Monthly Archives: February 2023

The importance of copyright and shared norms for credit in Open Educational Resources

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Open Educational Resources (OER) are reducing barriers to education while allowing creators the opportunity to share their work with the world and continue owning copyright of their work. To support new authors and adaptors in the OER space, we provide an overview of common considerations that creators and adaptors of OER should make with respect to issues related to copyright in the context of OER. Further, and importantly, a challenge in the OER space is ensuring that original creators receive appropriate credit for their work, while also respecting the credit of those who have adapted work. Thus, in addition to providing important considerations when it comes to the creation of open access works, we propose shared norms for ensuring appropriate attribution and credit for creators and adaptors of OER.

871-22-R Research Data Support Manager – Jobs at St. George’s

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“St George’s is a world-leading healthcare research University, and many of our translational programmes and projects benefit from research data management. We are seeking an enthusiastic, experienced individual to lead and deliver our already established research data management service which includes the storage, preservation, and discoverability of the Institution’s research data assets. 

You will have either a background in research (as a programme manager, or involvement in research projects) or in open science (for example as part of a library or research office team). Your excellent interpersonal skills will be invaluable as you engage proactively with St George’s community of researchers in the provision of training and guidance and raising awareness of the support available. The post-holder will work closely with other Library teams, maintain St George’s Figshare data repository and other research data management systems, and will work in partnership with the institution’s stakeholders, including the Joint Research & Enterprise Service and Information Governance staff to ensure a cohesive and researcher-centric service is provided….”

3rd UN Open Science Conference Recap: Open Science Central to Achieving UN Sustainability Goals – SPARC

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“From mitigating climate change to preparing for the next pandemic, so many pressing challenges demand global collaboration. Yet many researchers don’t have access to the latest scientific discoveries or avenues to contribute their solutions. This is prompting a growing call for open science practices and a more equitable knowledge sharing ecosystem in which librarians can play a key role.

Participants in the 3rd United Nations Open Science Conference February 8-10 called for policy and culture change to democratize the record of science. There was a sense of urgency among the 100 people gathered in New York and 2,000 online at the hybrid event for research to be shared across borders in order to accelerate progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The conference emphasized three priorities: equity in open scholarship; reforming scientific publishing; and strengthening the science-policy-society interface….”

New partnership to promote open data awareness and participation in Africa | STM Publishing News

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“Figshare – a world leader in digital infrastructure that supports open research, and part of Digital Science – has formed a new partnership with the African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA), which is committed to open data and information sharing across Africa….”

ChronosHub Agreement Management: Open for Publishers To Take Control of Agreements – ChronosHub

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“Publisher customers subscribing to the ChronosHub platform can now access the new agreement management feature, where agreement information can be maintained. Moving away from Excel spreadsheets and into a platform enables publishers to manage the complexity of business rules efficiently. Import tools, bulk editing, and immediate editing rights make the process much faster and updates easy….

 The built-in platform flexibility allows publishers to cater for the variation in agreements with institutions or consortia. For example, different deciding dates when an article is counted as part of an agreement – this could be the date of submission, date of acceptance or even the final publication date. 

 

In addition, individual journals or collections of journals can be assigned to each agreement, as well as specific licenses, and of course, the business rules around required payment – I.e., whether an agreement covers the full APC cost, a set APC, or a discount on the APC, and if a cap applies….”

China and Open Access – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“Based on the agreed principles that I just referenced, the report is written and organized around four themes — and the findings and takeaways are different for each. 

The first – “Open access as practiced globally” – is a primer on open access publishing. This will be invaluable for those working in the scholarly communications community in China as an introduction to open access as practiced globally. And, since it may be a unique report bringing what we know together so concisely, it could be useful for colleagues to read anywhere in the world. Whilst comprehensive in its coverage, it illustrates well the steady and accelerating march of Gold open access globally. 

