“Publications Router, the service from Jisc that adds research articles automatically to repositories, is now fully interoperable with Haplo Repository, an open-source repository and research information management system. This means that the Router service is now available to you if your institution uses Haplo and is a Jisc member….”
Monthly Archives: September 2020
Wikipedia and the End of Open Collaboration?
“Wikipedia’s incredible success masks a more complex story. In fact, not even Wikipedia has been able to maintain a stable community of volunteers over the past two decades. Figure 1 shows the number of “active” contributors to eight of the largest language versions of Wikipedia over time. The top left panel shows English Wikipedia’s explosive contributor growth through March 2007 and its transition into a long, slow period of decline. The other panels show similar patterns across the seven largest Wikipedia language versions measured by contributor base. Readership and other uses of Wikipedia have increased steadily over the period shown. As scholars of open collaboration and as concerned contributors to, and users of, Wikipedia, these dynamics have been the center of much of our research over the last decade.
Although the death of Wikipedia has been foretold many times, the dynamics playing out in the graphs above imply that long-term decline in contributors may be undermining the project from within in important ways. As the contributor bases of most of the large Wikipedia language versions shrink over time, fewer editors means reduced capacity to cover new topics and to maintain high quality content. What future do these projects have? What explains the patterns illustrated in Figure 1? What should Wikipedia and proponents of open collaborations and knowledge do? …”
Could you be more specific? Preregistering analysis methods…
Work in Progress: First steps towards open science
An interview with Heather Piwowar, Co-founder, Open Research, Canada | Zenodo
“This is one of a series of interviews to share insights into the sustainability of open infrastructure services.
These interviews were conducted in the Spring/Summer of 2020. This is an Invest in Open Infrastructure Project: https;//investinopen.org.
This work is supported by Open Society Foundations and SPARC Europe, in collaboration with Invest in Open Infrastructure.
For more on this work see https://sparceurope.org/ioiinterviews …”
10 Key Interviews – SPARC Europe
Just lauched: 2 of 10 in-depth interviews with #OSinfrastructure services—Our Research & REDALYC. Dig in to discover what essential lessons these services have learned on their journey to sustainability.
This is an Invest in Open Infrastructure Project.
India pushes bold ‘one nation, one subscription’ journal-access plan
“The Indian government is pushing a bold proposal that would make scholarly literature accessible for free to everyone in the country. The government wants to negotiate with the world’s biggest scientific publishers to set up nationwide subscriptions, rather than many agreements with individual institutions that only scholars can use, say researchers consulting for the government….”
Improving data access democratizes and diversifies science | PNAS
Abstract: The foundation of the scientific method rests on access to data, and yet such access is often restricted or costly. We investigate how improved data access shifts the quantity, quality, and diversity of scientific research. We examine the impact of reductions in cost and sharing restrictions for satellite imagery data from NASA’s Landsat program (the longest record of remote-sensing observations of the Earth) on academic science using a sample of about 24,000 Landsat publications by over 34,000 authors matched to almost 3,000 unique study locations. Analyses show that improved access had a substantial and positive effect on the quantity and quality of Landsat-enabled science. Improved data access also democratizes science by disproportionately helping scientists from the developing world and lower-ranked institutions to publish using Landsat data. This democratization in turn increases the geographic and topical diversity of Landsat-enabled research. Scientists who start using Landsat data after access is improved tend to focus on previously understudied regions close to their home location and introduce novel research topics. These findings suggest that policies that improve access to valuable scientific data may promote scientific progress, reduce inequality among scientists, and increase the diversity of scientific research.
Job Application for Director of Product, Anti-Disinformation at Wikimedia Foundation
“The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Director of Product Management to design and implement our anti-disinformation program. This unique position will have a global impact on preventing Disinformation through Wikipedia and our other Wikimedia projects. You will gain a deep understanding of the ways in which our communities have fought disinformation for the last two decades and how this content is used globally. You will work cross-functionality with Legal, Security, Research and other teams at the Foundation and imagine and design solutions that enable our communities to achieve our Vision: a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge….”
