The National Library Ivan Vazov in Plovdiv is the second largest library in Bulgaria. It serves asthe second national legal depository of Bulgarian printed works. In addition, it has contributedsignificantly to the preservation and the digital accessibility of the national cultural andhistorical heritage. This article offers an overview of the library’s history and currentdevelopments in the field of automation and digitization.
The National Library of Romania shares digital resources, providing access to knowledge andcultural heritage, on three online platforms. These are:a) The Traditional Virtual Catalogue for the books published before 1993. It is the virtual image ofthe traditional catalogue which is organized alphabetically by author name in the appropriatefolders physical drawers. The platform and database was designed by the students from theTechnical University Bucuresti. Accessible at http://bookathon.bibnat.ro; b) The OnlineCatalogue on Aleph system, which offers bibliographic information about documents in thelibrary collections since 1993. There are two logical databases, The Doctoral Theses Referential,Publishing digital resources which provides access to online content thereof (by digitizing paper or archiving electroniccontent of CD attached by author) and digital library for the blind (project Sound of pages) thatdisabled users have access to requested digitized works. Accessible http://alephnew.bibnat.ro:8991/F; c) The Digital platform on Digitool system. It started in 2009. It is comprised of digitalcollections created by digitizing special collections of documents in the National Library ofRomania, organized by themes or after events. Accessible at http://digitool.bibnat.ro/R. Thedatabases have grown steadily and have become researching and learning tools for somecategories of users. The systems provide open resources, learning and navigating tutorials andcontribute to a creative […]
The paper discusses the current state of digitizing Islamic manuscript in Russia and the gradualbuilding of the digital collection “Manuscripta Islamica Rossica”. It outlines some of thechallenges and the benefits from providing digital access to these resources.
Green Road is deeply anchored in the scholarly communication system. Based on the analysis of a panel of 6 repositories, the study identify strategies repositories have adopted in order to meet or adjust to Open Science requirements in terms of bibliodiversity. Typically, thematic repositories are not only concerned with articles but also consider new artefacts, linked and interlinked. Research outcomes suggest reconsidering the term “repository” as it no longer seems relevant to our panel.
The current system of scientific publication is faced with several serious problems: its cost and lack of transparency and the long time from the obtainment of scientific results to their publication. We also believe that the economic model on which the current publishing system is based perverts the system. We have created Peer Community In (PCI)—https://peercommunityin.org/ ; https://youtu.be/4PZhpnc8wwo—to tackle all these problems. This project is based on the publication of critical evaluations and recommendations of articles that have not yet been published, but are freely available in electronic form from open archives on the Internet, in which they have been deposited. These evaluations and recommendations are performed by researchers acting on a voluntary basis with no links to private publishers. Publication costs disappear: PCI validates, distributes and allows consultation of the articles submitted free of charge. The time lag to information access is eliminated: the scientific articles evaluated are deposited in open archives as soon as they are written. The system becomes transparent: reviews, editorial decisions, authors’ responses and recommendations are published on the website of the scientific community concerned (e.g. PCI Evolutionary Biology, PCI Ecology, PCI Paleontology…)
Almost one year after the announcement of the French National Plan for Open Science, the intervention aims at presenting a progress report on achievements in strengthening bibliodiversity and setting up a National Open Science Fund, two of the objectives of the Plan. At the national level, the work was carried out within a working group the Open Science Committee. Four complementary aspects were taken into account:•the establishment of exemplary criteria to assess infrastructures and platforms in terms of governance, ethics, openness and sustainability. These 40 criteria are to be used in the evaluation of the initiatives that will apply to the National Open Science Fund.•support for the strategic orientation of the National Open Science Fund.•the drafting of recommendations for the implementation of Plan S by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), which is member of cOAlition S.•information exchange and coordination with other initiatives such as OA2020 and SCOSS.At the institutional level, several initiatives have made it possible to initiate greater financial support for open science. Four case studies illustrate this fact:•the launch of an open science fund with a 800 K€ budget by the 18 French major research universities (Curif),•the establishment of a network of open access journals incubators run by 12 institutions (Repères),•the support of 43 French libraries for the first campaign aiming at funding open access monographs in Frenchthe […]
After the launch of multiple plans for Open Science, there is now a need for an accurate method or tool to monitor the Open Science trends and in particular Open Access (OA) trends. We address this requirement with a methodology that we developed and tested for France, but that could be extended to other countries. Only open data and information available on the Web are used, leveraging as much as we can large-scale systems such as Unpaywall, HAL (the main open repository in France, part of the CNRS), ORCID and IDRef (referential for French Higher Education and Research). We used rule-based and machine learning techniques to enrich the metadata of the publications. We estimate that the overall OA rate for French affiliated publications ranges from 39% to 42% between 2013 and 2017. The trend is slightly up, except for the last year, but we gather evidence that shows this is a consequence of the moving nature of the OA status. Therefore these figures should be seen as a snapshot rather than definitive. For the last observed year (2017), we show that the OA rate varies according to the publication type, the publisher and the discipline (more than 60% in Mathematics while it is about 30% in Medical research which represents the largest share in the number of publications). We describe the main challenges of our method (detection of the publications with a French affiliation, metadata enrichment with machine learning, open access status) and evaluate the errors of each step. Most […]
The article describes the results of the first year of the Centre Mersenne for Open Scientific Publishing, a diamond open access platform for scientific publications developed by Mathdoc, a joint service unit based in Grenoble (France).The Centre Mersenne was launched on 1st January 2018 to offer the scientific community a new open access publication solution for journals publishing in LaTeX and thus contributes to bibliodiversity.This article discusses challenges faced by the Centre Mersenne while implementing concretely its goals, refining its business model, and actions taken to address the needs of new journals.This article specifically focuses on the three new journals launched during that year, among which two newly-created and one ‘flipped’ journal, as well as two newly-migrated journals from Cedram, a dissemination platform for mathematics journals bound to disappear.
