A Method for Verifying Indicators of Journal Quality

A recent search of the UlrichsWeb Global Serials Directory for active, digital, peer reviewed, scholarly journals shows that world’s academic articles are published in more than 58,500 journals. By one estimate the growth of new journal titles increases by 2.5% ever year (Ware & Mabe, 2015). At the same time, universities are adopting researcher information systems that provide administrators and other campus stakeholders with nearly complete bibliographic data for all articles published by their faculty authors. As campus leaders work to make sense of this data, they may turn to their library for help. Questions may include: Are all of these new or previously unencountered journal titles legitimate? Who are the main publishers of our articles? What are the emerging trends that promotion and tenure committees should consider? The most common way to address these questions involves significant shortcomings--proprietary subscription databases, like Scopus, Web of Science, and Academic Analytics, have limited coverage of the journal literature and, by design, are unlikely to include newer and lesser known journal titles. At the same time many universities publish thousands of articles per year, manually checking each article submitted to a faculty annual review database would prove to be a tedious and lengthy process. To reduce the labor involved in identifying indicators of journal quality, we have developed a method using open source software and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In specific, our method reduces the labor in identifying the publishers for a long list of journals and in identifying the access model for these journals (subscription-only or open access). To do this we wrote an R script that uses the SHERPA RoMEO and the DOAJ APIs. Using this method permitted us to quickly identify the journals that needed closer inspection. This method will help others that are working to verify journal quality in large data sets without relying on problematic, journal blacklists

Wikidata: Open Linked Data for Library Publishing

Presentation given at the 2019 Library Publishing ForumWikidata, a collaboratively edited, open, linked data knowledge base hosted by the Wikimedia foundation, includes a growing collection of open citation data. As of November 2018, more than 20 million publications and 160 million citations have been contributed to Wikidata (http://wikicite.org/statistics.html). Many of these data items have been added by bots that contribute data from open bibliographic databases, including PubMed Central, and from data made available by Crossref and the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). Although this approach may be the most efficient way to build a large corpus of open citation data, many scholarly journals will be missed. Journals that cannot meet the requirements of a Crossref contract (for financial or technical reasons) will be invisible in growing open citation network. The journals that are likely to be missed are also those that have not been well-served by for-profit publishers and large university presses–including print journals that flipped to open access and journals in fields that are unfamiliar with or unconvinced of the value of a Crossref DOI (e.g., law reviews and some arts and humanities journals). In this presentation we demonstrate how a library publisher can contribute bibliographic data to Wikidata. By using both manual and batch-processing methods, we contributed complete runs for selected journals hosted on our library’s instance of Open Journal Systems. We share our methods for contributing data for journals that mint DOIs and for journals that do not. We also provide a demonstration of the short-term benefits of building this collection in Wikidata and reflect on the challenges of including Wikidata in a library-publishing program

Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Illinois Lung Cancer Incidence, Mortality Stage at Diagnosis, Surgical Treatment, and Screening

This study analyzes the extent of racial and ethnic disparities in lung cancer in Illinois as compared to national trends. Cancer registry data were used to compare lung cancer incidence, mortality and stage at diagnosis rates for non-Hispanic (NH) white, NH Black and Hispanic Illinois residents. Hospital discharge data were used to compare medical and surgical admission and screening rates. Smoking across race and ethnic groups was compared using data from the Illinois Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to determine the extent to which disparities might be related to smoking prevalence. Rate ratios for NH Black and Hispanics compared to NH whites were used to determine the significance of differences and to compare to national data. Despite having a lower prevalence of ever smoking compared to NH whites, NH Blacks had higher lung cancer incidence, mortality, and diagnosis with distant stage disease. NH blacks had more lung cancer medical admissions, but lower surgical admission and screening rates as compared to NH whites. Hispanics had much lower rates of lung cancer incidence and hospital care but had the highest rate of diagnosis at distant stage (61.4% as compared to 50.3% for NH whites). Illinois NH Black versus NH white rate ratios were 1.17 for incidence and 1.24 for mortality as compared to national estimates of only 1.07 and 1.04, respectively. Addressing lung cancer disparities will require a stronger effort to reduce tobacco use in minority communities where smoking is often a response to very high levels of chronic stress. This will require culturally sensitive, community-based messaging and cheaper, more accessible smoking cessation alternatives, plus more equitable access to high-quality preventive health care

