Month: June 2022

Champions of open access books through reliable usage data

The value proposition peddled by academic publishers relies on usage as a metric to justify library investment in a research output commodity, whether it be an online journal, book or other research output unit. In subscription or paywalled platforms, providers “count” the times and ways (e.g. downloads, views) content is accessed through proprietary systems that authorize and authenticate users by their payment or their affiliation with an institution that has paid for access on their behalf. In an open access environment, proprietary systems are not in place to count when the “gates” are opened and closed and on whose behalf.

The OA Book Usage Data Trust was established in 2021 “to champion strategies for the improved publication and management of open-access books by exchanging reliable usage data in a trusted, equitable, and community-governed way.” Initially funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project team has done the groundwork on the data supply chain, use cases and technical requirements for a diverse, global, secure, community-governed for OA book usage data exchange. The next phase of the work is to develop, build and test international data spaces based on the Trust’s guiding principles:

  • data exchange focused
  • collaborative
  • community informed
  • sustainable
  • responsive
  • inclusive
  • ethical
  • transparent.

The OA Book Usage Data Trust offers the potential for expanding how scholars and scholarly communities measure the value of book publications. It’s work to date is available through Zenodo.

The peer review crisis

Problems with peer review, and efforts to address those problems, have been regularly chronicled in this space. This month Inside Higher Education has expanded on and elevated the systemic problems in “The Peer-Review Crisis.” The latest problem is the shortage of available reviewers across all fields which has become especially acute in 2022. The number of papers submitted to journals has increased in Covid-related fields, and editors are unable to find people to review them. The issue is so significant that research publication is delayed and journal editors are resigning as a result of their higher workload. What was a fragile system prior to Covid is now teetering on collapse.

The article explores potential remedies, including paying fees for reviews, institutional recognition for peer reviewers, increasing the number of tenured faculty with professional service obligations, reducing or eliminating “revise and re-submit” practices and curbing the proliferation of journals. Some academics are refusing to provide review services to for-profit publishers without compensation. A couple of surveys suggest that money is less a motivator to incentivize grant proposal and journal article review than formal recognition of the work by institutions.

Consequences of the peer review crisis include but are not limited to delays in distribution of validated research and to the careers of scholars whose advancement depends on publications. Ultimately the problems stem from labor shortages and unfair labor practices. Ryan Cordell of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign notes: “…the real answers are, like they are across labor sectors in 2022: hire more people, give them fairer contracts, reduce exploitative workloads…real solutions would require labor solidarity across academic tracks & ranks because everything else is a bandaid.”

Improving research and expanding open peer review

eLife, a “publish, review, curate” open access, non-profit life sciences and medicine publisher, and PREreview, a collaborative, open peer review platform, are furthering their collaboration to engage more scholars from communities around the world in preprint review. Together they’ve offered peer review training programs for early-career researchers in a joint project with AfricArXiv, Eider Africa and TCC Africa. Their goal is to improve and strengthen research globally by engaging multiple perspectives from traditionally marginalized communities in preprint review. Both eLife and PREreview operate open access and open source platforms, and they are integrating them with each other and with ORCID, so that any researcher with an ORCID ID can request and share reviews to any preprint with a digital object identifier (DOI). These are welcomed efforts to build more robust technical and human partnerships in service of open science.

Reviews and a catalog of digital humanities projects

Reviews in Digital Humanities (RDH) is a growing treasure trove of digital scholarship. Starting in January 2020, the monthly issues include special issues on digital pedagogies, Borderlands, LatinX, Jewish, sound, Black and other digital humanities (DH) foci. The editors “particularly encourage submission of digital scholarship in critical ethnic, African diaspora, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, and postcolonial studies.” Each project reviewed becomes part of a registry through which one can browse projects by title, time period, field of study, or topic or method. For examples of the range of digital projects covered, read about Radio Free Stein: critical sound project on Gertrude Stein’s dramatic works, the Indian Community Cookbooks Project, GeoNewsMiner, or On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance.

Organized as an open access journal, each issue has notes from the editors covering the state of RDH, as well as scope notes for the issue. Each review is published with a Creative Commons license and follows a template: project description; project’s people, content and technical foundations; description of project team and their expertise; description of audience; and description in context of professional guidelines and relevance for scholarly discipline. Review processes and content are thoroughly documented, with recognition of the labor contributed by reviewers as well as the role of the review DH project contributors’ tenure and promotion cases and future funding. RDH is published on an open-source, community-led publishing platform, PubPub. Sarah Lynn Patterson, Assistant Professor in UMass Amherst’s Department of English, currently serves on the editorial board.