Category: Open Access

Three Major Reports Released on Open Data Science

Mark Bilby

Collecting and summarizing these recently issued reports in a single place:

UNESCO’s 2021 Recommendation on Open Science. The meeting of UNESCO’s General Conference throughout most of November this year resulted in a 36 page report outlining common standards for open science signed by 193 countries, forging an international definition of “open science” for the first time, calling for robust governmental, NGO, and educational funding and policy-making in this area, and highlighting the vital importance of open publications and open data to reduce global and societal inequities in all areas of life.

ITHAKA S+R’s December 1st report, Big Data Infrastructure at the Crossroads: Support Needs and Challenges for Universities. The document distills down findings from over 200 interviews with faculty facilitated by librarians from over 20 colleges and universities. Consistent themes emerged of the inherently interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of data management and data analysis, the advantages of international teams, and the lack of consistent coordination and infrastructure (technical and staffing) to support big data planning, wrangling, storage, and ongoing curation. The concluding, detailed list of recommendations for University Research Offices (including IRB processes), Departments, Libraries, Funders, Scholarly Societies, and Vendors are spot on and highly valuable.

Digital Science, Springer Nature, and figshare’s joint November 30th report, 2021 State of Open Data Report. This report stands out as “the largest longitudinal survey of researcher motivations, challenges, perceptions and behaviors toward open data with over 21,000 responses from researchers in 192 different countries over a six year period.” The results show a sharp uptick between 2020 and 2021 over concerns about misuse of data and researchers not receiving appropriate credit or acknowledgement for their work on creating, collecting, and managing data, pointing to the increasing importance of open data/science for research and institutional lag in keeping up with these trends.

Lessons in Transformational Use: The Copyright Permissions Request

Mark Bilby

In the interest of sharing my academic research and publishing experience as a form of Scholarly Communications advice, I’m appending below the full text of my email to Brill’s copyright office today asking for copyright permissions for a major transformational use of a small portion of a monograph to which Brill holds copyright. I look forward to their response and may opt to post updates here.

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Article Published in Journal of Open Humanities Data

Mark Bilby

Title: Normalized Datasets of Harnack’s Reconstruction of Marcion’s Gospel

Abstract: These two datasets are the first born-digital, normalized, peer-reviewed datasets of Harnack’s classic reconstruction of Marcion’s Gospel. The first consists of human-readable postclassical Greek, the second of lemmatized and morphologically tagged text following the openly licensed BibleWorks Greek Morphology schema. The recent deluge of critical editions of Marcion’s Gospel makes Harnack’s public domain work even more relevant as scholars turn from theology- to text-based approaches to restore Marcion’s Gospel and account for its place in the editorial history of early canonical and non-canonical Gospels. These datasets resource Marcion’s Gospel becoming a major topic of interest in Computational Linguistics research.

DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/johd.47

Unglue.it Campaign Successful

Mark Bilby

Yesterday the $3100 fundraising campaign announced six months ago concluded successfully! Thanks to the generosity of ten different donors, we were able to meet the goal in the nick of time yesterday. Because of you, my monograph (As the Bandit Will I Confess You) will be transformed into an Open Access digital book by the publisher (University of Strasbourg) and distributor (Brepols). Thank you to Eric Hellman for creating the Unglue.it project and site, as well as your donation. Thank you also to Alexander Sterkens at Brepols and Prof. Rémi Gounelle at Strasbourg for putting together the terms of the agreement to flip/unglue/unlatch this book to Open Access. It’s exciting to think about this print book getting a new, digital life as an Open Access resource!

Heartfelt Congratulations to CSU East Bay for Passing the First Green OA Policy in the CSU

Mark Bilby

Heard today from my ScholComm colleague Lana Wood that the President at CSU East Bay today signed the Green Open Access Policy passed for the second year in a row by their Academic Senate. Congrats to Lana, her policy co-champion (Vanessa Yingling from Kinesiology), the CSUEB Committee on Research, the CSUEB Academic Senate, and the CSUEB President on being on the first CSU to achieve this honor. CSUEB joins the hallowed ranks of the UCs, Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, and lots of R1, R2, M1, M2, and Liberal Arts institutions that have passed such policies!

