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2016: The Year Open Access Broke?Posted: October 27, 2016 | Author: Margaret Heller | Filed under: open access, Scholarly Communication | Tags: open access, what-if? | Comments Off on 2016: The Year Open Access Broke?
It's Open Access Week, which for scholarly communications librarians and institutional repository managers is one of the big events of the year to reflect on our work and educate others. Over the years, it has become less necessary to explain what open access is. Rather, everyone seems to have a perception of open access and an opinion about it. But those perceptions and opinions may not be based on the original tenets of the open access movement. The commercialization of open access means that it may now seem too expensive to pursue for individuals to publish open access, and too complicated for institutions to attempt without buying a product.
In some ways, the open access movement is analogous to punk music–a movement that grew out of protest and DIY sensibilities, but was quickly coopted as soon as it became financially successful. While it was never free or easy to make work open access, changes in the market recently might make it feel even more expensive and complicated. Those who want to continue to build open access repositories and promote open access need to understand where their institution fits in the larger picture, the motivations of researchers and administration, and be able to put the right solutions together to avoid serious missteps that will set back the open access movement.
Like many exciting new ideas, open access is partially a victim of its own success. Heather Morrison has kept for the past ten years a tally of the dramatic growth of open access in an on-going series. Her post for this year's Open Access Week is the source for the statistics in this paragraph. Open access content makes up a sizeable portion of online content, and therefore is more of a market force. BASE now includes 100 million articles. Directory of Open Access Journals, even after the stricter inclusion process, has an 11% growth in article level searching with around 500,000 items. There are well over a billion items with a Creative Commons license. These numbers are staggering, and give a picture of how overwhelming the amount of content available all told is, much less open access. But it also means that almost everyone doing academic research will have benefited from open access content. Not everyone who has used open access (or Creative Commons licensed) content will know what it is, but as it permeates more of the web it becomes more and more relevant. It also becomes much harder to manage, and dealing with that complexity requires new solutions–which may bring new areas of profit.
An example of this new type of service is 1Science, which launched a year ago. This is a service that helps libraries manage their open access collections, both in terms of understanding what is available in their subscribed collections as well as their faculty output. 1Science grew out of longer term research projects around emerging bibliometrics, started by Eric Archambault, and according to their About Us page started as a way to improve findability of open access content, and grew into a suite of tools that analyzes collections for open access content availability. The market is now there for this to be a service that libraries are interested in purchasing. Similar moves happened with alternative metrics in the last few years as well (for instance, Plum Analytics).
But the big story for commercial open access in 2016 was Elsevier. Elsevier already had a large stable of open access author-pays journals, with fees of up to $5000. That is the traditional way that large commercial publishers have participated in open access. But Elsevier has made several moves in 2016 that are changing the face of open access. They acquired SSRN in May, which built on their acquisition of Mendeley in 2013, and hints at a longer term strategy for combining a content platform and social citation network that potentially could form a new type of open access product that could be marketed to libraries. Their move into different business models for open access is also illustrated in their controversial partnership with the University of Florida. This uses an API to harvest content from ScienceDirect published by UF researchers, but will not provide access to those without subscriptions except to certain accepted manuscripts, and grew out of a recognition that UF researchers published heavily in Elsevier journals and that working directly with Elsevier would allow them to get a large dataset of their researchers' content and funder compliance status more easily. 1 There is a lot to unpack in this partnership, but the fact that it can even take place shows that open access–particularly funder compliance for open access versions–is something about which university administration outside the library in the Office of Research Services is taking note. Such a partnership serves certain institutional needs, but it does not create an open access repository, and in most ways serves the needs of the publisher in driving content to their platform (though UF did get a mention of interlibrary loan into the process rather than just a paywall). It also removes incentives for UF faculty to publish in non-Elsevier journals, since their content in those journals will become even easier to find, and there will be no need to look elsewhere for open access grant compliance. Either way, this type of move takes the control of open access out of the hands of libraries, just as so many previous deals with commercial enterprises have done.
As I said in the beginning of this piece, more and more people already know about and benefit from open access, but all those people have different motivations. I break those into three categories, and which administrative unit I think is most likely to care about that aspect of open access:
- Open access is about the justice of wider access to academic content or getting back at the big publishers for exploitative practices. These people aren't going to be that interested in a commercial open access solution, except inasmuch as it allows more access for a lower cost–for instance, a hosted institutional repository that doesn't require institutional investment in developers. This group may include librarians and individual researchers.
- Open access is about following the rules for a grant-funded project since so many of those require open access versions of articles. Such requirements lead to an increase in author-pays open access, since publishers can command a higher fee that can be part of the grant award or subsidized by an institution. Repositories to serve these requirements and to address these needs are in progress but still murky to many. This group may include the Office of Research Services or Office of Institutional Research.
- "Open access" is synonymous with putting articles or article citations online to create a portfolio for reputation-building purposes. This last group is going to find something like that UF/Elsevier partnership to be a great situation, since they may not be aware of how many people cannot actually read the published articles. This last group may include administrators concerned with building the institution's reputation.
For librarians who fall into the first category but are sensitive to the needs of everyone in each category, it's important to select the right balance of solutions to meet everyone's needs but still maintain the integrity of the open access repository. That said, this is not easy. Meeting these variety of needs is exactly why some of these new products are entering the market, and it may seem easier to go with one of them even if it's not exactly the right long-term solution. I see this as an important continuing challenge facing librarians who believe in open access, and have to underpin future repository and outreach strategies.
- Russell, Judith C.; Wise, Alicia; Dinsmore, Chelsea S.; Spears, Laura I.; Phillips, Robert V.; and Taylor, Laurie (2016) "Academic Library and Publisher Collaboration: Utilizing an Institutional Repository to Maximize the Visibility and Impact of Articles by University Authors," Collaborative Librarianship: Vol. 8: Iss. 2, Article 4.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.du.edu/collaborativelibrarianship/vol8/iss2/4. ↩
Low Expectations Distributed: Yet Another Institutional Repository Collection Development WorkflowPosted: February 16, 2016 | Author: Margaret Heller | Filed under: open access, Scholarly Communication, workflow | Tags: institutional repositories | Comments Off on Low Expectations Distributed: Yet Another Institutional Repository Collection Development Workflow
Anyone who has worked on an institutional repository for even a short time knows that collecting faculty scholarship is not a straightforward process, no matter how nice your workflow looks on paper or how dedicated you are. Keeping expectations for the process manageable (not necessarily low, as in my clickbaity title) and constant simplification and automation can make your process more manageable, however, and therefore work better. I've written before about some ways in which I've automated my process for faculty collection development, as well as how I've used lightweight project management tools to streamline processes. My newest technique for faculty scholarship collection development brings together pieces of all those to greatly improve our productivity.
Allocating Your Human and Machine Resources
First, here is the personnel situation we have for the institutional repository I manage. Your own circumstances will certainly vary, but I think institutions of all sizes will have some version of this distribution. I manage our repository as approximately half my position, and I have one graduate student assistant who works about 10-15 hours a week. From week to week we only average about 30-40 hours total to devote to all aspects of the repository, of which faculty collection development is only a part. We have 12 librarians who are liaisons with departments and do the majority of the outreach to faculty and promotion of the repository, but a limited amount of the collection development except for specific parts of the process. While they are certainly welcome to do more, in reality, they have so much else to do that it doesn't make sense for them to spend their time on data entry unless they want to (and some of them do). The breakdown of work is roughly that the liaisons promote the repository to the faculty and answer basic questions; I answer more complex questions, develop procedures, train staff, make interpretations of publishing agreements, and verify metadata; and my GA does the simple research and data entry. From time to time we have additional graduate or undergraduate student help in the form of faculty research assistants, and we have a group of students available for digitization if needed.
