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

Do species evenness and plant density influence the magnitude of selection and complementarity effects in annual plant species mixtures?

Plant species richness influences primary productivity via mechanisms that (1) favour species with particular traits (selection effect) and (2) promote niche differentiation between species (complementarity). Influences of species evenness, plant density and other properties of plant communities on productivity are poorly defined, but may depend on whether selection or complementarity prevails in species mixtures. We predicted that selection effects are insensitive to species evenness but increase with plant density, and that the converse is true for complementarity. To test predictions, we grew three species of annuals in monocultures and in three-species mixtures in which evenness of established plants was varied at each of three plant densities in a cultivated field in Texas, USA. Above-ground biomass was smaller in mixtures than expected from monocultures because of negative \u27complementarity\u27 and a negative selection effect. Neither selection nor complementarity varied with species evenness, but selection effects increased at the greatest plant density as predicted

Guest editorial : Social prescribing

Journal guest editorial article

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

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

Visceral Leishmaniasis in Traveler to Guyana Caused by Leishmania siamensis, London, UK.

The parasite Leishmania siamensis is a zoonotic agent of leishmaniasis; infection in animals has been documented in Europe and the United States. Reported authochthonous human infections have been limited to Thailand. We report a case of human visceral Leishmania siamensis infection acquired in Guyana, suggesting colonization in South America