This is not only a tremendous honor for Lana and CSUEB, but also a significant milestone in the Open Access movement and achievement in the scientific community and for the public good. Like comparable Green OA opt-out policies at other universities, this one retains faculty copyright over articles and secures default open access licenses that benefit students, the general public, and institutional web/repository usage. It’s a win-win-win for everyone except publisher monopolies. And it finally got done at the nation’s largest public university system!

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Publisher Monopoly Long-Game: Make Libraries Renters, Not Owners

Mark Bilby

Lifting up this excellent article in the Daily Beast by Jennie Rose Halperin, the Executive Director of Library Futures. It highlights the recent forum at Georgetown Law with Senator Ron Wyden and provides a quick litany of the negative impacts of ebook licensing on public education. To quote just one example:

The draconian terms mean, for example, that a single e-copy of The Diary of Anne Frank can cost a school district as much as $27 per student per year—with the lion’s share of the money going to billion-dollar publishing companies.

Library Futures is welcoming consortial and university partners to join in activism around technological and educational initiatives to preserve Library rights. Johns Hopkins has recently joined as a partner. Here’s hoping the Cal State Libraries will consider joining as well!

How to Make an Open Access Article Fee Waiver Request

Mark Bilby

Copying the letter I sent today to Cambridge University Press both as a ScholComm diary entry and as an example to authors as to how you can self-advocate for OA fee waivers. Squeaky wheels and such…

April 17, 2021

Dear Cambridge University Press Representative,

Thank you for your excellent work supporting high-quality, peer-reviewed academic publishing. I am writing as the corresponding author of an article recently accepted for your journal, Harvard Theological Review, to ask for a waiver of the Gold Open Access APC of $3200.

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SBL Proposal Accepted for Digital Humanities section: Introducing LODLIBs

Mark Bilby

[Cross-posted from Vocesanticae.com]

Got confirmation of acceptance of a second paper this morning. Thank you to the session chairs (Garrick Allen and Paul Dilley) and the review committee for the opportunity to present this research.

Title: Introducing Linked Open Data Living Informational Books

Abstract: In a recent article, Claire Clivaz surveys the rise of VREs (Virtual Research Environments) that allow for scientific hypothesis-driven, iterative, and collaborative research in the Humanities. In this presentation, we propose a new kind of VRE, the Linked Open Data Living Informational Book or LODLIB, essentially a scientific hypothesis-driven iterative digital codex. LODLIBs follow the structure of scientific articles (introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion), leverage international Linked Open Data standards (unique and interconnected DOIs), rely on non-commercial Open Science repositories, include internal data dictionaries and lexicographical resources, embed datasets and code within the digital book, invite global open peer-review and collaboration, and allow for cycles of continuous improvement characteristic of agile software and systems development. Essentially, the LODLIB reimagines the codex as human- and machine-readable software, bringing together research and publishing, the Sciences and the Humanities. The LODLIB format inverts the power- and economic relationships between academic authors and publishers, opens academic discourse to the global public, allows for rich analytics about readership and citations, and has the potential to make monographs and compilations go viral in online environments. The conclusion will relate the story of the presenter’s prototyping of the LODLIB format to propose and realize a new, scientific solution to Q and the Synoptic Problem.

Subjects: Computer-Assisted Research | Historical Criticism | Lexicography

Personal OA Experiment: Transforming a Past Published Monograph to Open Access via Unglue.it

Mark Bilby

As an academic author and a passionate advocate for Open Access, I have launched a crowdfunding campaign on unglue.it to provide access to my 2013 monograph for everyone in the world and to lead by example in my work as a Scholarly Communication Librarian in the California State University system. The print book has been unavailable on commercial sites for over a year now. My hope is that a successful campaign will give a new life to this book, increase its usage and citations, and inspire many other faculty in the CSU to start similar campaigns to unglue their books to Open Access.

UC-Elsevier Transformative Agreement Contrasted with the CSU-Elsevier Transformative Agreement

Mark Bilby

Big news today in the Academic Publishing world: the University of California and Elsevier reached a Transformative Agreement, the biggest of its kind in history. Congrats to the UC negotiation team for achieving a truly transformative, transformative agreement! The unique leverage of the UC as the world’s largest producer of academic journal literature and a system with a decade of leadership and innovation in the Open Access movement made this moment possible. It will certainly be a blueprint for other institutions, including the CSUs, to follow.

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