This paper discusses research undertaken by the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) andparticipants during and following an Open Knowledge international workshop held in Mauritiusin September 2019. The workshop brought together key experts to explore the role of openknowledge in the creation of equitable and inclusive global knowledge landscapes. This paperexplores the role of open access and institutional repositories in knowledge sharing and thedissemination of research output from higher education and research institutions within theAfrican continent. The paper reviews the landscape of research output from the Africancontinent; analyses open access research output, overviews of institutional knowledge sharingpositions and the dissemination of research output from Ghana, Rwanda, South Africa andUganda.
This paper reports on a study of social media events relating to 28 Open Access (OA) monographs,published between 2014 and 2015. As with citations (Cronin 1981) social media events representthe frozen footprints of the journey that monographs take as they move through digitallandscapes. The study captured mentions of the study-set of monographs via Twitter, Facebook,Wikipedia and online blogs; as well as user ratings on Google Books, Amazon and Goodreads.Information relating to the ways in which the books were bookmarked and cited was capturedvia the online reference managing platform Mendeley. The benefits and limitations of differentaltmetrics approaches to capturing and analyzing this data are discussed. Practical suggestionsfor researchers interested in the application of Altmetrics approaches to studies of monographsare also provided.
The Open Access movement has reached adulthood, but not maturity: fewer than one-third ofnewly-published peer-reviewed articles are available open access (OA) and progress widening OAhas stalled. Scores of uncoordinated initiatives try to achieve universal OA, but academic journalpublishing is still dominated by a handful of powerful commercial publishers. Individual authorsshow little interest in OA and indeed have to be mandated (see the UK REF or Plan S) to releasetheir research on OA. The BitViews Project is a low-cost, no-risk, high-return initiative to turn allacademic journals «green» through a combination of blockchain technology, provision ofappropriate incentives to authors, and a new crowdfunding mechanism. The project is predicatedon the active participation of individual libraries taking direct action. The paper will provide aninterim report on the progress of the project and an account of how libraries and their variousassociations (both in the global South and in the global North) have reacted to the project. Theconcluding section of the paper sketches a possible direction for academic journal publishing inthe near future. Huge savings and increased efficiency can flow to the academy from finallydissolving its current one-sided contract with publishers and from reclaiming control of thepeer-review process. Practical and incentive-based suggestions are proposed for the transitionfrom publisher-owned to academy-owned peer review.
My proposal offers to take account of developments in the digitisation of out-of-copyrighttextual material in East-Central Europe. Taking Western European digitisation as the norm andindicator of directions, my paper will argue that digitisation in East-Central Europe is behind, butthere is an increasing awareness of the need to make large-scale investments. The Hungariancase argues that it the National Széchényi Library is expected to lead the progress, and furtherresearch will provide comparative data about the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Based on projectdescription information retrieved from the site of knowledge institutions, as well as policydocuments communicated and held by professional bodies, I will attempt to assess the shorttermdevelopments and point at the pitfalls of these projected developments.
From the perspective of Sociology of literature, this paper sets the question of what happens withcommunication and reception issues in the context of e-publishing, considering the culturalsituation of lacking critic methods and established values? Related to e-publishing, the precisequestion is: how to set the reliable system of filtering e-books on the net? The paper discusses themain obstacles in that process and analyzes a few individual attempts to set that kind ofmechanism. Besides technical improvements which will be mainly discussed on the EIPub Forum,this paper aims to motivate us to point some theoretical issues considering the problem ofevaluation and reception as part of literary communication.
