Who Owns This Article? Applying Copyright’s Work-Made- for-Hire Doctrine to Librarians’ Scholarship

The  Copyright  Act  of  1976  provides  that  works—including  scholarship—written within  the  scope  of  employment  belong  to  employers.  But  copyright  law  and  actual practices  widely  diverge.  The  academic  community  generally  allows  librarians  to  claim ownership of their writing, even when that ignores copyright law. Mr. Hellyer supports copyright ownership by librarians, and calls for the law and common practices to be harmonized.

URL : http://www.aallnet.org/mm/Publications/llj/LLJ-Archives/vol-108/no-1/2016-2.pdf

The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship

There is an urgent need to improve the infrastructure supporting the reuse of scholarly data. A diverse set of stakeholders—representing academia, industry, funding agencies, and scholarly publishers—have come together to design and jointly endorse a concise and measureable set of principles that we refer to as the FAIR Data Principles.

The intent is that these may act as a guideline for those wishing to enhance the reusability of their data holdings. Distinct from peer initiatives that focus on the human scholar, the FAIR Principles put specific emphasis on enhancing the ability of machines to automatically find and use the data, in addition to supporting its reuse by individuals.

This Comment is the first formal publication of the FAIR Principles, and includes the rationale behind them, and some exemplar implementations in the community.

URL : The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship

Alternative location : http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618

Data Policy Recommendations for Biodiversity Data. EU BON Project Report

There is a strong need for a comprehensive, coherent, and consistent data policy in Europe to increase interoperability of data and to make its reuse both easy and legal. Available single recommendations/guidelines on different topics need to be processed, structured, and unified. Within the context of the EU BON project, a team from the EU BON partners from Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Plazi, and Pensoft has prepared this report to be used as a part of the Data Publishing Guidelines and Recommendations in the EU BON Biodiversity Portal.

The document deals with the issues: (i) Mobilizing biodiversity data, (ii) Removing legal obstacles, (iii) Changing attitudes, (iv) Data policy recommendations and is addressed to legislators, researchers, research institutions, data aggregators, funders, and publishers.

URL : Data Policy Recommendations for Biodiversity Data. EU BON Project Report

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/rio.2.e8458

Identifying and Improving Dataset References in Social Sciences Full Texts

Scientific full text papers are usually stored in separate places than their underlying research datasets. Authors typically make references to datasets by mentioning them for example by using their titles and the year of publication. However, in most cases explicit links that would provide readers with direct access to referenced datasets are missing.

Manually detecting references to datasets in papers is time consuming and requires an expert in the domain of the paper. In order to make explicit all links to datasets in papers that have been published already, we suggest and evaluate a semi-automatic approach for finding references to datasets in social sciences papers.

Our approach does not need a corpus of papers (no cold start problem) and it performs well on a small test corpus (gold standard). Our approach achieved an F-measure of 0.84 for identifying references in full texts and an F-measure of 0.83 for finding correct matches of detected references in the da|ra dataset registry.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.01774v1

Changing Roles of Librarians and Library Technicians

What significant changes are librarians and library technicians experiencing in their roles? A survey put forward across Canada to librarians and library technicians addressing this question was conducted in February 2014. Eight hundred eighty-two responses were obtained from librarians, defined as MLIS graduates, and library technicians, defined as graduates from a two-year library diploma program.

Respondents needed to have been employed in the last two years in these roles and students of either an MLIS or LIT program were also welcome to participate.

The results suggest that both librarians and library technicians perceive their roles as growing in scope and complexity and that the lines of responsibility are blurring. A majority of respondents indicated that they perceive a change in their roles in the past five years and commented on what the perceived changes were.

Librarian and library technician roles may be shifting away from what may be viewed as traditional or clearly defined responsibilities and both librarians and library technicians may be taking on new tasks as well as experiencing task overlap.All library staff will need to be fluid, adaptable, and open to change. Library school curricula and workplace training need to incorporate the development of these competencies.

URL : Changing Roles of Librarians and Library Technicians

Alternative location : https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/3333

Developing Infrastructure to Support Closer Collaboration of Aggregators with Open Repositories

The amount of open access content stored in repositories has increased dramatically, which has created new technical and organisational challenges for bringing this content together. The COnnecting REpositories (CORE) project has been dealing with these challenges by aggregating and enriching content from hundreds of open access repositories, increasing the discoverability and reusability of millions of open access manuscripts.

As repository managers and library directors often wish to know the details of the content harvested from their repositories and keep a certain level of control over it, CORE is now facing the challenge of how to enable content providers to manage their content in the aggregation and control the harvesting process. In order to improve the quality and transparency of the aggregation process and create a two-way collaboration between the CORE project and the content providers, we propose the CORE Dashboard.

URL : https://www.liberquarterly.eu/articles/10138/

Managing open access with EPrints software: a case study

Recent additional open access (OA) requirements for publications by authors at UK higher education institutions require amendments to support mechanisms. These additional requirements arose primarily from the Research Councils UK Open Access Policy, applicable from April 2013, and the new OA policy for Research Excellence Framework  eligibility published in March 2014 and applicable from April 2016.

Further provision also had to be made for compliance with the UK Charities Open Access Fund, the European Union, other funder policies, and internal reporting requirements.

In response, the University of Glasgow has enhanced its OA processes and systems. This case study charts our journey towards managing OA via our EPrints repository. The aim was to consolidate and manage OA information in one central place to increase efficiency of recording, tracking and reporting. We are delighted that considerable time savings and reduction in errors have been achieved by dispensing with spreadsheets to record decisions about OA.

URL : Managing open access with EPrints software: a case study

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.277