Category Archives: open access

Library Publishing Through the IFLA Global Lens

This posting is sponsored by the Library Publishing SIG and published in cooperation with the ARL Section. Members of the Library Publishing SIG reach out to library publishers and invite them to respond to a series of questions.

This post features Markus Putnings, a Senior Librarian at the University Library of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Bavaria, Germany, in charge of FAU University Press and the Open Access Department, see full bio on LinkedIn and activities & works in ORCiD.

 

What attracted you to work in library publishing?

I have worked in several areas of the book industry. Originally, I trained as a bookseller. Then e-books came along, Amazon became big, everything was particularly painful for the small, owner-operated bookshops. Adapt or perish was the motto, so I studied business informatics with a focus on information systems and e-business and started working in the new media editorial department at a medium-sized German publishing house. This publishing house was one of the first to publish in a media-neutral way; it brought out eBooks on USB sticks and CD-ROMs to accompany books, created small databases and knowledge clusters. However, the commercial environment was still tough and there were always extreme trade-offs between economic viability, saleability, media appeal, etc. Finally, I found my ideal through the library internship at the KIT library, which also housed the university press KIT Scientific Publishing: non-commercial library publishing, where science, quality, transparency and reusability (via Open Access and Open Data for research data) are the focus of all activities.

What partners do you collaborate with?

Like many small library publishers or university presses, we are a bit behind the curve in terms of media-neutral XML publishing. So far, we have only produced PDF eBooks. In order to keep up with commercial publishers and their professional content offerings, a greater degree of automation and streamlining of processes is required. The Open Source Academic Publishing Suite (OS-APS) project in collaboration with our partner SciFlow and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg aims to achieve this:

Small and medium-sized publishers typically receive Word manuscripts. OS-APS automatically extracts the underlying XML from these manuscripts, offers an optimisation option and, most importantly, export options in various formats (XML, HTML, PDF). The professional corporate design, e.g. of the PDFs, is managed automatically by using templates or by creating your own with the OS-APS Template Development Kit. In addition, OS-APS connects to scholarly and collaborative publishing platforms such as Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Monograph Press (OMP) and Dspace.

To our other partners: All books published by our library are Open Access. However, when authors require printed versions for the book trade, we work with a number of different printers, depending on the author’s requirements. For example, print-on-demand titles are often printed by Docupoint.

What values and principles inform your work?

Due to our university ties, we are of course primarily bound by the values and principles of the university, e.g. good scientific practice. In addition, there are influences from relevant research funders in the German academic landscape (e.g. Research Integrity from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), from the working groups in which we are represented (e.g. the quality standards of the AG Universitätsverlage) and from relevant publishing coalitions such as COPE, C4DISC, OASPA, EASE. We try to aggregate these influences in our policies and present them in a transparent, comprehensible and practice-oriented way for our authors, book series editors and, of course, ourselves in our daily work.

An example of this is our recently published Diversity and Inclusion Policy, which, in addition to our Editorial Policy and Publication Ethics Guidelines, incorporates aspects of the DFG’s „Equal opportunities and diversity“, „Relevance of Sex, Gender and Diversity in Research“, the „Joint Statement of Principles“ of the Coalition for Diversity and Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC), and the Library Publishing Coalition’s „Ethical Framework for Library Publishing – Topic: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion“.

What is the impact of your library publishing programme at institutional level?

The FAU University Press publishing house, its publishing programme and functions (e.g. to strengthen Open Access among disciplines with a strong affinity for books and among young scholars) were and are very well integrated institutionally. For example, it is endorsed in the university’s former Open Access Policy and new Open Science Policy, there are book series for almost all disciplines at FAU, and it is part of the General Doctoral Regulations. Within the doctoral regulations, it is recommended to doctoral candidates as an equal publication channel to commercial publishers.

Tell us about a book that changed your life.

A book that impressed me in my youth was the Hagakure. In very general terms, it is about being a good servant to your employer, who in turn has a duty of care. Why was this so important to me? In Germany there are a lot of prejudices against civil servants, e.g. that they only like to do their work “go-slow”, just according to the rules, etc. For me, I took away from the book that the opposite should actually be the case and that as a civil servant librarian I can, should and must do more than a comparable person in the commercial sector. Because it’s not just about the salary, it’s about the greater good of society, such as Open Access or Open Science and the resulting benefits of knowledge transfer and research progress.