500 signatures collected and no sign of slowing down.. – Campaign to investigate the academic ebook market
“We have now collected and published 500 signatures to the open letter. This is a phenomenal result given this is only the first “working” day of the campaign. To quote one respondent “This evidences the current impasse with ebook acquisition in HE libraries. Review and culture shift is definitely required to drive change”
We all want to support our students as best we can. It is unacceptable and distressing that we cannot even provide the basics to our students due to the over-commodification of information and gross profiteering….”
Myth-busting: DOAJ is run and owned by publishers – DOAJ News Service
“Common misconceptions are that DOAJ exists purely to benefit publishers and that DOAJ is owned by publishers. In reality, DOAJ is 100% independent and the majority (82%) of its funding is from public organisations….”
As Universities Switch to Online Teaching, Digital Collections of Libraries and Publishers Take Centerstage | Open Research Community
“The importance of Open Access for university libraries and academic publishers is slated to increase, as printed books and in-person access become deemphasized in the COVID-19 context….
In North America, the pandemic onset has accelerated the evolution of university libraries toward closer involvement with supporting the digital access needs of students and researchers. On the one hand, this has spurred the launch of publisher-led projects targeted at the higher education market. On the other hand, scholarly publishers, such as ProQuest, make extra efforts to integrate Open Access into the panoply of their offerings that span both paywalled and freely accessible content (Enis, 2020).
In this respect, Open Access books and resources are likely to demand less copyright compliance management than their closed access counterparts. Additionally, Open Access does not involve the access uncertainty that free access usually does, as journal and book publishers wind down their free access deals with the presence of COVID-19 becoming the new normal. In this context, renewable subscription models gain in uptake, as vendors factor in library budget shortfalls into their product structures (Enis, 2020)….”
Shared Investment in OSF Sustainability
“We launched the Open Science Framework (OSF) in 2012 as infrastructure to support our mission to change the research culture toward openness, integrity, and reproducibility. With OSF, our goal is to make rigor and transparency enhancing behaviors possible, easy, and efficient to ease onboarding of researchers who are responding to shifting cultural norms, incentives, and policies promoting open research. Like many other service providers in the open research community, we have been amazed at the enthusiasm and pace of the community adopting open research. For example, our user base has grown non-linearly every year and recently hit 250,000 registered users….
Google provides hosting services for OSF, and the bill for storage and hosting has been increasing an average of 5% per month, every month. At this rate, within a few years, the entire budget for the Center for Open Science would be going to Google.
COS’s sustainability model begins with its $250,000 preservation fund, which ensures data hosted on OSF will remain should COS ever close its doors. We also actively collaborate with groups such as Internet Archive to distribute and steward long-term access to open research data by implementing sustainable infrastructure for libraries, open repositories, and other data curators….
Starting November 3, 2020, OSF will limit the storage capacity for private projects to 5 GB of OSF Storage, and 50 GB for public projects. Please take a moment to learn more and review what these storage changes may mean for you, your collaborators, and your existing storage workflows….”
The ESM Item Repository
Clarivate Collaboration with Open Access Monitor Germany to Provide Web of Science Data Across DACH region
” Clarivate Plc (NYSE:CCC), a global leader in providing trusted information and insights to accelerate the pace of innovation, is supporting the Open Access Monitor (OA Monitor), Germany with the provision of Web of Science™ publication, grant and funding data to increase the impact of scientific scholarship and to enable more equitable participation in research. Clarivate™ will provide weekly customised data from the Web of Science covering the publication literature for the DACH region (which includes Germany, Switzerland and Austria).
Supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and managed by Forschungszentrum Jülich, the OA Monitor provides evaluations of both the volume and financing of publications at federal, state and institutional level in the DACH region. The ability to connect the corresponding author data from the Web of Science with the publication fee information sourced by OA Monitor will have particularly broad implications for the German academic library community. The data will also help policy makers gauge the status of the transformation to Open Access (OA). …”