Those are our human resources. The tools that we use for the day-to-day work include Digital Measures (our faculty activity system), Excel, OpenRefine, Box, and Asana. I'll say a bit about what each of these are and how we use them below. By far the most important innovation for our faculty collection development workflow has been integration with the Faculty Activity System, which is how we refer to Digital Measures on our campus. Many colleges and universities have some type of faculty activity system or are in the process of implementing one. These generally are adopted for purposes of annual reports, retention, promotion, and tenure reviews. I have been at two different universities working on adopting such systems, and as you might imagine, it's a slow process with varying levels of participation across departments. Faculty do not always like these systems for a variety of reasons, and so there may be hesitation to complete profiles even when required. Nevertheless, we felt in the library that this was a great source of faculty publication information that we could use for collection development for the repository and the collection in general.
We now have a required question about including the item in the repository on every item the faculty member enters in the Faculty Activity System. If a faculty member is saying they published an article, they also have to say whether it should be included in the repository. We started this in late 2014, and it revolutionized our ability to reach faculty and departments who never had participated in the repository before, as well as simplify the lives of faculty who were eager participants but now only had to enter data in one place. Of course, there are still a number of people whom we are missing, but this is part of keeping your expectation low–if you can't reach everyone, focus your efforts on the people you can. And anyway, we are now so swamped with submissions that we can't keep up with them, which is a good if unusual problem to have in this realm. Note that the process I describe below is basically the same as when we analyze a faculty member's CV (which I described in my OpenRefine post), but we spend relatively little time doing that these days since it's easier for most people to just enter their material in Digital Measures and select that they want to include it in the repository.
The ease of integration between your own institution's faculty activity system (assuming it exists) and your repository certainly will vary, but in most cases it should be possible for the library to get access to the data. It's a great selling point for the faculty to participate in the system for your Office of Institutional Research or similar office who administers it, since it gives faculty a reason to keep it up to date when they may be in between review cycles. If your institution does not yet have such a system, you might still discuss a partnership with that office, since your repository may hold extremely useful information for them about research activity of which they are not aware.
The Workflow
We get reports from the Faculty Activity System on roughly a quarterly basis. Faculty member data entry tends to bunch around certain dates, so we focus on end of semesters as the times to get the reports. The reports come by email as Excel files with information about the person, their department, contact information, and the like, as well as information about each publication. We do some initial processing in Excel to clean them up, remove duplicates from prior reports, and remove irrelevant information. It is amazing how many people see a field like "Journal Title" as a chance to ask a question rather than provide information. We focus our efforts on items that have actually been published, since the vast majority of people have no interest in posting pre-prints and those that do prefer to post them in arXiv or similar. The few people who do know about pre-prints and don't have a subject archive generally submit their items directly. This is another way to lower expectations of what can be done through the process. I've already described how I use OpenRefine for creating reports from faculty CVs using the SHERPA/RoMEO API, and we follow a similar but much simplified process since we already have the data in the correct columns. Of course, following this process doesn't tell us what we can do with every item. The journal title may be entered incorrectly so the API call didn't pick it up, or the journal may not be in SHERPA/RoMEO. My graduate student assistant fills in what he is able to determine, and I work on the complex cases. As we are doing this, the Excel spreadsheet is saved in Box so we have the change history tracked and can easily add collaborators.
At this point, we are ready to move to Asana, which is a lightweight project management tool ideal for several people working on a group of related projects. Asana is far more fun and easy to work with than Excel spreadsheets, and this helps us work together better to manage workload and see where we are with all our on-going projects. For each report (or faculty member CV), we create a new project in Asana with several sections. While it doesn't always happen in practice, in theory each citation is a task that moves between sections as it is completed, and finally checked off when it is either posted or moved off into some other fate not as glamorous as being archived as open access full text. The sections generally cover posting the publisher's PDF, contacting publishers, reminders for followup, posting author's manuscripts, or posting to SelectedWorks, which is our faculty profile service that is related to our repository but mainly holds citations rather than full text. Again, as part of the low expectations, we focus on posting final PDFs of articles or book chapters. We add books to a faculty book list, and don't even attempt to include full text for these unless someone wants to make special arrangements with their publisher–this is rare, but again the people who really care make it happen. If we already know that the author's manuscript is permitted, we don't add these to Asana, but keep them in the spreadsheet until we are ready for them.
We contact publishers in batches, trying to group citations by journal and publisher to increase efficiency so we can send one letter to cover many articles or chapters. We note to follow up with a reminder in one month, and then again in a month after that. Usually the second notice is enough to catch the attention of the publisher. As they respond, we move the citation to either posting publisher's PDF section or to author's manuscript section, or if it's not permitted at all to the post to SelectedWorks section. While we've tried several different procedures, I've determined it's best for the liaison librarians to ask just for author's accepted manuscripts for items after we've verified that no other version may be posted. And if we don't ever get them, we don't worry about it too much.
I hope you've gotten some ideas from this post about your own procedures and new tools you might try. Even more, I hope you'll think about which pieces of your procedures are really working for you, and discard those that aren't working any more. Your own situation will dictate which those are, but let's all stop beating ourselves up about not achieving perfection. Make sure to let your repository stakeholders know what works and what doesn't, and if something that isn't working is still important, work collaboratively to figure out a way around that obstacle. That type of collaboration is what led to our partnership with the Office of Institutional Research to use the Digital Measures platform for our collection development, and that in turn has led to other collaborative opportunities.
A Clean House at the Directory of Open Access JournalsPosted: November 30, 2015 | Author: Margaret Heller | Filed under: open access, publication, Scholarly Communication | Tags: directory of open access journals, doaj | 2 Comments »
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an international directory of journals and index of articles that are available open access. Dating back to 2003, the DOAJ was at the center of a controversy surrounding the "sting" conducted by John Bohannon in Science, which I covered in 2013. Essentially Bohannon used journals listed in DOAJ to try to find journals that would publish an article of poor quality as long as authors paid a fee. At the time many suggested that a crowdsourced journal reviewing platform might be the way to resolve the problem if DOAJ wasn't a good source. While such a platform might still be a good idea, the simpler and more obvious solution is the one that seems to have happened: for DOAJ to be more strict with publishers about requirements for inclusion in the directory. 1.
The process of cleaning up the DOAJ has been going on for some time and is getting close to an important milestone. All the 10,000+ journals listed in DOAJ were required to reapply for inclusion, and the deadline for that is December 30, 2015. After that time, any journals that haven't reapplied will be removed from the DOAJ.
"Proactive Not Reactive"
Contrary to popular belief, the process for this started well before the Bohannon piece was published 2. In December 2012 an organization called Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA) (founded by Alma Swan and Caroline Sutton) took over DOAJ from Lund University, and announced several initiatives, including a new platform, distributed editorial help, and improved criteria for inclusion. 3 Because DOAJ grew to be an important piece of the scholarly communications infrastructure it was inevitable that they would have to take such a step sooner or later. With nearly 10,000 journals and only a small team of editors it wouldn't have been sustainable over time, and to lose the DOAJ would have been a blow to the open access community.
