Publications, Volume 7, Issue 2 (June 2019) – 22 articles

A wide range of disciplines are building preprint services—web-based systems that enable publishing non peer-reviewed scholarly manuscripts before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. We have quantitatively surveyed nine of the largest English language preprint services offered by the Center for Open Science (COS) and available through an Application Programming Interface. All of the services we investigate also permit the submission of postprints, non-typeset versions of peer-reviewed manuscripts. Data indicates that all services are growing, but with submission rates below more mature services (e.g., bioRxiv). The trend of the preprint-to-postprint ratio for each service indicates that recent growth is a result of more preprint submissions. The nine COS services we investigate host papers that appear in a range of peer-reviewed journals, and many of these publication venues are not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. As a result, COS services function as open repositories for peer-reviewed papers that would otherwise be behind a paywall. We further analyze the coauthorship network for each COS service, which indicates that the services have many small connected components, and the largest connected component encompasses only a small percentage of total authors on each service. When comparing the papers submitted to each service, we observe topic overlap measured by keywords self-assigned to each manuscript, indicating that search functionalities would benefit from cutting across the boundaries of a single service. Finally, though annotation capabilities are integrated into all COS services, it is rarely used by readers. Our analysis of these services can be a benchmark for future studies of preprint service growth. Full article

Eugene Garfield advanced the theory and practice of information science and envisioned information systems that made the discovery of scientific information much more efficient. The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which he founded in Philadelphia in 1960, developed innovative information products that have revolutionized science. ISI provided current scientific information to researchers all over the world by publishing the table of contents of key scientific journals in the journal Current Contents (CC). Garfield introduced the citation as a qualitative measure of academic impact and propelled the concepts of “citation indexing” and “citation linking”, paving the way for today’s search engines. He created the Science Citation Index (SCI), which raised awareness about citations; triggered the development of new disciplines (scientometrics, infometrics, webometrics); and became the foundation for building new important products such as Web of Science. The journal impact factor (IF), originally designed to select journals for the SCI, became the most widely accepted tool for measuring academic impact. Garfield actively promoted English as the international language of science and became a powerful force in the globalization of research. His ideas changed how researchers gather scientific information, communicate their findings, and advance their careers. This article looks at the impact of Garfield’s ideas and legacy on the culture of research. Full article

The University of North Texas Libraries’ Digital Collections are situated as a unified whole within their preservation infrastructure, with three separate user interfaces serving the content to different audiences. These separate interfaces are: The UNT Digital Library (DL), The Portal to Texas History, and The Gateway to Oklahoma History. Situated within each interface are collections, and hosted within these collections are digital objects. One collection, the UNT Scholarly Works Repository, specifically serves UNT’s research and creative contributions and functions as the Institutional repository (IR) for the University of North Texas. Because UNT Scholarly works is seated as a collection amongst other collections, users can access faculty research, not just out of an interest in research from specific faculty members, but also as it ties into the user’s broader understanding of a given topic. With flexible infrastructure and metadata schema that connect collections beneath the umbrella of the wider preservation infrastructure, the UNT DL employs full-text searching and interlinked metadata to strengthen and make visible the connections between objects in different collections. This paper examined how users navigated between other collections within the UNT IR, as well as within the UNT DL. Through this examination, we observed patterns between how users navigated between objects, understood which collections may have related to one another, examined why some unique items were used more than others, and viewed the average number of items used within a session. Full article

The digital format opens up new possibilities for interaction with monographic publications. In particular, annotation tools make it possible to broaden the discussion on the content of a book, to suggest new ideas, to report errors or inaccuracies, and to conduct open peer reviews. However, this requires the support of the users who might not yet be familiar with the annotation of digital documents. This paper will give concrete examples and recommendations for exploiting the potential of annotation in academic research and teaching. After presenting the annotation tool of Hypothesis, the article focuses on its use in the context of HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science Infrastructure), a project aimed to improve the Open Access digital monograph. The general line and the aims of a post-peer review experiment with the annotation tool, as well as its usage in didactic activities concerning monographic publications are presented and proposed as potential best practices for similar annotation activities. Full article

A scholarly communication system needs to register, distribute, certify, archive, and incentivize knowledge production. The current article-based system technically fulfills these functions, but suboptimally. I propose a module-based communication infrastructure that attempts to take a wider view of these functions and optimize the fulfillment of the five functions of scholarly communication. Scholarly modules are conceptualized as the constituent parts of a research process as determined by a researcher. These can be text, but also code, data, and any other relevant pieces of information that are produced in the research process. The chronology of these modules is registered by iteratively linking to each other, creating a provenance record of parent and child modules (and a network of modules). These scholarly modules are linked to scholarly profiles, creating a network of profiles, and a network of how profiles relate to their constituent modules. All these scholarly modules would be communicated on the new peer-to-peer Web protocol Dat, which provides a decentralized register that is immutable, facilitates greater content integrity than the current system through verification, and is open-by-design. Open-by-design would also allow diversity in the way content is consumed, discovered, and evaluated to arise. This initial proposal needs to be refined and developed further based on the technical developments of the Dat protocol, its implementations, and discussions within the scholarly community to evaluate the qualities claimed here. Nonetheless, a minimal prototype is available today, and this is technically feasible. Full article

