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Connecting the Knowledge Commons: From Projects to Sustainable Infrastructure
ELPUB 2018 marks the 22nd edition of the International Conference in ELectronic PUBlishing and the 10th anniversary of the meeting being held in Toronto.
1. Global OA APCs (APC) 2010–2017: Major Trends
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.
Section:
Long Papers
2. An Expertise Recommender System Based on Data from an Institutional Repository (DiVA)
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.
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Long Papers
3. The Public Knowledge Project: Reflections and Directions After Its First Two Decades
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.
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Long Papers
4. Automatic Subject Indexing and Classification Using Text Recognition and Computer-Based Analysis of Tables of Contents
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.
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Long Papers
5. Availability of Cultural Heritage Structured Metadata in the World Wide Web
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 […]
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Long Papers
6. Game not Over: End-User Programming and Game System Modding as Models for Extending Community Engagement
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.
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Long Papers
7. Data Driving Sustainability—the African Open Science Platform Project
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.
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Long Papers
8. The Value of Network Sustainability: Why We Join Research Infrastructures
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.
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Long Papers
9. Framing Power: Tracing Key Discourses in Open Science Policies
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.
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Long Papers
10. Global Scholarly Collaboration: from Traditional Citation Practice to Direct Communication
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.
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Long Papers
11. Open Access Infrastructure in Greece: Current Status, Challenges and Perspectives
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.
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Long Papers
12. The End of a Centralized Open Access Project and the Beginning of a Community-Based Sustainable Infrastructure for Latin America: Redalyc.org after Fifteen Years The Open Access ecosystem in Latin America
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.
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Long Papers
13. Beyond the Dichotomy between Natural and Knowledge Commons: Reflections on the IAD Framework from the Ubatuba Open Science Project
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.
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Long Papers
14. Inequality in Knowledge Production: The Integration of Academic Infrastructure by Big Publishers
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.
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Long Papers
15. Whose Infrastructure? Towards Inclusive and Collaborative Knowledge Infrastructures in Open Science
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 […]
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Long Papers
16. Open Science Practices Adopted by Latin American & Caribbean Open Access Journals
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.
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Long Papers
17. The DOAJ Ambassador Programme: An Example Project for Promoting Cognitive Justice in the Global South
Global scientific publishing, including open access publishing, is heavily biased towards journals and authors from the Global North. This has resulted in a knowledge gap between the South and the North. It has led to a situation where scientific knowledge from the Global South is very much underrepresented in the collective scientific output worldwide: a problem which has been described as cognitive injustice. Unfortunately this situation is not helped by the fact that many questionable publishers are based in countries in the Global South. To address these issues the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) started an Ambassador programme in 2016 with the help of funding from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC Canada). The main objective of the programme was to increase the number of quality open access journals published, and the quality of open access publishing, in the Global South.
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Short Papers
18. Publishing Authentic, Private, Personal Data About Service Quality of Healthcare for Pain
An inclusive systemic design is specified for publishing data derived from personal private health records, owned and curated by patients. The design is specified with an example of a digital scrapbook of private personal records of care for medically significant pain. This scrapbook is designed to aggregate private records of patient pain experiences and of the care and accommodations they access. The design also specifies how to store, access and analyze those private records through distributed ledgers and how qualitative and quantitative data derived from that private data can be published as a common pool resource with polycentric governance.
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Short Papers
19. Shared Infrastructure for Next- Generation Books: HIRMEOS
This paper presents an introduction and status report on work being done to provide shared infrastructure for open access book publishers under the HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure) project. It focuses specifically on the work being done to provide shared altmetrics services, including reporting on annotation activity.
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Short Papers
20. ScholarlyHub: A Progress Report at Six Months
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.
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Practitioner Papers
21. Simplifying OA Policy Compliance for Authors Through a Publisher- Repository Partnership
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.
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Practitioner Papers
22. Full Disclosure: Open Business Data and the Publisher's Cookbook
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.
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Practitioner Papers
23. Sustainability in Publishing: An Open Access Publisher’s View
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.
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Practitioner Papers
24. The Launch of Centre Mersenne, a Technical Infrastructure to Support the Move Towards Diamond Open Access
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.
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Practitioner Papers
25. Collecting Inclusive Usage Metrics for Open Access Publications: the HIRMEOS Project
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.
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Practitioner Papers
26. In Search of a Sustainable Model for Digital Heritage Repositories: A Case Study
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.
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Practitioner Papers
27. Spatial Reference Patterns as a Point of Hegemonic Struggle: A Case Study of Biotechnology Journals in Latin America
Anglophone hegemony in knowledge production processes has been long acknowledged. Academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie, 2004) and its neoliberal rationalities, the dominant narratives within the colonial ventures, and a dominant and unreflective use of English in the production of textual knowledge have produced uneven structures in the academic publishing space, a homogenization of the concept of ‘international’ (Paasi 2005, 2015; Tietze and Dick, 2013; Péloquin, 2017). The contribution of the present research to this debate is the identification of points of hegemonic disruption in Latin America. We performed a case study on six articles written in Spanish and Portuguese of two Latin American Biotechnology journals with the purpose of identifying their spatial reference pattern. Findings show a high use of references in Spanish and Portuguese (54,31% and 36.49%, respectively. We interpret complex linguistic referencing patterns - this is citing in languages other than English - as an environment that opens meanings and enriches discussion. Moreover, we conceive Latin America as a space of hegemonic struggle against English homogenization in Science, and the SciELO platform as the infrastructure with the potential to (hopefully) transform the current academic status quo.
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Poster Abstracts
28. A Collaborative Approach to Support Document Structuring Process in the Context of Open Government Data
The online availability of public data using unstructured documents and non-open file formats is still found in ma-ny government agencies what hampers so-ciety to consume data, as unlocking da-ta from them is not a trivial task di-rected to everyone. This in progress work aims at expanding a previous pro-posal by elaborating an important as-pect of a conceptual software architec-ture which is the collaborative ap-proach in the context of open govern-ment data. The contribution of this work is shown in the form of software requirements that make it possible for users in the open data community be in-volved with the entire data structuring process while government agencies pre-pare themselves to publish open data by default.
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Poster Abstracts
29. DocLoop-OER: Channelling Reader Feedback into Open Educational Resources
docLoop-OER is a web platform where readers can give feedback on stretches of a (text)book. This feedback is channelled into an issue tracker.
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Poster Abstracts
30. OpenAIRE FP7 Post-Grant Pilot: A Summary of the Main Results
This short article aims at presenting the main outcomes of the OpenAIRE FP7 post-grant pilot, an initiative from the European Commission to cover publication costs after the end of the projects.
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Poster Abstracts
31. Mapping Academic Publishing: Locating Enclaves of Development Knowledge
With the intention of highlighting en-claves [in this context, the term en-clave simply refers to exclusive con-centrations of academic development knowledge; ultimately leading to narrow frames for development practice and po-licy] in academic knowledge production, this poster portrays geographic varia-tions in the institutions represented by articles published in the Journal of Peasant Studies and Third World Quar-terly from 2005-2015 via proportional symbol maps. Empirical data was col-lected via the Scopus database. Visua-lizing empirical bibliographic data shows higher percentages of academic publications from institutions located in the Global North. While the chain of academic publication and dissemination is extensive, this map focuses solely on the quantity of academic articles published. These representational ine-qualities can be paralleled in academia and other forms of exchange and work towards deconstructing perpetual struc-tural inequalities.
Section:
Poster Abstracts