The purpose of this paper is to set the scene for further twofold exploratory studies: first, inexamining what type of game designs are suitable for digital libraries to motivate both producingand consuming library content in order to offer a personalised experience to using digitallibraries, and second, in exploring how to leverage Semantic Web technologies to createpersonalised digital games (including VR and AR applications) for using digital librariesgenerated from various open and linked datasets. We are providing an overview of theTowards Semantic Digital Games for Semantic Digital Libraries development of games and semantic technologies as a basis for a better understanding of the roleof games in current digital resources provision
Scientific journals are the main form of recording and disseminating results of scientificresearch. After the advancement of digital media, their search, access, and navigation becameeasier and faster. This changes the way readers interact with the content. In this sense, theconfiguration of typography, an essential component of text-based publications, should facilitatethe reading and understanding of the information presented. Thus, this research aimed toformalize an analysis process for the application of typography in papers on electronic scientificjournals. Based on the literature review, an analysis structure was formulated. The analysisidentified the fundamental principles of application of typography as: legibility, readability,spacing and font size and information hierarchy. Subsequently, four electronic papers fromBrazilian scientific journals with different areas of knowledge were selected as objects of study.As a result, a potential application of typography for digital media was identified, but thispotential is not fully explored by the editors of scientific journals nor by the literature dealingwith the topic.
This study investigated high school students’ and school librarians’ conceptions about what it means to be safe online and to understand the actions, processes, and strategies they engage in order to be safe online. The study also identified the existing library programs organized by school librarians in relation to digital safety and how school librarians and school libraries can support and address students’ digital safety needs. This paper sought to answer the following research questions: 1) What do students think it means to be safe online? Sub-question: What do students do themselves to be safe online? 2) What do school librarians think it means to be safe online? Sub-question: What do school librarians do themselves to be safe online? 3) What do students think of librarians’ role helping them to be safe online? 4)What existing library programs are implemented by school librarians in relation to digital safety? By understanding possible gaps between students’ and school librarians’ conceptions and practices on digital safety, educators and school administrators will gain understanding on how digital safety could be more effectively developed and integrated as part of the school curriculum.
This paper reports findings from a study commissioned by the Association of College & Research Libraries to identify a new research agenda for scholarly communications and the research environment. The final report provides an overview of trends and practices and identifies and describes important questions where deeper inquiry is needed to accelerate the transition to more open, inclusive, and equitable systems of scholarship. This research agenda is informed by scholarly literature, as well as by advances in practice and the voices of historically underrepresented communities. The research involved structured engagement with the academic library community throughout the process, incorporated through project update webinars, expert interviews, focus groups, workshops, and an online survey. Over one thousand participants offered their thoughts and expertise to shape the research agenda. The themes that emerged include People, Content, and Systems, which each raised new research areas to explore. To further this new research agenda, ACRL is issuing research grants to investigate timely and substantial research questions, developing solutions that will move the community forward.
This paper comprises an attempt to create information visualizations for the Public Library of Veria city, Greece based on library data. Specifically, it is a formative study about the use of a visualization tool for analysing library data. The goal of this study is to make suggestions for the presentation of the public library’s data in order to be more accessible and understandable by the users and the librarians. The data were provided by the Library and the data types that were used were selected after a thorough consultation with the library staff. Consideration was given to the availability of data. The study employed information visualization techniques to create the visual displays of the data. Visualizations were created using the Tableau Public software in an effort to provide a quantitative, analytical, and evidence-based view of how libraries could manage their data. The study also aimed to gather any additional potential uses of visualizations that can be exploited by the libraries in the future. The current research was conducted in a single public library, thus further research in different, expanded settings and contexts is suggested.
