Partnering in the Research and Learning Ecosystem: An Interview with Mary Lee Kennedy

Mary Lee Kennedy and John O’Brien, Educause Review, July 30, 2018

This is a short interview with the current Executive Director of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Mary Lee Kennedy. One key quote states: “Research libraries will be even more intimately engaged in supporting the full life cycle and activity range of knowledge discovery, use, and preservation, as well as in curating and sharing knowledge in the diverse contexts of the university's mission and of society more broadly. ARL, as an organization, will enable and catalyze research libraries to leverage and mobilize individual assets toward the collective advancement of learning, research, and societal impact.”

New Book Chapter by Dempsey, Malpas Considers the Future of the Academic Library

Dempsey L., Malpas C. (2018) Academic Library Futures in a Diversified University System. In: Gleason N. (eds) Higher Education in the Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore

This early quote summarizes the gist of this chapter written by Lorcan Dempsey and Constance Malpas, both of OCLC Research. “We contend that different types of libraries will be on different vectors, influenced by the types of universities or colleges they support.” The authors’ direct attention to emerging types is to be found among institutions of higher education. In prior eras, a library might have been gauged according to identity (the scope of its holdings and collections), value (the degree of access provided to scholars), and workflow (presence in the library being needed to accomplish the researcher’s task). Over the course of the past 45 years, the criteria for establishing the successful contribution of the library in the digital age have shifted. Identifying models of excellence for an academic library encompasses different measures. In the present environment, the emphasis is on expanding access to locally held collections, shared infrastructure for library systems, and enhanced user experiences. “The library now increasingly defines itself in terms of university needs in a changing environment -- how to make research more productive, how to contribute to student success and retention, how to improve the engagement between the university and its community and so on.” As individual universities define their missions and establish goals, so libraries will refashion the nature of their services to align with those goals.

Shared Infrastructure for Next-Generation Books: HIRMEOS

Brian Hole, Francesco De Virgilio, Chealsye Bowley. Shared Infrastructure for Next- Generation Books: HIRMEOS. Leslie Chan; Pierre Mounier. ELPUB 2018, Jun 2018, Toronto, Canada

This paper was presented at the ELPUB event in June of 2018. It outlines the scope of a “multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents whether they are published or not.” High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science Infrastructure (HIRMEOS) is intended to integrate open access books with the broader open science environment. The intent is to share the costs and potential risks of platform development and enhance subsequent efficiencies for publishing activities from a variety of non-profit and for-profit partners. Standard identifiers (DOIs, ORCIDs, etc.) will enhance integration. The system will feature such advanced features as annotation, entity recognition, and alternative metrics.

Preprints in Europe PMC: Reducing Friction for Discoverability

Maria Levchenko, Europe PMC Blog, July 11, 2018

Europe PMC announced on July 11 that it would begin to index preprints, including abstracts for those preprints with a DOI and retrievable by CrossRef metadata services. By so doing, the organization “will make the science reported in preprints more widely discoverable and support their inclusion into workflows such as grant reporting, article citing and credit and attribution.”  Such preprints will show up in Europe PMC within 24 hours of being sent to CrossRef with links to the full text via the DOI included. The items will be clearly labelled as preprints.

UK Progress Towards the Use of Metrics Responsibly: Three Years on from the Metric Tide Report

UK Forum for Responsible Research Metrics, 10 July 2018

The UK Forum for Responsible Research Metrics (FFRRM) is seeking to advise the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 on the better application of metrics in the context of research assessment of higher education in the UK. This report reflects the findings of a survey conducted by the FFRM as well as provides a sense of the discussions that are ongoing about the best use of research metrics. Discussions held during an on-site event earlier in 2018 indicate that a change in the application of research metrics is desirable but difficult to implement. Disciplinary culture and practice, as well as institutional culture, make such a shift challenging. According to the executive summary of this report, “although the UK is engaged, more work needs to be done to share practice and instigate change.”

One quote that is indicative of the anticipated direction of the group states “…it seems likely that applications of metrics and ‘big data’ within universities are still at a relatively early stage, given the longer-term possibilities. Over the next decade, it is easy to envisage increasingly granular data on research qualities and impacts being combined with more sophisticated metrics for teaching and learning to give managers, planners and policymakers access to an unprecedented wealth of real-time data and metrics.”

The incoming chair of the FFRRM anticipates attention being paid to:

• Creation of a clear and realistic policy framework for responsible use of metrics
• Sharing of emerging practices and ensuring that the right community of practice is engaged in shaping such practices
• Additional work to structure and coordinate data collection with due notice given to those institutions regarding the intended use of that data in future assessment exercises
• Improvement of data quality and availability.

Open Science by Design: Realizing a Vision for 21st Century Research. New Report from National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2018

Released on July 17, a new report from the National Academies of Science (NAS) “recommends coordinated action from the academic community and other research stakeholders, and the use of an ‘open science by design’ framework to foster openness throughout the research process.” The intent is for the NAS to provide guidance to research communities on how to restructure existing incentives to publish findings and data in open access publications to maximize access to emerging knowledge.