One of the remarkable things about the revitalization of the DOAJ is the transparency of the process. The DOAJ News Service blog has been detailing the behind the scenes processes in detail since May 2014. One of the most useful things is a list of journals who have claimed to be listed in DOAJ but are not. Another important piece of information is the 2015-2016 development roadmap. There is a lot going on with the DOAJ update, however, so below I will pick out what I think is most important to know.
The New DOAJ
In March 2014, the DOAJ created a new application form with much higher standards for inclusion. Previously the form for inclusion was only 6 questions, but after working with the community they changed the application to require 58 questions. The requirements are detailed on a page for publishers, and the new application form is available as a spreadsheet.
While 58 questions seems like a lot, it is important to note that journals need not fulfill every single requirement, other than the basic requirements for inclusion. The idea is that journal publishers must be transparent about the structure and funding of the journal, and that journals explicitly labeled as open access meet some basic theoretical components of open access. For instance, one of the basic requirements is that "the full text of ALL content must be available for free and be Open Access without delay". Certain other pieces are strong suggestions, but not meeting them will not reject a journal. For instance, the DOAJ takes a strong stand against impact factors and suggests that they not be presented on journal websites at all 4.
To highlight journals that have extremely high standards for "accessibility, openness, discoverability reuse and author rights", the DOAJ has developed a "Seal" that is awarded to journals who answer "yes" to the following questions (taken from the DOAJ application form):
have an archival arrangement in place with an external party (Question 25). 'No policy in place' does not qualify for the Seal.
provide permanent identifiers in the papers published (Question 28). 'None' does not qualify for the Seal.
provide article level metadata to DOAJ (Question 29). 'No' or failure to provide metadata within 3 months do not qualify for the Seal.
embed machine-readable CC licensing information in article level metadata (Question 45). 'No' does not qualify for the Seal.
allow reuse and remixing of content in accordance with a CC BY, CC BY-SA or CC BY-NC license (Question 47). If CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC-ND, 'No' or 'Other' is selected the journal will not qualify for the Seal.
have a deposit policy registered in a deposit policy directory. (Question 51) 'No' does not qualify for the Seal.
allow the author to hold the copyright without restrictions. (Question 52) 'No' does not qualify for the Seal.
Part of the appeal of the Seal is that it focuses on the good things about open access journals rather than the questionable practices. Having a whitelist is much more appealing for people doing open access outreach than a blacklist. Journals with the Seal are available in a facet on the new DOAJ interface.
Getting In and Out of the DOAJ
Part of the reworking of the DOAJ was the requirementand required all currently listed journals to reapply–as of November 19 just over 1,700 journals had been accepted under the new criteria, and just over 800 had been removed (you can follow the list yourself here). For now you can find journals that have reapplied with a green check mark (what DOAJ calls The Tick!). That means that about 85% of journals that were previously listed either have not reapplied, or are still in the verification pipeline 5. While DOAJ does not discuss specific reasons a journal or publisher is removed, they do give a general category for removal. I did some analysis of the data provided in the added/removed/rejected spreadsheet.
At the time of analysis, there were 1776 journals on the accepted list. 20% of these were added since September, and with the deadline looming this number is sure to grow. Around 8% of the accepted journals have the DOAJ Seal.
There were 809 journals removed from the DOAJ, and the reasons fell into the following general categories. I manually checked some of the journals with only 1 or 2 titles, and suspect that some of these may be reinstated if the publisher chooses to reapply. Note that well over half the removed journals weren't related to misconduct but were ceased or otherwise unavailable.
|Inactive (has not published in the last calender year)
|Suspected editorial misconduct by publisher
|Website URL no longer works
|Ceased publishing
|Journal not adhering to Best Practice
|Journal is no longer Open Access
|Has not published enough articles this calendar year
|Wrong ISSN
|Other; delayed open access
|Other; no content
|Other; taken offline
|Removed at publisher's request
The spreadsheet lists 26 journals that were rejected. Rejected journals will know the specific reasons why their applications were rejected, but those specific reasons are not made public. Journals may reapply after 6 months once they have had an opportunity to amend the issues. 6 The general stated reasons were as follows:
|Has not published enough articles
|Journal website lacks necessary information
|Not an academic/scholarly journal
|Only Abstracts
|Web site URL doesn't work
The work that DOAJ is doing to improve transparency and the screening process is very important for open access advocates, who will soon have a tool that they can trust to provide much more complete information for scholars and librarians. For too long we have been forced to use the concept of a list of "questionable" or even "predatory" journals. A directory of journals with robust standards and easy to understand interface will be a fresh start for the rhetoric of open access journals.
Are you the editor of an open access journal? What do you think of the new application process? Leave your thoughts in the comments (anonymously if you like).
The Library as Research PartnerPosted: November 23, 2015 | Author: Yasmeen Shorish | Filed under: academic librarianship, data, Scholarly Communication | Comments Off on The Library as Research Partner
As I typed the title for this post, I couldn't help but think "Well, yeah. What else would the library be?" Instead of changing the title, however, I want to actually unpack what we mean when we say "research partner," especially in the context of research data management support. In the most traditional sense, libraries provide materials and space that support the research endeavor, whether it be in the physical form (books, special collections materials, study carrels) or the virtual (digital collections, online exhibits, electronic resources). Moreover, librarians are frequently involved in aiding researchers as they navigate those spaces and materials. This aid is often at the information seeking stage, when researchers have difficulty tracking down references, or need expert help formulating search strategies. Libraries and librarians have less often been involved at the most upstream point in the research process: the start of the experimental design or research question. As one considers the role of the Library in the scholarly life-cycle, one should consider the ways in which the Library can be a partner with other stakeholders in that life-cycle. With respect to research data management, what is the appropriate role for the Library?
In order to achieve effective research data management (RDM), planning for the life-cycle of the data should occur before any data are actually collected. In circumstances where there is a grant application requirement that triggers a call to the Library for data management plan (DMP) assistance, this may be possible. But why are researchers calling the Library? Ostensibly, it is because the Library has marketed itself (read: its people) as an expert in the domain of data management. It has most likely done this in coordination with the Research Office on campus. Even more likely, it did this because no one else was. It may have done this as a response to the National Science Foundation (NSF) DMP requirement in 2011, or it may have just started doing this because of perceived need on campus, or because it seems like the thing to do (which can lead to poorly executed hiring practices). But unlike monographic collecting or electronic resource acquisition, comprehensive RDM requires much more coordination with partners outside the Library.
Steven Van Tuyl has written about the common coordination model of the Library, the Research Office, and Central Computing with respect to RDM services. The Research Office has expertise in compliance and Central Computing can provide technical infrastructure, but he posits that there could be more effective partners in the RDM game than the Library. That perhaps the Library is only there because no one else was stepping up when DMP mandates came down. Perhaps enough time has passed, and RDM and data services have evolved enough that the Library doesn't have to fill that void any longer. Perhaps the Library is actually the *wrong* partner in the model. If we acknowledge that communities of practice drive change, and intentional RDM is a change for many of the researchers, then wouldn't ceding this work to the communities of practice be the most effective way to stimulate long lasting change? The Library has planted some starter seeds within departments and now the departments could go forth and carry the practice forward, right?
