DEIA Efforts
New library acquisitions advance academic distinction, diverse scholarship
Cornell University Library, L.S.A. Member, News Announcement, April 5, 2023
Cornell University Library recently allocated an additional $1 million to boost its $18 million collections budget for 2023 to acquire more books, journals, and other titles in a range of disciplines—from African American, Southeast Asian, and North American Indigenous studies, to classics and the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. The one-time supplemental funds for this year will support Cornell’s academic distinction and increase the library’s subject-area strengths while addressing broader, longstanding needs and urgent requests from researchers across the university, said Kizer Walker, director of collections.
The new acquisitions will also advance the library’s anti-racism goals for its collections, according to Walker. Among new resources are digitized records of the history of slavery in the United States, digitized international newspapers like the Hindustan Times, streaming video collections, and a collection of STEM books by authors who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
Partnerships and Collaborations
CCC Integrates its Get It Now Article Delivery Service Within Ex Libris Rapido Integrated Borrowing Solution
Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) and Ex Libris, Inc., Voting Members, Press Release, April 25, 2023
CCC, a leader in advancing copyright, accelerating knowledge, and powering innovation, announces an expansion to its longstanding integration with Ex Libris, a leading provider of cloud-based solutions for higher education. CCC’s award-winning article delivery service, Get It Now, is now available via a free add-on within Ex Libris’ Rapido integrated borrowing solution where articles can be purchased by library staff and delivered directly to patrons.
Get It Now provides faculty, students, researchers, and staff with full-text articles from unsubscribed journals – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. With Get It Now, librarians can purchase high-quality article PDFs from over 19,000 leading journals for immediate delivery. Get It Now is used by hundreds of academic libraries around the world to help expand their virtual collections.
Portico and KB extend their collaboration to support preservation of the scholarly record
ITHAKA/JStor/Portico, Voting Member, News Announcement, April 4, 2023
Portico and the KB, National Library of the Netherlands, are pleased to announce that they have extended their longstanding collaboration to host an online replica of the Portico archive at the KB.
For more than a decade, the KB and Portico cooperated to form and implement their respective digital preservation principles and practices. They have worked together over the years to research the handling of digital preservation formats and to develop automated preservation workflows. As part of this work, Portico provided copies of its archive, on disk, to the KB, which maintained custody of this offline copy. In 2018, Portico and the KB worked together to establish an online replica of the Portico archive at the KB, and have now agreed to extend this hosting arrangement.
Infrastructure and Platforms
Oklahoma State University to Adopt the FOLIO Library Services Platform With EBSCO FOLIO
Oklahoma State University, L.S.A. Member (Amigos Library Services), and EBSCO Information Services, Voting Member, Press Release, April 11, 2023
Oklahoma State University (OSU) Library begins the transition to the FOLIO Library Services Platform (LSP) using EBSCO FOLIO hosting and implementation services from EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO). The switch from its existing ILS to FOLIO will allow OSU to choose its preferred library automation solutions to maximize the workflow experience and build its own customizations.
EBSCO FOLIO provides a flexible, customizable experience that allows libraries to acquire the applications they need to create a unique system and avoid forced packages and predetermined workflows.
ClinicalTrials.gov is Modernizing to Serve You Better
National Library of Medicine (NLM), Voting Member, Blog Post, March 29, 2023
ClinicalTrials.gov is the world’s largest database of privately and publicly funded clinical trials. It provides easy access to clinical trial information for millions of users every month—from patients and their advocates to data submitters, data researchers, and the broader public. NLM is in the midst of a multi-year effort to modernize ClinicalTrials.gov to deliver an improved user experience on an updated platform that will accommodate future growth and enhance efficiency.
In June 2023, we will reach an important milestone: replacing the current website with the modernized ClinicalTrials.gov website. This modernized site will implement the innovations we have designed based on user feedback, including an updated look and feel and improved functionality for searching, viewing, and downloading information about clinical trials.
Open Access, Open Science
Big Ten Academic Alliance and JSTOR Announce Multi-year Agreement for Path to Open Pilot
ITHAKA/JStor/Portico, Voting Member, News Announcement, April 17, 2023
The research libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) have entered into a multi-year pilot agreement with JSTOR to support Path to Open, a new cost-effective, sustainable publishing model for supporting frontlist university press monographs and making them open access after three years.
More than 30 university presses and hundreds of authors are part of Path to Open. The initial 100 books will be released on JSTOR in the fall of 2023, with an additional 300 titles being published annually during the term of the pilot, 2024-2026. Path to Open participating libraries will have access to the titles during the first three years, and thereafter all titles will be converted to open access, benefiting readers worldwide. Path to Open books will be available DRM free with unlimited user access and integrated with other scholarly content on the JSTOR platform, including thousands of books, journals, and primary source collections.
Springer Nature and EMBO cooperate to publish the EMBO Press suite of journals
Springer Nature, Voting Member, Press Release, March 30, 2023
EMBO Press has chosen Springer Nature to be their new publishing partner from 1 January 2024. Authors who publish in EMBO Press journals will benefit from the global reach of Springer Nature’s leading journals. In addition, authors will have the option to transfer manuscripts between journals in the EMBO Press and Springer Nature portfolios.
This announcement follows EMBO Press’ recent decision that to advance global discoverability, transparency and availability of published research outcomes all papers will be published with full gold Open Access (OA) from 2024, and curated source data will be posted with fully reproducible methods.
