Jisc has announced a new agreement with Copernicus Publications, a fully open access, not-for-profit publisher, whose portfolio of journals covers engineering, geosciences, humanities and life sciences.
Abstract: Based on the Open access workflow model developed in the predecessor project OA-HVerlag, the research team addressing the question of how data exchange between the systems involved in the workflow can be made more robust and compatible. In this project, the academic approach of a communication structure is being developed. This data transfer container will ensure access to project-specific content and systematize and facilitate the transformation of metadata standards for the distribution of the publication on different platforms. In addition, a toolbox of consulting materials for modelling OA workflows were created and a production system for producing OA monographs was developed.
“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 monthly blog series, the different project participants will share perspectives on FAIR practices and recommendations.
In this post, Xiaoli Chen, project lead at DataCite, reflects on the gap between acknowledging FAIR and practicing FAIR….”
Bowie, S., Hall, G., & Kiesewetter, R. (2022). Implementing a Workflow for Combinatorial Books . Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). Retrieved from https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/combinatorial-books-documentation-workflows-post4
This is the fourth blogpost in a series documenting the COPIM/OHP Pilot Project Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers. You can find the previous blogposts here, here, and here.
Our aim in the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers Pilot Project is among other things the development of a research, editorial, and publishing workflow that enables the creation of new combinatorial books out of existing open access books (or collections of books) in the Open Humanities Press (OHP) catalogue that are available for reuse. To support other publishers interested in establishing and maintaining similar workflows for combinatorial book publishing projects, we have been exploring how these kinds of books sit within more standardised or established print and online book production, dissemination, and preservation systems. The workflow we have created for OHP’s Combinatorial Books book series is available here: https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/workflow-for-combinatorial-books
In this blogpost, the publisher Gary Hall (OHP) and the Combinatorial Books series editor and developer Simon Bowie (COPIM) will share, via audio contributions, conceptual and practical insights around how we have created this publishing and technical workflow and how we have adapted it for Ecological Re-writing as Disappropriation. Situated Encounters with the Chernobyl Herbarium, the first book coming out of the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers Pilot Project. Furthermore, we reflect on the socio-cultural adaptations to the editorial and publishing workflows that were needed to allow for more open and horizontal forms of community engagement.
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Adema, J., Bowie, S., Hall, G., & Kiesewetter, R. (2022). A workflow for Combinatorial Books. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). Retrieved from https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/workflow-for-combinatorial-books
“With its internal Open Access Strategy 2021–2025, the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany provides a framework to further shape the process of transforming the scholarly publishing system to open access. The Alliance’s main aim is to create and design structures in publishing that benefit science. As key challenges of the transformation, the science organizations have identified the following aspects that need to be addressed: ? the transformational effectiveness of future transformative agreements, and the prevention of long-term “double dipping” ? the avoidance of excessive cost increases for open access, and of complexity or lack of transparency of pricing structures ? the consideration and reduction of increases in administrative complexity ? the possible exacerbation of vendor lock-in by new services and tools of the same provider, and the consideration of this situation when making investment decisions ? measures against the impairment of researchers’ informational self-determination in the digital space To implement the Open Access Strategy 2021–2025, four measures intended to shape the open access transformation in Germany were defined. The present criteria have been developed within the framework of the measure “Further Design and Implementation of the Transformation of the Content of Commercial Providers.” With this measure, the science organizations are pursuing the aim of reducing costs and improving the conditions for specialized scientific information within the framework of contractual agreements with providers of publishing services. Thus, the criteria formulated here will serve in the future as a common, action-guiding framework for actors from all science organizations—that is, higher education institutions as well as non-university research institutions—for negotiations with providers of publishing services. The call for the greatest possible cost transparency and cost efficiency in the system as a whole forms the core of the actions of the science organizations in the context of their Open Access Strategy 2021–2025….”
Adema, J., & Kiesewetter, R. (2022). Experimental Book Publishing: Reinventing Editorial Workflows and Engaging Communities; Commonplace. https://doi.org/10.21428/6ffd8432.8998ab82
The publication of experimental, digital work engenders different roles and relationalities, requiring “a kind of collaboration among authors, editors, and technical staff that is quite different from the traditional publishing process
Hyde, A., Pattinson, D., & Shannon, P. (2022). Designing for Emergent Workflow Cultures: eLife, PRC, and Kotahi. Commonplace. https://doi.org/10.21428/6ffd8432.ef6691ea
Abstract
Scholarly publishing is evolving, and there is a need to understand and design the new (emergent) workflows while also designing technology to capture and support these processes. This article documents an ongoing collaboration to develop technology to meet emergent workflows in scholarly publishing, namely Publish-Review-Curate (PRC). We explore this topic with different eLife PRC community stakeholders using Kotahi, a flexible open-source scholarly publishing platform that can support variant workflows (built by Coko).
by Ross Higman
In a recent post, my colleague Miranda Barnes outlined the challenges of archiving and preservation for small and scholar-led open access publishers, and described the process of manually uploading books to the Loughborough University institutional repository. The conclusion of this manual ingest experiment was that while university repositories offer a potential route for open access archiving of publisher output, the manual workflow is prohibitively time- and resource-intensive, particularly for small and scholar-led presses who are often stretched in these respects.
