Category Archives: oa.volunteers

LPForum20: Make the Open Access Directory Better for All: A Library Publishers Edit-a-thon | Library Publishing Coalition

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“One of JeSLIB’s goals is to contribute to the Open Access and Library Publishing communities. There are many open access resources maintained by organizations around the world that are community driven. This means they depend on community input and crowd-sourcing.

The editors planned an interactive workshop, or edit-a-thon, to teach forum participants how to contribute to one of these community-driven platforms, The Open Access Directory (OAD). The OAD was co-founded by Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project. OAD is hosted by the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, maintained by the OA community at large, and supervised by an independent editorial board….”

Scholarly publishers are working together to maximize efficiency during COVID-19 pandemic – OASPA

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“Scholarly publishers are working together to maximize the efficiency of peer review, ensuring that key work related to COVID-19 is reviewed and published as quickly and openly as possible.

The group of publishers and scholarly communications organizations — initially comprising eLife, Hindawi, PeerJ, PLOS, Royal Society, F1000 Research, FAIRsharing, Outbreak Science, and PREreview — is working on initiatives and standards to speed up the review process while ensuring rigor and reproducibility remain paramount. The group has issued an Open Letter of Intent and is launching an initiative to ensure a rapid, efficient, yet responsible review of COVID-19 content.

The initiative is asking for volunteer reviewers with suitable expertise relevant to COVID-19, from all career stages and disciplines, to add their names to a “rapid reviewer list“. By doing so, these reviewers will be committing to rapid reviewing times, and upfront agreement that their reviews and identity can be shared among participating publishers and journals if submissions get rerouted for any reason….”

COVID-19 Publishers Open Letter of Intent – Rapid Review – OASPA

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“The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new urgency to openly and rapidly share and review COVID-19 research. 

We, a group of publishers and scholarly communications organizations, are committing to work together on a cross-publisher rapid review and review transfer initiative. With the endorsement of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) we are making the following calls to reviewers, editors, authors, and publishers in the research community, in order to maximize the efficiency and speed of the triage and peer review process of COVID-19 research.

To reviewers and authors:

We call on volunteer reviewers with suitable expertise relevant to COVID-19 from all career stages and disciplines, including those from industry, to sign up to a “rapid reviewer pool” and commit to rapid reviewing times, along with an upfront agreement that their reviews and identity can be shared among publishers and journals if submissions get rerouted. Please sign up in this form. 
We call on volunteer reviewers (whether or not they have signed up for rapid review) to identify and highlight important and crucial COVID-19 preprints (e.g. by using https://outbreaksci.prereview.org/), as early as possible, to optimise the limited time of expert reviewers who are subsequently invited to review the most important and promising research by a journal/platform.
We call on authors to support reviewers and publishers in this endeavour by ensuring the deposition of their submission as a preprint, and by working with publishers to make the peer-reviewed article and associated dataset, software, and model available for reuse as rapidly as possible….”

Wikipedia Editors Are Fighting The Coronavirus Both Online And Offline

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““It is actually rare for me to become as involved in a set of articles as I have been in the coronavirus articles,” Dekimasu says. “However, there is a clear need for people to edit them, and I feel an ethical obligation to make them as helpful as possible, since they are getting hundreds of thousands of views every day.”

Those pages include the Wikipedia article for the virus itself, known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, the disease it causes, COVID-19, and the ongoing global pandemic the coronavirus has caused.

 

With so many eyes on Wikipedia’s coronavirus articles, providing accurate information is more important than ever. But it’s not blatantly inaccurate information that Dekimasu worries about, but the “subtle misinformation” that can appear….”

Call to Action to the Tech Community on New Machine Readable COVID-19 Dataset | The White House

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“Today, researchers and leaders from the Allen Institute for AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Microsoft, and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) of scholarly literature about COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and the Coronavirus group.

Requested by The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the dataset represents the most extensive machine-readable Coronavirus literature collection available for data and text mining to date, with over 29,000 articles, more than 13,000 of which have full text.

Now, The White House joins these institutions in issuing a call to action to the Nation’s artificial intelligence experts to develop new text and data mining techniques that can help the science community answer high-priority scientific questions related to COVID-19….”

Open Access Directory – A resource for making sense of the open access landscape | Impact of Social Sciences

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The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a wiki of factual lists on the subject of open access. Designed to make sense out of the chaos of different information about open access, in this post Nancy Pontika recounts why the OAD was created and outlines how it forms an important knowledge base for anyone seeking to learn about open access and its development.

CORE Ambassadors

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“While the adoption of open access, open data, open science and text mining practices are growing, CORE is proud to follow these developments and grow as a service. We are looking for enthusiastic organizations and individuals to volunteer as ambassadors to spread the word about CORE’s mission and services.

