Category Archives: oa.metadata

Leaked document on Elsevier negotiations sparks controversy – ScienceGuide

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“In exchange for full open access Elsevier requests full cooperation in a number of (meta)data projects, a leaked negotiating document reveals. Initial responses to the proposed deal show a fear of ‘vendor lock-in’ and condemn tying open access to open science goals….

Friday’s revelations about the ongoing negotiations between Dutch Universities and Elsevier have led to a stream of dismayed reactions. As a negotiating offer the publisher has indicated to be willing grant open access to all of its journals – possibly even including flagship publications such as Cell and The Lancet – with no increase in contract costs. The company is willing to do this in exchange for an extensive pilot program on metadata….”

Guest Post – Crossref at a Crossroads: All Roads Lead to Crossref – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“January of 2020 marks 20 years since the incorporation of Crossref. This platinum anniversary is an opportune time to look back and take stock of how far the organization has come in the intervening decades, and ponder where its strengths and achievements might lead it in the future. The visionary publishers who formed Crossref, and the staff who have run it from the start, should feel extremely proud of the organization they created – not least for its success as technical infrastructure, but also, arguably, as the scholarly information community’s most extensive, impactful, and stable consortium. That said, it is unlikely that the founding publishers envisioned at the outset the diverse, multi-stakeholder federation that the organization is today. As an early staff member myself, and now a member of the Board, I share a sense of pride in how far Crossref has come, and care deeply about its future….

By dint of its vast coverage of scholarly literature, along with its ability both (1) to associate ever richer metadata with any DOI-identified object and (2) to convene – or rally – the scholarly information community around new initiatives, practices, and standards, Crossref is in a truly unique position to “scaffold” enriched representations of digital scholarship. That is, Crossref is better placed than any other organization to support community-driven efforts to improve discovery and navigation, and our ability to capture and assess contributions to science and scholarship. The pressing questions at this juncture, to my mind, are: will Crossref rise to this opportunity; who gets to decide whether or not it does; and do the governance and sustainability models it started with 20 years ago still serve the organization today, and into the future? …

I would go so far as to say that Crossref’s success was, if indirectly, a significant forcing function for open access as well. The experience of hitting a paywall after clicking on a DOI-powered link was and is a source of significant frustration for readers and libraries, especially when also encountering high fees for access to individual articles. The lucrative “article economy” envisioned in the 2000s never quite reached publishers’ expectations….

With the growth of open access, some of the larger and more progressive commercial publishers have pivoted on strategy, and are banking increasingly on their data, technology, and analytics businesses (see, for example, the 2019 SPARC Landscape Analysis authored by Claudio Aspesi). It behooves the leaders of today’s research institutions to explore fully the implications of commercial control of research data, analytics, and infrastructure, along with the potential for community-owned alternatives. The prospect of an open metadata commons for digital scholarship, and open infrastructure for computing over that data, may be less exciting for entities who intend to grow revenues from their technology and analytics products than it is for other publishers, because of how it might compete with their current and future offerings. It would be foolhardy to ignore this fact as Crossref’s membership, staff, and Board work together to help the organization realize its full promise….”

The open access needle in the discovery haystack | Jisc

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“The transition towards making scholarly communication openly available and accessible for all is a high priority for funding organisations. A tremendous amount of work is underway by libraries to disclose new sets of data to ensure that their collections can be searched and found.

Supporting this trend, Jisc has recently launched the library hub discover offering a fast and convenient way to search for publications held by UK libraries….

There is good news, however! A lot of different people and organisations around the world are focused on finding ways forward….

In addition to all the work that Jisc has done, the OAPEN initiative has been active for some years and the Knowledge Exchange has undertaken surveys and released reports. The British Library is leading on work and, more recently, the COPIM project has received a substantial amount of funding to pursue solutions in this space….

