Checking Rights: An IR Manager’s Guide to Checking Copyright

Authors : Stewart C. Baker, Sue Kunda

Institutional repository (IR) managers often find themselves providing copyright guidance to faculty who wish to self-archive their published scholarship or to students depositing theses and dissertations. As IR managers may not be copyright experts themselves, making determinations and checking rights can be difficult and time-consuming.

This article is intended as a practical guide to describe common types of material that can be placed in an IR as well as potential copyright issues and other considerations for each type. Material types covered include book chapters, journal articles, conference proceedings, student papers, electronic theses and dissertations, research data sets, historical and archival materials, and oral histories.

Underlying issues such as copyright ownership, work made for hire, and the legal definition of publication are also discussed. For easier reference, the appendix contains a chart with brief descriptions of issues and resources.

URL : Checking Rights: An IR Manager’s Guide to Checking Copyright

DOI : https://doi.org/10.17161/jcel.v3i3.8248

Data Management Planning: How Requirements and Solutions are Beginning to Converge

Authors : Sarah Jones, Robert Pergl, Rob Hooft, Tomasz Miksa, Robert Samors, Judit Ungvari, Rowena I. Davis, Tina Lee

Effective stewardship of data is a critical precursor to making data FAIR. The goal of this paper is to bring an overview of current state of the art of data management and data stewardship planning solutions (DMP).

We begin by arguing why data management is an important vehicle supporting adoption and implementation of the FAIR principles, we describe the background, context and historical development, as well as major driving forces, being research initiatives and funders. Then we provide an overview of the current leading DMP tools in the form of a table presenting the key characteristics.

Next, we elaborate on emerging common standards for DMPs, especially the topic of machine-actionable DMPs. As sound DMP is not only a precursor of FAIR data stewardship, but also an integral part of it, we discuss its positioning in the emerging FAIR tools ecosystem. Capacity building and training activities are an important ingredient in the whole effort.

Although not being the primary goal of this paper, we touch also the topic of research workforce support, as tools can be just as much effective as their users are competent to use them properly.

We conclude by discussing the relations of DMP to FAIR principles, as there are other important connections than just being a precursor.

URL : Data Management Planning: How Requirements and Solutions are Beginning to Converge

 

Playing Well on the Data FAIRground: Initiatives and Infrastructure in Research Data Management

Authors : Danielle Descoteaux, Chiara Farinelli, Marina Soares e Silva, Anita de Waard

Over the past five years, Elsevier has focused on implementing FAIR and best practices in data management, from data preservation through reuse. In this paper we describe a series of efforts undertaken in this time to support proper data management practices.

In particular, we discuss our journal data policies and their implementation, the current status and future goals for the research data management platform Mendeley Data, and clear and persistent linkages to individual data sets stored on external data repositories from corresponding published papers through partnership with Scholix.

Early analysis of our data policies implementation confirms significant disparities at the subject level regarding data sharing practices, with most uptake within disciplines of Physical Sciences. Future directions at Elsevier include implementing better discoverability of linked data within an article and incorporating research data usage metrics.

URL : Playing Well on the Data FAIRground: Initiatives and Infrastructure in Research Data Management

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1162/dint_a_00020

Publishers’ Responsibilities in Promoting Data Quality and Reproducibility

Author : Iain Hrynaszkiewicz

Scholarly publishers can help to increase data quality and reproducible research by promoting transparency and openness.

Increasing transparency can be achieved by publishers in six key areas: (1) understanding researchers’ problems and motivations, by conducting and responding to the findings of surveys; (2) raising awareness of issues and encouraging behavioural and cultural change, by introducing consistent journal policies on sharing research data, code and materials; (3) improving the quality and objectivity of the peer-review process by implementing reporting guidelines and checklists and using technology to identify misconduct; (4) improving scholarly communication infrastructure with journals that publish all scientifically sound research, promoting study registration, partnering with data repositories and providing services that improve data sharing and data curation; (5) increasing incentives for practising open research with data journals and software journals and implementing data citation and badges for transparency; and (6) making research communication more open and accessible, with open-access publishing options, permitting text and data mining and sharing publisher data and metadata and through industry and community collaboration.

This chapter describes practical approaches being taken by publishers, in these six areas, their progress and effectiveness and the implications for researchers publishing their work.

URL : Publishers’ Responsibilities in Promoting Data Quality and Reproducibility

Alternative location : https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F164_2019_290

Linked Research on the Decentralised Web

Author : Sarven Capadisli

This thesis is about research communication in the context of the Web. I analyse literature which reveals how researchers are making use of Web technologies for knowledge dissemination, as well as how individuals are disempowered by the centralisation of certain systems, such as academic publishing platforms and social media.

I share my findings on the feasibility of a decentralised and interoperable information space where researchers can control their identifiers whilst fulfilling the core functions of scientific communication: registration, awareness, certification, and archiving.