The second section – “Open access publishing in China” – includes a large amount of data on publishing activity in China and references the various policies and initiatives put in place over time to accelerate open science in the country. The highest profile journals, whether published solely by publishing houses in China or in partnership with international publishers, are similarly launching or moving at the same pace to Gold open access as we see in the global statistics. There is also what we could call a domestic publishing industry, publishing in both Chinese and English languages. The publishing models for open access for these publishers are different, as described in the report.

The third section – “Research integrity in open access publishing” – covers the major areas of this work for publishers internationally, and sets up a sort of dialogue between STM and CAST on what is happening in China. As we all know, these are critical issues and the report shows how China is grappling with many of the same problems as global publishers.

And finally, we have case examples of collaborations by some STM members with publishers, institutions, and journals in China. This is not a comprehensive directory of activity and the submissions were included as submitted. We chose a range of publishing houses to illustrate some different ways in which collaborations have been established, including commercial publishers, learned societies, and university presses. The takeaway here is that there are many exciting partnerships underway for the benefit of researchers in China and globally.”

Creating an Open Textbook: The Science of Sleep – Open Education Network Blog

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“With the goal of creating a new textbook for her Kapi‘olani Science of Sleep course, Sheryl pondered how she might capture her teaching style in written word, and began contacting commercial textbook publishers in 2018.

 

Sheryl’s plans changed, however, thanks to an impromptu conversation with colleague Sunyeen “Sunny” Pai. Sunny is the Kapi‘olani Digital Initiatives Librarian who, as Sheryl writes in her acknowledgments, “opened my eyes to the social justice impact of OER and the myriad benefits of zero-cost textbooks.” …”

Explore how Europeana Subtitled increased access to audiovisual heritage | Europeana Pro

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“Europeana Subtitled gathered seven major national broadcasters and audiovisual archives from seven European countries to provide high-quality audiovisual materials to Europeana. The project combined AI technology and audiovisual cultural heritage to produce high-quality closed captions and English subtitles for local video content, and created a platform to allow organisations to run crowdsourcing campaigns to revise captions using state of the art editing tools. 

Europeana Subtitled also supported cultural heritage professionals with the use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) technologies in the cultural sector through an online training suite consisting of video tutorials, documentation and guidelines, and worked with teachers and museum educators to create learning resources with audiovisual content. 

Finally, the project engaged audiences through crowdsourcing events and editorial activities on the Europeana website, in particular, through the ‘Broadcasting Europe’ page and ‘Mass-media and propaganda’ online exhibition….

The Subtitled content is publicly available and videos can be enjoyed directly on the Europeana website, while you can also access freely reusable content with more than 3,000 records in the Public Domain….”

WorldFAIR project

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“In the WorldFAIR project, CODATA ( the Committee on Data of the International Science Council) and RDA (the Research Data Alliance), work with a set of 11 disciplinary and cross-disciplinary case studies to advance implementation of the FAIR principles and, in particular, to improve interoperability and reusability of digital research objects, including data. Particular attention is paid to the articulation of an interoperability framework for each case study and research domain.”

WorldFAIR Project (D13.1) Cultural Heritage Mapping Report: Practices and policies supporting Cultural Heritage image sharing platforms | Zenodo

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Abstract:  Deliverable 13.1 for the WorldFAIR Project’s Cultural Heritage Work Package (WP13) outlines current practices guiding online digital image sharing by institutions charged with providing care and access to cultural memory, in order to identify how these practices may be adapted to promote and support the FAIR Principles for data sharing.

The report has been compiled by the Digital Repository of Ireland as a key information resource for developing the recommendations forthcoming in Deliverable 13.2. The DRI is Ireland’s national repository for the arts, humanities and social sciences. A Working Group of cultural heritage professionals has been invited to contribute feedback.

