An Interactive Map for Showcasing Repository Impacts

Authors : Hui Zhang, Camden Lopez

Digital repository managers rely on usage metrics such as the number of downloads to demonstrate research visibility and impacts of the repositories. Increasingly, they find that current tools such as spreadsheets and charts are ineffective for revealing important elements of usage, including reader locations, and for attracting the targeted audiences.

This article describes the design and development of a readership map that provides an interactive, near-real-time visualization of actual visits to an institutional repository using data from Google Analytics.

The readership map exhibits the global impacts of a repository by displaying the city of every view or download together with the title of the scholarship being read and a hyperlink to its page in the repository.

We will discuss project motivation and development issues such as authentication with Google API, metadata integration, performance tuning, and data privacy.

URL : http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12349

Linked Data is People: Building a Knowledge Graph to Reshape the Library Staff Directory

Authors : Jason A. Clark, Scott W. H. Young

One of our greatest library resources is people. Most libraries have staff directory information published on the web, yet most of this data is trapped in local silos, PDFs, or unstructured HTML markup.

With this in mind, the library informatics team at Montana State University (MSU) Library set a goal of remaking our people pages by connecting the local staff database to the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud.

In pursuing linked data integration for library staff profiles, we have realized two primary use cases: improving the search engine optimization (SEO) for people pages and creating network graph visualizations.

In this article, we will focus on the code to build this library graph model as well as the linked data workflows and ontology expressions developed to support it. Existing linked data work has largely centered around machine-actionable data and improvements for bots or intelligent software agents.

Our work demonstrates that connecting your staff directory to the LOD cloud can reveal relationships among people in dynamic ways, thereby raising staff visibility and bringing an increased level of understanding and collaboration potential for one of our primary assets: the people that make the library happen.

URL : http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/12320

Anticipated effects of an open access policy at a private foundation

Author : Eesha Khare, Carly Strasser

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF) was interested in understanding the potential effects of a policy requiring open access to peer-reviewed publications resulting from the research the foundation funds.

To explore this question, we collected data on more than 2000 publications in over 500 journals that were generated by GBMF grantees since 2001. We then examined the journal policies to establish how two possible open access policies might have affected grantee publishing habits.

We found that 99.3% of the articles published by grantees would have complied with a policy that requires open access within 12 months of publication. We also estimated the annual costs to GBMF for covering fees associated with « gold open access » to be between $250,000 and $2,500,000 annually.

URL : http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/18/128413

Open Science: What, Why, and How

Authors : Barbara A. Spellman, Elizabeth A. Gilbert, Katherine S. Corker

Open Science is a collection of actions designed to make scientific processes more transparent and results more accessible. Its goal is to build a more replicable and robust science; it does so using new technologies, altering incentives, and changing attitudes.

The current movement towards open science was spurred, in part, by a recent “series of unfortunate events” within psychology and other sciences.

These events include the large number of studies that have failed to replicate and the prevalence of common research and publication procedures that could explain why.

Many journals and funding agencies now encourage, require, or reward some open science practices, including pre-registration, providing full materials, posting data, distinguishing between exploratory and confirmatory analyses, and running replication studies.

Individuals can practice and encourage open science in their many roles as researchers, authors, reviewers, editors, teachers, and members of hiring, tenure, promotion, and awards committees.

A plethora of resources are available to help scientists, and science, achieve these goals.

URL : https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ak6jr

Perseids: Experimenting with Infrastructure for Creating and Sharing Research Data in the Digital Humanities

Author : Bridget Almas

The Perseids project provides a platform for creating, publishing, and sharing research data, in the form of textual transcriptions, annotations and analyses. An offshoot and collaborator of the Perseus Digital Library (PDL),

Perseids is also an experiment in reusing and extending existing infrastructure, tools, and services.

This paper discusses infrastructure in the domain of digital humanities (DH). It outlines some general approaches to facilitating data sharing in this domain, and the specific choices we made in developing Perseids to serve that goal.

It concludes by identifying lessons we have learned about sustainability in the process of building Perseids, noting some critical gaps in infrastructure for the digital humanities, and suggesting some implications for the wider community.

URL : Perseids: Experimenting with Infrastructure for Creating and Sharing Research Data in the Digital Humanities

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2017-019

From publishers to self-publishing: The disruptive effects of digitalisation on the book industry

Authors : Morten Hviid, Sabine Jacques, Sofia Izquierdo Sanchez

This paper explores the structure of the book publishing industry post-digitalisation. We argue that the introduction of successful e-book readers has belatedly given digitalisation the characteristics of a disruptive technology by making self-publishing a serious option for authors.

This has been supported by the entry of new types of intermediaries and the
strengthening of others. These changes have reduced the overall complexities for an author to get a book self-published.

As a result, a larger share of the surplus from the book industry is likely going to authors, explaining the significant increase in the supply of books. The potential over-supply of books has created a new problem by making consumer search more difficult.

We argue that digitalisation has shifted the potential market failure from inadequate supply of books to asymmetric information about quality.

It remains to be seen whether the market will provide appropriate intermediaries to solve the associated asymmetric information problem and, if not, what appropriate interventions should be contemplated.

URL : https://zenodo.org/record/321609/files/CREATe-Working-Paper-2017-06.pdf

Metrics for openness

Authors : David M. Nichols, Michael B. Twidale

The characterization of scholarly communication is dominated by citation-based measures. In this paper we propose several metrics to describe different facets of open access and open research.

We discuss measures to represent the public availability of articles along with their archival location, licenses, access costs, and supporting information. Calculations illustrating these new metrics are presented using the authors’ publications.

We argue that explicit measurement of openness is necessary for a holistic description of research outputs.

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/10289/10842