Library Publishing Through the IFLA Global Lens

This posting is sponsored by the Library Publishing SIG and published in cooperation with the ARL Section. Members of the Library Publishing SIG reach out to library publishers and invite them to respond to a series of questions.

This post features Paul Royster, Linnea Fredrickson, and Sue Ann Gardner, who are responsible for the library publishing program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries, which was established in 2005. Their institutional repository is available at https://digitalcommons.unl.edu.

Affiliation: University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States

Describe your work in library publishing.

PR: We always considered the institutional repository as a publishing project. So it was a concise step to developing and finding original materials to publish. Our monograph imprint, Zea Books, has published more than 150 titles. We produce, publish, host, or mirror about 20 journals of various sizes and frequencies. We recruit, edit, design, and typeset as required in each case.

SG: The way we approach our work, all that we do involves library publishing in one form or another, whether it’s publishing books and journals, or populating the institutional repository.

LF: I do a number of things as a staff member in our scholarly communications unit that bit by bit helps to change scholarly communications—for the better is our goal. I help find, prepare, and upload materials—mostly professors’ academic papers—to our institutional repository (though we host all kinds of reports, curricula, proceedings, posters, videos, etc.). We also host entire journals, so I help post those that arrive in final form, and I copyedit and prepare for design and typesetting the articles of those that use our editorial service. We are also book publishers, and I use skills and processes from being an academic press project editor and copy editor to work with authors or editors and ready book manuscripts for design and typesetting. I also do proofreading on all sorts of projects, and I help with supervising some student workers who do scanning and IR uploading.

What attracted you to work in library publishing?

LF: Colleagues found me, thank goodness, while I was in library school mid-career, but with my experience in publishing (most recently in academic and educational publishing), it was a very nice fit to continue that kind of work in a library setting and be involved in changing scholarly communications in the twenty-first century—and for the “twenty-first-century academic library.”

SG: One thing that attracts me to work in library publishing is the collaborative nature of it. Researchers need to communicate with one another, their students, and the public at large, and we help them do that. Roger Chartier has said that authors don’t write books—they write manuscripts. From these, editors and publishers craft books, and that is what we do in our work.

What training resources have you found helpful in your work?

LF: Copy editors train every day with their style manuals—The Chicago Manual of Style, Scientific Style and Format, The Associated Press Stylebook, MLA Style Manual, Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, and more. I am also a member of ACES: The Society for Editing (https://aceseditors.org/). I attend virtually the Library Publishing Forums, Southern Miss Institutional Repository Conferences (SMIRC), and the Digital Commons North American Conferences. I write workflow documentation or tips for myself and others, and then after I haven’t done a certain thing for half a year (busy with something else), I use my documentation to retrain myself!

What values and principles inform your work?

SG: One principle that informs our work is that the repository belongs to the faculty. We don’t own it and it’s not our place to saddle it with a bunch of extraneous policy and gatekeeping. We are allied with the faculty and aim above all to support and amplify their work.

PR:

  • The content belongs to the author.
  • It should be easy to be published if you are serious.
  • Someone somewhere is looking for this information.

What is the impact of your library publishing programme at institutional level?

PR: Our original publishing has a limited impact, perhaps around 20 faculty who have authored or edited works that we publish, and perhaps another 10 or 12 from outside the institution. But if we count all the contributors to the volumes and journals, it would number well into the thousands. So we have extended our institutional brand on a global scale, probably farther than any other media.

SG: We queried a subset of our participants recently to ask them to describe their experience with the UNL Digital Commons. The answers we received showed us that our services have emerged as essential in many of our colleagues’ scholarly communication workflows. An example quote: “[The UNL institutional repository] is indeed a remarkable resource, especially at the global level. My own papers, for which I am one of the authors, get picked up and later cited by people that would never have ready access to them otherwise. For that reason, I consider it a major means of promoting the scholarly strength of the university.”

What do you think is the impact of library publishing in the broader scholarly communications landscape?

PR: Right now, we are in a proof-of-concept stage—showing that professional-level publication is feasible for libraries at a modest scale. I believe we are also proving that online digital and on-demand publication do not require the full apparatus inherited from traditional paper publishing. We seek to change not simply the final form in which the product is delivered, but the entire system of scholarly publishing, including and especially the ownership and access to the means of production.

What are your hopes and aspirations for the global library publishing community?