Well, yes. That would be ideal for many aspects of RDM. I personally would very much like to see the intentional planning for, and management of, research data more seamlessly integrated into standard experimental methodology. But I don't think that by accomplishing that, the Library should be removed as a research partner in the data services model. I say this for two reasons:
- The data/information landscape is still changing. In addition to the fact that more funders are requiring DMPs, more research can benefit from using openly available (and well described – please make it understandable) data. While researchers are experts in their domain, the Library is still the expert in the information game. At its simplest, data sources are another information source. The Library has always been there to help researchers find sources; this is another facet of that aid. More holistically, the Library is increasingly positioning itself to be an advocate for effective scholarly communication at all points of the scholarship life-cycle. This is a logical move as the products of scholarship take on more diverse and "nontraditional" forms.
Some may propose that librarians who have cultivated RDM expertise can still provide data seeking services, but perhaps they should not reside in the Library. Would it not be better to have them collocated with the researchers in the college or department? Truly embedded in the local environment? I think this is a very interesting model that I have heard some large institutions may want to explore more fully. But I think my second point is a reason to explore this option with some caution:
2. Preservation and access. Libraries are the experts in the preservation and access of materials. Central Computing is a critical institutional partner in terms of infrastructure and determining institutional needs for storage, porting, computing power, and bandwidth but – in my experience – are happy to let the long-term preservation and access service fall to another entity. Libraries (and archives) have been leading the development of digital preservation best practices for some time now, with keen attention to complex objects. While not all institutions can provide repository services for research data, the Library perspective and expertise is important to have at the table. Moreover, because the Library is a discipline-agnostic entity, librarians may be able to more easily imagine diverse interest in research data than the data producer. This can increase the potential vehicles for data sharing, depending on the discipline.
Yes, RDM and data services are reaching a place of maturity in academic institutions where many Libraries are evaluating, or re-evaluating, their role as a research partner. While many researchers and departments may be taking a more proactive or interested position with RDM, it is not appropriate for Libraries to be removed from the coordinated work that is required. Libraries should assert their expertise, while recognizing the expertise of other partners, in order to determine effective outreach strategies and resource needs. Above all, Libraries must set scope for this work. Do not be deterred by the increased interest from other campus entities to join in this work. Rather, embrace that interest and determine how we all can support and strengthen the partnerships that facilitate the innovative and exciting research and scholarship at an institution.
Data, data everywhere…but do we want to drink?Posted: July 16, 2015 | Author: Yasmeen Shorish | Filed under: academic librarianship, data, library, Planning, Scholarly Communication | Comments Off on Data, data everywhere…but do we want to drink?
The role of data, digital curation, and scholarly communication in academic libraries.
Ask around and you'll hear that data is the new bacon (or turkey bacon, in my case. Sorry, vegetarians). It's the hot thing that everyone wants a piece of. It is another medium with which we interact and derive meaning from. It is information[1]; potentially valuable and abundant. But much like [turkey] bacon, un-moderated gorging, without balance or diversity of content, can raise blood pressure and give you a heart attack. To understand how best to interact with the data landscape, it is important to look beyond it.
What do academic libraries need to know about data? A lot, but in order to separate the signal from the noise, it is imperative to look at the entire environment. To do this, one can look to job postings as a measure of engagement. The data curation positions, research data services departments, and data management specializations focus almost exclusively on digital data. However, these positions, which are often catch-alls for many other things do not place the data management and curation activities within the larger frame of digital curation, let alone scholarly communication. Missing from job descriptions is an awareness of digital preservation or archival theory as it relates to data management or curation. In some cases, this omission could be because a fully staffed digital collections department has purview over these areas. Nonetheless, it is important to articulate the need to communicate with those stakeholders in the job description. It may be said that if the job ad discusses data curation, digital preservation should be an assumed skill, yet given the tendencies to have these positions "do-all-the-things" it is negligent not to explicitly mention it.
Digital curation is an area that has wide appeal for those working in academic and research libraries. The ACRL Digital Curation Interest Group (DCIG) has one of the largest memberships within ACRL, with 1075 members as of March 2015. The interest group was intentionally named "digital curation" rather than "data curation" because the founders (Patricia Hswe and Marisa Ramirez) understood the interconnectivity of the domains and that the work in one area, like archives, could influence the work in another, like data management. For example, the work from Digital POWRR can help inform digital collection platform decisions or workflows, including data repository concerns. This Big Tent philosophy can help frame the data conversations within libraries in a holistic, unified manner, where the various library stakeholders work collaboratively to meet the needs of the community.
The absence of a holistic approach to data can result in the propensity to separate data from the corpus of information for which librarians already provide stewardship. Academic libraries may recognize the need to provide leadership in the area of data management, but balk when asked to consider data a special collection or to ingest data into the institutional repository. While librarians should be working to help the campus community become critical users and responsible producers of data, the library institution must empower that work by recognizing this as an extension of the scholarly communication guidance currently in place. This means that academic libraries must incorporate the work of data information literacy into their existing information literacy and scholarly communication missions, else risk excluding these data librarian positions from the natural cohort of colleagues doing that work, or risk overextending the work of the library.
This overextension is most obvious in the positions that seek a librarian to do instruction in data management, reference, and outreach, and also provide expertise in all areas of data analysis, statistics, visualization, and other data manipulation. There are some academic libraries where this level of support is reasonable, given the mission, focus, and resourcing of the specific institution. However, considering the diversity of scope across academic libraries, I am skeptical that the prevalence of job ads that describe this suite of services is justified. Most "general" science librarians would scoff if a job ad asked for experience with interpreting spectra. The science librarian should know where to direct the person who needs help with reading the spectra, or finding comparative spectra, but it should not be a core competency to have expertise in that domain. Yet experience with SPSS, R, Python, statistics and statistical literacy, and/or data visualization software find their way into librarian position descriptions, some more specialized than others.
For some institutions this is not an overextension, but just an extension of the suite of specialized services offered, and that is well and good. My concern is that academic libraries, feeling the rush of an approved line for all things data, begin to think this is a normal role for a librarian. Do not mistake me, I do not write from the perspective that libraries should not evolve services or that librarians should not develop specialized areas of expertise. Rather, I raise a concern that too often these extensions are made without the strategic planning and commitment from the institution to fully support the work that this would entail.
Framing data management and curation within the construct of scholarly communication, and its intersections with information literacy, allows for the opportunity to build more of this content delivery across the organization, enfranchising all librarians in the conversation. A team approach can help with sustainability and message penetration, and moves the organization away from the single-position skill and knowledge-sink trap. Subject expertise is critical in the fast-moving realm of data management and curation, but it is an expertise that can be shared and that must be strategically supported. For example, with sufficient cross-training liaison librarians can work with their constituents to advise on meeting federal data sharing requirements, without requiring an immediate punt to the "data person" in the library (if such a person exists). In cases where there is no data point person, creating a data working group is a good approach to distribute across the organization both the knowledge and the responsibility for seeking out additional information.
Data specialization cuts across disciplinary bounds and concerns both public services and technical services. It is no easy task, but I posit that institutions must take a simultaneously expansive yet well-scoped approach to data engagement – mindful of the larger context of digital curation and scholarly communication, while limiting responsibilities to those most appropriate for a particular institution.
[1] Lest the "data-information-knowledge-wisdom" hierarchy (DIKW) torpedo the rest of this post, let me encourage readers to allow for an expansive definition of data. One that allows for the discrete bits of data that have no meaning without context, such as a series of numbers in a .csv file, and the data that is described and organized, such as those exact same numbers in a .csv file, but with column and row descriptors and perhaps an associated data dictionary file. Undoubtedly, the second .csv file is more useful and could be classified as information, but most people will continue to call it data.