Universities are key sites of knowledge creation. Governments and research funders are increasingly interested in ensuring that their investments in the production of new knowledge deliver a quantifiable return on investment, including in the form of ‘impact’. Ensuring that research outputs are not locked behind paywalls, and that research data can be interrogated and built upon are increasingly central to efforts to improve the effectiveness of global research landscapes. We argue that mandating and promoting open access (OA) for published research outputs, as well as the sharing of research data are important elements of building a vibrant open knowledge system, but they are not enough. Supporting diversity within knowledge-making institutions; enabling collaboration across boundaries between universities and wider communities; and addressing inequalities in access to knowledge resources and in opportunities to contribute to knowledge making processes are also important. New tools are needed to help universities, funders, and communities to understand the extent to which a university is operating as an effective open knowledge institution; as well as the steps that might be taken to improve open knowledge performance. This paper discusses our team’s efforts to develop a model of Open Knowledge that is not confined to measures of OA and open data. The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative is a project of the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University. With […]
The advent of the digital book has brought changes and challenges that have affected the conception, production, distribution and even the purpose and culture associated with the book. Given these transformations, it is necessary to reinforce attention to the design process of the digital book from a new perspective, adopting a systemic thinking to obtain a clear vision of the specificities of these artifacts and the complexity of their project. In this direction, this research aimed to propose a framework for the digital book design process, from a systemic perspective. To that, interviews were conducted with professionals who work in the development of digital books, whose results together with the findings of the literature gave rise to a set of premises that underpinned the construction of the first version of the framework, adjusted and refined from contributions of designers in the context of a focus group. The framework proposed in this study has explanatory character, diagrammatic form and represents the system that influences the digital book design process, composed of 13 interrelated factors and organized into three groups: primary (Content, Technology and Reader), secondary (Author, Other Agents, Publisher, Business Management and Distributor) and tertiary (Printed Book, Digital Rights, Similar Digital Books and Technological Players), as well as subfactors distributed among them.
Although bibliometrics and library science are older, bibliometric tools were really born about 50 years ago and were only made available to a large audience with the widespread use of the Internet. Although their concrete forms have been largely modified, they are still based today on epistemic and computer foundations decided at the time. Three important characteristics of these tools can be identified: first, they are proprietary, i.e. users not only have to pay for access to the data but it is also difficult to manipulate and verify; second, in the name of a principle of scarcity or quality, tool creators assume to rely only on a selection of accessible scientific documents; thirdly, this choice of a small sample is, moreover, very marked by a historical irreversibility that makes invisible in particular some types of documents (books, conferences, preprints) and written documents in the vast majority of languages other than English. However, over the last twenty years, there has been a progressive liberation of scientific texts through the existence of different disciplinary (ArXiv, PubMedCentral, REPEC) and institutional (HAL, universities archive...) open archival systems, and publication models allowing the harvesting of texts and/or metadata - including the references cited. It is in the continuation of this movement that the construction of a real tool, Matilda, is taking into account all available sources and user personalization, in order to serve as an elementary […]
Given the growing need to strengthen the bonds between the business tissue and research, the purpose of this study is synthetizing evidence in the literature as to i) the dynamics of knowledge-sharing and communication within linguistically diverse business and research networks and ii) the role of multilingualism within bibliodiversity in scientific publishing, in order to boost business development. Nowadays, the role of language in research practice tends to be secondary, since there seems to be a tacit assumption that English is widely accepted as language of communication. Besides, it tends to be promoted in (inter)national and European research and innovation policies–mainly written in English and with no reference to language use or multilingualism. The same happens in business context, in which, given the increasing need for internationalisation, as well as labour pooling and poaching, the use of English as lingua franca seems to be inevitable. In fact, in both contexts, there is a need for a common international means of communication and of general information disclosure, but the use of mother tongue seems to be more effective for in-depth understanding, and knowledge co-creation and sharing. The results of the content analysis and interpretation allowed for the definition of categories in the scope of: i) Englishisation and balanced multilingualism, ii) organisational language policies, and iii) added-value of language diversity.
This paper describes Community Proofreading as implemented by Language Science Press via PaperHive. Community members comment on a final draft version of a book and highlight possible improvements. A database of over 43.000 comments was compiled, which allows for the formulation of novel research questions. Two of those (“small details vs. big picture” and “reviewer fatigue”) are tested in this paper. Furthermore, the paper shows that Community Proofreading can serve as a tool to attract new authors.
The objective of this study is to investigate how Open Science (OS) values and practices have influenced open access (OA) journals publishers in Latin American and the Caribbean (LA&C) countries. Our key research question is: to what extent are these practices being adopted by LA&C journals? In order to address this question, we conducted a survey with a sample of LA&C journals listed on the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) database. The results reveal that many journals are somewhat aware of or informed about most of open science practices being discussed, but just some of them have already successfully adopted those practices.
