Convergence of Data and Scholarship: Open Access and Reproducibility

Please find our proposal for the upcoming 2018 Online Northwest conference below. We would like to propose this topic to be part of a panel or as its own presentation. As librarians who work in scholarly communications and research data management, we support researchers in their current workflows but are also called upon to promote and often impose change at our institutions. Some researchers adapt to the requirements of open science early and understand the new landscape of publishers, funders and institutions, yet others resist change. We will consider how the norms of a research community influence practice, and how norms of openness and sharing can be shaped to encourage researchers who share in one aspect of their research cycle to share in another. We will explore past examples of change in academic research workflows, suggest emerging trends, and discuss the intersections of open data and open access publishing

Open Science and Data Management: Introducing Graduate Students to Research Workflows in a Local Context

The Engineering & Physical Sciences Division of the UC Berkeley Library partners with researchers to support the entire research life cycle. Since 2016, the division’s Science Data Librarian has offered Research Data Management training that covers data management, storage, documentation, and sharing. Based on this established work, division librarians piloted a series of open science workshops in 2019. The Earth & Planetary Sciences (EPS) Department was chosen as the target department for this work. Librarians began by replacing their traditional orientation session, focused on library procedures and resources, with an approach that highlighted local support for open research workflows

Introducing Reproducibility to Citation Analysis: a Case Study in the Earth Sciences

Objectives: Replicate methods from a 2019 study of Earth Science researcher citation practices. Calculate programmatically whether researchers in Earth Science rely on a smaller subset of literature than estimated by the 80/20 rule. Determine whether these reproducible citation analysis methods can be used to analyze open access uptake. Methods: Replicated methods of a prior citation study provide an updated transparent, reproducible citation analysis protocol that can be replicated with Jupyter Notebooks. Results: This study replicated the prior citation study’s conclusions, and also adapted the author’s methods to analyze the citation practices of Earth Scientists at four institutions. We found that 80% of the citations could be accounted for by only 7.88% of journals, a key metric to help identify a core collection of titles in this discipline. We then demonstrated programmatically that 36% of these cited references were available as open access. Conclusions: Jupyter Notebooks are a viable platform for disseminating replicable processes for citation analysis. A completely open methodology is emerging and we consider this a step forward. Adherence to the 80/20 rule aligned with institutional research output, but citation preferences are evident. Reproducible citation analysis methods may be used to analyze open access uptake, however, results are inconclusive. It is difficult to determine whether an article was open access at the time of citation, or became open access after an embargo

Editorial workflow of a community-led, all-volunteer scientific journal: lessons from the launch of Seismica

Seismica is a community-led, volunteer-run, diamond open-access journal for seismology and earthquake science, and Seismica's mission and core values align with the principles of Open Science. This article describes the editorial workflow that Seismica uses to go from a submitted manuscript to a published article. In keeping with Open Science principles, the main goals of sharing this workflow description are to increase transparency around academic publishing, and to enable others to use elements of Seismica's workflow for journals of a similar size and ethos. We highlight aspects of Seismica's workflow that differ from practices at journals with paid staff members, and also discuss some of the challenges encountered, solutions developed, and lessons learned while this workflow was developed and deployed over Seismica's first year of operations

The launch of Seismica: a seismic shift in publishing

Seismica, a community-run Diamond Open Access (OA) journal for seismology and earthquake science, opened for submissions in July 2022. We created Seismica to support a shift to OA publishing while pushing back against the extreme rise in the cost of OA author processing charges, and the inequities this is compounding. Seismica is run by an all-volunteer Board of 47 researchers who fulfil traditional editorial roles as well as forming functional teams to address the needs for technical design and support, copy editing, media and branding that would otherwise be covered by paid staff at a for-profit journal. We are supported by the McGill University Library (Québec, Canada), who host our website and provide several other services, so that Seismica does not have any income or financial expenditures. We report the process of developing the journal and explain how and why we made some of the major policy choices. We describe the organizational structure of the journal, and discuss future plans and challenges for the continued success and longevity of Seismica

Editorial workflow of a community-led, all-volunteer scientific journal: lessons from the launch of Seismica