A wide range of initiatives for developing research and data infrastructures have been funded in recent years. There is a growing concern amongst the academic community to maintain the resources invested beyond the period of the original research funding. If technical progress has been made to preserve the data themselves, few thinking and operational solutions exist for the institutions that create, disseminate, curate and preserve the data. How to ensure their existence over the medium or the long-term? This paper is a case study: it addresses the sustainability issues faced by Persée, a French platform dedicated to digitized documentary heritage that was launched in 2003. Through this example, the aim is to present, in practical terms, how an organization has to adapt and to change to sustain over time. Persée tested and combined various mechanisms (technical actions, users’ involvement, organizational evolution, marketing, funding models) with reciprocal influence, to achieve sustainability. Rather than a steady state, ensuring the long term existence of a data infrastructure is an ongoing and resource intensive process.
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.
The aim of this paper is to present the Centre Mersenne for Open Scientific Publishing, a new open access scien-tific publishing infrastructure for publications written in LaTeX.The Centre Mersenne was launched in January 2018 with the first volume of the newly-created journal Algebraic Combinatorics.This non-profit initiative hosted by French public institutions was created to address a growing need within the scientific community for alternative solutions simultaneously scalable, sus-tainable, trustworthy, of high quality and at fair price.The Centre Mersenne supports publica-tions such as journals, books and pro-ceedings from any scientific disci-pline, provided they are written in La-TeX and engaged towards Diamond open access.
Sustainability is an essential part of the work of publishers. Here, the view of an open access publisher, MDPI, is presented with regards to sustainability within publishing. MDPI’s understanding of sustainability is given and some of the concrete actions it leads to. These include supporting umbrella initiatives, exploring alternative business and editorial models, elements of open science, and ensuring the long-term sustainability of published content. Our aim is to demonstrate actions that could be taken by other publishers and to invite dialog with the broader research community for how a large open access publisher can contribute to a sustainable knowledge ecosystem.
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 bu-siness 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 unders-tand, adapt, and modify the community-based model of Language Science Press.
In April of 2015, Canadian Science Publishing (CSP) in partnership with the University of Toronto Libraries launched an automated manuscript deposit service. Upon author’s opt-in, an automated workflow transfers their accepted manuscript from the publisher system into the University of Toronto research repository, TSpace, where it is made openly available with a reference to the final version on the journal website. This free service is available to authors publishing their work in CSP’s NRC Research Press journals and is of particular interest to grant recipients looking to comply with the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications that came into effect in 2015. This paper provides an overview of the partnership and the workflow that makes over 1,200 manuscripts openly available annually. It also shares the script that can be adopted by other libraries and publishers looking to provide automated deposit service to authors for the purpose of funder mandate compliance, green OA, or preservation.
ScholarlyHub (SH) was launched in November 2017 as a portal to fund and create a social network for scholarship-using individuals and communities that is supported and directed from the bottom up and not beholden to venture capitalists on the one hand and governments on the other. As an inclusive, member-run portal, it hopes to connect rather than replace numerous non-profit and open-source OA initiatives, which tend to lack a visible and attractive front end, and which may not currently be interoperable. If its goals can be realized, SH may offer one solution to the full workflow platforms that for-profit conglomerates are on the cusp of achieving. This practitioner’s paper presents the key characteristics of SH and offers an early progress report.