The current discourse around Open Science has tended to focus on the creation of new technological platforms and tools to facilitate sharing and reuse of a wide range of research outputs. There is an assumption that once these new tools are in place, researchers—and at times, members of the general public—will be able to participate in the creation of scientific knowledge in more accessible and efficient ways. While many of these new tools have indeed assisted in the ease of collaboration through online spaces and mechanisms, the narrowness of how infrastructure is imagined by open science practitioners tends to put the use of technology ahead of the issues that people are actually trying to solve and fails to acknowledge the systemic constraints that exist within and between some communities. Drawing on an analytical framework grounded in Black feminist intersectionality (Noble 2016), this paper highlights the need for more inclusive knowledge infrastructures, particularly in the context of sustainable development. Three case studies from the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet), are outlined in order to illustrate the importance of moving beyond a definition of infrastructure as merely a technical or physical entity. These cases, arising from research conducted in South Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean, demonstrate how more sustainable and nuanced forms of collaboration and participation may be enabled through broader understandings of […]
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.
The paper presents a critical analysis of the possibilities and limits of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, proposed by Elinor Ostrom and team, specially addressing the mutual relations between natural and knowledge commons. It results from an action-research project on the role of open science (OS) in development, carried out in the municipality of Ubatuba, on the North Coast of the State of São Paulo, Brazil, in 2015-2017. The work involved: systematizing the literature on the IAD framework; mapping and selecting literature representative of other theoretical and conceptual approaches; critically using and adapting the framework to the case studied. The project provided the opportunity to observe how these dynamics take place in a relatively small-scale (while heavily interconnected) context. While the IAD framework helped us to analyse the institutional, political, and governance issues affecting knowledge production and circulation, we observed the higher complexity of our action arena, shedding light on the fact that natural and knowledge commons are the two dimensions of the same “commoning” process.
The Latin American region has an ecosystem where the nature of publication is conceived as the act of making public, of sharing and not as the publishing industry. International, national and institutional contexts have led to a redefinition of a project—Redalyc.org—that begun in 2003 and that has already fulfilled its original mission: give visibility to knowledge generated in Latin America and promote quality of scientific journals. Nevertheless, it is mandatory to be transformed from a Latin American platform based in Mexico into a community-based regional infrastructure that continues assessing journals quality and providing access to full-text in benefit of journals visibility and free access to knowledge. A framework that generates technology in favor of the empowerment and professionalization of journal editors, making the editorial task in open access sustainable and that allows Redalyc to sustain itself collectively. This work describes the first Redalyc's model, presents the problematic in course and the new business model Redalyc is designing and adopting to operate on.
Open access (OA) is a global movement to make research results widely available by removing price and permission barriers. OA infrastructure is necessary for implementing open access and open science in any country. The aim of the present paper is twofold: (i) to give a description of the Greek OA infrastructure with emphasis on academic repositories and OA journals, and (ii) to examined the OA availability of publications authored by Greek researchers and published in international journals. Results indicated that Open access infrastructures in Greece have been steadily improving over the past years, with 28 out of 36 HEIs running their own IR and 116 OA journals being published. The OA availability of the literature produced by Greek researchers is similar to that found in other studies and falls within the range that has been reported for European countries. Although numbers seem rather satisfactory, there are a number of challenges that have to be addressed at both the infrastructural and the policy level, the most important being the implementation of national open policies and funders mandates.
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.
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.
This paper develops the concept of network sustainability. To become and stay sustainable, distributed research infrastructures must satisfy present needs while at the same time be flexible and resilient to meet future requirements. For this it is not enough to merely build a resilient economic model and be technically viable. Research infrastructures that can understand, address and shape future needs have a sustainable community network. Clear characteristics of a research infrastructure with a sustainable network are that partners gain access to other networks and interest groups, that knowledge, information and expertise is shared freely among partners, that the infrastructure increases partners’ visibilities and vice versa, and that partners are enabled to stay current and state-of-the-art. This is shown on OPERAS (open access in the european research area through scholarly communication), a research infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities, and its partner the Max Weber Foundation, a German research institution.