The contemporary research communication paradigm operates under a diverse set of sociotechnical constraints, which influence how units of research information and personal data are created and exchanged.

Economic forces and non-interoperable system designs mean that researcher identifiers and research contributions are largely shaped and controlled by third-party entities; participation requires the use of proprietary systems.

From a technical standpoint, this thesis takes a deep look at semantic structure of research artifacts, and how they can be stored, linked and shared in a way that is controlled by individual researchers, or delegated to trusted parties. Further, I find that the ecosystem was lacking a technical Web standard able to fulfill the awareness function of research communication.

Thus, I contribute a new communication protocol, Linked Data Notifications (published as a W3C Recommendation) which enables decentralised notifications on the Web, and provide implementations pertinent to the academic publishing use case. So far we have seen decentralised notifications applied in research dissemination or collaboration scenarios, as well as for archival activities and scientific experiments.

Another core contribution of this work is a Web standards-based implementation of a clientside tool, dokieli, for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions. dokieli can be used to fulfill the scholarly functions of registration, awareness, certification, and archiving, all in a decentralised manner, returning control of research contributions and discourse to individual researchers.

The overarching conclusion of the thesis is that Web technologies can be used to create a fully functioning ecosystem for research communication. Using the framework of Web architecture, and loosely coupling the four functions, an accessible and inclusive ecosystem can be realised whereby users are able to use and switch between interoperable applications without interfering with existing data.

Technical solutions alone do not suffice of course, so this thesis also takes into account the need for a change in the traditional mode of thinking amongst scholars, and presents the Linked Research initiative as an ongoing effort toward researcher autonomy in a social system, and universal access to human- and machine-readable information.

Outcomes of this outreach work so far include an increase in the number of individuals self-hosting their research artifacts, workshops publishing accessible proceedings on the Web, in-the-wild experiments with open and public peer-review, and semantic graphs of contributions to conference proceedings and journals (the Linked Open Research Cloud).

Some of the future challenges include: addressing the social implications of decentralised Web publishing, as well as the design of ethically grounded interoperable mechanisms; cultivating privacy aware information spaces; personal or community-controlled on-demand archiving services; and further design of decentralised applications that are aware of the core functions of scientific communication.

URL : https://csarven.ca/linked-research-decentralised-web

Collaborating Across Campus to Advance Open Access Policy Compliance

Authors : Andrew Johnson, Melissa Cantrell, Ryan Caillet

In 2018, the Data and Scholarly Communication Services Unit (DSCS) at the University of Colorado Boulder began implementing two open access (OA) policy workflows with the aim of increasing content in the institutional repository CU Scholar, expanding awareness of the campus OA policy that was passed in 2015, and decreasing the burden on researchers for participation in the policy.

DSCS leveraged collaborative relationships with other library departments and campus units in order to mobilize the data, infrastructure, procedures, and documentation to execute these workflows.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) workflow identifies existing open access publications by CU Boulder faculty and mediates deposit in order to make them available in CU Scholar. The liaison outreach workflow partners with liaison librarians to request from faculty preprints and author’s final manuscripts of publications in which the publisher version may have copyright restrictions.

At present, the DOAJ workflow has resulted in 754 articles deposited in CU Scholar, and the liaison outreach workflow has resulted in 91 articles deposited. Each of these workflows pose challenges that have required flexibility, experimentation, and clear communication between stakeholders.

This case study, which includes detailed descriptions of both open access policy workflows, initial results, and plans for future implementation, may serve as a guide for other institutions wishing to adopt and/or adapt institutional repository workflows and forge collaborative relationships to further open access initiatives in their local context.

URL : Collaborating Across Campus to Advance Open Access Policy Compliance

Alternative location : https://digitalcommons.du.edu/collaborativelibrarianship/vol11/iss3/7

The International Open Access Movement and Its Status in Pakistan

Author : Arslan Sheikh

The objective of this study is to analyze the present status of the open access movement in Pakistan, identify challenges, and make recommendations for the effective use of this publishing model.

The article looks primarily at the open access movement in Asia, with special reference to Pakistan, India, and China. Findings show that, since the emergence of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2001, the open access movement has developed rapidly at the international level. From the Pakistani perspective, gold open access, in which articles or monographs are freely available in their original form on publishers’ websites, developed quickly.

However, green open access, which relies on authors to self-archive their articles in institutional or subject repositories, has been relatively slow to develop. A lack of support from educational institutions, libraries, library associations, and funding bodies may explain the slow growth of green open access in Pakistan.

The author recommends that Pakistani universities, research institutions, and funding agencies develop open access policies, set up institutional repositories, and encourage publishing in open access journals and self-archiving in institutional repositories.

URL : https://preprint.press.jhu.edu/portal/sites/ajm/files/20.1sheikh.pdf