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Collaborating for public access to scholarly publications: A case study of the partnership between the US Department of Energy and CHORUS

Authors : H. Frederick Dylla, Jeffrey Salmon

Key points

The success of the CHORUS and DOE relationship is the result of nearly two decades of interactions between the DOE and a group of scientific publishers.
The relationship between CHORUS and the US federal agencies required understanding of different motivations, operations, and philosophies.
Although achieving public access was simple in principle, it required considerable effort to develop systems that satisfied all parties.
Publishers had been working with federal agencies to achieve open access before the 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, but this helped to create a path for a more fruitful relationship.

Why we publish where we do: Faculty publishing values and their relationship to review, promotion and tenure expectations

Authors : Meredith T. Niles, Lesley A. Schimanski, Erin C. McKiernan, Juan Pablo Alperin

Using an online survey of academics at 55 randomly selected institutions across the US and Canada, we explore priorities for publishing decisions and their perceived importance within review, promotion, and tenure (RPT).

We find that respondents most value journal readership, while they believe their peers most value prestige and related metrics such as impact factor when submitting their work for publication.

Respondents indicated that total number of publications, number of publications per year, and journal name recognition were the most valued factors in RPT.

Older and tenured respondents (most likely to serve on RPT committees) were less likely to value journal prestige and metrics for publishing, while untenured respondents were more likely to value these factors.

These results suggest disconnects between what academics value versus what they think their peers value, and between the importance of journal prestige and metrics for tenured versus untenured faculty in publishing and RPT perceptions.

URL : Why we publish where we do: Faculty publishing values and their relationship to review, promotion and tenure expectations

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228914

Funding Sources for Open Access Article Processing Charges in the Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities in the United States

Authors : Melissa H. Cantrell, Juleah A. Swanson

Article processing charges (APCs) are one method of many to ensure open access to research literature, but studies that explore the funding sources for such payments, especially as related to open access publications in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, have been limited.

This study seeks to understand the range of funding sources that are available and used by faculties in these disciplines to pay for APCs associated with publishing in open access journals, as well as attitudes towards and awareness of available institutional funds that may inflect future engagement with open access publishing.

The authors distributed a survey to faculty who had an open access journal article published in 2017 from three doctoral granting, high research activity universities in the United States.

Twenty-two scholars participated in the final survey, ten of whom indicated that they paid an APC for their publication. While the results cannot make generalizations about funding sources, they do suggest that both the prevalence of APCs as well as attitudes about open access engagement may be influenced by disciplinary self-identification.

This research contributes to discussions around the future of open access funding models as well as to disciplinary outreach regarding APC funding for journal publications.

URL : Funding Sources for Open Access Article Processing Charges in the Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities in the United States

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications8010012

Understanding researcher needs and raising the profile of library research support

Authors : Colin Nickels, Hilary Davis

Researchers at North Carolina State University expect little to no difficulty in discerning how their Library can support their work. At the same time, librarians repeatedly find that researchers are unaware of what our Library has to offer.

Within this context, we embarked on a two-year study to help inform the development of outreach strategies to enable new research engagement opportunities that will scale and, at the same time, help us transform our model of research support strategies and engagement.

We interviewed both librarians and researchers to gain an understanding of researcher needs from both perspectives. The results of the interviews provided a solid grounding for building our awareness of researchers’ behaviors, expectations and workflows as well as presenting a unique picture of both unmet and unarticulated needs.

In this article we summarize our results with a specific focus on findings from the researcher interviews. We share our recommendations for evolving library research support and enhancing outreach strategies to provide an easier starting point for different types of researchers to discover relevant research assets provided by libraries such as ours.

DOI : http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.493

Copyright and the Progress of Science: Why Text and Data Mining Is Lawful

Author : Michael W. Carroll

This Article argues that U.S. copyright law provides a competitive advantage in the global race for innovation policy because it permits researchers to conduct computational analysis — text and data mining — on any materials to which they have access.

Amendments to copyright law in Japan, and the European Union’s recent addition of limitations on copyright to legalize some TDM research, implicitly acknowledge the competitive benefits provided by the fair use provision of U.S. copyright law.

