Monthly Archives: November 2019

Supreme Court to decide if Georgia code is free to the public

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“On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court will take up that question as the justices consider whether the annotated version of Georgia code is protected under copyright law or should be made available to the public free of charge.

The hotly disputed case, pitting the state against an open records proponent, has caught the attention of the Trump administration, whose lawyers say Georgia’s code should be protected. At the same time, news media and civil rights organizations are also weighing in, contending the public should have unhindered access to the state code….”

Co-creating Open Infrastructure to Support Diversity and Equity

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“To reframe our priorities in this way requires collective will and coordination across regions and institutions to build new kinds of support for resource reallocation. It further requires institutional courage and political will to declare that open, autonomous, and equitable systems are preferred over “prestigious” Euro-centric research systems that continue to undermine other epistemic communities from around the world. It requires that disciplines and societies prioritize who they have been centering in their research, whose voices they’ve been amplifying, and whose they have been silencing. Supporting the status quo while leaving initiatives that reflect epistemic diversity and knowledge equity as second-tier priorities will result in continued entrenchment of status quo inequities and the marginalization of truly innovative, equitable systems….”

We’re open! — Thoughts on building a new home for SMK’s online collection

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“It’s alive. After months (ok years) of discussion, iteration, and intense testing we’ve now opened the digital door to SMK’s new online collection. We are truly thrilled to be able to contribute to SMK [Statens Museum for Kunst]— and openglam — goals of making cultural heritage easily available in friendly, open formats….”

SMK Open | SMK – National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen (Statens Museum for Kunst)SMK – National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen (Statens Museum for Kunst)

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“SMK [Statens Museum for Kunst] in Sølvgade in Copenhagen is an excellent frame for the art collection of the Danish people. But not everybody has easy acces to the physical museum and when you visit the building – and if you see all the artworks on display – you’ll only have experienced 0.7% of the entire collection.

This means there’s an enormous potential in digitizing and making available the collection in digital form. The digital versions obviously can’t replace the original artworks but they can

Be accessed independently of time and space
Be re-used for new work
Be studied in minute details
Be shared
Be inserted in everything from books to research articles to school papers
Be printed on anything from posters to couch cushions

With support from Nordea-fonden the SMK Open project (2016-2020) aims to make the country’s art collection available for free use. Everyone should have the opportunity to explore the world of art on their own terms and draw information from SMK’s large collection of knowledge and additional material. With SMK Open, we’re turning the collection into a giant tool-box full of freely usable building blocks.

The project builds on a vision of making art available and relevant for far more Danes by turning it into a resource and tool that one may bring into one’s own life and use on one’s own terms….”

Open access dell’Università statale di Milano | Scienza in rete

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The article presents the OA journal publishing platform owned and maintained by the University of Milan. All journals are no-fee OA journals and the majority of them deal with humanities.

In the extensive introduction, the key concepts related to OA (including Plan S, transformative agreements, self-archiving, etc.) are discussed.

“Collaborating Across Campus to Advance Open Access Policy Compliance” by Andrew Johnson, Melissa Cantrell et al.

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In 2018, the Data and Scholarly Communication Services Unit (DSCS) at the University of Colorado Boulder began implementing two open access (OA) policy workflows with the aim of increasing content in the institutional repository CU Scholar, expanding awareness of the campus OA policy that was passed in 2015, and decreasing the burden on researchers for participation in the policy. DSCS leveraged collaborative relationships with other library departments and campus units in order to mobilize the data, infrastructure, procedures, and documentation to execute these workflows. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) workflow identifies existing open access publications by CU Boulder faculty and mediates deposit in order to make them available in CU Scholar. The liaison outreach workflow partners with liaison librarians to request from faculty preprints and author’s final manuscripts of publications in which the publisher version may have copyright restrictions. At present, the DOAJ workflow has resulted in 754 articles deposited in CU Scholar, and the liaison outreach workflow has resulted in 91 articles deposited. Each of these workflows pose challenges that have required flexibility, experimentation, and clear communication between stakeholders. This case study, which includes detailed descriptions of both open access policy workflows, initial results, and plans for future implementation, may serve as a guide for other institutions wishing to adopt and/or adapt institutional repository workflows and forge collaborative relationships to further open access initiatives in their local context.

DataTags

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“There are many worthy purposes for sharing data widely. In research, data sharing enables replication and validation of scientific findings and maximizes return on research investment, so it is not surprising that sponsors and publishers expect or mandate the sharing of data where possible. In organizations, data sharing leads to insights on operations and opportunities to improve goods and services. However, data containing sensitive information about individuals or personal data collected under various agreements cannot be shared openly without appropriate safeguards. An extensive body of statutes, regulations, institutional policies, consent forms, data sharing agreements, and common practices govern how sensitive data should be used and disclosed in different contexts. Researchers, institutions and companies that manage and share data must interpret how the various legal requirements and other data privacy and security standards apply to their handling of a given dataset.

DataTags helps data holders navigate these complex issues….”

Open Science Training Handbook | FOSTER

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“A group of fourteen authors came together in February 2018 at the TIB (German National Library of Science and Technology) in Hannover to create an open, living handbook on Open Science training. High-quality trainings are fundamental when aiming at a cultural change towards the implementation of Open Science principles. Teaching resources provide great support for Open Science instructors and trainers. The Open Science training handbook will be a key resource and a first step towards developing Open Access and Open Science curricula and andragogies. Supporting and connecting an emerging Open Science community that wishes to pass on their knowledge as multipliers, the handbook will enrich training activities and unlock the community’s full potential. The handbook is managed in this GitHub repository….”