The Oxford Common File Layout describes a shared approach to filesystem layouts for institutional and preservation repositories, providing recommendations for how digital repository systems should structure and store files on disk or in object stores. The authors represent institutions where digital preservation practices have been established and proven over time or where significant work has been done to flesh out digital preservation practices. A community of practitioners is surfacing and is assessing successful preservation approaches designed to address a spectrum of use cases. With this context as a background, the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) will be described as the culmination of over two decades of experience with existing standards and practices. Full article

Hundreds of years of biodiversity research have resulted in the accumulation of a substantial pool of communal knowledge; however, most of it is stored in silos isolated from each other, such as published articles or monographs. The need for a system to store and manage collective biodiversity knowledge in a community-agreed and interoperable open format has evolved into the concept of the Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management System (OBKMS). This paper presents OpenBiodiv: An OBKMS that utilizes semantic publishing workflows, text and data mining, common standards, ontology modelling and graph database technologies to establish a robust infrastructure for managing biodiversity knowledge. It is presented as a Linked Open Dataset generated from scientific literature. OpenBiodiv encompasses data extracted from more than 5000 scholarly articles published by Pensoft and many more taxonomic treatments extracted by Plazi from journals of other publishers. The data from both sources are converted to Resource Description Framework (RDF) and integrated in a graph database using the OpenBiodiv-O ontology and an RDF version of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) taxonomic backbone. Through the application of semantic technologies, the project showcases the value of open publishing of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) data towards the establishment of open science practices in the biodiversity domain. Full article

In 2016, Florida State University adopted an institutional Open Access policy, and the library staff were tasked with implementing an outreach plan to contact authors and collect publication post-prints. In 2018, I presented at Open Repositories in Bozeman to share our workflow, methods, and results with the repository community. This workflow utilizes both restricted and open source methods of obtaining and creating research metadata and reaching out to authors to make their work more easily accessible and citable. Currently, post-print deposits added using this workflow are still in the double digits for each year since 2016. Like many institutions before us, participation rates of article deposit in the institutional repository are low and it may be too early in the implementation of this workflow to expect a real change in faculty participation. Full article

Initially funded as part of the Jisc Data Spring Initiative, a team of stakeholders (publishers, data repository managers, coders) has developed a simple workflow to streamline data paper submission. Metadata about a dataset in a data repository is combined with ORCID metadata about the author to automate and thus greatly reduce the friction of the submission process. Funders are becoming more interested in good data management practice, and institutions are developing repositories to hold the data outputs of their researchers, reducing the individual burden of data archiving. However, to date only a subset of the data produced is associated with publications and thus reliably archived, shared and re-used. This represents a loss of knowledge, leading to the repetition of research (especially in the case of negative observations) and wastes resources. It is laborious for time-poor researchers to fully describe their data via an associated article to maximise its utility to others, and there is little incentive for them to do so. Filling out diverse submission forms, for the repository and journal(s), makes things even lengthier. The app makes the process of associating and publishing data with a detailed description easier, with corresponding citation potential and credit benefits. Full article

The first ever quantitative paper to claim that papers published in so-called “predatory” open access (OA) journals and publishers were financially remunerated emerged from Canada. That study, published in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing (University of Toronto Press) in 2017 by Derek Pyne at Thompson Rivers University, garnered wide public and media attention, even by renowned news outlets such as The New York Times and The Economist. Pyne claimed to have found that most of the human subjects of his study had published in “predatory” OA journals, or in OA journals published by “predatory” OA publishers, as classified by Jeffrey Beall. In this paper, we compare the so-called “predatory” publications referred to in Pyne’s study with Walt Crawford’s gray open access (grayOA) list, as well as with Cabell’s blacklist, which was introduced in 2017. Using Cabell’s blacklist and Crawford’s grayOA list, we found that approximately 2% of the total publications (451) of the research faculty at the small business school were published in potentially questionable journals, contrary to the Pyne study, which found significantly more publications (15.3%). In addition, this research casts doubt to the claim made in Pyne’s study that research faculty members who have predatory publications have 4.3 “predatory” publications on average. Full article

