providers, and other key actors. We then opened up a survey to receive community feedback, and reported publicly on the results in September of 2022. Later that same month, we began holding regular open community calls to bring together diverse actors across the research ecosystem and discuss possible workstreams. Our community calls – four in total to date – have consistently had good engagement, with 40-50 participants per session….”
Transformative agreements and their practical impact: a librarian perspective – Insights
Abstract: This case study aims at describing how transformative agreements (TAs) have affected our profession with new tasks and workflows at two university libraries in Sweden, namely Karolinska Institutet University Library and Södertörn University Library. TAs are one of the mechanisms by which scientific publications are made open access; they involve moving libraries’ contracts with publishers from payment to read toward payment to publish. We will summarize the status and progress of open access in Sweden, in particular the significant growth of TAs over a short time span. We will then focus on describing how TAs have affected our everyday work and what new tasks they have imposed. We will share our experiences and point out things we find challenging, for example, we will explore questions about eligibility, the verification process, publication types and title changes during the contract period. We will also give some recommendations on how we would prefer the workflows surrounding the TAs to be. Finally, we will share our conclusions and comments about the impact of TAs on the publishing landscape and speculate about what will happen next.
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.
Siems (2023) „Überwachen und Strafen“ – Tracking und Kontrolle des Forschungszyklus (“Surveil and Punish” – Tracking and Control of the Research Life Cycle) | ABI Technik
Siems, R. (2023). „Überwachen und Strafen“ – Tracking und Kontrolle des Forschungszyklus. ABI Technik, 43(2), 86-95. https://doi.org/10.1515/abitech-2023-0016
Abstract
Since the German Research Foundation’s Information Paper 2021, data tracking in science has been widely discussed. However, comprehensive concepts on how to remedy this threat to scientific autonomy and integrity, for example by strengthening digital sovereignty, are not given, nor is the grip of the relevant economic actors on the entire research cycle adequately addressed. This paper looks at scientific workflows and their undermining by data-based business models.
Zusammenfassung
Seit dem Informationspapier der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft aus dem Jahr 2021 wird das Thema Datentracking in der Wissenschaft viel diskutiert. Jedoch sind bislang weder umfassende Konzepte sichtbar, wie der damit einhergehenden Gefährdung der wissenschaftlichen Autonomie und Integrität beispielsweise durch die Stärkung digitaler Souveränität abgeholfen werden könnte, noch kommt der Griff der maßgeblichen wirtschaftlichen Akteure nach dem gesamten Forschungszyklus angemessen in den Blick. Dieser Aufsatz betrachtet die wissenschaftlichen Workflows und deren Unterminierung durch datenbasierte Geschäftsmodelle.
Research Organization Registry (ROR) | Case Study: ROR at Rockefeller University Press and Silverchair
“When we first implemented this workflow we were only collecting ROR IDs for the corresponding author’s current address, which was a problem because that’s not necessarily a manuscript affiliation. Since then we’ve improved the process, and I show that in this short video. EJP has its own instance of the ROR database in their system. When the author is filling out their submission and starts typing the institution name the typeahead is looking up the ROR record in the EJP database. The author chooses the correct institution from the results list and is then presented with a green checkmark next to the institution name, an indication that it has been validated. We also have a new section asking the corresponding author for all of their affiliations. It’s the same process as just described for each affiliation. The video shows what happens if the author does not select from the typeahead menu, and they just hit Save, or if they choose a name that’s not in ROR – they get this message that basically says, “Look, if you leave it this way, you’re not going to be eligible for any free publishing.” Authors can add as many affiliations as needed, and all of those will be checked against our deals to see if the article is eligible. Our policy is that any corresponding author affiliation on the manuscript is eligible….”
Knowledge Integration: Introducing “Open Access”, a brand new FOLIO app
“Working with the Knowledge Integration, Leipzig University, and the wider FOLIO community to develop the Open Access requests management application has been challenging, interesting and fun. As this is (as far as I know) the first time open access request management has been fully integrated with a library service platform, leaps of imagination have been needed from all sides, to envisage how this work will integrate with the wider library service. The flexibility of the FOLIO environment, where we can add new applications as libraries observe the need for them, has made it possible to develop a module independently while ensuring that it fully integrates with the existing electronic resource management (also developed by Knowledge Integration) and the invoicing functionality (developed by EBSCO) relatively easily.
Weekly meetings with the FOLIO open access specialist interest group have provided regular and valuable feedback. This is all part of our iterative consultation process, which enables us to adjust our approach and the functionality in the application as, development, review, and re-development as needed. Through this process we’ve developed innovative approaches to tracking workflows and ensuring all aspects of a request to publish open access articles and books can be recorded and managed. The final application includes:
The ability to record all aspects of an open access request
Checklists for workflow management
The ability to record correspondence in relation to the request and whether there are any related follow-ups that need to happen
The ability to link requests to any transitional or transformational publisher agreements in place at the library, and to report on all open access publications made under a single agreement
Recording charges, including taxes and discounts, in many currencies, with integration into FOLIO’s existing invoicing and finance applications. Making it possible to track a library’s open access expenditure in the same place as the library’s materials budgets
Reporting in OpenAPC compliant formats…”