Exploitation of the digital revolution offers great potential for less affluent and least economically developed countries (LEDCs) and for the attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, LEDCs typically have poorly resourced national research systems. If they cannot participate in research based on big and open data, the gap could grow exponentially in coming years. They will be unable to collect, store and share data, unable to participate in the global research enterprise, unable to contribute as full partners to global efforts on climate change, health care, and resource protection, and unable to fully benefit from such efforts, where global solutions will only be achieved if there is global participation. Thus, both emerging and developed countries have a clear and direct interest in helping to fully mobilize LEDC science potential and thereby to contribute to achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The initiative described here (African Open Science Platform or AOSP) is directed towards minimising a divide between emerging and developed countries in what is arguably the most important current opportunity to enhance the power and efficiency of the scientific enterprise and its contribution to societal benefit.
In certain digital gaming subcultures, specific games are extended and enhanced by players who create “mods”, or modifications, that add new artwork, new scenarios, and even new rules. “Modders” meet in online communities that foster engagement through the discussion and self-publication of mods, and these can keep interest in a given game going years after it is released. Most importantly, modding allows players to challenge and subvert dominant discourses, and to foster cultures of inclusivity. These DIY efforts could be adapted by academic publishers, particularly those focused on design research, to encourage sustained engagement with scholarly materials. This article discusses the history of modding, provides examples, and sketches one online modding community in detail. It then makes the argument that modding is a form of end-user engagement of the sort advocated by scholars such as Gerald Fischer, and compares modding to other online academic publishing efforts, such as webtexts.
In the World Wide Web, a very large number of resources is made available through digital libraries. The existence of many individual digital libraries, maintained by different organizations, brings challenges to the discoverability, sharing and reuse of the resources. A widely-used approach is metadata aggregation, where centralized efforts like Europeana facilitate the discoverability and use of the resources by collecting their associated metadata. The cultural heritage domain embraced the aggregation approach while, at the same time, the technological landscape kept evolving. Nowadays, cultural heritage institutions are increasingly applying technologies designed for the wider interoperability on the Web. This paper presents a study of the current application by cultural heritage data providers of technological solutions in use for making structured metadata available for re-use in the Internet. We investigated the use of both linked data and technologies related with indexing of resources by Internet search engines. We have conducted a harvesting experiment of the landing pages from websites of digital libraries that participate in Europeana, and collected statistics about the usage these particular technologies. These technologies allow for representing structured data within HTML, or for structured data to be referred to by links within HTML or through HTTP headers capabilities. We conclude with a discussion of future work for establishing a solution for cultural […]
This paper will describe a method for machine-based creation of high quality subject indexing and classification for both electronic and print documents using tables of contents (ToCs). The technology described here is primarily focused on electronic and print documents for which, because of technical or licensing reasons, it is not possible to index full text. However, the technology would also be useful for full text documents, because it could significantly enhance the accuracy and relevance of subject description by analyzing the structure of ToCs.
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.
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.
The open access (OA) article processing charges (APC) project is a longitudinal study of the minority of fully OA journals (27% in 2016) that have APCs. The global average APC shows little change; in USD, 906 in 2010, 964 in 2016, 974 in 2017. The average masks currency differences and the impact of a growing market; new APC journals often start with an APC of 0. Traditional commercial scholarly publishers are entering the OA market: the largest OA journal publishers’ portfolios in 2017 were Springer, De Gruyter, Elsevier, and Wolters Kluwer Medknow. However, these are a small portion of OA journal publishing which is still marked by a very long tail and extensive involvement by very small, often university or society publishers. APC pricing shows a wide range and variability. The APC market can be described as volatile.