Seismica is a community-led, volunteer-run, diamond open-access journal for seismology and earthquake science, and Seismica's mission and core values align with the principles of Open Science. This article describes the editorial workflow that Seismica uses to go from a submitted manuscript to a published article. In keeping with Open Science principles, the main goals of sharing this workflow description are to increase transparency around academic publishing, and to enable others to use elements of Seismica's workflow for journals of a similar size and ethos. We highlight aspects of Seismica's workflow that differ from practices at journals with paid staff members, and also discuss some of the challenges encountered, solutions developed, and lessons learned while this workflow was developed and deployed over Seismica's first year of operations

Is authorship sufficient for today’s collaborative research? A call for contributor roles

Assigning authorship and recognizing contributions to scholarly works is challenging on many levels. Here we discuss ethical, social, and technical challenges to the concept of authorship that may impede the recognition of contributions to a scholarly work. Recent work in the field of authorship shows that shifting to a more inclusive contributorship approach may address these challenges. Recent efforts to enable better recognition of contributions to scholarship include the development of the Contributor Role Ontology (CRO), which extends the CRediT taxonomy and can be used in information systems for structuring contributions. We also introduce the Contributor Attribution Model (CAM), which provides a simple data model that relates the contributor to research objects via the role that they played, as well as the provenance of the information. Finally, requirements for the adoption of a contributorship-based approach are discussed

The launch of Seismica: a seismic shift in publishing

Seismica, a community-run Diamond Open Access (OA) journal for seismology and earthquake science, opened for submissions in July 2022. We created Seismica to support a shift to OA publishing while pushing back against the extreme rise in the cost of OA author processing charges, and the inequities this is compounding. Seismica is run by an all-volunteer Board of 47 researchers who fulfil traditional editorial roles as well as forming functional teams to address the needs for technical design and support, copy editing, media and branding that would otherwise be covered by paid staff at a for-profit journal. We are supported by the McGill University Library (Québec, Canada), who host our website and provide several other services, so that Seismica does not have any income or financial expenditures. We report the process of developing the journal and explain how and why we made some of the major policy choices. We describe the organizational structure of the journal, and discuss future plans and challenges for the continued success and longevity of Seismica

Is Authorship Sufficient for Today’s Collaborative Research? A Call for Contributor Roles

Assigning authorship and recognizing contributions to scholarly works is challenging on many levels. Here we discuss ethical, social, and technical challenges to the concept of authorship that may impede the recognition of contributions to a scholarly work. Recent work in the field of authorship shows that shifting to a more inclusive contributorship approach may address these challenges. Recent efforts to enable better recognition of contributions to scholarship include the development of the Contributor Role Ontology (CRO), which extends the CRediT taxonomy and can be used in information systems for structuring contributions. We also introduce the Contributor Attribution Model (CAM), which provides a simple data model that relates the contributor to research objects via the role that they played, as well as the provenance of the information. Finally, requirements for the adoption of a contributorship-based approach are discussed

Seismica: Open science and community building in a new diamond open access journal

Seismica, a pioneering diamond open access journal in Seismology and Earthquake Science, launched in July 2022. Seismica is an independent journal supported by McGill University, designed and built by a global community of researchers with the aim of making scientific research freely available. Our international team of over 40 people includes disciplinary experts as well as specialists in open science and data; equity, diversity and inclusion; outreach and communication; and digital media and branding. Volunteers cover traditional editorial roles as well as the journal’s full-time management and operation (including technical support, copy editing, branding and communications). Now in its second year of publication, Seismica has evolved as both a journal and a community dedicated to transparency in science, and supporting not only open access articles, but also a fully open publication process. Beyond traditional research articles, Seismica publishes an innovative set of peer-reviewed reports including fast reports, null results/failed experiments, software reports, and instrument deployment/field campaign reports; we also require the sharing of related data and code. This initial year of growth has included the development of of our own reproducible workflows on the backend, the publication of a special issue in response to the Turkiye earthquakes of February 2023, and much work behind the scenes fostering community, mentoring new editors, opening peer review, investigating future funding and planning for sustainable succession. This presentation will demonstrate how Seismica contributors have responded to community needs and changing expectations in the field while gaining invaluable professional experience along the way.This presentation was supported by a Presentation Grant from the Librarians Association of the University of California (LAUC)