Yasmeen Shorish is assistant professor and Physical & Life Sciences librarian at James Madison University. She is a past-convener for the ACRL Digital Curation Interest Group and her research focus is in the areas of data information literacy and scholarly communication.
Educating Your Campus about Predatory PublishersPosted: April 13, 2015 | Author: Margaret Heller | Filed under: academic librarianship, publication, Scholarly Communication | Comments Off on Educating Your Campus about Predatory Publishers
The recent publication of Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella's piece in College and Research Libraries News "Beyond Beall's List: Better understanding predatory publishers" is a reminder that the issue of "predatory publishers" continues to require focus for those working in scholarly communication. Berger and Cirasella have done a exemplary job of laying out some of the issues with Beall's list, and called on librarians to be able "to describe the beast, its implications, and its limitations—neither understating nor overstating its size and danger."
At my institution academic deans have identified "predatory" journals as an area of concern, and I am sure similar conversations are happening at other institutions. Here's how I've "described the beast" at my institution, and models for services we all can provide, whether subject librarian or scholarly communication librarian.
What is a Predatory Publisher? And Why Does the Dean Care?
The concept of predatory publishers became much more widely known in 2013 with a publication of an open access sting by John Bohannon in Science, which I covered in this post. As a recap, Bohannon created a fake but initially believable poor quality scientific article, and submitted it to open access journals. He found that the majority of journals accepted the poor quality paper, 45% of which were included in the Directory of Open Access Journals. At the time of publication in October 2013 the response to this article was explosive in the scholarly communications world. It seems that more than a year later the reaction continues to spread. Late in the fall semester of 2014, library administration asked me to prepare a guide about predatory publishers, due to concern among the deans that unscrupulous publishers might be taking advantage of faculty. This was a topic I'd been educating faculty about on an ad hoc basis for years, but I never realized we needed to address it more systematically. That all has changed, with senior library administration now doing regular presentations about predatory publishers to faculty.
If we are to be advocates of open access, we need to focus on the positive impact that open access has rather than dwell for too long on the bad sides of it. We also need faculty to be clear on their own goals for making their work open access so that they may make more informed choices. Librarians have limited faculty bandwidth on the topic, and so focusing on education about self-archiving articles (otherwise known as green open access) or choosing no-fee (also known as gold) open access journals is a better way to achieve advocacy goals than suggesting faculty choose only a certain set of gold open access journals. Unless we are offering money for paying article fees, we also don't have much say about where faculty choose to publish. Education about how to choose a journal and a license responsibly is what we should focus on, even if it diverges from certain ideals (see Meredith Farkas on choosing creative commons licenses.)
Understanding the Needs and Preparing the Material
As I mentioned, my library administration asked for a guide that that they could use in presentations and share with faculty. In preparing this guide, I worked with our library's Scholarly Communications committee (of which I am co-chair) to determine the format and content.
We decided that adding this material to our existing Open Access research guide would be the best move, since it was already up and we shared the URL widely already. We have a robust series of Open Access Week events (which I wrote about last fall) and this seemed to ideal place to continue engaging people. That said, we determined that the guide needed an overhaul to make it more clear that open access was an on-going area of concern, not a once a year event. Since faculty are not always immediately thinking of making work open access but of the mechanics of publishing, I preferred to start with the title "Publishing Your Own Work".
To describe its features a bit more, I wanted to start from the mindset of self-archiving work to make it open access with a description of our repository and Peter Suber's useful guide to making one's own work open access. I then continued with an explanation of article publication fees, since I often get questions along those lines. They are not unique to open access journals, and don't imply any fee to accept for publication, which was a fear that I heard more than once during Open Access Week last year. I only then discussed the concept of predatory journals, with the hope that a basic understanding of the process would allay fears. I then present a list of steps to research a journal. I thought these steps were more common sense than anything, but after conversations with faculty and administration, I realized that my intuition about what type of journal I am dealing with is obvious because I have daily practice and experience. For people new to the topic I tried to break down research into easy steps that help them to figure out where a journal is on the continuum from outright scams to legitimate but new or unusual journals. It was also important to me to emphasize self-archiving as a strategy no matter the journal publication model.
Lastly, while most academic libraries have a model of liaison librarians engaging in scholarly communications activities, the person who spends every day working on these issues is likely to be more versed in emerging trends. So it is important to work with liaisons to help them research journals and to identify quality open access journals in their disciplines. We plan to add this information to the guide in a future version.
Taking it on the Road
We felt that in-person instruction on these matters with faculty was a crucial next step, particularly for people who publish in traditional journals but want to make their work available. Traditional journals' copyright transfer agreements can be predatory, even if we don't think about it in those terms. Taking inspiration from the ACRL Scholarly Communications Roadshow I attended a few years ago, I decided to take the curriculum from that program and offer it to faculty and graduate students. We read through three publication agreements as a group, and then discussed how open the publishers were to reuse of material, or whether they mentioned it at all. We then included a section on addenda to contracts for negotiation about additional rights.
The first workshop received modest attendance, but included some thoughtful conversations, and we have promised to run it again. Some people may never have read their agreements closely, and never realized they were doing something illegal or not specifically allowed by, for instance, sharing an article they wrote with their students. That concrete realization is more likely to spur action than more abstract arguments about the benefits of open access.
Escaping the Predator Metaphor
If I could go back, I would get rid of the concept of "predator" attached to open access journals. Let's call it instead unscrupulous entrants into an emerging business model. That's not as catchy, but it explains why this has happened. I would argue, personally, that the hybrid gold journals by large publishers are just as predatory, as they capitalize on funding requirements to make articles open access with high fees. They too are trying new business models, and those may not be tenable either. As I said above, choosing a journal with eyes wide open and understanding all the ramifications of different publication models is the only way forward. To suggest that faculty are innocently waiting to be pounced on by predators is to deny their agency and their ability to make choices about their own work. There may be days where that metaphor seems apt, but I think overall this is a damaging mentality to librarians interested in promoting new models of scholarly communication. I hope we can provide better resources and programming to escape this, as well as to help administration to understand how to choose to fund open access initiatives.
In the comments I'd like to hear more suggestions about how to escape the "predator" metaphor, as well as your own techniques for educating faculty on your campus.
Making Open Access Everyone's BusinessPosted: October 23, 2014 | Author: Margaret Heller | Filed under: change, publication, Scholarly Communication | Tags: open access, open access week | 1 Comment »
Librarians should have a role in promoting open access content. The best methods and whether they are successful is a matter of heated debate. Take for an example a recent post by Micah Vandergrift on the ACRL Scholarly Communications mailing list, calling on librarians to stage a publishing walkout and only publish in open access library and information science journals. Many have already done so. Others, like myself, have published in traditional journals (only once in my case) but make a point of making their work available in institutional repositories. I personally would not publish in a journal that did not allow such use of my work, and I know many who feel the same way. 1 The point is, of course, to ensure that librarians are not be hypocritical in their own publishing and their use of repositories to provide open access–a long-standing problem pointed out by Dorothea Salo 2, among others3 We know that many of the reasons that faculty may hesitate to participate in open access publishing relate to promotion and tenure requirements, which generally are more flexible for academic librarians (though not in all cases–see Abigail Goben's open access tenure experiment). I suspect that many of the reasons librarians aren't participating more in open access has partly to do with more mundane reasons of forgetting to do so, or fearing that work is not good enough to make public.
