ELPUB 2018

Google Docs Session Notes

With the rise of audit culture in higher education it has been argued that academic value is increasingly becoming “monetised” and as a result academic values are being transformed (Burrows 2012). Auditing is a power based relationship with those being observed being made into objects of information rather than participants in communication (Foucault 1977). Audits establish the definitions of quality as much as they evaluate (Power 1944). Ultimately, effective audit technologies transform the way people perceive themselves, and relate to their work and colleagues (Shore and Wright 2000). Since the 1980’s universities and their researchers have increasingly been assessed for performance, quality, and efficiency in order to determine value for money (Shore and Wright 2000; Audit Commission 1984). The resulting Research Assessment Exercise and Research Excellence Framework in the United Kingdom, and White House’s Public Access Policy in the United States, although great progress for open science, also epitomise the uptake of “value for money” auditing by governments. Academic reward systems are “the valuing of people’s professional lives” (O’Meara 2002), but the current emphasis on openness is a model of valuing, both economic and sociocultural, the research process as well (Levin and Leonelli 2016). Although current academic reward systems privileging high impact factor publications have hindered adoption of open science, the new funder and university Open Access policies are shifting the requirements for researchers, simultaneously creating new opportunities for open science and new hurdles for researchers. Where is the line between positive growth for open science and simple value for money? Is open science becoming yet another metric that earlier career scientists must fit into in order to survive in the academy?

The open science movement is altering what it means to be an academic scientist. PhD students and early career researchers have reported being dismissed by senior colleagues for submitting to Open Access journals, and being told their publications aren’t ‘real’ because the journal is Open Access and doesn’t have an Impact Factor. However, with the recent growth in open science, the values of the academy may shift to be more inclusive of open science just as they shifted previously in the mid twentieth century for auditing — with the caveat that researchers would then be evaluated based on openness. Or will early career researchers that want to practice open science continue being pulled in two directions and having their identity as a ‘real’ academic scientist questioned?

Purpose of the workshop: To present research on the identities of academic scientists and then have a discussion among attendees on how open science is impacting their research identities. This workshop will begin with the presenter’s discussion of their own research on the identities of academic scientists and then transition into an open discussion among attendees, particularly early career researchers, on how open science practice is impacting their researcher identities.

Target audience: Early career researchers

Learning objectives:

• Attendees will reflect on how the scientific identity is shaped by research practices.
• Attendees will share how research practices affect their researcher identity.
• Attendees will discuss how to bridge the values of open research with the requirements of academic success.

Google Docs Session Notes

In this two-hour workshop we will attempt to overview basic concepts in text and data mining, with a focus on open source implementations in R. The examples used will be trivial, to convey understanding of the principles. We will pick out some published examples from the biological and chemical literature to show how TDM techniques have been successfully applied. The session will end with an open discussion on the theme of: "Why aren't more researchers using text and data mining?" and all the open access related policy issues that come with this question.

Objectives: 
Overview the power, scalability, and utility of TDM techniques

Who should be interested:
People who do not think of themselves as computer scientists

What attendees are expected to learn:
* Some of what current TDM methods can and cannot do
* The significant difference(s) between "title, abstract, and keyword" mining vs. fulltext mining
* De-mystification of TDM jargon like document-term matrix (DTM), tokenization, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, named entity recognition...
* Why open access papers must be licensed to permit public reposting, modification, and commercial use (a defence of CC BY licencing from the TDM point-of-view)

Google Docs Session Notes

Framing power: Tracing key discourses in Open Science policies
Authors: Denisse Albornoz, Maggie Huang, Issra Marie Martin, Maria Mateus, Aicha Yasmine Touré, Leslie Chan

Open Science is becoming a popular policy object around the world. We question the extent to which Open Science is becoming an “empty” rhetoric tool that serves as a instrument to strengthen powerful institutions and the discursive hegemonies that sustain them. This study sought to identify key narratives about Open Science in policy, and critically assess the extent to which they affect multi-layered domination and inequality schemes that pre-exist in scientific knowledge production. To do so, we conducted a content analysis of Open Science policies stemming from Europe, North America, Latin America and Africa to understand how narratives about Open Science policies are produced, reproduced and by whom; and in turn whose interests are neglected in this process. We found that OS policies are predominantly stemming from Europe, and promoting a technocentric and modernization approach to Open Science that risks widening power imbalances in scientific production.