Fortunately, many institutional repositories provide routes for uploading files and metadata which allow for the process to be automated, as an alternative to the standard web browser user interface. Different repositories offer different routes, but a large proportion of them are based on the same technologies. By experimenting with a handful of repositories, we were therefore able to investigate workflows which should also be applicable to a much broader spread of institutions.
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Arts and humanities researchers tend to be multitasking heroes and versatility buffs. This is probably not a matter of choice. Whether we work on digital editions of literary works, analyze historical events by creating and exploiting corpora of digitized newspapers, or model archaeological sites in 3D, our research processes are often quite complex: they involve multiple steps, different tools and a combination of methods. We are no strangers to heterogeneous datasets, modular system architectures, metadata crosswalks and software pipelines. And we are increasingly aware of the importance of data sharing and the notion of reproducible research in the age of Open Science. A scholarly process may start with identifying and collecting data and end with the publication of some research outputs, but the very beginning and the very end never tell the full story of the research data lifecycle.
In this year’s DARIAH Theme Call, we are looking for proposals and projects that will explore, assess, analyze and embody the challenges of designing, implementing, documenting and sharing digitally-enabled workflows in the context of arts and humanities research from a technical, methodological, infrastructural and conceptual point of view.
What is the state of the art in research workflows in the digital arts and humanities? What are we doing well, and what should we do better? How can we evaluate the appropriateness of a workflow or assess its efficiency? What makes a workflow innovative? What does it mean for a workflow to be truly reproducible? Are there modeling or standardization frameworks that make this job easier? What kind of documentation is necessary and at what level of granularity? What are the hidden costs of our workflows? What should DARIAH do – in addition to treating workflows as a particular content type on the SSH Open Marketplace – to help researchers develop, deploy and disseminate better workflows?
Over the past three years, Library Publishing Workflows—an IMLS-funded (LG-36-19-0133-19) project of Educopia Institute, the Library Publishing Coalition, and twelve partner libraries—has been fostering conversation about the workflows library publishers use to publish journals, how libraries have developed their journal publishing services, and the major challenges they face in their day-to-day work. We have also released a wide range of materials—from workflows to documentation tools to reflections—to support library publishers in their work. As the project winds down, we wanted to provide a round-up of all of the major project outputs.
Barnes, M. (2022). Experimenting with repository workflows for archiving: Manual ingest. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.85c38501
Over the course of the last year (2021-2022), colleagues in COPIM’s archiving and preservation team have been considering ways to solve the issues surrounding the archiving and preservation of open access scholarly monographs. Most large publishers and many University presses have existing digital preservation relationships with digital preservation archives, but small and scholar-led publishers lag behind due to lack of resource.
One of the potential solutions we have been considering is the university repository as open access archive for some of these presses. COPIM includes a number of scholar-led presses, such as Mattering Press, meson press, Open Humanities Press, Open Book Publishers and punctum books. Partners on the project also include UCSB Library and Loughborough University Library. In cooperation with Loughborough University Library, we began to run some preliminary repository workflow experimentations to see what might be possible, using books from one of the partner publishers.
Loughborough University employs Figshare as their primary institutional repository, so we began with this as a test bed for our experimentations.
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“Ultimately, Elsevier’s user acquisition and monetization strategy here is as sophisticated as anything we have seen in scholarly publishing to date. Open access advocates might be concerned about some of these directions, but my sense is that many of these scientists and librarians remain largely focused on trying to compete with, or at least influence, scientific publishing. Building businesses that support, and potentially monetize, researcher workflow is a very different animal. While the Center for Open Science and the SHARE initiative are trying to offer up counterweights, there is little evidence that the open access community as a whole is engaged with Elsevier’s transformation. Springer Nature’s sibling Digital Science is probably Elsevier’s foremost competitor in this space, albeit with a different investment and integration model….”
“Higher education institutions must manage open access funds, track research outputs across the publication lifecycle, as well as meeting funders’ open research policies.?These resource intensive activities pose challenges across the sector. Our new product tackles this head on….
The product will include a publication database, reporting suite, transitional agreement log, analytics dashboard, and more. It will provide a platform that centralises major workflow components and streamlines open access management….”
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.