But it shouldn't be only staunch advocates of open access, open peer review, or new digital models for work and publishing who are participating. We have to find ways to advocate and educate in a gentle but vigorous manner, and reach out to new faculty and graduate students who need to start participating now if the future will be different. Enter Open Access Week, a now eight-year-old celebration of open access organized by SPARC. Just as Black Friday is the day that retailers hope to be in the black, Open Access Week has become an occasion to organize around and finally share our message with willing ears. Right?
It can be, but it requires a good deal of institutional dedication to make it happen. At my institution, Open Access Week is a big deal. I am co-chair of a new Scholarly Communications committee which is now responsible for planning the week (the committee used to just plan the week, but the scope has been extended). The committee has representation from Systems, Reference, Access Services, and the Information Commons, and so we are able to touch on all aspects of open access. Last year we had events five days out of five; this year we are having events four days out of five. Here are some of the approaches we are taking to creating successful conversations around open access.
- Focus on the successes and the impact of your faculty, whether or not they are publishing in open access journals.
The annual Celebration of Faculty Scholarship takes place during Open Access Week, and brings together physical material published by all faculty at a cocktail reception. We obtain copies of articles and purchase books written by faculty, and set up laptops to display digital projects. This is a great opportunity to find out exactly what our faculty are working on, and get a sense of them as researchers that we may normally lack. It's also a great opportunity to introduce the concept of open access and recruit participants to the institutional repository.
- Highlight the particular achievements of faculty who are participating in open access.
We place stickers on materials at the Celebration that are included in the repository or are published in open access journals. This year we held a panel with faculty and graduate students who participate in open access publishing to discuss their experiences, both positive and negative.
- Demonstrate the value the library adds to open access initiatives.
Recently bepress (which creates the Digital Commons repositories on which ours runs) introduced a real time map of repositories downloads that was a huge hit this year. It was a compelling visual illustration of the global impact of work in the repository. Faculty were thrilled to see their work being read across the world, and it helped to solve the problem of invisible impact. We also highlighted our impact with a new handout that lists key metrics around our repository, including hosting a new open access journal.
- Talk about the hard issues in open access and the controversies surrounding it, for instance, CC-BY vs. CC-NC-ND licenses.
It's important to not sugarcoat or spin challenging issues in open access. It's important to include multiple perspectives and invite difficult conversations. Show scholars the evidence and let them draw their own conclusions, though make sure to step in and correct misunderstandings.
- Educate about copyright and fair use, over and over again.
These issues are complicated even for people who work on them every day, and are constantly changing. Workshops, handouts, and consultation on copyright and fair use can help people feel more comfortable in the classroom and participating in open access.
- Make it easy.
Examine what you are asking people to do to participate in open access. Rearrange workflows, cut red tape, and improve interfaces. Open Access Week is a good time to introduce new ideas, but this should be happening all year long.
We can't expect revolutions in policy and and practice to happen overnight, or without some sacrifice. Whether you choose to make your stand to only publish in open access journals or some other path, make your stand and help others who wish to do the same.
- Publishers have caught on to this tendency in librarians. For instance, Taylor and Francis has 12-18 month repository embargoes for all its journals except LIS journals. Whether this is because of the good work we have done in advocacy or a conciliatory gesture remains up for debate. ↩
- Salo, Dorothea. "Innkeeper at the Roach Motel," December 11, 2007. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/22088. ↩
- Xia, Jingfeng, Sara Kay Wilhoite, and Rebekah Lynette Myers. "A 'librarian-LIS Faculty' Divide in Open Access Practice." Journal of Documentation 67, no. 5 (September 6, 2011): 791–805. doi:10.1108/00220411111164673. ↩
Responsibilities For Open AccessPosted: October 24, 2013 | Author: Margaret Heller | Filed under: Scholarly Communication | Tags: altmetrics, open access | 1 Comment »
In honor of Open Access Week, I want to look at some troubling recent discussions about open access, and what academic librarians who work with technology can do. As the manager of an open access institutional repository, I strongly believe that providing greater access to academic research is a good worth pursuing. But I realize that this comes at a cost, and that we have a responsibility to ensure that open access also means integrity and quality.
On "stings" and quality
By now, the article by John Bohannon in Science has been thoroughly dissected in the blogosphere 1. This was not a study per se, but rather a piece of investigative journalism looking into the practices of open access journals. Bohannon submitted variations on an article written under African pseudonyms from fake universities that "any reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry…should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately." Over the course of 10 months, he submitted these articles to 304 open access journals whose names he drew from the Directory of Open Access Journals and Jeffrey Beall's list of predatory open access publishers. Ultimately 157 of the journals accepted the article and 98 rejected it, when any real peer review would have meant that it was rejected in all cases. It is very worth noting that in an analysis of the raw data that Bohannon supplied some publishers on Beall's list rejected the paper immediately, which is a good reminder to take all curative efforts with an appropriate amount of skepticism 2.
There are certainly many methodological flaws in this investigation, which Mike Taylor outlines in detail in his post 3, and which he concludes was specifically aimed at discrediting open access journals in favor of journals such as Science. As Michael Eisen outlines, Science has not been immune to publishing articles that should have been rejected after peer review–though Bohannon informed Eisen that he intended to look at a variety of journals but this was not practical, and this decision was not informed by editors at Science. Eisen's conclusion is that "peer review is a joke" and that we need to stop regarding the publication of an article in any journal as evidence that the article is worthwhile 4. Phil Davis at the Scholarly Kitchen took issue with this conclusion (among others noted above), since despite the flaws, this did turn up incontrovertible evidence that "a large number of open access publishers are willfully deceiving readers and authors that articles published in their journals passed through a peer review process…" 5. His conclusion is that open access agencies such as OASPA and DOAJ should be better at policing themselves, and that on the other side Jeffrey Beall should be cautious about suggesting a potential for guilt without evidence. I think one of the more level-headed responses to this piece comes from outside the library and scholarly publishing world in Steven Novella's post on Neurologica, a blog focused on science and skepticism written by an academic neurologist. He is a fan of open access and wider access to information, but makes the point familiar to all librarians that the internet creates many more opportunities to distribute both good and bad information. Open access journals are one response to the opportunities of the internet, and in particular author-pays journals like "all new 'funding models' have the potential of creating perverse incentives." Traditional journals fall into the same trap when they rely on impact factor to drive subscriptions, which means they may end up publishing "sexy" studies of questionable validity or failing to publish replication studies which are the backbone of the scientific method–and in fact the only real way to establish results no matter what type of peer review has been done 6.
More "perverse incentives"
So far the criticisms of open access have revolved around one type of "gold" open access, wherein the author (or a funding agency) pays article publication fees. "Green" open access, in which a version of the article is posted in a repository is not susceptible to abuse in quite the same way. Yet a new analysis of embargo policies by Shan Sutton shows that some publishers are targeting green open access through new policies. Springer used to have a 12 month embargo for mandated deposit in repositories such as PubMed, but now has extended it to all institutional repositories. Emerald changed its policy so that any mandated deposit to a repository (whether by funder or institutional mandate) was subject to a 24 month embargo 7.
In both cases, paid immediate open access is available for $1,595 (Emerald) or $3,000 (Springer). It seems that the publishers are counting that a "mandate" means that funds are available for this sort of hyrbid gold open access, but that ignores the philosophy behind such mandates. While federal open access mandates do in theory have a financial incentive that the public should not have to pay twice for research, Sutton argues that open access "mandates" at institutions are actually voluntary initiatives by the faculty, and provide waivers without question 8. Additionally, while this type of open access does provide public access to the article, it does not address larger issues of reuse of the text or data in the true sense of open access.