 

Become a CORE ambassador to enhance CORE’s efforts in advancing open access and supporting text-mining in your area by:

 

Updating the CORE Team with the community’s feedback about our services

Identifying repositories in your country harvested by CORE

Offering advice with regards to key national initiatives and projects in the area of open access infrastructure in your country

Presenting CORE to research stakeholders at local venues

Posting CORE news on blogs and social media

Sharing information about CORE to local mailing lists, venues and contacts

Posting CORE news on blogs and social media…”

Invitation to participate in a new project: Help open journals’ deep backfiles | Everybody’s Libraries

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“As I’ve noted here previously, there’s a wealth of serial content published in the 20th century that’s in the public domain, but not yet freely available online, often due to uncertainty about its copyright (and the resulting hesitation to digitize it).  Thanks to IMLS-supported work we did at Penn, we’ve produced a complete inventory of serials from the first half of the 20th century that still have active copyright renewals associated with them. And I’ve noted that there was far more serial material without active copyright, as late as the 1960s or even later.  We’ve also produced a guide to determining whether particular serial content you may be interested in is in the public domain.

Now that we’ve spent a lot of time surveying what is still in copyright though, it’s worth turning more focused attention to serial content that isn’t in copyright, but still of interest to researchers.  One way we can identify journals whose older issues (sometimes known as their “deep backfiles”) are still of interest to researchers and libraries is to see which ones are included in packages that are sold or licensed to libraries.   Major vendors of online journals publish spreadsheets of their backfile offerings, keyed by ISSN.  And now, thanks to an increasing amount of serial information in Wikidata (including links to our serials knowledge base) it’s possible to systematically construct inventories of serials in these packages that include, or might include, public domain and other openly accessible content….”

WikiJournal User Group – Wikiversity

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“The WikiJournal User Group publishes a set of open-access, peer-reviewed academic journals with no publishing costs to authors. Its goal is to provide free, quality-assured knowledge. Secondly, it aims to bridge the Academia-Wikipedia gap by enabling expert contributions in the traditional academic publishing format to improve Wikipedia content….

Appropriate material is integrated into Wikipedia for added reach and exposure….

At least 2 reviewers per article. All peer reviews are published and publicly accessible….

All of our published articles are openly accessible under a free Creative Commons Cc.logo.circle.svg or similar license….

We are a fully non-profit journal with a volunteer board of editors, and we therefore have no publication charges of any kind….

The journal group is also currently applying to be a Wikimedia Foundation Sister Project. This would give greater control over the workings and formatting of the site, as well as a dedicated domain name….”

Copyright Review Program | www.hathitrust.org | HathiTrust Digital Library

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“Each year we invite your continued participation and seek new team members for copyright review projects. 

Typically there will be a call for nominations in September and January each year.  The January 2019 open call has been completed and participants selected for this year.

There was an informational webinar about the Participating in the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program held on September 11, 1:00-2:00pm ET for anyone seeking to learn more about participation.  Slides and recording.

To nominate for a copyright team member position on the US Monographs project you must:

be employed at a HathiTrust member institution
have the support of your institution to contribute 6 hours of regular work time each week for a year
be present at online class training sessions or watch the recorded classes promptly (late Feb-Mar)…”

Copyright Review Program | www.hathitrust.org | HathiTrust Digital Library

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“Each year we invite your continued participation and seek new team members for copyright review projects. 

Typically there will be a call for nominations in September and January each year.  The January 2019 open call has been completed and participants selected for this year.

There was an informational webinar about the Participating in the HathiTrust Copyright Review Program held on September 11, 1:00-2:00pm ET for anyone seeking to learn more about participation.  Slides and recording.

To nominate for a copyright team member position on the US Monographs project you must:

be employed at a HathiTrust member institution
have the support of your institution to contribute 6 hours of regular work time each week for a year
be present at online class training sessions or watch the recorded classes promptly (late Feb-Mar)…”

The In/Visible, In/Audible Labor of Digitizing the Public Domain

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Abstract:  In this article I call for more recognition of and scholarly engagement with public, volunteer digital humanities projects, using the example of LibriVox.org to consider what public, sustainable, digital humanities work can look like beyond the contexts of institutional sponsorship. Thousands of volunteers are using LibriVox to collaboratively produce free audiobook versions of texts in the US public domain. The work of finding, selecting, and preparing texts to be digitized and published in audio form is complex and slow, and not all of this labor is ultimately visible, valued, or rewarded. Drawing on an ethnographic study of 12 years of archived discourse and documentation, I interrogate digital traces of the processes by which several LibriVox versions of Anne of Green Gables have come into being, watching for ways in which policies and infrastructure have been influenced by variously visible and invisible forms of work. Making visible the intricate, unique, archived experiences of the crowdsourcing community of LibriVox volunteers and their tools adds to still-emerging discussions about how to value extra-institutional, public, distributed digital humanities work.

The Wikipedia Library – Meta

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“The Wikipedia Library is an open research hub, a place for active Wikipedia editors to gain access to the vital reliable sources that they need to do their work and to be supported in using those resources to improve the encyclopedia. We aim to make access and use of sources free, easy, collaborative and efficient.

The Wikipedia Library is run by a team of Wikimedia Foundation staff and global volunteers. We operate on a community-organized satellite model: we administer the global project but work with local coordinators in local Wikipedia projects to help each community set up their own libraries….”