Big national deals with an open access component – Google Sheets

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This spreadsheet displays information on consortial “big deal” agreements with an open access component.

The information is collected from webpages of the consortium websites, as could be found online.

In addition, some general information about publisher sizes is also displayed, as found on the SciLit website and information about self archving allowances from the Sherpa/RoMEO website.

Cambridge Open Engage

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“The collaborative platform to upload, share and advance your research

Cambridge Open Engage is the new early content platform from Cambridge University Press, designed to provide researchers with the space and resources to connect and collaborate with their communities, and rapidly disseminate early research. The platform is currently under development using a co-creation approach and we’re inviting researchers to actively input to help us shape the features and functionality. Register your interest below to stay up to date and to participate in its progress!…”

US GAO Recommends Actions to Improve Public Access to Research Results – Association of Research Libraries

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“The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released its study, Additional Actions Needed to Improve Public Access to Research Results. The report examines the extent of US agencies’ progress implementing plans to increase public access to federally funded research results (both publications and data), per the 2013 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo directing the development of such plans. The report contains a review of progress across 16 agencies, and issues 37 recommendations for executive action at both the individual agency and interagency level, in such areas as repository development or guidance, requirements for data management plans (DMPs), and compliance checking.

Next month, at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) “Implementing Effective Data Practices” conference, participants—research officers, librarians, tool-builders, and others in the research community—will hear from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy (DOE), and private funding agencies on these issues, including data management plans, repositories, and compliance. ARL is committed to working with the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) on recommendations for intra-institutional workflows and guidelines, and to partnering with the agencies to make publicly funded research outputs findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable….”

Linked Research on the Decentralised Web

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Abstract:  This thesis is about research communication in the context of the Web. I analyse literature which reveals how researchers are making use of Web technologies for knowledge dissemination, as well as how individuals are disempowered by the centralisation of certain systems, such as academic publishing platforms and social media. I share my findings on the feasibility of a decentralised and interoperable information space where researchers can control their identifiers whilst fulfilling the core functions of scientific communication: registration, awareness, certification, and archiving.

The contemporary research communication paradigm operates under a diverse set of sociotechnical constraints, which influence how units of research information and personal data are created and exchanged. Economic forces and non-interoperable system designs mean that researcher identifiers and research contributions are largely shaped and controlled by third-party entities; participation requires the use of proprietary systems.

From a technical standpoint, this thesis takes a deep look at semantic structure of research artifacts, and how they can be stored, linked and shared in a way that is controlled by individual researchers, or delegated to trusted parties. Further, I find that the ecosystem was lacking a technical Web standard able to fulfill the awareness function of research communication. Thus, I contribute a new communication protocol, Linked Data Notifications (published as a W3C Recommendation) which enables decentralised notifications on the Web, and provide implementations pertinent to the academic publishing use case. So far we have seen decentralised notifications applied in research dissemination or collaboration scenarios, as well as for archival activities and scientific experiments.

Another core contribution of this work is a Web standards-based implementation of a clientside tool, dokieli, for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions. dokieli can be used to fulfill the scholarly functions of registration, awareness, certification, and archiving, all in a decentralised manner, returning control of research contributions and discourse to individual researchers.

The overarching conclusion of the thesis is that Web technologies can be used to create a fully functioning ecosystem for research communication. Using the framework of Web architecture, and loosely coupling the four functions, an accessible and inclusive ecosystem can be realised whereby users are able to use and switch between interoperable applications without interfering with existing data.

Technical solutions alone do not suffice of course, so this thesis also takes into account the need for a change in the traditional mode of thinking amongst scholars, and presents the Linked Research initiative as an ongoing effort toward researcher autonomy in a social system, and universal access to human- and machine-readable information?. Outcomes of this outreach work so far include an increase in the number of individuals self-hosting their research artifacts, workshops publishing accessible proceedings on the Web, in-the-wild experiments with open and public peer-review, and semantic graphs of contributions to conference proceedings and journals (the Linked Open Research Cloud).

Some of the future challenges include: addressing the social implications of decentralised Web publishing, as well as the design of ethically grounded interoperable mechanisms; cultivating privacy aware information spaces; personal or community-controlled on-demand archiving services; and further design of decentralised applications that are aware of the core functions of scientific communication.

Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs | Open Access Scholarship / Littérature savante en libre accès

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Abstract – Open access journals have been developing in India for several decades for promoting the visibility of research done in various streams. OA to science has been encouraged by government sponsored repositories of student and doctoral proposals, and numerous Indian journals are distributed with OA. There is a need to build mindfulness among Indian scholastics with respect to publication practices, including OA, and its potential advantages, and use this methodology of distribution at whatever point doable, as in openly supported research. This research also showed that a well doing publisher in India gets acquired by  European publisher Wolters Kluwer and becomes commercialised. The number of journals with “title not found” or “risky URL”, for example leading to a scam website, is surprising as one might assume that the motivation for this publisher’s society, university and commercial partners is that such partnership would result in high quality services. Most Medknow journals do not charge publication fees. The journals with publication fees are increasing the cost up to 50%. For documentation and a link to the underlying dataset, see Morrison et al. (2019).

Library Receives $1M Mellon Grant to Experiment with Digital Collections as Big Data | Library of Congress

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“The Library of Congress has been awarded a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud (CCHC) project, which will pilot ways to combine cutting edge technology and the collections of the largest library in the world, to support digital research at scale. …”