As part of the Jisc library hub roadmap, we have plans to build and release a tool that will help smaller libraries and open access publishers to more easily create good quality bibliographic records that will be optimised for visibility in discovery systems….”

The amount of data brought together by this service is growing daily, but at the time of writing, 135 academic and specialist libraries have contributed, adding up to more than 102 million catalogue records. But here’s the rub: among those 102 million records, it’s not easy to find out which electronic books under which topic are free, unrestricted and legally accessibly. …”

Help Build Open Infrastructure for Organization Identifiers: A Call to Support and Sustain ROR

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“ROR is the Research Organization Registry, a community-led project to develop an open, sustainable, usable, and unique identifier for every research organization in the world. 

ROR emerged to fill a crucial gap in the scholarly communication landscape: while we already had an open network of identifiers for research outputs (DOIs for publications and data) and research contributors (ORCID IDs), open infrastructure for research organizations was a missing piece. 

ROR is a robust and stable registry of identifiers for close to 100K organizations (and counting!), and provides open tools for using and implementing ROR IDs, including a front-end search interface, an API, a reconciler that works with OpenRefine, and a public data dump. Everything is openly available on Github….”

The NIH Open Citation Collection: A public access, broad coverage resource

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Abstract:  Citation data have remained hidden behind proprietary, restrictive licensing agreements, which raises barriers to entry for analysts wishing to use the data, increases the expense of performing large-scale analyses, and reduces the robustness and reproducibility of the conclusions. For the past several years, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Portfolio Analysis (OPA) has been aggregating and enhancing citation data that can be shared publicly. Here, we describe the NIH Open Citation Collection (NIH-OCC), a public access database for biomedical research that is made freely available to the community. This dataset, which has been carefully generated from unrestricted data sources such as MedLine, PubMed Central (PMC), and CrossRef, now underlies the citation statistics delivered in the NIH iCite analytic platform. We have also included data from a machine learning pipeline that identifies, extracts, resolves, and disambiguates references from full-text articles available on the internet. Open citation links are available to the public in a major update of iCite (https://icite.od.nih.gov).

 

 

Library Cloud | Harvard Library Lab

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“Library Cloud is a prototype metadata hub and data service that provides open, programmatic access to the metadata available within the Harvard Library ecosystem. It normalizes metadata so that it can be found across silos, and enriches it with connections to information within the Library’s collection and beyond.  Benefits of such a metadata server include an open platform for developers to create related tools and applications, provision of data for research purposes, and lower barriers to creating services for specialized research and teaching communities….”

OASPA and the Initiative for Open Citations – OASPA

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“One of the goals of OASPA is to support the transition to a world in which open access becomes the predominant mode of publication. As we have charted in the annual statistics on the growth of open content published using various Creative Commons licenses, steady progress is being made (see for example the most recent update). We are now introducing a new membership requirement for OASPA to increase openness, specifically of citation data.

Another area where publishers have helped to make progress towards greater openness is in the provision of metadata. Many members of OASPA already deposit metadata with Crossref and make this data openly available. There are good reasons for publishers to do this – it can help with the discoverability of content whether it is open access or behind subscription barriers. To find out whether a particular publisher deposits metadata and makes those data available, Crossref has introduced a service called Participation Reports (example here)….”

OASPA and the Initiative for Open Citations – OASPA

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“One of the goals of OASPA is to support the transition to a world in which open access becomes the predominant mode of publication. As we have charted in the annual statistics on the growth of open content published using various Creative Commons licenses, steady progress is being made (see for example the most recent update). We are now introducing a new membership requirement for OASPA to increase openness, specifically of citation data.

Another area where publishers have helped to make progress towards greater openness is in the provision of metadata. Many members of OASPA already deposit metadata with Crossref and make this data openly available. There are good reasons for publishers to do this – it can help with the discoverability of content whether it is open access or behind subscription barriers. To find out whether a particular publisher deposits metadata and makes those data available, Crossref has introduced a service called Participation Reports (example here)….”