The changing world of scholarly communication and the emerging new wave of ‘Open Science’ or ‘Open Research’ has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly debated topics. Evidence-based rational debate is regularly drowned out by misinformed or exaggerated rhetoric, which does not benefit the evolving system of scholarly communication. This article aims to provide a baseline evidence framework for ten of the most contested topics, in order to help frame and move forward discussions, practices, and policies. We address issues around preprints and scooping, the practice of copyright transfer, the function of peer review, predatory publishers, and the legitimacy of ‘global’ databases. These arguments and data will be a powerful tool against misinformation across wider academic research, policy and practice, and will inform changes within the rapidly evolving scholarly publishing system. Full article

Scholarly communication is today immersed in publish-or-perish culture that propels non-cooperative behavior in the sense of strategic games played by researchers. Here we introduce and describe a blockchain based platform for decentralized scholarly communication. The design of the platform rests on community driven publishing reviewing processes and implements cryptoeconomic incentives that promote cooperative user behavior. The key to achieve cooperation in blockchain based scholarly communication is to transform today’s static research paper into a modifiable research paper under continuous peer review process. We introduce and discuss the implementation of a modifiable research paper as a smart contract on the blockchain. Full article

In this study, I developed operational versions of Gini’s and Hirsch’s indexes that can be applied to characterize each researcher’s publication history (PH) as heterodox, orthodox, and interdisciplinary. In addition, the new indicators warn against anomalies that potentially arise from tactical or opportunistic citation and publication behaviors by authors and editors, and can be calculated from readily available information. I split the original Hirsch index into nested indexes to isolate networking activity, as well as to distinguish scientific production (number of articles) from scientific productivity (rate of production), and used nested Gini indexes to identify intentional and successful intertopical and interdisciplinary research. I applied the most popular standardizations (i.e., per author and per year), and used simple methodologies (i.e., least-squares linear and cubic fitting, whole-career vs. subperiods, two-dimensional graphs). I provide three representative numerical examples based on an orthodox multidisciplinary PH, a heterodox PH from the social sciences, and an orthodox unidisciplinary PH from the physical sciences. Two additional numerical examples based on PHs from the life and health sciences show that the suggested PH characterization can be applied to different disciplines where different publication and citation practices prevail. Software is provided to help readers explore the use of these indicators. Full article

Within the fields of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP), the question of whether English as an Additional Language (EAL) scholars are disadvantaged by the pressure to publish in English continues to be debated. In this paper, I challenge this orthodoxy, raising questions about the evidence upon which it is based. Within a framework of ‘verbal hygiene’, I will argue that the attention accorded to ‘non-nativeness’ may be disproportionate to its significance for publication success. I conclude by proposing some reorientations for researchers and practitioners in the field that encompass non-linguistic structures of inequity. Full article

Many academic and research institutions today maintain multiple types of institutional repositories operating on different systems and platforms to accommodate the needs and governance of the materials they house. Often, these institutions support multiple repository infrastructures, as these systems and platforms are not able to accommodate the broad range of materials that an institution creates. Announced in 2017, the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Libraries implemented a new repository solution and service model. Built upon the Figshare for Institutions platform, the KiltHub repository has taken on the role of a traditional institutional repository and institutional data repository, meeting the disparate needs of its researchers, faculty, and students. This paper will review how the CMU Libraries implemented the KiltHub repository and how the repository services was redeveloped to provide a more encompassing solution for traditional institutional repository materials and research datasets. Additionally, this paper will summarize how the CMU University Libraries surveyed the current repository landscape, decided to implement Figshare for Institutions as a comprehensive institutional repository, revised its previous repository service model to accommodate the influx of new material types, and what needed to be developed for campus engagement. This paper is based upon a presentation of the same title delivered at the 2018 Open Repositories Conference held at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. Full article

Most out-of-the-box institutional repository systems do not provide the workflows and metadata features required for research data. Consequently, many libraries now support two institutional repository systems—one for publications, and one for research data—even when there are nearly a thousand data repositories in the United States, many of which provide services and policies that ensure their trustworthiness and suitability for research data. Libraries are either increasing spending by purchasing data repository solutions from vendors, or replicating work by building, customizing, and managing individual instances of data repository software. This article gives an update on a potential solution to this issue: An in-progress prototype for an open source Dataset Search tool that promotes discovery and reuse of institutional research datasets through automatic metadata harvesting and search engine optimization. Once finished, the Dataset Search tool has the potential to support three key impacts: Increasing discovery, reuse, and citation of research data; reinforcing the idea that research data are a legitimate scholarly product; and promoting community-owned systems that require less resource expenditure. Full article

