“In the resource section of our website you can find the record of the HIRMEOS webinar about the Peer-Review Certification System for Open Acces Books with presentations by Pierre Mounier, Samuel Moore and Isabella Meinecke.”
Category Archives: oa.hirmeos
2nd HIRMEOS Webinar: A Peer-review Certification System for Open Access Books – Hirmeos Project
“The webinar is aimed at presenting the peer-review certification service developed in the course of the HIRMEOS project.
Peer-review has a critical importance in scholarly communication, but both its practices and understanding exhibit a great deal of opacity. This is especially true for the peer review processes concerning open access monographs.
The HIRMEOS Open Book Peer-Review Certification service is a response to the increasing need for transparency and a better understanding of book peer review processes. The certification system, developed in collaboration with the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), provides a convenient way to reassure authors and evaluation agencies about the scientific quality of Open Access books. In the webinar, we are going to introduce this service to different communities by bringing together the perspectives of scholars, publishers, developers and librarians. …”
Enabling A Conversation Across Scholarly Monographs through Open Annotation
Abstract: The digital format opens up new possibilities for interaction with monographic publications. In particular, annotation tools make it possible to broaden the discussion on the content of a book, to suggest new ideas, to report errors or inaccuracies, and to conduct open peer reviews. However, this requires the support of the users who might not yet be familiar with the annotation of digital documents. This paper will give concrete examples and recommendations for exploiting the potential of annotation in academic research and teaching. After presenting the annotation tool of Hypothesis, the article focuses on its use in the context of HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science Infrastructure), a project aimed to improve the Open Access digital monograph. The general line and the aims of a post-peer review experiment with the annotation tool, as well as its usage in didactic activities concerning monographic publications are presented and proposed as potential best practices for similar annotation activities.
In support of open infrastructures: A statement from OPERAS in response to the ‘Open Research Library’, a new initiative from Knowledge Unlatched
On May 16, Knowledge Unlatched (KU) launched a new hosting platform for Open Access monographs, the Open Research Library (ORL). Notwithstanding its name, we do not consider the Open Research Library to qualify as an open infrastructure.
In support of open infrastructures: A statement from OPERAS in response to the ‘Open Research Library’, a new initiative from Knowledge Unlatched – OPERAS
On May 16, Knowledge Unlatched (KU) launched a new hosting platform for Open Access monographs, the Open Research Library (ORL). Notwithstanding its name, we do not consider the Open Research Library to qualify as an open infrastructure.
The statement from KU opens as follows:
“Free access to scientific content is often limited due to the fragile technical infrastructure around it: content is stored in a variety of versions at various locations and without any uniform search functionalities. The Open Access initiative Knowledge Unlatched has addressed this growing problem and is now launching the Open Research Library together with several international partners. Its goal is to unite all Open Access (OA) book content over the coming months. To this end the Open Research Library is working with publishers and libraries worldwide and is open to all providers and users of quality-assured research content.”
While we can agree with the observation that ‘free access to scientific content is often limited due to the fragile infrastructure around it’, we do not think this initiative is helpful in strengthening the Open Access infrastructure for monographs.
OPERAS, the European Research Infrastructure dedicated to open scholarly communication in the Social Sciences and Humanities, supports the Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures: infrastructures should be open, transparent, sustainable, and community-governed. OPERAS is dedicated to develop a distributed research infrastructure in close collaboration with the scholarly community, in accordance with these principles. OPERAS has demonstrated its support of these principles in various projects:
- the HIRMEOS project, a collaborative project of five European book publishing platforms to develop a shared set of added value services, in order to make these available to the scholarly community and enable integration with the open science ecosystem;
- the development of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) as a central platform to improve transparency and quality assurance around Open Access monographs;
- the upcoming, recently funded project TRIPLE, an innovative discovery service aimed at increasing the discovery, access, reuse and societal impact of Social Sciences and Humanities artefacts (data, publications and projects).
In our opinion, the ORL does not meet the criteria for open infrastructures. On the contrary, based on the statement from KU and the early release of the ORL, the approach of this platform closely resembles well-known internet strategies to quickly achieve a dominant position by aggregating all available content and offering a free service to the community, while aiming for a lock-in of users and stakeholders. The ORL is neither open nor transparent, in particular regarding its governance.
While we are not against commercial ventures or market competition, we strongly believe that vital infrastructures supporting Open Science should not fall in the hands of commercial operators. These infrastructures should be a collective responsibility of stakeholders in scholarly communication. We see SCOSS and the recent launch of the IOI initiative as positive signs that this collective responsibility can become a reality. With this in mind, we think that the ORL is not helpful, and could well be harmful, on the road to establishing a distributed, open and sustainable infrastructure for Open Access monographs.
This statement is the outcome of an open consultation with the OPERAS Core Group. 20 May 2019.
Flash Call for Discussants – Hirmeos Project
“The HIRMEOS project is looking for members of the research community and scholarly communication experts who are interested in contributing to its workshop Shaping new Ways to Open the Book by participating as a discussant. The HIRMEOS consortium will cover travel and accommodation costs of the selected participants….”
Shaping new ways to open the book. A workshop of the HIRMEOS project, 2 June 2019, Marseille – Hirmeos Project
“After two and a half years, the HIRMEOS project is coming to its conclusion. We have tested and implemented innovative services and tools on five publishing platforms and we now want to explore what still needs to be done in order to support the dissemination of Open Access digital monographs. In this workshop, organized in the context of the 23rd ELPUB Conference, we are going to discuss the development and future perspective of the scholarly monographs together with people who write, read and publish them. We therefore invite Ph.D. students, postdocs and early-career researchers to give a presentation (15 minutes) on their own experiences, needs and wishes concerning the publication of Open Access monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In particular, we would like to have presentations on the following topics:…”
Leveraging Concepts in Open Access Publications
Abstract : This paper addresses the integration of a Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) service within a group of open access (OA) publishing digital platforms and considers its potential impact on both research and scholarly publishing. The software powering this service, called entity-fishing, was initially developed by Inria in the context of the EU FP7 project CENDARI and provides automatic entity recognition and disambiguation using the Wikipedia and Wikidata data sets. The application is distributed with an open-source licence, and it has been deployed as a web service in DARIAH’s infrastructure hosted by the French HumaNum. In the paper, we focus on the specific issues related to its integration on five OA platforms specialized in the publication of scholarly monographs in the social sciences and humanities (SSH), as part of the work carried out within the EU H2020 project HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure). In the first section, we give a brief overview of the current status and evolution of OA publications, considering specifically the challenges that OA monographs are encountering. In the second part, we show how the HIRMEOS project aims to face these challenges by optimizing five OA digital platforms for the publication of monographs from the SSH and ensuring their interoperability. In sections three and four we give a comprehensive description of the entity-fishing service, focusing on its concrete applications in real use cases together with some further possible ideas on how to exploit the annotations generated. We show that entity-fishing annotations can improve both research and publishing process. In the last chapter, we briefly present further possible application scenarios that could be made available through infrastructural projects.
Göttingen University Press Platform supports Annotation via Hypothes.is – Hirmeos Project
“Within the HIRMEOS project, Göttingen University Press aims to add on its platform new services that allow for deeper interaction with Open Access monographs. The University Press is pleased to announce that now it is possible to annotate all its publications within the browser through the Hypothes.is annotation tool….”
Identification Services: Standards Implemented! – Hirmeos Project
“The platforms can now add unique identifiers to documents (DOI) and their authors (ORCID) and link them to research projects (Fundref)….”