Data driving sustainability - the African Open Science Platform project
Authors: Ina Smith, Academy of Science of South Africa; Susan Veldsman, Academy of Science of South Africa

Exploitation of the digital revolution offers great potential for less affluent and least economically developed countries (LEDCs) and for the attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, LEDCs typically have poorly resourced national research systems. If they cannot participate in research based on big and open data, the gap could grow exponentially in coming years. They will be unable to collect, store and share data, unable to participate in the global research enterprise, unable to contribute as full partners to global efforts on climate change, health care, and resource protection, and unable to fully benefit from such efforts, where global solutions will only be achieved if there is global participation. Thus, both emerging and developed countries have a clear and direct interest in helping to fully mobilize LEDC science potential and thereby to contribute to achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.  The initiative described here (African Open Science Platform or AOSP) is directed towards minimising a divide between emerging and developed countries in what is arguably the most important current opportunity to enhance the power and efficiency of the scientific enterprise and its contribution to societal benefit.

Open Science practices adopted by Latin American & Caribbean open access journals
Authors: Andre Luiz Appel, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; Ivonne Lujano, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México; Sarita Albagli, Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia

The objective of this study is to investigate how Open Science (OS) values and practices have influenced open access (OA) journals publishers in Latin American and the Caribbean (LA&C). Our key questions regarding this issue are: a) to what extent are these practices being adopted by LA&C journals? b) what are the corresponding decision-making processes of scientific publishers? c) are there any public policies in LA&C currently supporting the adoption of these practices? d) what are the possible impacts of these practices (e.g., increased number of articles submissions, greater visibility, indexing of journals, and others)?. In order to answers these questions, we conducted a survey with a sample of LA&C journals obtained from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) database. From a population of 1,900 journals distributed among 19 LA&C countries listed by UNESCO, we randomly selected a sample of 322 based on a confidence interval of 95% and a margin of error of 5%, distributed per country proportionally. We distributed questionnaires over e-mail in the beginning of March and received a total of 55 full responses. The results reveal that much journals are somewhat aware of or informed about most of open science practices being discussed, but just some of them have already successfully implemented some practices.

Google Docs Session Notes

The DOAJ Ambassador Programme: an example project for promoting cognitive justice in the Global South
Authors:  Tom Olyhoek, DOAJ Editor in Chief; Barbara Porrett, DOAJ Ambassador Canada; Dominic Mitchell, DOAJ Operations Manager
Global scientific publishing, including open access publishing, is heavily biased towards journals and authors from the Global North.  This has resulted in a knowledge gap  between the South and the North. It has led to a situation where scientific knowledge from the Global South is very much underrepresented  in the collective scientific output worldwide: a problem which has been described as cognitive injustice.  Unfortunately this situation is not helped by the fact that many questionable publishers are based in countries in the Global South. To address these issues the Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ) started an Ambassador programme in 2016 with the help of funding from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC Canada). The main objective of the programme was to increase the number of quality open access journals published, and the quality of open access publishing, in the Global South.