Research Initiatives
ORCID Poised to Support Research Institutions in New Era of Public Access and Research Security
ORCID, Inc., Voting Member, Featured Article, March 28, 2023
When ORCID set up its vision of “a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time,” we understood that meeting the practical realities of this vision would require both the technical underpinnings of the infrastructure we provide, as well as community buy-in to encourage wide adoption and practice. The past few years has seen an acceleration of the latter as persistent identifiers such as ORCID IDs have been incorporated into multiple national science and open research strategies around the world. Recent impactful memos published by the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), part of the Executive Office of the President, contribute to this body of policies by encouraging the adoption of persistent identifiers to enhance public access to research and improve research security. ORCID is encouraged by the potential of these recommendations to positively impact research integrity and public accessibility and by the fact that the infrastructure ORCID provides can help the research community as they update their workflows and public access policies to meet the new requirements.
On 14 January, 2021, the OSTP first signaled its support for persistent identifiers in a Presidential Memorandum on the topic of Research Security, now commonly referred to as NSPM-33. This memo gives direction to the major US Federal funding agencies which includes the adoption of persistent identifier (PID) infrastructure as an important way of enabling researchers to be transparent about their research activities while reducing administrative burden. The NSPM-33 Guidance published a year later further described the role and expectations of funders in adopting persistent identifiers and listed the standards that a PID service for researchers must meet to be included in Federal grant application processes. ORCID is the only organization that currently satisfies all of these criteria.
Product Innovation
EBSCO Information Services Introduces EBSCOhost® Passport™ Browser Extension
EBSCO Information Services, Voting Member, Press Release, April 5, 2023
EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is making research more streamlined for library users and researchers with the launch of the EBSCOhost® Passport™ browser extension. EBSCOhost Passport provides a more efficient solution for those who begin their search for information on a traditional search engine, allowing them to find, use and cite reliable resources while utilizing their library’s resources.
EBSCOhost Passport allows the many users who start their research on the web to access and utilize their library’s resources more efficiently. With the addition of the EBSCOhost Passport to a browser, any web page where Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) are present can be scanned to see whether the user has access to the article either in an EBSCOhost full-text database, through a publisher site, or if it is an open access article. Once users find results, they can authenticate with their institution, allowing them to access additional full-text content, including periodicals and articles, through their library.
Financials, Grants, and Mergers
NEH grant to transform UChicago’s creation and delivery of digital collections and research data
University of Chicago, L.S.A. Member, News Announcement, April 18, 2023
The National Endowment for the Humanities is awarding the University of Chicago nearly $1 million to transform UChicago’s creation, stewardship, and delivery of digital collections and research data. Working together, the University of Chicago Library and Division of the Humanities will use the grant to build a new digital structure, UChicagoNode—the core of what will eventually be a network extending and enhancing the practice of digital research at UChicago and around the world. The University is committed to raising an additional $4 million to fulfill the vision for this project.
Treasure troves of more than 200 digital collections exist across the University, but they are found in a wide range of unconnected systems, including several hundred terabytes of digital content held at the Library. UChicagoNode will give researchers a single place to go to discover available digital collections through a unified, open access platform. It will provide a long-term home for content created as part of research and teaching at UChicago, contributed by partners from outside the University, and digitized by the Library. Future scholars will also benefit from UChicagoNode because it will provide an established infrastructure for a diverse range of digital collections and will break down barriers between traditionally siloed datasets. The collections will exist as datasets that can be used with machine analysis, natural language processing, spatial mapping, and other AI-based explorations.
CRKN Celebrates Five Years Since Merger with Canadiana
Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), L.S.A. Consortium Member, News Announcement, April 11, 2023
The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) is celebrating five years of operating as a combined organization with the former Canadiana.org. The two organizations merged on April 1, 2018, after nearly two years of strategic discussions.
CRKN began merger discussions with Canadiana in June 2016 with the goal of bringing together two of Canada’s most impactful national organizations supporting digital research content. In October 2017, at CRKN’s Annual Meeting of the Members, the CRKN membership voted to merge with Canadiana.org as a combined organization under the leadership of CRKN. The removal of the paywall on the Canadiana collections was an exciting first milestone after the merger. Thanks to the financial support of our members, CRKN was able to make Canadiana’s millions of pages of digitized historical content accessible at no charge.
Discover the Library's Annual Report 2021-2022
University of Ottawa, L.S.A. Member (CRKN), News Announcement, April 4, 2023
The University of Ottawa Library is proud to present its Annual Report 2021-2022.
Browse the report to learn how the Library is advancing the aspirations of Transformation 2030 and our own Strategic Plan 2025, particularly in the areas of open scholarship, transformative learning, specialized research services, and inclusion, accessibility, and diversity.
Libraries, Collections and Archives
Serials reductions as part of the life cycle
University of California Berkeley Library, L.S.A. Member, Blog Post, April 5, 2023
You need not fret about L’Infiniti, Écrits de Paris, Revue des deux mondes, Revue des études Italiennes, Revista de occidente, Claves de razón práctica, El Mediterráneo, Atena, MicroMega, Humanitas, Europe, Misure critiche, Commentaire, Nuova antologia, Il Mulino, and many more journals in the Southern European collection. These have evaded cancellation for now in the second year of a two-year planned reduction of UC Berkeley Library’s acquisitions and licensing budget.
This week, the Library has shared with the campus via CALmessages a complete list of proposed serials cancellations for public comment until May 12. For 2023/24, the budget for recurring annual costs such as subscription databases, journal subscriptions, ebook and journal packages will be reduced by $850K. The Arts and Humanities portion of the serials reduction came to about $165,000. Much of this was met through a renegotiation of the price share for a statewide Taylor & Francis journal package that met about $65,000 of our target. The remaining $100,000 came from the subject funds. (For Latin American and Caribbean Studies, please scroll down to the Social Sciences grouping.)