Group authorship, an excellent opportunity laced with ethical, legal and technical challenges

Authors : Mohammad Hosseini, Alex O. Holcombe, Marton Kovacs, Hub Zwart, Daniel S. Katz, Kristi Holmes

Group authorship (also known as corporate authorship, team authorship, consortium authorship) refers to attribution practices that use the name of a collective (be it team, group, project, corporation, or consortium) in the authorship byline. Data shows that group authorships are on the rise but thus far, in scholarly discussions about authorship, they have not gained much specific attention.

Group authorship can minimize tensions within the group about authorship order and the criteria used for inclusion/exclusion of individual authors. However, current use of group authorships has drawbacks, such as ethical challenges associated with the attribution of credit and responsibilities, legal challenges regarding how copyrights are handled, and technical challenges related to the lack of persistent identifiers (PIDs), such as ORCID, for groups.

We offer two recommendations: 1) Journals should develop and share context-specific and unambiguous guidelines for group authorship, for which they can use the four baseline requirements offered in this paper; 2) Using persistent identifiers for groups and consistent reporting of members’ contributions should be facilitated through devising PIDs for groups and linking these to the ORCIDs of their individual contributors and the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the published item.

URL : Group authorship, an excellent opportunity laced with ethical, legal and technical challenges

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2024.2322557

Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles

Author : Martin Paul Eve

Introduction

Digital preservation underpins the persistence of scholarly links and citations through the digital object identifier (DOI) system. We do not currently know, at scale, the extent to which articles assigned a DOI are adequately preserved.

Methods

We construct a database of preservation information from original archival sources and then examine the preservation statuses of 7,438,037 DOIs in a random sample.

Results

Of the 7,438,037 works examined, there were 5.9 million copies spread over the archives used in this work. Furthermore, a total of 4,342,368 of the works that we studied (58.38%) were present in at least one archive. However, this left 2,056,492 works in our sample (27.64%) that are seemingly unpreserved.

The remaining 13.98% of works in the sample were excluded either for being too recent (published in the current year), not being journal articles, or having insufficient date metadata for us to identify the source.

Discussion

Our study is limited by design in several ways. Among these are the facts that it uses only a subset of archives, it only tracks articles with DOIs, and it does not account for institutional repository coverage. Nonetheless, as an initial attempt to gauge the landscape, our results will still be of interest to libraries, publishers, and researchers.

Conclusion

This work reveals an alarming preservation deficit. Only 0.96% of Crossref members (n = 204) can be confirmed to digitally preserve over 75% of their content in three or more of the archives that we studied. (Note that when, in this article, we write “preserved,” we mean “that we were able to confirm as preserved,” as per the specified limitations of this study.) A slightly larger proportion, i.e., 8.5% (n = 1,797), preserved over 50% of their content in two or more archives.

However, many members, i.e., 57.7% (n = 12,257), only met the threshold of having 25% of their material in a single archive. Most worryingly, 32.9% (n = 6,982) of Crossref members seem not to have any adequate digital preservation in place, which is against the recommendations of the Digital Preservation Coalition.

URL : Digital Scholarly Journals Are Poorly Preserved: A Study of 7 Million Articles

DOI : https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.16288

Persistent Identification for Conferences

Authors : Julian Franken, Aliaksandr Birukou, Kai Eckert, Wolfgang Fahl, Christian Hauschke, Christoph Lange

Persistent identification of entities plays a major role in the progress of digitization of many fields. In the scholarly publishing realm there are already persistent identifiers (PID) for papers (DOI), people (ORCID), organisation (GRID, ROR), books (ISBN) but there is no generally accepted PID system for scholarly events such as conferences or workshops yet.

This article describes the relevant use cases that motivate the introduction of persistent identifiers for conferences. The use cases were mainly derived from interviews, discussions with experts and their previous work. As primary stakeholders who are involved in the typical conference event life cycle researchers, conference organizers, and data consumers were identified.

The resulting list of use cases illustrates how PIDs for conference events will improve the current situation for these stakeholders and help with problems they are facing today.

URL : Persistent Identification for Conferences

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-011

Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Under the Context of Research Data Librarianship

AuthorJia Liu

A digital object identifier (DOI) is an increasingly prominent persistent identifier in finding and accessing scholarly information. This paper intends to present an overview of global development and approaches in the field of DOI and DOI services with a slight geographical focus on Germany.

At first, the initiation and components of the DOI system and the structure of a DOI name are explored. Next, the fundamental and specific characteristics of DOIs are described and DOIs for three (3) kinds of typical intellectual entities in the scholar communication are dealt with; then, a general DOI service pyramid is sketched with brief descriptions of functions of institutions at different levels.

After that, approaches of the research data librarianship community in the field of RDM, especially DOI services, are elaborated. As examples, the DOI services provided in German research libraries as well as best practices of DOI services in a German library are introduced; and finally, the current practices and some issues dealing with DOIs are summarized. It is foreseeable that DOI, which is crucial to FAIR research data, will gain extensive recognition in the scientific world.

URL : Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Under the Context of Research Data Librarianship

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2021.1180

Using ORCID, DOI, and Other Open Identifiers in Research Evaluation

Authors : Laurel L. Haak, Alice Meadows, Josh Brown

An evaluator’s task is to connect the dots between program goals and its outcomes. This can be accomplished through surveys, research, and interviews, and is frequently performed post hoc.

Research evaluation is hampered by a lack of data that clearly connect a research program with its outcomes and, in particular, by ambiguity about who has participated in the program and what contributions they have made. Manually making these connections is very labor-intensive, and algorithmic matching introduces errors and assumptions that can distort results.

In this paper, we discuss the use of identifiers in research evaluation—for individuals, their contributions, and the organizations that sponsor them and fund their work. Global identifier systems are uniquely positioned to capture global mobility and collaboration.

By leveraging connections between local infrastructures and global information resources, evaluators can map data sources that were previously either unavailable or prohibitively labor-intensive.

We describe how identifiers, such as ORCID iDs and DOIs, are being embedded in research workflows across science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics; how this is affecting data availability for evaluation purposes: and provide examples of evaluations that are leveraging identifiers.

We also discuss the importance of provenance and preservation in establishing confidence in the reliability and trustworthiness of data and relationships, and in the long-term availability of metadata describing objects and their inter-relationships.

We conclude with a discussion on opportunities and risks for the use of identifiers in evaluation processes.

URL : Using ORCID, DOI, and Other Open Identifiers in Research Evaluation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2018.00028