Inequality in knowledge production: The integration of academic infrastructure by big publishers
Authors: George Chen, Knowledge GAP - University of Toronto; Alejandro Posada, Knowledge GAP - University of Toronto
This paper attempts to illustrate the implications of a simultaneous redirection of the big publishers’ business strategy towards open access business models and the acquisition of scholarly infrastructure utilizing the conceptual framework of rent-seeking theory. To document such a transformation, we utilized financial databases to analyze the mergers and acquisitions of the top publicly traded academic publishers. We then performed a service analysis to situate the acquisitions of publishers within the knowledge and education life-cycles, illustrating what we term to be their vertical integration within their respective expansion target life-cycles. Implications of higher education institutions’ increased dependency towards the companies and increased influence by the companies on the institution and individual researcher were noted from the vertical integration of products. Said vertical integration is analyzed via a rent theory framework and described to be a form of rent-seeking complementary to the redirection of business strategies to open access. Finally, the vertical integration is noted to generate exclusionary effects upon researchers/institutions in the global south.

The Public Knowledge Project: Reflections and directions after its first two decades
Authors:  Juan Pablo Alperin, Simon Fraser University; John Willinsky, Stanford University; Brian Owen, Simon Fraser University; James MacGregor, Simon Fraser University; Alec Smecher, Simon Fraser University; Kevin Stranack, Simon Fraser University
As the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) enters its third decade, it faces the responsibilities of supporting the more than 10,000 journals using its software and are dependent on PKP continuing to develop the code. In the fall of 2017, PKP, with the support of the Arnold Foundation, contracted the consulting services of BlueSky to Blueprint, with its principal Nancy Maron embarking on an exploration of PKP’s standing and prospects among a sample of those involved in scholarly publishing, including current, former, and potential users of its software (Maron 2018). This paper presents BlueSky’s findings and PKP’s responses in what may serve as a lesson on the maturing of, and challenges faced by, an open source software project seeking to sustain increased global access to research and scholarship.

Google Docs Session Notes

Global Trends in APCs
Author: Heather Morrison, University of Ottawa School of Information Studies

A partnership in support of Open Access to scholarly journals in HSS and arts and letters
Authors: Elise Bergeron, Érudit; Emilie Paquin, Érudit
This paper presents the evolution and the key issues of the Partnership in Support of Open Access to Scholarly Journals in HSS and Arts and Letters. First proposed to the community by Erudit and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) - and now driven by Coalition Publi.ca, a strategic partnership created in the spring of 2017 by Erudit and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) - this Partnership establishes an innovative model for collaboration between university libraries and scholarly journals in transition toward complete open access.

Sustainability in publishing: An Open Access publisher’s view
Author: Martyn Rittman, MDPI
Sustainability is an essential part of the work of publishers. Here, the view of an open access publisher, MDPI, is presented with regards to sustainability within publishing. MDPI’s understanding of sustainability is given and some of the concrete actions it leads to. These include supporting umbrella initiatives, exploring alternative business and editorial models, elements of open science, and ensuring the long-term sustainability of published content. Our aim is to demonstrate actions that could be taken by other publishers and to invite dialog with the broader research community for how a large open access publisher can contribute to a sustainable knowledge ecosystem.

Google Docs Session Notes

The value of network sustainability: Why we join research infrastructures
Author: Elisabeth Heinemann, Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (MWS)
This paper develops the concept of network sustainability. To become and stay sustainable, distributed research infrastructures need to satisfy present needs while at the same time be flexible and resilient to meet future requirements. For this it is not enough to merely build a sustainable economic model and be technically viable. Research infrastructures that can understand, address and shape future needs have a sustainable community network. Clear characteristics of a research infrastructure with a sustainable network are that partners gain access to other networks and interest groups, that knowledge, information and expertise is shared freely among partners, that the infrastructure increases partners’ visibilities and vice versa, and that partners are enabled to stay current and state-of-the-art. This is shown on OPERAS (open access in the european research area through scholarly communication), a research infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities, and its partner Max Weber Stiftung (MWS), a German research foundation.

Global scholarly collaboration: from traditional citation practice to direct communication
Authors: Sergey Parinov, CEMI RAS, RANEPA Victoria Antonova, Higher School of Economics
Recent research information systems development allows a transformation of citations in research papers’ full-text into interactive elements. Such interactivity in some cases works as an instrument of direct scholarly communications between citing and cited authors. We discuss this challenge for research e-infrastructure development including opportunities for improvements in research cooperation and in collaboration mechanisms of global research community.

