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Academic publishing and digital bibliodiversity
The 23rd edition of the International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ElPub) 2019 celebrates the cultural diversity in all aspects of the transmission and perception of the written, spoken and illustrated word
1. Community proofreading as a tool for community engagement: A quantitative analysis
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.
Section:
Long Papers
2. If, Alongside Libraries, Funders Pulled Their Weight: A Study in Universal Open Access
This demonstration study sets out the way in which a model for open access can work in which funders pay the portion of publishing costs associated with the articles that acknowledge research funder. Using the field of anthropology, this analysis presents the participation incentives and advantages behind of an open access model in which a journal article’s publication costs are paid by either (a) the research funder(s) acknowledged by the article or, if without a funder, (b) the libraries whose patrons read and utilize the research. Using both hypothetical and actual examples, the paper describes how the existing metadata systems such as Crossref’s Open Funder Registry can be utilized to automate the implementation of the model. It also addresses the model’s economic impact, from an initial pilot study to large-scale implementation, for the principal stakeholders in scholarly communication.
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Short Papers
3. Modeling scholarly publications for sustainable workflows
This study deals with the strategy of converting the workflow and document basis from a proprietary format to a fully standards-compliant system in the context of a publishing platform, that offers multiple output formats of monographs in the arts and humanities. It stresses the importance of creating an abstract document model as the basis for this single-source publishing approach and how a model offers guidance on each step of the way in book production.
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Short Papers
4. Is multilingualism seen as added- value in bibliodiversity?: A literature review focussed on business and research contexts
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.
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Long Papers
5. The significant difference in impact: An exploratory study about the meaning and value of metrics for open access monographs
This paper analyses usage statistics, citation data and altmetrics from a university press publishing open access monographs. The bibliometric data is then contrasted to the outcome of a survey of attitudes and behaviour among authors and editors who have published open access books. The metrics indicate that downloads and citations depend on the community of practice of the intended audience within each specific academic discipline, as well as the content itself. There is, for example, a clear difference in usage patterns between monographs and anthologies. The altmetric data used in the study indicate how users interact with the published books online. The data suggests, despite the small sample, that authors can to a greater extent influence how their book is discovered by the readership. It would, therefore, be relevant for authors to become more aware of the type of metrics available and how they can be interpreted and used for better understanding of how the book can reach its intended audience. Further studies are needed, and publishers of open access books are encouraged to share data for benchmarking and development of best practices.
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Short Papers
6. Matilda: Building a bibliographic/metric tool for open citations and open science
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 […]
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Long Papers
7. Service intermediation as a concept for an institutional publishing department
The service portfolio of the institutional publishing platform perspectivia.net is built on partnerships, cooperations, and community networks. The paper discusses context, preconditions, best practices and challenges of an institutional service concept relying on services outside the institution.
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Short Papers
8. The Centre Mersenne, one year of operation
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.
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Practitioner Papers
9. Monitoring Open Access at a national level: French case study
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 […]
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Practitioner Papers
10. A framework to the digital book design process
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.
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Long Papers
11. Universities and knowledge sharing: Evaluating progress to openness at the institutional level
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 […]
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Long Papers
12. Science should be open, right?: A survey conducted by the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) on the use of academic literature and open science
What does “open science” mean to researchers? A survey of researchers at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) suggests some interesting conclusions, particularly as far as the humanities are concerned. According to the responses, most of these researchers are in favour of open science as a matter of personal conviction. However, when it comes to publishing their own work, hardly any would consent to being published under some basic conditions of open science (adaptation, commercial use). Furthermore, they do appreciate subscription-based e-libraries, although they admit to using other methods, e.g. “resourcefulness”, to gain access to research papers. They would rather not pay to be published or to acquire an e-article of a fellow researcher. They read predominantly in English, with the second language of their research literature being Slovenian (before any other language). Even the most productive age group (40–50 years of age) write more articles than they perform peer-reviewing. They do not support open reviews, yet they consider peer-reviews to be very important; in their opinion peer-reviewing should be included in their evaluation. The survey and its results are just a minor example from a European country, but they have a very clear and universal message: open science is something yet to be defined.
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Short Papers
13. Strengthening bibliodiversity: The current situation in France at national and institutional levels
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 […]
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Practitioner Papers
14. Repositories at Bibliodiversity Stakes: Community Approaches
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.
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Practitioner Papers
15. Information visualisation and library data: A case study of Public Library of Veria, Greece
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.
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Long Papers
16. The Extent of Adoption of e-Publishing by University Presses in Kenya
Knowledge creating and dissemination is synonymous with institutions of higher learning. However, many institutions, especially in Africa spurn electronic publishing (e-publishing), failing to join most parts of the world that have embraced it with very positive results. Though connected to internet and the World Wide Web, only a number of universities practice electronic publishing. This paper aims to study the electronic publishing trends in institutions of higher learning and identify the opportunities and challenges faced by academic publishers in Kenya. The objectives of the study are to: identify institutions that practice academic publishing in Kenya; examine the relationship between authors’ knowledge on e-publishing platforms and publishers’ choice of e-platforms; analyze whether an existing work relationship between the publisher and an author influences the format of a publication; examine whether or not there is an association between levels of staff experiences within publishing and e-publishing. This is a research survey that employed a mixed method approach. The sample frame of 49 universities was used. Judgmental sampling was used in selecting key participants under the study. Data were collected by questionnaires and document analysis where simple descriptive statistical analysis was done based on objectives of the study to gauge the relationships between variables. Findings of the survey show that 12.2% of the Kenyan academic publishers are engaged in […]
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Short Papers
17. Creating a More Inclusive Future for Scholarly Communications: ACRL’s New Research Agenda for Scholarly Communications and the Research Environment
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.
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Long Papers
18. A comparative analysis of high school students’ and school librarians’ conceptions and practices of Digital Safety
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.
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Long Papers
19. Peer Community In: A free process for the recommendation of unpublished scientific papers based on peer review
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…)
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Practitioner Papers