DataCite as a novel bibliometric source: Coverage, strengths and limitations

This paper explores the characteristics of DataCite to determine its possibilities and potential as a new bibliometric data source to analyze the scholarly production of open data. Open science and the increasing data sharing requirements from governments, funding bodies, institutions and scientific journals has led to a pressing demand for the development of data metrics. As a very first step towards reliable data metrics, we need to better comprehend the limitations and caveats of the information provided by sources of open data. In this paper, we critically examine records downloaded from the DataCite's OAI API and elaborate a series of recommendations regarding the use of this source for bibliometric analyses of open data. We highlight issues related to metadata incompleteness, lack of standardization, and ambiguous definitions of several fields. Despite these limitations, we emphasize DataCite's value and potential to become one of the main sources for data metrics development.Comment: Paper accepted for publication in Journal of Informetric

Assigning Creative Commons Licenses to Research Metadata: Issues and Cases

This paper discusses the problem of lack of clear licensing and transparency of usage terms and conditions for research metadata. Making research data connected, discoverable and reusable are the key enablers of the new data revolution in research. We discuss how the lack of transparency hinders discovery of research data and make it disconnected from the publication and other trusted research outcomes. In addition, we discuss the application of Creative Commons licenses for research metadata, and provide some examples of the applicability of this approach to internationally known data infrastructures.Comment: 9 pages. Submitted to the 29th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2016), Nice (France) 14-16 December 201

The need for ‘Diamond Engagement’ around open access to high quality research output

This paper advocates for a co-ordinated cultural shift in their engagement with access to resources in order to make peer-reviewed articles available to a wider audience. This Paper addresses two audiences: scientists, especially those who have been traditionally more resistant to the OA approach, and policy makers. The Scientific Committee is well aware of the difficulties that some research communities face in engaging with the OA approach and would like to offer a way forward to address the current status quo. Social scientists in particular have been struggling with the discussion on OA, given the length of time that the current quality standards and good practice for publication took to set up. The community of researchers perceives that these standards are now guarded by the peer-reviewed ranked journals which do not offer OA for either articles or books, a situation that is certain to persist for some time.   The other important aspect is that payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) to journals for OA publication is often unaffordable given the limited resources available to the social sciences disciplines. In this context, this paper illustrates how the deposition of articles in public repositories can be beneficial to the research community. At the same time, this Paper encourages policy makers to better invest in the harmonisation of research information metadata standards across Europe using existing public infrastructures, and to ensure good quality of records, interoperability and discoverability. It also links the discussion of OA with an issue that is crucial in both research and policy agendas: demonstration of the impact of publicly-funded research

A brief overview of international trends in Open Access

Definition and stakeholders Open Access can be defined as access to research-based publications that are peer reviewed, permanently and promptly accessible without payment, and re-usable on the sole condition of crediting the author(s). Achieving Open Access (OA) involves all the stakeholders of the research life cycle to begin with the authors who are the initial copyright holders of the publications and then the publishers who coordinate the peer review. Libraries build and maintain the national and institutional infrastructures that facilitate prompt and permanent access. Research funders define conditions for granting financing; mandating access to the resulting publications may be among these conditions. Service providers encourage the reuse of scientific and scholarly findings. Ultimately, legislators may set rules for access to knowledge in our knowledge-permeated democracies

The CHAIN-REDS Semantic Search Engine

e-Infrastructures, and in particular Data Repositories and Open Access Data Infrastructures, are essential platforms for e-Science and e-Research and are being built since several years both in Europe and the rest of the world to support diverse multi/inter-disciplinary Virtual Research Communities. So far, however, it is difficult for scientists to correlate papers to datasets used to produce them and to discover data and documents in an easy way. In this paper, the CHAINREDS project’s Knowledge Base and its Semantic Search Engine are presented, which attempt to address those drawbacks and contribute to the reproducibility of science