What should a librarian do?
The issues above are complex, but there are a few trends that we can draw on to understand our responsibilities to open access. First, there is the issue of quality, both in terms of researcher experience in working with a journal, and that of being able to trust the validity of an individual article. Second, we have to be aware of the terms under which institutional policies may place authors. As with many such problems, the technological issues are relatively trivial. To actually address them meaningfully will not happen with technology alone, but with education, outreach, and network building.
The major thing we can take away from Bohannon's work is that we have to help faculty authors to make good choices about where they submit articles. Anyone who works with faculty has stories of extremely questionable practices by journals of all types, both open access and traditional. Speaking up about those practices on an individual basis can result in lawsuits, as we saw earlier this year. Are there technical solutions that can help weed out predatory publishers and bad journals and articles? The Library Loon points out that many factors, some related to technology, have meant that both positive and negative indicators of journal quality have become less useful in recent years. The Loon suggests that "[c]reating a reporting mechanism where authors can rate and answer relatively simple questions about their experiences with various journals seems worthwhile." 9
The comments to this post have some more suggestions, including open peer review and a forum backed by a strong editor that could be a Yelp-type site for academic publisher reputation. I wrote about open peer review earlier this year in the context of PeerJ, and participants in that system did indeed find the experience of publishing in a journal with quick turnarounds and open reviews pleasant. (Bohannon did not submit a fake article to PeerJ). This solution requires that journals have a more robust technical infrastructure as well as a new philosophy to peer review. More importantly, this is not a solution librarians can implement for our patrons–it is something that has to come from the journals.
The idea that seems to be catching on more is the "Yelp" for scholarly publishers. This seems like a good potential solution, albeit one that would require a great deal of coordinated effort to be truly useful. The technical parts of this type of solution would be relatively easy to carry out. But how to ensure that it is useful for its users? The Yelp analog may be particularly helpful here. When it launched in 2004, it asked users who were searching for some basic information about their question, and to provide the email addresses of additional people whom they would have traditionally asked for this information. Yelp then emailed those people as well as others with similar searches to get reviews of local businesses to build up its base of information. 10 Yelp took a risk in pursuing content in that way, since it could have been off-putting to potential users. But local business information was valuable enough to early users that they were willing to participate, and this seems like a perfect model to build up a base of information on journal publisher practices.
This helps address the problem of predatory publishers and shifting embargoes, but it doesn't help as much with the issue of quality assurance for the article content. Librarians teach students how to find articles that claim to be peer reviewed, but long before Bohannon we knew that peer review quality varies greatly, and even when done well tells us nothing about the validity of the research findings. Education about the scholarly communication cycle, the scientific method, and critical thinking skills are the most essential tools to ensure that students are using appropriate articles, open access or not. However, those skills are difficult to bring to bear for even the most highly experienced researchers trying to keep up with a large volume of published research. There are a few technical solutions that may be of help here. Article level metrics, particularly alternative metrics, can aid in seeing how articles are being used. (For more on altmetrics, see this post from earlier this year).
One of the easiest options for article level metrics is the Altmetric.com bookmarklet. This provides article level metrics for many articles with a DOI, or articles from PubMed and arXiv. Altmetric.com offers an API with a free tier to develop your own app. An open source option for article level metrics is PLOS's Article-Level Metrics, a Ruby on Rails application. These solutions do not guarantee article quality, of course, but hopefully help weed out more marginal articles.
No one needs to be afraid of open access
For those working with institutional repositories or other open access issues, it sometimes seems very natural for Open Access Week to fall so near Halloween. But it does not have to be frightening. Taking responsibility for thoughtful use of technical solutions and on-going outreach and education is essential, but can lead to important changes in attitudes to open access and changes in scholarly communication.
- Bohannon, John. "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?" Science 342, no. 6154 (October 4, 2013): 60–65. doi:10.1126/science.342.6154.60. ↩
- "Who Is Afraid of Peer Review: Sting Operation of The Science: Some Analysis of the Metadata." Scholarlyoadisq, October 9, 2013. http://scholarlyoadisq.wordpress.com/2013/10/09/who-is-afraid-of-peer-review-sting-operation-of-the-science-some-analysis-of-the-metadata/. ↩
- Taylor, Mike. "Anti-tutorial: How to Design and Execute a Really Bad Study." Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week. Accessed October 17, 2013. http://svpow.com/2013/10/07/anti-tutorial-how-to-design-and-execute-a-really-bad-study/. ↩
- Eisen, Michael. "I Confess, I Wrote the Arsenic DNA Paper to Expose Flaws in Peer-review at Subscription Based Journals." It Is NOT Junk, October 3, 2013. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1439. ↩
- Davis, Phil. "Open Access 'Sting' Reveals Deception, Missed Opportunities." The Scholarly Kitchen. Accessed October 17, 2013. http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/10/04/open-access-sting-reveals-deception-missed-opportunities/. ↩
- Novella, Steven. "A Problem with Open Access Journals." Neurologica Blog, October 7, 2013. http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/a-problem-with-open-access-journals/. ↩
- Sutton, Shan C. "Open Access, Publisher Embargoes, and the Voluntary Nature of Scholarship: An Analysis." College & Research Libraries News 74, no. 9 (October 1, 2013): 468–472. ↩
- Ibid., 469 ↩
- Loon, Library. "A Veritable Sting." Gavia Libraria, October 8, 2013. http://gavialib.com/2013/10/a-veritable-sting/. ↩
- Cringely, Robert. "The Ears Have It." I, Cringely, October 14, 2004. http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2004/pulpit_20041014_000829.html. ↩
Citation Manager RoundupPosted: May 29, 2013 | Author: Margaret Heller | Filed under: Scholarly Communication | Tags: citation management, mendeley, zotero | 1 Comment »
In April of this year, the two most popular free citation managers–Mendeley and Zotero–both underwent some big changes. On April 8th, TechCrunch announced that Elsevier had purchased Mendeley, which had been surmised in January. 1 Just a few days later, Zotero announced the release of version 4, with a number of new features. 2 Just as with the sunsetting of Google Reader, this has prompted many to consider what citation managers they have been using and think about switching or changing practices. I will not address subscription or paid products like RefWorks and EndNote specifically, though there are certainly many reasons you might prefer one of those products.
Mendeley: a new Star Wars movie in the making?
The rhetoric surrounding Elsevier's acquisition of Mendeley was generally alarmist in nature, and the hashtag "#mendelete" that popped up immediately after the announcement suggests that many people's first instinct was to abandon Mendeley. Elsevier has been held up as a model of anti-open access, and Mendeley as a model for open access. Yet Mendeley has always been a for-profit company, and, like Google, benefits itself and its users (particularly the science community) by knowing what they are reading and sharing. After all, the social features of Mendeley wouldn't have any value if there was no public sharing. Institutional Mendeley accounts allow librarians to see what their users in aggregate are reading and saving, which helps them make collection development decisions– a service beyond what the average institutional citation manager product accomplishes. Victor Henning promises on the Mendeley blog that nothing will change, and that this will give them more freedom to develop more features 3. As for Elsevier, Oliver Dumon promises that Mendeley will remain independent and allowed to follow their own course–and that bringing it together with ScienceDirect and Scopus will create a "central workflow and collaboration site for authors".4
There are two questions to be answered in this. First, is it realistic to assume that the Mendeley team will have the creative freedom they say they will have? And second, are users comfortable with their data being available to Elsevier? For many, the answers to both these questions seem to be "no" and "no." A more optimistic point of view is that if Elsevier must placate Mendeley users who are open access advocates, they will allow more openness than before.
