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The Public Knowledge Project: Reflections and Directions After Its First Two Decades

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Juan Pablo Alperin, John Willinsky, Brian Owen, James MacGregor, Alec Smecher, Kevin Stranack

As the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) enters its third decade, it faces the responsibilities of supporting the more than 10,000 journals using its software and are dependent on PKP continuing to develop the code.

In the fall of 2017, PKP, with the support of the Arnold Foundation, contracted the consulting services of BlueSky to Blueprint, with its principal Nancy Maron embarking on an exploration of PKP’s standing and prospects among a sample of those in-volved in scholarly publishing, inclu-ding current, former, and potential users of its software (Maron 2018).

This paper presents BlueSky’s findings and PKP’s responses in what may serve as a lesson on the maturing of, and challenges faced by, an open source software project seeking to sustain in-creased global access to research and scholarship.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01816677

EN

Inequality in Knowledge Production: The Integration of Academic Infrastructure by Big Publishers

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Alejandro Posada, George Chen

This paper attempts to illustrate the implications of a simultaneous redirection of the big publishers’ business strategy towards open access business models and the acquisition of scholarly infrastructure utilizing the conceptual framework of rent-seeking theory.

To document such a transformation, we utilized financial databases to analyze the mergers and acquisitions of the top publicly traded academic publishers. We then performed a service analysis to situate the acquisitions of publishers within the knowledge and education life-cycles, illustrating what we term to be their vertical integration within their respective expansion target life-cycles.

Implications of higher education institutions’ increased dependency towards the companies and increased influence by the companies on the institution and individual researcher were noted from the vertical integration of products.

Said vertical integration is analyzed via a rent theory framework and described to be a form of rent-seeking complementary to the redirection of business strategies to open access. Finally, the vertical integration is noted to generate exclusionary effects upon researchers/institutions in the global south.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01816707

EN

Framing Power: Tracing Key Discourses in Open Science Policies

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Denisse Albornoz, Maggie Huang, Issra Martin, Maria Mateus, Aicha Touré, Leslie Chan

Given that “Open Science” is becoming a popular policy object around the world, this study sought to identify key narratives about Open Science in policy, and critically examine the extent to which they are sustaining or strengthening multi-layered domination and inequality schemes that pre-exist in scientific knowledge production.

To do so, we conducted a content analysis of Open Science policies stemming from Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia and Africa to understand which narratives about Open Science policies are produced, reproduced and by whom; and in turn, whose interests may be neglected in this process.

We found that Open Science policies, mostly stemming from Europe, frame “openness” as a vehicle to promote technological change as part of an inevitable and necessary cultural shift to modernity in scientific production.

The global reach of these narratives, and the technologies, standards and models these narratives sustain, are dictating modes of working and collaborating among those who can access them, and creating new categories of exclusion that invalidate knowledge that cannot meet this criteria, putting historically marginalized researchers and publics at further disadvantage.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01816725

EN

Full Disclosure: Open Business Data and the Publisher’s Cookbook

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Sebastian Nordhoff, Felix Kopecky

This short paper presents the three main outcomes of the OpenAire project “Full disclosure: replicable strategies for book publications supplemented with empirical data”: a fully specified business model; accountacy data; and a “cookbook” containing recipes how to set up a resilient community-based book publisher.

The provision of these items available for free reuse will allow other publishing projects to understand, adapt, and modify the community-based model of Language Science Press.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01816822

EN

Global Scholarly Collaboration: from Traditional Citation Practice to Direct Communication

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Sergey Parinov, Victoria Antonova

The development of recent research information systems allows a transformation of citations in the full text of research papers into interactive elements. Such interactivity in some cases works as an instrument of direct scholarly communications between citing and cited authors.

We discuss this challenge for research e-infrastructure development including opportunities for improvements in research cooperation and in collaboration mechanisms for the global research community.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01816700

EN

Collecting Inclusive Usage Metrics for Open Access Publications: the HIRMEOS Project

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Javier Arias

Open Access has matured for journals, but its uptake in the book market is still delayed, despite the fact that books continue to be the leading publishing format for social sciences and humanities.

The 30-months EU-funded project HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure) tackles the main obstacles of the full integration of five important digital platforms supporting open access monographs.

The content of participating platforms will be enriched with tools that enable identification, authentication and interoperability (via DOI, ORCID, Fundref), and tools that enrich information and entity extraction (INRIA (N)ERD), the ability to annotate monographs (Hypothes.is), and gather usage and alternative metric data.

This paper focuses on the development and implementation of Open Source Metrics Services that enable the collection of OA Metrics and Altmetrics from third-party platforms, and how the architecture of these tools will allow implementation in any external platform, particularly in start-up Open Access publishers.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01816811

EN

An Expertise Recommender System Based on Data from an Institutional Repository (DiVA)

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Milena Angelova, Vishnu Devagiri, Veselka Boeva, Peter Linde, Niklas Lavesson

Finding experts in academics is an important practical problem, e.g. recruiting reviewers for reviewing conference, journal or project submissions, partner matching for research proposals, finding relevant M. Sc. or Ph. D. supervisors etc.

In this work, we discuss an expertise recommender system that is built on data extracted from the Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) instance of the institutional repository system DiVA. The developed prototype system is evaluated and validated on information extracted from the BTH DiVA installation, concerning thesis supervision of researchers affiliated with BTH.

The extracted DiVA classification terms are used to build an ontology that conceptualizes the thesis domain supported by the university. The supervisor profiles of the tutors affiliated with the BTH are constructed based on the extracted DiVA data. These profiles can further be used to identify and recommend relevant subject thesis supervisors.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01816680