There are well-established standards and traditions driving the various approaches to image sharing in the sector, both local and global, which influence everything from the creation of digital image files, their intellectual organisation and level of description, to statements of rights governing use. Additionally, there are technological supports and infrastructures that have emerged to facilitate these practices which have significant investment and robust community support. These practices and technologies serve the existing communities of users well, primarily the needs of government, business and higher education, as well as the broader general public. Recommendations for adapting established collections delivery mechanisms to facilitate the use of cultural heritage images as research data would ideally not supersede or duplicate processes that also serve these other communities of users, and any solutions proposed in the context of the WorldFAIR Project must be made in respect of these wider contexts for image sharing.

New from WorldFAIR! Cultural Heritage Mapping Report: ‘Practices and policies supporting Cultural Heritage image sharing platforms’ – out now – CODATA, The Committee on Data for Science and Technology

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“New WorldFAIR Project Deliverable 13.1 ‘Cultural Heritage Mapping Report: Practices and Policies supporting Cultural Heritage image sharing platforms’ outlines current practices guiding online digital image sharing by institutions charged with providing care and access to cultural memory, in order to identify how these practices may be adapted to promote and support the FAIR principles for data sharing.

This report looks closely at the policies and best practices endorsed by a range of professional bodies and institutions representative of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (the ‘GLAMs’) which facilitate the acquisition and delivery, discovery, description, digitisation standards and preservation of digital image collections. The second half of the report further highlights the technical mechanisms for aggregating and exchanging images that have already produced a high degree of image interoperability in the sector with a survey of six national and international image sharing platforms: DigitalNZ, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Europeana, Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive and Flickr….”

DataCite launches Global Access Program with support from CZI – DataCite Blog

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“DataCite is proud to announce the launch of our Global Access Program (GAP), which is designed to increase access to and adoption of PID services and infrastructure for communities beyond the Global North. The program is made possible by Grant 2022-316573 from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative….

The Global Access Program is based on three pillars: increasing community awareness, supporting and developing infrastructure, and lowering financial barriers to access. These pillars were defined and prioritized by a working group of DataCite members, including current DataCite members from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. As a first step, through the Global Access Program, we are pleased to be hiring three new team members based in Africa, Latin America and Middle East or Asia. We believe that staff based in these regions will be best placed to understand the regional needs and opportunities, as well as delivering and refining the program….

DataCite is committed to taking a proactive role in supporting communities beyond the Global North to develop and adopt open infrastructure through a comprehensive and collaborative approach. As part of this commitment, our goal is to actively address the different challenges that currently prevent organizations from fully participating in and benefiting from our infrastructure services. …”

 

 

Conference Calls 2023 | Open Science Conference

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“This call focuses on inspiring talks given by international experts and upcoming talents that discuss Open Science and its recent developments from a wider and forward-looking perspective.

We invite you to submit an abstract for a conference talk covering topics including (but not limited to):

Open Science in research evaluation
Open Science and reproducible research
Open Science and civic science education
Open Science in times of crises and geopolitical developments
Open Science and discipline-specific challenges and perspectives (e.g. humanities)
Open Science and global research equity…”

Shutting down our preprint bots | Feb 21, 2023 | Liberate Science

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“We started running Twitter bots in 2017, when Liberate Science was only a side project. First we launched the PsyArxiv bot. Later, we launched bots for the MetaArxiv (2020) and EdArxiv (2021) preprint servers. Six years in, we are shutting down these Twitter bots. You may have already noticed they are no longer posting any new preprints since February 13th (previously 9th). There are several things that motivate us to stop the preprint bots’ operations. It includes the exodus from Twitter overall; it includes the recent announcement that Twitter API access is no longer free. It includes that the community has taken it upon itself to offer replacement bots on Mastodon.?? We offered preprint bots for free all these years, but that does not mean it was free to run this. We had to run a custom RSS feed service (based on Jeff Spies’ osfpreprints-feed; run on Glitch for $99/year). Automating a bot is free and easy if there is relatively little volume. Especially for PsyArxiv, the amount of preprints grew so rapidly that we had to upgrade our automation and costs went up to ~$600 per year (using Zapier). This is also why the 1,500 free post limit proves too uncertain in the long run….”