Category: Open infrastructure

The U.S. ORCID Consortium is five!

To commemorate the fifth anniversary of the formation of the U.S. ORCID Community through Lyrasis, Scholarly Kitchen interviewed Sheila Rabun, the original ORCID U.S. Community Specialist and now Program Leader for Persistent Identifier Communities for Lyrasis. ORCID plays a key role in enabling researchers to efficiently share their research works throughout the scholarly communication ecosystem. In 2018 the U.S. Community came under the administration of Lyrasis when the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the Greater Western Library Alliance and the NorthEast Research Libraries merged with Lyrasis to form a stronger organization to advance the adoption of ORCID and provide a community of practice. The ORCID US Consortium is now one of 26 consortium worldwide. They provide ORCID related webinars, showcases of integrations and best practices, member support and community resources. They also offer a “ORCID Workshop for Researchers.” 

From the perspective of this member library, the community has been a very important resource. Sheila named challenges that we as a university face as well: individual researchers not using their ORCID iD and ORCID record, and lack of ORCID API integration in the many software systems being used in the research ecosystem. The outlook for ORCID adoption and use by individual researchers and U.S. institutions is more promising as the NSPM-33 (National Security Presidential Memorandum 33) and the recent White House Office of Science and Technology Policy OSTP memo are implemented. Persistent identifiers, including ORCID, are key elements of FAIR research information exchange which benefit scientific communities around the world.

Visit the UMass Amherst Libraries ORCID guide for more information about getting and using an ORCID ID, and contact us with any questions.

CrossRef as source metadata for literature in the arts and humanities

For those seeking citations for literature in the arts and humanities, the most prominent tools have limitations of discipline, language, geographic and/or open availability. The authors of “Crossref as a bibliographic discovery tool in the arts and humanities” investigate CrossRef as a potential source of literature on the arts and humanities. CrossRef has the advantages of being an open source, community-governed, non-profit and globally adopted platform for sharing research objects. Its mission is to make “research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.” The authors examine Dimensions, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Scopus and Web of Science as potential sources of research in the arts and humanities. Google Scholar has the most comprehensive coverage and is free to use, but these researchers dismissed it for lack of widespread use. Web of Science and Scopus are both large and widely used, though their coverage tilts towards English language, STEM research produced in the Global North. Ultimately the authors choose to compare CrossRef with Scopus using the European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH Plus) journal title list as the basis for subject comparison because CrossRef does not include subject metadata.

The authors found that CrossRef covered more ERIH Plus journals than Scopus (80% to 49%) and better coverage of journals published in Eastern and Southern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. They note the significance of this in the arts and humanities where research often has a regional or national focus. The disadvantages of CrossRef as a tool come through in the metadata available. The lack of subject metadata is a major drawback for any search that doesn’t begin with a known citation. Reference linking and cited-by tools depend on publishers depositing reference metadata with articles, and the study found that only half the journals have article reference lists. This should improve as CrossRef required publishers to make reference lists open in 2022. The inclusion of abstracts and author information also varied depending on language of the document. The study authors conclude that CrossRef has its strengths in coverage for the arts and humanities, but also has its problems as a discovery tool. They lay the responsibility for this with publishers and encourage further study of publisher motivations and practices for sharing metadata.

Examining the role of governance in scholarly communication and open research

A recent Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) blog post, “Good governance: Investigating models in scholarly communication and open science,” offers a community governance framework specifically for scholarly communication and open research infrastructures that breeds transparency, accountability and trust. As academics and scholarly communication practitioners struggle to share research outputs through unfettered channels, attention to the controlling mechanisms of undergirding platforms is timely. In this context:

…governance structures that empower a broad and diverse group of community stakeholders to meaningfully impact the strategic planning and management of infrastructure providers are urgently needed to move beyond the parroting of shareholder and market-driven models prevalent in the for-profit industry and realize a true “commoning” of open research infrastructure.

Key characteristics are established organizational structures that de-centralize decision-making; codified processes for how the organization operates; and codified organizational vision and norms. Good governance must be an early consideration for a developing organization, it must be intentional and rules-based, and it must be an embedded process that continually responds to change.

The report, “Community Governance in Scholarly Communication” offers a rationale for good governance and detailed explanations of its characteristics.

Humanities Commons to expand to STEM education research

Michigan State University announced it has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to build out its open-source Humanities Commons platform to establish a Commons that focuses on STEM education research. Established in December 2016, the Humanities Commons currently facilitates collaboration among thousands of humanities scholars and practitioners around the world through discussion forums, open access publication of scholarly works, profiles, networks and a robust search and discovery platform. It is a not-for-profit platform operating under a shared governance model. The Humanities Commons is free for anyone to join and use.

The NSF Award describes this new STEM Commons as a “Discipline-Based Education Research plus (DBER+) Commons” that will “…build consensus around and capacity for open science, the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) practices, principles, and guidelines for use in undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, graduate, and postdoctoral science education research activities.” Other goals include advancing quality control of metadata for research products, stewardship practices, interoperability, reproducibility, sustainability, equity, and democratization of access to research data.” This is a $1.2 million, three year grant starting January 1st, 2023.

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.