Service management—the entirety of activities undertaken by an organization to design, plan, deliver, operate, and control information technology (IT) services offered to stakeholders—has long been applied successfully by the government and commercial sectors. In this article, service management is discussed in the context of open-source software developed in an academic library setting, by exploring the creation and growth of the Spotlight at Stanford service framework. First, service management is briefly introduced as a guiding principle and philosophy, within the Stanford Libraries context. Second, the Spotlight at Stanford software is described. Third, people who are key players in both the delivery and use of the software are discussed. Fourth, processes including goals and activities of the Spotlight at Stanford service team are reviewed. Fifth, various accomplishments are listed, including how the service team has contributed to the successful adoption and development of the web application at Stanford University. Finally, lessons learned are discussed and directions are shared for the future development of the Spotlight at Stanford service framework. Full article

In the past three decades, a body of research on issues related to multilingual scholars writing for publication has emerged, paralleling the rise of pressures on scholars around the world to publish their work in high-status journals, especially those included in particular journal citation indexes; these indexes typically privilege the use of English. Researchers have investigated multilingual scholars’ experiences and perspectives, the social contexts of their work, policies on research publishing, aspects of the texts produced by multilingual scholars, the kinds of people scholars interact with while working to publish their research, their collaborations and networks, and pedagogical initiatives to support their publishing efforts. Nevertheless, as ongoing research is conducted, the existing research base has not always been consulted in meaningful ways. In this paper, we draw on the notion of ‘lore’ to identify some of the preconceptions or received wisdom about multilingual scholars and their writing that seem to be circulating, then argue for researchers to move beyond the ‘lore’ and make greater use of both findings from empirical research and related theoretical and methodological conversations. We identify directions for future research to be conducted. Full article

Much of the debate on Plan S seems to concentrate on how to make toll-access journals open access, taking for granted that existing open access journals are Plan S-compliant. We suspected this was not so and set out to explore this using Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) metadata. We conclude that a large majority of open access journals are not Plan S-compliant, and that it is small publishers in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) not charging article processing charges (APC) that will face the largest challenge with becoming compliant. Plan S needs to give special considerations to smaller publishers and/or non-APC based journals. Full article

Although English is the dominant language of scholarly publication, many multilingual scholars continue to publish in other languages while they also publish in English. A large body of research documents how these multilingual scholars negotiate writing in English for publication. We know less, however, about the implications of such negotiations for other languages that scholars work in. We wanted to investigate trends in writing conventions in language other than English during a period when multilingual publication patterns have been common. Specifically, we examined changes in rhetorical patterns in the introduction sections of the 1994 and the 2014 volumes of three Norwegian-language journals in three different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Our findings show that while certain features of our material might be interpreted as the result of a non-English discourse community adopting dominant Anglo-American models, the overall picture is more complex. Our study indicates that we need more research that examines cross-linguistic textual practices that focus on English and any other languages that scholars may work in. We also consider the possible pedagogical implications of such a focus. Full article

Research studies, especially in the sciences, may benefit from substantial non-author support without which they could not be completed or published. The term “contributorship” was coined in 1997 to recognize all contributions to a research study, but its implementation (mostly in biomedical reports) has been limited to the inclusion of an “Author Contributions” statement that omits other contributions. To standardize the reporting of contributions across disciplines, irrespective of whether a given contribution merits authorship or acknowledgment, the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) was launched in 2014. Our assessment, however, shows that in practice, CRediT is a detailed authorship classification that risks denying appropriate credit for persons who contribute as non-authors. To illustrate the shortcomings in CRediT and suggest improvements, in this article we review key concepts of authorship and contributorship and examine the range of non-author contributions that may (or may not) be acknowledged. We then briefly describe different types of editorial support provided by (non-author) translators, authors’ editors and writers, and explain why it is not always acknowledged. Finally, we propose two new CRediT taxa and revisions to three existing taxa regarding both technical and editorial support, as a small but important step to make credit attribution more transparent, accurate and open. Full article

As Open access (OA) is often perceived as the end goal of scholarly publishing, much research has focused on flipping subscription journals to an OA model. Focusing on what can happen after the presumed finish line, this study identifies journals that have converted from OA to a subscription model, and places these “reverse flips” within the greater context of scholarly publishing. In particular, we examine specific journal descriptors, such as access mode, publisher, subject area, society affiliation, article volume, and citation metrics, to deepen our understanding of reverse flips. Our results show that at least 152 actively publishing journals have reverse-flipped since 2005, suggesting that this phenomenon does not constitute merely a few marginal outliers, but instead a common pattern within scholarly publishing. Notably, we found that 62% of reverse flips (N = 95) had not been born-OA journals, but had been founded as subscription journals, and hence have experienced a three-stage transformation from closed to open to closed. We argue that reverse flips present a unique perspective on OA, and that further research would greatly benefit from enhanced data and tools for identifying such cases. Full article