Focusing only on U.S. law, this Article makes two general contributions to the literature on fair use: (1) in cases involving archiving, the user’s security precautions are relevant under the first fair use factor and should not be treated as an unenumerated factor or as part of the market harm analysis; and (2) good faith should not be a factor in fair use analysis, but even if courts do consider good faith, TDM research conducted on infringing sources, such as Sci-Hub, is still lawful because the research provides transformative benefits without causing harm to the markets that matter.

This Article also revisits the issue of temporary copies to argue that certain steps in TDM research do not make copies that “count” under U.S. law and that it is possible to design cloud-based TDM research that does not implicate U.S. copyright law at all.

This Article addresses the needs of many audiences including policymakers, courts, university counsel, research libraries, and legal scholars who seek a thorough legal analysis to support this argument.

URL : https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/53/2/articles/53-2_carroll.html

Data Curation for Big Interdisciplinary Science: The Pulley Ridge Experience

Authors : Timothy B. Norris, Christopher C. Mader

The curation and preservation of scientific data has long been recognized as an essential activity for the reproducibility of science and the advancement of knowledge. While investment into data curation for specific disciplines and at individual research institutions has advanced the ability to preserve research data products, data curation for big interdisciplinary science remains relatively unexplored terrain.

To fill this lacunae, this article presents a case study of the data curation for the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS) funded project “Understanding Coral Ecosystem Connectivity in the Gulf of Mexico-Pulley Ridge to the Florida Keys” undertaken from 2011 to 2018 by more than 30 researchers at several research institutions.

The data curation process is described and a discussion of strengths, weaknesses and lessons learned is presented. Major conclusions from this case study include: the reimplementation of data repository infrastructure builds valuable institutional data curation knowledge but may not meet data curation standards and best practices; data from big interdisciplinary science can be considered as a special collection with the implication that metadata takes the form of a finding aid or catalog of datasets within the larger project context; and there are opportunities for data curators and librarians to synthesize and integrate results across disciplines and to create exhibits as stories that emerge from interdisciplinary big science.

URL : Data Curation for Big Interdisciplinary Science: The Pulley Ridge Experience

Alternative location : https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol8/iss2/8/

Peer Review of Research Data Submissions to ScholarsArchive@OSU: How can we improve the curation of research datasets to enhance reusability?

Authors : Clara Llebot, Steven Van Tuyl

Objective

Best practices such as the FAIR Principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability) were developed to ensure that published datasets are reusable. While we employ best practices in the curation of datasets, we want to learn how domain experts view the reusability of datasets in our institutional repository, ScholarsArchive@OSU.

Curation workflows are designed by data curators based on their own recommendations, but research data is extremely specialized, and such workflows are rarely evaluated by researchers.

In this project we used peer-review by domain experts to evaluate the reusability of the datasets in our institutional repository, with the goal of informing our curation methods and ensure that the limited resources of our library are maximizing the reusability of research data.

Methods

We asked all researchers who have datasets submitted in Oregon State University’s repository to refer us to domain experts who could review the reusability of their data sets. Two data curators who are non-experts also reviewed the same datasets.

We gave both groups review guidelines based on the guidelines of several journals. Eleven domain experts and two data curators reviewed eight datasets.

The review included the quality of the repository record, the quality of the documentation, and the quality of the data. We then compared the comments given by the two groups.

Results

Domain experts and non-expert data curators largely converged on similar scores for reviewed datasets, but the focus of critique by domain experts was somewhat divergent.

A few broad issues common across reviews were: insufficient documentation, the use of links to journal articles in the place of documentation, and concerns about duplication of effort in creating documentation and metadata. Reviews also reflected the background and skills of the reviewer.

Domain experts expressed a lack of expertise in data curation practices and data curators expressed their lack of expertise in the research domain.

Conclusions

The results of this investigation could help guide future research data curation activities and align domain expert and data curator expectations for reusability of datasets.

We recommend further exploration of these common issues and additional domain expert peer-review project to further refine and align expectations for research data reusability.

URL : Peer Review of Research Data Submissions to ScholarsArchive@OSU: How can we improve the curation of research datasets to enhance reusability?

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2019.1166