Budapest Open Access Initiative 20 Years Later

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) issued its original declaration in February 2002 and UMass Amherst was a signatory. It gave us a working definition of open access we still use:

By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration, February 14, 2002

The original goal of BOAI was open access to peer reviewed journal literature. In the ensuing 20 years, that goal has broadened in several respects. The BOAI 20th Anniversary Recommendations recognize the growth of OA published research, repositories, new journals and greater consideration of policies, funding models, peer review, infrastructure and barriers placed on authors on the basis of financial limitations. Upon review of its history BOAI realized “…that OA is not an end in itself, but a means to other ends, above all, to the equity, quality, usability, and sustainability of research.”

In clarifying these other goals, BOAI 20 issued 4 new recommendations, succinctly put:

1. Host OA research on open infrastructure. Host and publish OA texts, data, metadata, code, and other digital research outputs on open, community-controlled infrastructure. Use infrastructure that minimizes the risk of future access restrictions or control by commercial organizations. Where open infrastructure is not yet adequate for current needs, develop it further.

2. Reform research assessment and rewards to improve incentives. Adjust research assessment practices for funding decisions and university hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. Eliminate disincentives for OA and create positive new incentives for OA.

3. Favor inclusive publishing and distribution channels that never exclude authors on economic grounds. Take full advantage of OA repositories and no-APC journals (“green” and “diamond” OA). Move away from article processing charges (APCs).

4. When we spend money to publish OA research, remember the goals to which OA is the means. Favor models which benefit all regions of the world, which are controlled by academic-led and nonprofit organizations, which avoid concentrating new OA literature in commercially dominant journals, and which avoid entrenching models in conflict with these goals. Move away from read-and-publish agreements.

Below each of these recommendations are several suggestions for further consideration, along with references to other useful guidelines and tools. BOAI 20 readily acknowledges unintended consequences of the original OA movement, specifically the consolidated control of scholarly research among existing for-profit publishers according to Global North norms, and seeks to remedy them. Its new emphasis on open infrastructure and shared governance is welcomed. BOAI 20 remains focused on research articles and pre-prints, though it gives a nod to other OA research outputs, e.g. data, metadata, protocols, books, code, courseware, standards, peer review, etc. These recommendations are a welcomed update and guide.

Surveillance technologies and patron privacy: what can libraries do?

Commercial publisher practices of employing tracking technologies to collect and sell user data have been fairly widely addressed (see “tracking tools” post), and Emily Cukier recently summarized the issues for libraries in “What the Vendor Saw: Digital Surveillance in Libraries.” Commercial publishers, such as Thomson Reuters, the RELX Group, Clarivate, Wiley and others, are incentivized to make money, and they have expanded their revenue sources from the published content itself (subscription fees, author processing charges) to user data which they monetize in different ways.

Aside from the financial implications of extracting more revenue from libraries and their users, libraries’ reliance on these publisher platforms to deliver content conflicts with a fundamental tenet of the American Library Association’s Code of Ethics:

We protect each library user’s right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.

ALA Code of Ethics, #3

Code that tracks both a specific item of content and its user has potential and real chilling effects on intellectual freedom. Aggregated data that informs policy and practices can also “bake in” existing biases and inequities that further disadvantage marginalized communities.

So what can libraries do to protect patron privacy? A first step is to ensure that providers have clear, accessible and easily findable privacy policies. Another is to draw attention to these policies and their implications. Libraries should also make provider policies and practices a part of their contracts. Cukier cites ALA’s privacy best practice guides, including one on vendors and privacy that offers checklists for what should (e.g. security standards, disclosure to outside parties, how data is encrypted and stored) and should not (e.g. vagueness, lack of definition, reserved rights to monitor users) be in contracts. The Library Freedom Project also offers privacy resources, including a Vendor Privacy Scorecard and Privacy Audit Worksheet.

Finally, Cukier references an interview with Felix Rada from the Society for Civil Rights and the four aspects he says are important for contracts with external service providers:

  • Bid so that different companies have to compete
  • Avoid “lock-in effects” such as proprietary platforms that leave libraries permanently dependent on a specific provider
  • Let licenses allow unlimited further use on any platform, for any purpose
  • Prohibit search tracking at the level of individual researchers and run software in-house wherever possible.

Librarians and researchers will recognize these publisher practices. Ultimately Rada says, “Universities and libraries should preferably completely avoid these contracts and invest the money in their own infrastructure.” He advocates for open access and open science built on publicly-aligned infrastructure.

Sustaining open content and infrastructure: views from research libraries

Academic research libraries are among the stakeholders – with scholars, funders, professional societies and public policy experts – with a mission to widely disseminate research and scholarship. Many believe that open content and infrastructure are critical means to unfettered distribution and beneficial impact. The Association of Research Libraries’ recent report, Research Library Issues, no. 302 (2021): Sustaining Open Content and Infrastructure, delves into three aspects of open scholarship ecosystems: open persistent identifiers, digital accessibility planning, and standardized data about open scholarly infrastructure use and funding. If these terms and acronyms sound vaguely familiar, this report will give you context: PIDs, DOI, ORCiD ID, ROR, APIs, DMP, HTML, EPUB, and PDF, WCAG, Accessible EPUB3, PDF U/A, captioning, 2.5% commitment, SCIP, SCOSS, COAR and more! The report gives rationale, history and current standards or initiatives for each of these. It doesn’t break new ground, but it does highlight what the Association of Research Libraries deems in need of urgent attention.