Monthly Archives: December 2018

How to make journal bundles (“big deals”) fair and promote quality? (#100) · Issues · Publishing Reform / discussion · GitLab

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“Suggestions for publishers: Allow fairness and flexibility

Allow customers to fairly add/remove individual products based on their needs.

Allow customers to only choose necessary services and price categories for each product….

Suggestions for libraries: Inform your faculty

Maintain lists of publishers in each cost/value/policy group.

Inform faculty about changes to allow them adjust their support.

Specifically address back-issue policy to allow faculty reward publishers with fairer policy.

Allow faculty to up- or down-vote products, because the mere number of downloads may not be an accurate metric for quality/value.

Better inform your faculty of concerns with paywalls and benefits of open access without author fees…..”

Building library-based support structures for Open Science (IATUL 2018)

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Research institutions meet increasing demands for transparency, accountability, added value and reuse of all aspects of scientific production, from documenting the research process to sharing underlying data to open access to publications. Going beyond admirable slogans about openness there is a clear need for support infrastructures relating to the actual practice of Open Science describing metadata, archiving datasets and publications and disseminating increasingly interdisciplinary research results. Research libraries, having always been stewards of research institutions’ collective knowledge and offering a variety of research support services, are in a unique position to offer future support for Open Science based on the core competencies already existing at the library. This paper describes the process of building a comprehensive research support structure for Open Science at the university library of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. It shows how the library identified stated, but not necessarily operationalized, university strategies for Open Access and Open Data, and proceeded to strengthen its existing competencies in this area with human resources and a targeted approach to linking the library to the central research infrastructure of the university. This resulted in the library assuming responsibility for new research support services and plans of action for Open Access and Open Data for the whole of NTNU.

How Shared, Open Data Can Help Us Better Overcome Disasters | WIRED

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“Hopefully, interest in data about air quality and the difficulty in getting a comprehensive view will drive more people to consider an open data and approach over proprietary ones. Right now, big companies and governments are the largest users of data that we’ve handed to them—mostly for free—to lock up in their vaults. Pharmaceutical firms, for instance, use the data to develop drugs that save lives, but they could save more lives if their data were shared. We need to start using data for more than commercial exploitation, deploying it to understand the long-term effects of policy, and create transparency around those in power—not of private citizens. We need to flip the model from short-term commercial use to long-term societal benefit….”

Reimagining Open Science Through a Feminist Lens – Denisse Alejandra – Medium

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“Today I will talk about what it could mean to reimagine open science from a feminist perspective?—?a question we have been exploring at OCSDNet over the past few months….

Our position was that much of the Open Science discourse and practices, particularly at the policy-making and institutional level, frame open science as a technology-enabled means to produce more productive, efficient and competitive science. One of the main critiques we put forth was that this framing was biased in favor of a very utilitarian conception of science that looks to incentivize knowledge production for the sake of innovation and international competitiveness, while losing sight of other equally important functions served by research and knowledge production?—?such as attending to social challenges or equipping citizens to access their fundamental rights….”

Open education can address Indonesia’s educational inequalities – Opinion – The Jakarta Post

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“On the other hand, in Indonesia, as in other developing countries, there is lingering concern over the “colonization of pedagogical practices”,  where  “valuable knowledge” is the one produced by “foreign” knowledge producers — legitimate, national curriculum producers or scholars from developed nations. Such a mindset is also reflected in our awe over high ranks in international league tables such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). We also place high prominence on publishing of scholarly work in international journals – which is indeed necessary, but we pay scant attention to inequities in education….”

University of California leads fight over access to research

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“Behind closed doors, the University of California is staging a revolt against the world’s largest journal publisher, threatening to drop all subscriptions when its contract with Reed Elsevier soon expires.

This is no pointy-headed dispute: Publication is how new discoveries are shared, building the foundation for future intellectual breakthroughs.

The university was poised to lose access to Elsevier’s journals when its five-year contract ends on Dec. 31.  But on Friday [12/21] afternoon, the adversaries agreed to extend the deadline for one more month.

If an agreement is not reached, everyone in the UC system — 21,200 faculty and 251,700 students — could face tighter access to new research findings. (Access to older articles would continue uninterrupted.) The university’s library says it would work to get them through other means, such as a loan from a non-UC library….”

Should Libraries Support Open Access Funds? | Zenodo

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“While library supported open access funds have helped the institution’s faculty raise visibility of their articles by making them openly available, the authors of this poster urge libraries to critically examine their participation in OA fund programs. In our experience as OA fund coordinators at the Health Sciences Library of the University of Colorado (CU-HSL), we faced many practical challenges but additionally, as a number of scholars point out, it can lead to changes in the core mission of academic libraries….”

Come Together: Interdepartmental Collaboration to Connect the IR and Library Catalog: The Serials Librarian: Vol 0, No 0

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Abstract:  While institutional repositories (IRs) often include a built-in search tool and/or are indexed by web search engines, some patrons go directly to the online library catalog with their information need. Rather than hope that users will stumble on the IR from the library website or assume that they will start their research with a Google search, librarians can enhance IR discoverability and usage by integrating its content into the library catalog. With strong teamwork, good communication, and a shared vision, this endeavor transforms the IR and library catalog from separate, siloed platforms into a more cohesive collections package. At the University of San Diego, librarians and administrators across three departments came together to share information and work in concert to explore the benefits of auto-harvesting IR content into the library catalog. Driven by a vision of enhancing discoverability and access, as well as promoting the IR and enriching the catalog, the team members worked cooperatively to identify specific IR collections appropriate for harvest, investigate technical logistics, consult outside vendors (including Innovative Interfaces, Inc./III and bepress), and experiment with implementation.