Increasing Visibility of Research in IUPUI ScholarWorks through NCBI LinkOut

Background : To increase the visibility and access to an academic university’s institutional repository content by participating in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) “Institutional Repository LinkOut” program. Description : The authors used R, an open source programming language, and an R package called ‘rentrez’ to a) identify those articles in the university's repository that were in PubMed and b) determine of those, which ones did not already have full-text available via PubMed Central. Identifying articles in PubMed that are not in PubMed Central is required by NCBI in order to participate in the “Institutional Repository LinkOut” program. Using the R package, a set of 4,400 open access items from the repository were processed, 557 eligible records were identified, and were sent to NCBI. In June 2018, the R scripts were revised to further streamline the process--at the beginning of July 2018 a total of 2,129 repository items were processed and 434 eligible records were identified for inclusion in the LinkOut program. Conclusion : The university’s institutional repository experienced a significant increase in visibility due to its participation in the NCBI’s “Institutional Repository LinkOut” program. In its first implementation (July 2017), this automated solution was estimated to save over 30 hours of manual work on the part of the library staff. The LinkOut program has resulted in a 9% annual increase in web traffic to the repository and PubMed is now the third most frequent referral site to the repository. The R script and implementation process are publicly available, via GitHub, to help other institutions reduce the barriers for participating in the LinkOut program

Journal flipping: A case study from Metropolitan Universities

Poster presented at IUPUI Research Day, April 8, 2016Recent events in scholarly publishing, such as the editorial board of Elsevier’s Lingua resigning en masse, shed light on the dilemma faced by many journal editors: balancing a desire to increase impact with promoting open and sustainable models for publishing. These two goals are not mutually exclusive. Recently, editors and publishers are seeing success in reconciling these goals by converting subscription-based journals to open-access, through a process commonly called journal flipping. The IUPUI University Library has a history of supporting the publication of open-access scholarly journals through its Open Access Journals at IUPUI program (http://journals.iupui.edu/). A number of titles, most notably Advances in Social Work and Metropolitan Universities, began as subscription-based journals that were only available in print. This poster presents the process for "flipping" Metropolitan Universities, digitizing the full run of issues and making them openly available via IUPUI’s instance of Open Journal Systems

Metropolitan Universities: Building an Online, Open Access Archive

Metropolitan Universities (MUJ) provides peer-reviewed publishing on topics in higher education, including distributed learning, K-16 collaborations, assessment, service learning, campus-community partnerships and other subjects. In 2015 MUJ published its 25th volume. Beginning in the year 2000 (volume 11), MUJ has been published as a print journal with editorial offices at IUPUI. To celebrate more than of 25 years of successful publishing and to introduce new modes of dissemination, MUJ has developed an open access, online archive of its entire publication run. Here we describe the process of digitizing, indexing and building the MUJ archive

Mining the Indianapolis Recorder: An Exploratory Study of a Digital Humanities Dataset

This poster presents an initial study using full-text transcripts from the Indianapolis Recorder, one of the nation's most important African American newspapers. Basic text mining and visualization approaches are used to highlight this data set and its potential for use in the digital humanities

The Intersection of GERD, Aspiration, and Lung Transplantation

Lung transplantation is a radical but life-saving treatment option for patients with end-stage lung diseases, such as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and scleroderma. In light of the proposed association and controversy linking gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) to IPF and lung transplant outcome, the American Gastroenterological Association convened during the DDW in Washington in May 2015 a multidisciplinary group of experts in the field of GERD and lung transplantation to make considerations about the care of these patients based on available data and subsequent expert panel discussion at this symposium. The following topics were discussed: (1) pathophysiology of GERD-induced pulmonary symptoms, (2) GERD evaluation before and after lung transplantation, (3) outcome of lung transplantation for IPF and scleroderma, and (4) role of laparoscopic fundoplication before or after lung transplantation

Promotion and tenure for community-engaged research: An examination of promotion and tenure support for community-engaged research at three universities collaborating through a Clinical and Translational Science Award

This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Marrero DG, Hardwick EJ, Staten LK, Savaiano DA, Odell JD, Comer KF, Saha C. Promotion and Tenure for Community-Engaged Research: An Examination of Promotion and Tenure Support for Community-Engaged Research at Three Universities Collaborating through a Clinical and Translational Science Award. Clin Transl Sci. 2013 Jun;6(3):204-8, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cts.12061.Introduction. Community engaged health research, an approach to research which includes the participation of communities, promotes the translation of research to address and improve social determinants of health. As a way to encourage community engaged research, the National Institutes of Health required applicants to the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) to include a community engagement component. Although grant-funding may support an increase in community engaged research, faculty also respond to the rewards and demands of university promotion and tenure standards. This paper measures faculty perception of how three institutions funded by a CTSA support community engaged research in the promotion and tenure process. Methods: At three institutions funded by a CTSA, tenure track and non-tenure track faculty responded to a survey regarding perceptions of how promotion and tenure committees value community engaged research. Results: Faculty view support for community engaged research with some reserve. Only 36% agree that community engaged research is valued in the promotion and tenure process. Discussion: Encouraging community engaged scholarship requires changing the culture and values behind promotion and tenure decisions. Institutions will increase community engaged research and more faculty will adopt its principles, when it is rewarded by promotion and tenure committees

Why Are Male Social Relationships Complex in the Doubtful Sound Bottlenose Dolphin Population?

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