I attended an excellent SPARC OpenCon Librarian Community call on August 10th about publishers, namely Elsevier, Thomson Reuters and Clarivate among others, who have transitioned their revenue streams over the past 30 years from selling published content to selling data products built upon proprietary systems and surveillance technologies. Data tracking in research: aggregation and use or sale of usage data by academic publishers, a white paper from DFG/German Research Foundation, describes the current situation: data tracked, collected and analyzed to develop new businesses to sell data about knowledge and to develop new services on existing platforms. However, data profiles about individuals and institutions could be created, potentially threatening data privacy and independent governance. Tracking tools are ubiquitous. The report also details three types of data mining: third-party data through micro-targeting, bidstream data and port tracking, and publisher spyware. Data is aggregated from different sources (think ScienceDirect, Twitter, Google and Facebook) to create user profiles. There are many reasons to be alarmed by this, including the inaccuracy of the data assigned to people and the chilling effect on academic freedom.
Tag: August 2021
The Lens: a new public good platform covering global patents and scholarly knowledge
With the dangers of proprietary systems and surveillance technologies as a backdrop, the SPARC Impact Story on The Lens caught my attention. The Lens is an online, open, public good platform developed over 20 years by the non-profit Australian organization Cambia which is “committed to its mission of making knowledge open, meaningful, useful and accessible” to individuals and institutions alike. “The Lens serves global patent and scholarly knowledge as a public resource to make science- and technology-enabled problem solving more effective, efficient and inclusive.” It ingests and normalizes metadata from 10 partner organizations, including CrossRef, ORCiD, PubMed, USPTO and WIPO, to form a database of over 225 million scholarly works, 127 million global patent records and 370 million patent sequences. The platform has a strong privacy policy summed up by “Your use of the Lens is your business, not ours.” In addition to its global coverage, it sports a nifty search and filter interface. It’s designed to spur collaboration among research institutions, policy makers, researchers, funders, prospective students, patent offices and publishers, and you can examine use cases for all of them.
Retracted science: reducing its spread
Covid-19 has spurred collaborations and recognition of the value of open science to addressing global health crises. It has also spurred some faulty science (just take a look at Retraction Watch’s list of retracted coronavirus papers). When methodologies, peer review and editorial review processes fail, a publication retraction is one means of invalidating research, but it is not always effective. Retracted papers may not be marked as such, they may remain in personal libraries and citations, and they may continue to be cited. “Recommendations from the Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda Project” is an impressive report with suggestions for addressing these problems:
- Develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information about retractions.
- Recommend a taxonomy of retraction categories/classifications and corresponding retraction metadata that can be adopted by all stakeholders.
- Develop best practices for coordinating the retraction process to enable timely, fair, unbiased outcomes.
- Educate stakeholders about publication correction processes including retraction and about pre- and post-publication stewardship of the scholarly record.
The report is published on the MetaArxiv preprint server and includes a CRediT statement of contributors. Appendix A covers RISRS project outcomes accomplished and in process, with links to papers and data sets. Wide participation in the implementation of recommendations is encouraged.
Research to help libraries break away from Elsevier’s Big Deal journal package
The Elsevier Title Level Pricing: Dissecting the Bowl of Spaghetti from the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication is timely as the UMass Amherst Libraries negotiate a new contract with Elsevier. Due to confidentiality agreements and variables by institution, pricing is opaque and a fair market value for each title is difficult to ascertain. By analyzing Elsevier journal pricing data provided by 5 academic libraries, the authors examine how Elsevier sets its pricing on individual journal titles for libraries that are leaving “Big Deal” packages in favor of individual journal subscriptions. They found significant variations in how final prices were determined for each institution which resulted in a range of average list prices and average cost per journal. Despite Elsevier’s pricing discrimination, each institution gained significant savings – an average of $889,400 – by moving from their Big Deal to a collection of individual journal subscriptions. This study provides other institutions who are negotiating with Elsevier data upon which to benchmark their calculations for better pricing and terms.
A new open access book model from Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press (CUP) is testing a new model, “Flip It Open,” to make books openly available after they have sold enough copies to achieve a revenue threshold. CUP has selected 28 titles for this program based on editorial conversations with authors. The books will be sold through CUP’s usual channels. Once each title has reached £8,000 in revenue, it will be made open access on the Cambridge Core platform. At that time a low cost paperback of the title will also be published. Both the digital and paperback versions of the book will include a list of libraries who have purchased the title to contribute to its conversion to open access. This model frees authors from paying fees and relies on libraries’ customary purchases to transition a publication to open access. The pilot will last 18 months and be assessed at its conclusion.
Helping faculty use their open education work to gain tenure or promotion
Time is a limited resource and the uptake of open scholarship in academia is dependent on recognition of the efforts invested in it. Open Education in Promotion, Tenure, and Faculty Development was produced through the Iowa OER project to help faculty present their work with open educational resources in ways that will be recognized for promotion and tenure (P&T). P&T criteria generally include assessment of teaching, research and service. This resource provides a rubric of OER activities and the evidence that matches the P&T criterion. It also outlines a rationale and strategy for gaining recognition of OER work in P&T requirements, advocacy that has been well done by the UMass Amherst Libraries OER Team. In fact the UMass Amherst Provost Annual Promotion and Tenure Memo is cited as one of three policies that addresses OERs for P&T. The rubric presented in this paper can help faculty make their cases.