ScholarlyHub: A progress report at six months
Authors: Guy Geltner, ScholarlyHub / University of Amsterdam; John Willinsky, ScholarlyHub / Stanford University
ScholarlyHub (SH) was launched in November 2017 as a portal to fund and create a social network for scholarship-using individuals and communities that is supported and directed from the bottom up and not beholden to venture capitalists on the one hand and governments on the other. As an inclusive, member-run portal, it hopes to connect rather than replace numerous non-profit and open-source OA initiatives, which tend to lack a visible and attractive front end, and which may not currently be interoperable. If its goals can be realized, SH may offer one solution to the full workflow platforms that for-profit conglomerates are on the cusp of achieving. This practitioner’s paper presents the key characteristics of SH and offers an early progress report.

Google Docs Session Notes

Coalition Publi.ca: Building a national infrastructure for Canadian scholarly publishing
Authors: Kevin Stranack, SFU Library / Public Knowledge Project; Brian Owen, SFU Library / Public Knowledge Project; Tanja Niemann, Erudit; Émilie Paquin, Erudit
This paper provides an introduction to Coalition Publi.ca, a new joint initiative of two key Canadian-based projects, Erudit and the Public Knowledge Project. Coalition Publi.ca is funded through the Canadian Foundation for Innovation - Major Science Initiative program (2017-2022) in order to build and sustain a national Canadian publishing, dissemination, and research infrastructure that offers services to both the French and English language scholarly publishing communities. We will argue that the development of sustainable open access publishing in Canada requires an open, non-commercial infrastructure, based in the academy and controlled by the academy. The Coalition Publi.ca model is specifically targeted to support humanities and social sciences publications in Canada, but we believe it is applicable to other national or regional jurisdictions.

Open access infrastructure in Greece: current status, challenges and perspectives
Authors: Aspasia Togia, Alexander TEI of Thessaloniki; Eleftheria Koseoglou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; Sofia Zapounidou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; Nikolaos Tsigilis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
OA infrastructure is necessary for implementing open access and open science in any country. Open access infrastructures in Greece have been steadily improving over the past years, as more and more stakeholders follow international trends and participate in European networks and projects. The aim of the present paper is to give a description of the Greek OA infrastructure with emphasis on Institutional Repositories and OA journals. Building upon previous literature (Banou & Kostagiolas, 2007; Chantavaridou, 2009; Georgiou & Papadatou, 2010) and relying of data collected from a number of sources, the article presents both quantitative and qualitative information relating to the state-of-the-art of OA in order to identify current trends and future challenges. Data gathered from directories and aggregators were verified to ensure that IRs, OA journals and digital collections are still active. We collected information about specific features, such as the type of content, the metadata schemas in use, the copyright policy and the software in order to give a complete picture of the status of OA infrastructure in Greece.


The end of a centralized Open Access project and the beginning of a community-based sustainable infrastructure for Latin America: Redalyc.org after fifteen years
Authors: Arianna Becerril-García, Autonomous University of the State of Mexico; Eduardo Aguado-López, Autonomous University of the State of Mexico 
The Latin American region has an ecosystem where the nature of publication is conceived as the act of making public, of sharing and not as the publishing industry. International, national and institutional contexts have led to a redefinition of a project –Redalyc.org- that began in 2003 and that has already fulfilled its original mission: give visibility to knowledge generated in Latin America and promote quality of scientific journals. Nevertheless, it is mandatory to be transformed from a Latin American platform based in Mexico into a community-based regional infrastructure that continues assessing journals quality and providing access to full-text in benefit of journals visibility and free access to knowledge. A framework that generates technology in favor of the empowerment and professionalization of journal editors, making the editorial task in open access sustainable and that allows Redalyc to sustain itself collectively. This work describes the first Redalyc's model, presents the problematic in course and the new business model Redalyc is designing and adopting to operate on.