Using “NASIG Core Competencies for Scholarly Communication Librarians” as a Framework to Develop Campus Support and Use of a New Institutional Repository: The Serials Librarian: Vol 0, No 0

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Abstract:  In August 2017, NASIG approved and adopted a set of core competencies that can serve as a roadmap for a new Scholarly Communication Librarian working to promote and build collections for a new campus Institutional Repository. This presentation addressed how to utilize the specific competencies to scaffold priorities when building a new repository, including developing campus partnerships with administration, colleges, departments, faculty, and students. The Core Competencies can also be used to develop effective short- and long-term goals, both for the librarian and for the Institutional Repository, and can provide communication and outreach strategies to share those goals to the campus community.

Thoughts on Plan S implementation guidelines – Open and Reproducible Research Group

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“Having been asked to give feedback on the recent Plan S Implementation Guidelines for a working group, I thought I’d share my thoughts here. I’ve not really been keeping on top of the Plan S discussions, and given how late I am to the party, likely much of this has been said better elsewhere already. But anyway….”

Plan S – on academic integrity and values | Koen Hufkens

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“Objections to Plan S have come in many shapes and forms. An often cited argument are the limitations on “academic freedom” ignoring the limits that currently already exists (financial / ethical or institutional). Others have argued that the possibility of re-use could discredit their work, while happily retweeting with statements that say “RT is not an endorsement”. The irony is lost on them. Many cite the financial burden being shifted to authors, which would discriminate the global South. Yet, this argument ignores the fact that the global South currently has to rely on illegal (criminal) actions to access the literature. Some argued that they have kids to feed and no tenure yet, so this whole open access thing will have to wait. This ignores the fact that others might equally well have kids to feed and currently don’t have access to literature, data, or worse medical advice, required to maintain a stable research position. Commonly PIs also co-opt students and post-docs, citing concern about promotion. However, in many of these discussions the concerns raised are not community concerns, or only veiled as such…..”

OSU Open Access Monograph Initiative | Ohio State University Libraries

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“The Ohio State University Libraries is partnering with the Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) on an Open Access digital monograph publishing initiative, TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), that will advance the wide dissemination of humanities and humanistic social science scholarship.

Under this initiative, peer-reviewed and professionally edited university press humanities and humanistic social sciences monographs will be funded through partnering universities and published as Open Access digital editions, available at no cost to the public….”

Conservation Biology as an Example of the Dilemmas Facing Scholarly Society Publishing

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“An editorial entitled “Open Access and Academic Imperialism” was published in Conservation Biology on November 9, 2018. The editorial was written by Mark Burgman, the editor-in-chief of the journal, but all of Conservation Biology’s editors and the editors-in-chief of the other two journals published by the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB), Conservation Letters and Conservation Science and Practice signed on.1

The editorial was an attack on Plan S, the funder mandate that will require by 2020 the immediate open access publication of articles based on the research supported by the Plan S funding agencies.2 The editorial did not mince words, “We think this policy is a mistake,” it begins, and continues, “Access to journals for authors and readers is a complex and nuanced topic, encompassing the cost of publication, academic freedom, and the potential for conflicts of interest between editors required to guarantee the quality of papers and authors paying for publication. We focus on a single issue, that of equity of access to publication by readers and authors.”3 The argument is that open access, what Burgman terms the “author-pays” model, disadvantages authors who can now publish at no cost in the “reader-pays” or subscription/paywall model. As the editorial puts it, “Enforcing author-pay models will strengthen the hand of those who have resources and weaken the hand of those who do not have, magnifying the north-south academic divide, creating another structural bias, and further narrowing the knowledge-production system.”4 The editorial supports the hybrid open access model, that is offered by Conservation Biology because authors get to decide whether or not to pay to have their article made open access, thus the ability to pay is not an obstacle for publication. The current version of the Plan S implementation guidelines say that hybrid open access journals are not compliant unless they have a plan to become fully open access within three years. Plan S also looks to constrain the article process charges (APCs) authors pay to have their articles published, but Burgman is unmoved by this provision.

Joona Lehtomäki, Johanna Eklund, Tuuli Toivonen write, in a critical response to the editorial, “We wish to express our disappointment with such a narrow and misleading interpretations of the recent attempts to make academic publishing more open, and what consequences this might have for the global conservation community.”5 They point out that reader-pays models are quite expensive and the expense denies access to the articles by many especially those in the global south that Burgman claims to be supporting. They also note that hybrid models can be seen as double-dipping, charging both authors and readers. They note the high profit margins of the large commercial publishers, including Wiley, the publisher of Conservation Biology, whose reported profit margin is nearly 30%. They end by writing, “In conclusion, we fear the approach advocated by Burgman will only bolster the current publishing system where all researchers and national science funders, irrespective of geographies, are being exploited by a few publishing empires.”6

It would be easy to view this argument as an academic tit-for-tat in a narrow subdiscipline of biology, but I think it is a useful example of the dilemmas facing many scholarly societies as they confront the changes taking place in scholarly publishing. In my view these changes are inevitable and irreversible. They are the result of the change in the technologies that drive scholarly communications. The old models were based on print of paper, and the new models are based on digital networkbased documents. This change is at least as revolutionary as printing, the technological change that made scholarly societies and their subscription journals possible in the first place. Scholarly societies are likely to have a difficult time managing this transition this change in technologies requires. To do so, they will have to resolve at least three dilemmas. The first is ethical; the second concerns the value of society membership, and the third is financial. We will address each below, but first it is useful to provide some background….”