From the National Academies’ press release: “The report’s recommended ‘open science by design’ framework envisions principles and practices and that should occur at each stage of the research process.  For example, at the beginning or ‘provocation’ phase of the research process, researchers have immediate access to the most recent publications and research results, free of charge; they use the latest database and text mining tools to explore these sources, identify concepts embedded in the research, and identify where novel contributions can be made; and they have robust collaborative tools to network with colleagues. Principles and practices are also outlined for subsequent phases of research -- ideation, knowledge generation, validation, dissemination, and preservation.”

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter Launch the Data Transfer Project

Paul Sawyers, Venture Beat, July 20, 2018

As both an effort to comply with the EU legislative GDPR requirements as well as a reaction to the recent data scandals experienced through Facebook and Google, the Data Transfer Project was officially unveiled this month by major tech companies. The intent of the project is to improve data portability by individuals -- exporting downloads of their data from a social platform and transferring to another service. The hope is that this will encourage a greater variety of services and minimize the influence of any single platform in the marketplace. (See additional information about this project under New and Proposed Specs and Standards.)

Mellon Foundation Funds Collections as Data: Part to Whole (Univ Nevada -Las Vegas)

S. Kennedy, UNLV Library News Blog, July 16, 2018

A 3-year project, Collections as Data: Part to Whole, funded by the Mellon Foundation, will examine how best to implement cultural heritage collections as data as well as how best to identify needed services to support scholarly use of such collections. The effort is headed by Principal Investigators Thomas Padilla, Visiting Digital Research Librarian at University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and Hannah Scales Kettler, Digital Humanities Research and Instruction Librarian, University of Iowa. A call for proposals for proposed re-grants is due to appear in August.

De Gruyter partners With Code Ocean to Improve Research Reproducibility

STM Publishing Blog, July 10, 2018

Code Ocean, a computational reproducibility platform and NISO voting member, has partnered with journal publisher De Gruyter to better enable “journal authors to publish and share working code associated with their research so readers can immediately reproduce the results.”  As noted in the De Gruyter press release, “Upon manuscript acceptance, De Gruyter will invite authors to submit their code in their journal manuscript workflow, creating an efficient way for authors to deposit and archive their code and comply with funder requirements. Upon submission, Code Ocean generates a citable Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to increase author attribution of code as part of their publication record.”

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter Partner for Ambitious New Data Project

Last week, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter joined to announce a new standards initiative called the Data Transfer Project, designed as a new way to move data between platforms. In a blog post, Google described the project as letting users “transfer data directly from one service to another, without needing to download and re-upload it.”

The current version of the system supports data transfer for photos, mail, contacts, calendars, and tasks, drawing from publicly available APIs from Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, Remember the Milk, and SmugMug. Many of those transfers could already be accomplished through other means, but participants hope the project will grow into a more robust and flexible alternative to conventional APIs. In its own blog post, Microsoft called for more companies to sign onto the effort, adding that “portability and interoperability are central to cloud innovation and competition.”

World Wide Web Consortium Launches Internationalization Initiative

On July 9, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the launch of the Internationalization Initiative, to attract participation in the form of stakeholders to provide expert personnel and additional funding to provide a significant boost to work in three main aspects of the internationalization continuum: language enablement, developer support, and author support. Internationalization makes it possible to use Web technologies with different languages, scripts, and cultures. The W3C Internationalization activity works with W3C working groups and liaises with other organizations to internationalize the Web. The mission of the W3C Internationalization (I18n) Initiative is to enable universal access to the World Wide Web. It proposes and coordinates the adoption at W3C of techniques, conventions, technologies, and designs that enable and enhance the use of the Web, with and between the various different languages, scripts, regions, and cultures. W3C pursues this goal in various ways, including collaboration with W3C groups, coordination with other organizations, creation of educational materials, and technical work itself on various topics. 

INCITS/ISO/IEC 20944-1:2013 [201x], Information Technology - Metadata Registries Interoperability and Bindings (MDR-IB) Reaffirmed as US Nationally-Adopted Standards

ITI International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) reaffirmed the US National Adoption of several INCITS/ISO/IEC standards regarding Metadata Registries Interoperability and Bindings:

INCITS/ISO/IEC 20944-1:2013 [201x], Information technology - Metadata Registries Interoperability and Bindings (MDR-IB) - Part 1: Framework, common vocabulary, and common provisions for conformance; INCITS/ISO/IEC 20944-2:2013 [201x], Information technology - Metadata Registries Interoperability and Bindings (MDR-IB) - Part 2: Coding bindings; INCITS/ISO/IEC 20944-3:2013 [201x], Information technology - Metadata Registries Interoperability and Bindings (MDR-IB) - Part 3: API bindings; INCITS/ISO/IEC 20944-4:2013 [201x], Information technology - Metadata Registries Interoperability and Bindings (MDR-IB) - Part 4: Protocol bindings; INCITS/ISO/IEC 20944-5:2013 [201x], Information technology - Metadata Registries Interoperability and Bindings (MDR-IB) - Part 5: Profiles.