It's too early to say, but I remain hopeful that Mendeley can continue to create a more open spirit in academic publishing. Peter Hoyt (a former employee of Mendeley and founder of PeerJ) suggests that much of the work that he oversaw to open up Mendeley was being stymied by Elsevier specifically. For him, this went against his personal ethos and so he was unable to stay at Mendeley–but he is confident in the character and ability of the people remaining at Mendeley. 5. I have never been a heavy user of Mendeley, but I have maintained a free account for the past few years. I use it mainly to create a list of my publications on my personal website, using a WordPress plug-in that uses the Mendeley API.
What's new with Zotero
Zotero is a very different product than Mendeley. First, it is open-source software, with lots of ways to participate in development. Zotero was developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, with foundation and user support. It was developed specifically to support the research work of humanists. Originally a Firefox plug-in, Zotero now works as a standalone piece of software that interacts with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari to recognize bibliographic data on websites and pull them into a database that can be synced across computers (and even some third party mobile software). The newest version of Zotero includes several improvements. The one I am most excited about is detailed download display, which tells you what folder you're saving a reference into, which is crucial for my workflow. Zotero is the citation manager I use on a daily basis, and I rely on it for formatting the footnotes you see on ACRL TechConnect posts or other research articles I produce. Since much of my research is on the open web, books, or other non-journal article resources, I find the ability of Zotero to pick up library catalog records and similar metadata more useful than the Mendeley import bookmarklet.
Both Zotero and Mendeley offer free storage for metadata and PDFs, with a cost for storage above the free level. (It is also possible to use a WebDAV server for syncing Zotero files).
|$20 / year
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Some concluding thoughts
Several graduate students in science 6 have written blog posts about switching away from Mendeley to Zotero. But they aren't the same thing at all, and given the backgrounds of their creators, Mendeley is more skewed to the sciences, and Zotero more to the humanities.
Nor, as I like to point out, must they be mutually exclusive. I use Zotero for my daily citation management since I much prefer it for grabbing citations online, but sync my Zotero library with Mendeley to use the social and API features in Mendeley. I can choose to do this as an individual, but consider carefully the implications of your choice if you are considering an institutional subscription or requiring students or members of a research group to use a particular service.
- Lunden, Ingrid. "Confirmed: Elsevier Has Bought Mendeley For $69M-$100M To Expand Its Open, Social Education Data Efforts." TechCrunch, April 18, 2013. http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/08/confirmed-elsevier-has-bought-mendeley-for-69m-100m-to-expand-open-social-education-data-efforts/. ↩
- Takats, Sean. "Zotero 4.0 Launches." Zotero, April 11, 2013. http://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-4-0-launches/. ↩
- Henning, Victor. "Mendeley and Elsevier – Here's More Info." Mend, April 19, 2013. http://blog.mendeley.com/community-relations/mendeley-and-elsevier-heres-more-info/ ↩
- Dumon, Oliver. "Elsevier Welcomes Mendeley." Elsevier Connect, April 8, 2013. http://elsevierconnect.com/elsevier-welcomes-mendeley/. ↩
- Hoyt, Jason. "My Thoughts on Mendeley/Elsevier & Why I Left to Start PeerJ," April 9, 2013. http://enjoythedisruption.com/post/47527556151/my-thoughts-on-mendeley-elsevier-why-i-left-to-start. ↩
- For one, see "Mendeley Sells Out; I'm Moving to Zotero." LJ Villanueva's Research Blog. Accessed May 20, 2013. http://research.coquipr.com/archives/492. ↩


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Moscow: French and US Open runner-up Elena Dementieva defeated Patty Schnyder of Switzerland 6-2, 6-3 to advance to the second round of the $2.3 million Kremlin Cup. American Venus Williams also advanced in her first match since losing to Lindsay Davenport in the fourth round of the US Open, eliminating Russian qualifier Alina Jidkova 6-4, 6-4. The fifth-seeded Dementieva was one of four Russian women ranked in the top 20 that won in straight sets yesterday. Sixth-seeded Vera Zvonareva breezed past Nathalie Dechy of France 6-0, 6-2; eighth-seeded Nadia Petrova disposed of Argentina's Paola Suares 7-5, 6-4; and unseeded Elena Bovina needed just 52 minutes to beat Slovakia's Daniela Hantuchova 6-2, 6-3. The sixth-ranked Dementieva, who will turn 23 on Friday, jumped to a 4-0 lead and won the opening set in 26 minutes. In the second set, both players held serve until Dementieva broke Schnyder in the seventh game for a 4-3 lead. She consolidated the lead by winning on her serve and then broke the Swiss again to complete the victory in 65 minutes. In the second round, she will take on Croatian qualifier Sanda Mamic, who upset French veteran Mary Pierce 6-0, 6-4. Bovina, ranked 19th, was drawn to play top seed Amelie Mauresmo in the second round, but the Frenchwoman withdrew because of a thigh injury. (AP)
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Zumba, a latin dance-inspired aerobic workout, isn't the most obvious choice for a video game adaption. There are no aliens, rarely any guns and it involves moving in a way that may impact on digestion of junk food. Despite all this going against it, Zumba Fitness by Majesco has proven to be incredibly popular.
Zumba Fitness is so popular, in fact, that it is regularly top of the charts — some ten weeks on the trot now — ahead of games which we would class as far better examples of video gaming excellence. While we're sitting in our Wotsit-stained living room and complaining about how a world where a dance game is outselling a work of art like Infamous 2 on a weekly basis isn't worth living in, there are other, less dramatic people who are enjoying their new Wii and Kinect-inspired Zumba lifestyle.
Everything but the very biggest releases seems to fall in the wake of a sweaty workout. The alternates on the Wii aren't doing much in the way of knocking the king from its throne either, but, considering some of what gets released on the Wii, I'm not sure what I was expecting.
For instance, not only can you get fit with Mel B, you can invite Daisy Fuentes into your home with her Pilates collection. Don't fancy rich celebrities condescending to you? EA Sports Active gives you a virtual gym, although I hear that horrible sweaty smell wasn't included in this version.
But surely there are some games, games of substance that can compete with Zumba Fitness? Out of all the AAA titles being released, titles that have cost millions and millions of dollars to make and years of developer's lives to even get into the stores, something must be able to outsell a dancing game, even one that lets you strut your funky Latin stuff.
Unfortunately, this is not the case.
I have a solution though. It's a little out there, so you'll have to bear with me. We should build a new hybrid game, something with a name like Zumba Warriors. The setting will be a busy shopping centre, full of irresponsible parents buying movie tie-ins and fitness games for their twelve year old children. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to stop them at any cost. Think of it as Dead Rising, but the people are brain dead thanks to advertising and brand recognition, not because they have been bitten by zombies.
The twist is this: if a parent manages to buy a game, they invite you round to their house in order to get a taste for what that game is really like. It would be far too awkward to say no, so you are forced to dance in lieu of losing a life. If you fail, game over, if you impress with your unexpected dancing prowess, you can go back to the shopping centre and try for another day.
Or maybe we could just accept that casual gamers like what they know is popular and which looks fun and that they're never going to sit down for hours and play Black Ops. No?
Zumba Warriors it is.