Copyright Transfer Agreements in an Interdisciplinary Repository

Copyright Transfer Agreements (CTA) are a rich source of rights information related to self-archiving. According to the Eprints Self-Archiving FAQ, To self-archive is to deposit a digital document in a publicly accessible website, preferably an OAI-compliant Eprint Archive. (1) This poster describes a study undertaken by DLIST whereby the CTAs of selected LIS journals were analyzed for publisher statements on the rights of authors related to self-archiving. The study differs from efforts such as the SHERPA/RoMEO database (2) that resulted from the large open access studies of Project RoMEO (3). The main differences are: 1) our focus on LIS journals and 2) focus on journals rather than publishers, since publishers appear to have different policies and CTAs for each of their journals. RoMEO/SHERPA focus on publishers in all disciplines and as such LIS is not fully/adequately represented. DLIST, Digital Library of Information Science and Technology is an Open Access Archive (OAA) for Library and Information Science and Technology based on E-prints; a cross-institutional disciplinary repository for the Information Sciences that focus on cultural heritage institutions such as Archives, Libraries, and Museums using interdisciplinary perspectives. To some researchers cultural heritage institutions and formal educational organizations are the critical information infrastructures for building the knowledge societ

DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field

Implementing Open Access Policy: First case studies

When implementing open access, policy pioneers and flagship institutions alike have faced considerable challenges in meeting their own aims and achieving a recognized success. Legitimate authority, sufficient resources and the right timing are crucial, but the professionals charged with implementing policy still need several years to accomplish significant progress. This study defines a methodological standard for evaluating the first generation of open access policies. Evaluating implementation establishes evidence, enables reflection, and may foster the emergence of a second generation of open access policies. While the study is based on a small number of cases, these case studies cover most of the pioneer institutions, present the most significant issues and offer an international overview. Each case is reconstructed individually on the basis of public documents and background information, and supported by interviews with professionals responsible for open access implementation. This article presents the highlights from each case study. The results are utilized to indicate how a second generation of policies might define open access as a key component of digital research infrastructures that provide inputs and outputs for research, teaching and learning in real time.</p

Pubfair: A Framework for Sustainable, Distributed, Open Science Publishing Services

Over the last thirty years, digitally-networked technologies have disrupted traditional media, turning business models on their head and changing the conditions for the creation, packaging and distribution of content. Yet, scholarly communication still looks remarkably as it did in the pre-digital age. The primary unit of dissemination remains the research article (or book in some disciplines), and today’s articles still bear a remarkable resemblance to those that populated the pages of Oldenburg’s Philosophical Transactions 350 years ago. In an age of such disruptive innovation, it is striking how little digital technologies have impacted scholarly publishing; and this is also somewhat ironic, since the Web was developed by scientists for research purposes. Pubfair is a conceptual model for a modular open source publishing framework which builds upon a distributed network of repositories to enable the dissemination and quality-control of a range of research outputs including publications, data, and more. Pubfair aims to introduce significant innovation into scholarly publishing. It enables different stakeholders (funders, institutions, scholarly societies, individuals scientists) to access a suite of functionalities to create their own dissemination channels, with built in open review and transparent processes. The model minimizes publishing costs while maintaining academic standards by connecting communities with iterative publishing services linked to their preferred repository. Such a publishing environment has the capacity to transform the scholarly communication system, making it more research-centric, dissemination-oriented and open to and supportive of innovation, while also collectively managed by the scholarly community

Digital Mathematics Libraries: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

The idea of a World digital mathematics library (DML) has been around since the turn of the 21th century. We feel that it is time to make it a reality, starting in a modest way from successful bricks that have already been built, but with an ambitious goal in mind. After a brief historical overview of publishing mathematics, an estimate of the size and a characterisation of the bulk of documents to be included in the DML, we turn to proposing a model for a Reference Digital Mathematics Library--a network of institutions where the digital documents would be physically archived. This pattern based rather on the bottom-up strategy seems to be more practicable and consistent with the digital nature of the DML. After describing the model we summarise what can and should be done in order to accomplish the vision. The current state of some of the local libraries that could contribute to the global views are described with more details