Category Archives: oa.metadata

The Open Syllabus Project maps out 6 million class syllabi

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“For decades, the syllabus has been the roadmap to college classes, listing homework, assignments, and most crucially, texts for students to read and reference. But while a syllabus might be able to teach students what they’re in for during the semester, academics have lacked a tool to analyze large masses of syllabi to better understand what teachers are teaching in different disciplines. That means there isn’t as much empirical data about the content being taught at universities.

The Open Syllabus Project aims to fix this problem. Researchers at the the American Assembly, a nonprofit housed within Columbia University, have collected an archive of more than six million syllabi from college courses all over the world that could help teachers to create new syllabi and researchers to garner a cross-cultural understanding of higher education.

The project first launched three years ago, but this new update has six times as many syllabi and search tools and visualizations designed to map out how academia works right now….”

Inaugural lectures by Sarah de Rijcke and Ludo Waltman

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“Ludo [Waltman] started his inaugural lecture by discussing the improvements made to the indicators, algorithms, and software tools used by CWTS. He explained how these improvements have led to better ways in which scientometric methods support the evaluation of scientific research. Ludo then talked about contextualized scientometrics. In this new approach to scientometrics, scientometric analyses are made fully transparent, enabling a deep engagement of end users in the interpretation of the analyses. Ludo emphasized that contextualized scientometrics requires openly available scientometric data sources. Finally, Ludo called for higher levels of quantitative literacy to improve the way scientometric analyses are used to inform research policy. Improvements need to be made in research and education. In addition, Ludo stressed the importance of having realistic expectations from scientometric analyses.”

ROR-ing Together: Implementing Organization IDs in Dryad

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“At its core, ROR is focused on filling a very specific and crucially important gap in scholarly research and publishing infrastructure: information about the organizations affiliated with researchers and research outputs. The rise of DOIs to identify datasets and publications and ORCID IDs to identify researchers and contributors has facilitated more efficient discovery and tracking of research outputs. But without being able to identify where these outputs and authors are affiliated, this discovery and tracking can only go so far. At best, an immense amount of additional and manual work is involved in extracting this information to fill the gap. At worst? The gap never gets filled in. With ROR IDs, the idea is that both of these scenarios no longer happen. ROR is intended for use by the research community, for the purposes of increasing the use of organization identifiers in the community and enabling connections between organization records in various systems.

ROR and Dryad joined forces this spring to tackle two different yet related challenges. Following the launch of the MVR, ROR was interested in finding a partner to pilot a simple yet effective implementation of the ROR API. Dryad was interested in implementing a solution to the problem of missing affiliation data. As a longstanding community partner in data publishing and open infrastructure projects, the Dryad team was eager to be an early adopter of ROR and blaze the trail toward wider implementation and collection of ROR IDs across multiple systems and platforms….”

Mixed access and licence values in repository records – Research data management

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“On 22nd May 2019, members of the Jisc Open Research Hub team held a webinar which presented a set of design options around the assigning of more than one licence or access type to a repository deposit. The aim was to get feedback to help the design team decide which approach to develop. 

Although the webinar concentrated on the UX aspects on the solution for the Jisc Research Repository, the overall problem that is being addressed is an international one and has cropped up at workshops in the UK and overseas. 

What’s driving discussion is the move towards bringing together files in order to create a research package. These packages might be publications, data and code, all of which may have different licences. The legal implications of what someone can then do with the research package is being addressed by the University of Glasgow in a continuing set of workshops about research data licencing. It is also of concern to the international audience and was a hot topic of conversation in the Legal interoperability group meeting at the recent Research Data Alliance plenary in Philadelphia. …”

Library Provision of Intellectual Access to Open Access Journal Articles: The Serials Librarian: Vol 0, No 0

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Abstract:  Academic libraries provide intellectual access (discovery and procurement) to the full text of electronic journal articles through traditional library technologies like discovery layers, link resolver software and knowledge bases. These technologies mainly rely on accurate title-level metadata to successfully deliver journal articles to library users. Open Access articles pose a difficulty for many participants in the e-journal supply chain, including libraries and publishers, as Open Access status is a property of the article, not the title. A review of the literature examines: the impact of Open Access on intellectual access through traditional library technologies, current proposed solutions, and emerging technologies.

Library Provision of Intellectual Access to Open Access Journal Articles: The Serials Librarian: Vol 0, No 0

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Abstract:  Academic libraries provide intellectual access (discovery and procurement) to the full text of electronic journal articles through traditional library technologies like discovery layers, link resolver software and knowledge bases. These technologies mainly rely on accurate title-level metadata to successfully deliver journal articles to library users. Open Access articles pose a difficulty for many participants in the e-journal supply chain, including libraries and publishers, as Open Access status is a property of the article, not the title. A review of the literature examines: the impact of Open Access on intellectual access through traditional library technologies, current proposed solutions, and emerging technologies.

Best practice license information – Crossref

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“The information below sets out guidance for publishers on registering license metadata with Crossref. This is to help academic institutions: they need to identify the articles written by their researchers, and also understand how they may use them – and to do so in an automated, machine-readable way.

Institutions need to know which article version may be exposed on an open repository, and from what date. It is no longer sufficient simply to describe in words how they may calculate the embargo end-date, for example, by referring them to a general set of terms and conditions that apply to all of your content across its whole lifecycle – they need to know whether this version of this article can be exposed on their repository and, if so, from what specific date, and what repository readers can then do with the content they find there.

The Crossref schema contains all the fields you need to specify this unambiguously. By doing so, you can also be more confident that institutions will have the information they need to respect your terms and conditions….”

Best practice license information – Crossref

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“The information below sets out guidance for publishers on registering license metadata with Crossref. This is to help academic institutions: they need to identify the articles written by their researchers, and also understand how they may use them – and to do so in an automated, machine-readable way.

Institutions need to know which article version may be exposed on an open repository, and from what date. It is no longer sufficient simply to describe in words how they may calculate the embargo end-date, for example, by referring them to a general set of terms and conditions that apply to all of your content across its whole lifecycle – they need to know whether this version of this article can be exposed on their repository and, if so, from what specific date, and what repository readers can then do with the content they find there.

The Crossref schema contains all the fields you need to specify this unambiguously. By doing so, you can also be more confident that institutions will have the information they need to respect your terms and conditions….”

Jisc and Crossref issue guidance to publishers on better licensing metadata | Jisc scholarly communications

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“Wouldn’t it be great if you could look up the green OA status of any journal article? What if you could easily find out, for any article, which version you can expose on an open repository, exactly when its embargo ends, and which post-embargo licence then applies?

Jisc and Crossref have worked together to issue new guidance to publishers to help bring that closer to reality….”

Jisc and Crossref issue guidance to publishers on better licensing metadata | Jisc scholarly communications

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“Wouldn’t it be great if you could look up the green OA status of any journal article? What if you could easily find out, for any article, which version you can expose on an open repository, exactly when its embargo ends, and which post-embargo licence then applies?

Jisc and Crossref have worked together to issue new guidance to publishers to help bring that closer to reality….”