SG: My hope for the global library publishing community is that we will converge on sustainable funding models. Partnering with for-profit companies and relying on philanthropic organizations each require us to establish intentional fiscal approaches that keep those other domains’ attendant value systems at arm’s length while still partnering with them. Some people think we can and should divest from for-profit businesses and in some cases also not-for-profit philanthropic entities, but I think that this kind of fiscal protectionism is short-sighted. In my estimation, the aggregator BioOne’s funding model as it was around 2010 (and perhaps still is) is an example of a viable funding schema. The details of the flow of funds are available in a conference paper I wrote several years ago called Hot Potato: Who Will End Up Paying for Open Access? Interested readers can find it available in UNL’s institutional repository (https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libraryscience/199/).

Paul Royster: Coordinator for Scholarly Communications

Linnea Fredrickson: Scholarly Communications Production Specialist

Sue Ann Gardner: Scholarly Communications Libraries

A Symposium on “Open Science beyond Open Access: Accessible, Global and Democratic Knowledge” in São Paulo, Brazil

This write-up is by Adriana Cybele Ferrari, Brazil

Always present in the perspective of librarians, teachers and researchers, Open Access to knowledge has been and continues to be a working premise. In recent decades, this view has gathered more and more defenders, including scientists. Science itself has increasingly been considered a public good, which must be within the reach of society and count on its participation. At this moment full of innovations, changes, questions and initiatives that lead to the opening of Science beyond Open Access, the Symposium “Open Science beyond Open Access: accessible, global and democratic knowledge” was held on October 24th and 25th, 2023 at the USP Faculty of Medicine. The event was part of the celebrations of the XXVI Book and Library Week at the University of São Paulo (USP) and International Open Access Week 2023 Organized and promoted by the Postgraduate Program in Public Health of the Faculty of Medicine (FMUSP), Library of the Faculty of Medicine (FMUSP) and  the Libraries and Digital Collections Agency (ABCD-USP) and with the support of the Dean of Research and Innovation at USP (PRPIUSP), the event was attended by experts, teachers, librarians, researchers and students. The Symposium was a very relevant initiative in providing the exchange of knowledge and real experiences, strengthening the importance of academic and library partnerships in guiding and promoting good practices related to Open Science and Open Access in universities. It was attended by librarians, library teams, professors and postgraduate students from USP. The recordings and materials presented are available at https://www.abcd.usp.br/noticias/slides-do-simposio-ciencia-aberta/  (in Portuguese).

Photo: Guest speakers and team from the Organizing Committee, including the Executive Coordinator of ABCD/USP and Adriana Cybele Ferrari, member of the IFLA Academic and Research Libraries Committee.

 

IFLA WLIC 2023 Grant Winners Congress Experience

My Experience as a Grant Winner at the World Library and Information Congress 88th IFLA General Conference and Assembly

My name is Anabelly Tinoco Altamirano, I live and work in Costa Rica. In this document I write some of my experiences at the World Library and Information Congress 88th IFLA General Conference and Assembly and in the Dutch country, which gave me the opportunity to appreciate and better understand areas of library science worldwide.

The World Library and Information Congress 88th IFLA General Conference and Assembly gave me the opportunity to meet, interact and learn with librarians from other countries. Such as dynamics of work, cooperation, collaboration, strategic alliances, access to information, open access, artificial intelligence, accessible documentary materials, accessibility in the library from the physical and technological infrastructure. In addition, I learnt about the impact that a library can generate when it integrates and executes any of the Sustainable Development Goals in their strategic plan.

On the other hand, the experiences shared and acquired in the host country of the World Library and Information Congress 88th IFLA General Conference and Assembly have allowed me to have a broader vision of the organization, administration and improvement in libraries, organizations that contribute to the access and generation of knowledge through books, information resources in digital format through technologies and applications.

By participating in several sessions, I was able to reflect and analyze that with effort, collaborative work, strategic alliances and library cooperation, the improvement of a library can be achieved and they could contribute towards the development of their community, users, regions, and countries.

Therefore, many thanks to all the people, organizations and sponsors who contributed to making it a reality for me to attend and participate in the World Library and Information Congress 88th IFLA General Conference and Assembly.

The experience of the World Library and Information Congress 88th IFLA General Conference and Assembly has been enriching, the vision of a congress of international magnitude to share knowledge reaffirms the potential of librarians, the value of knowledge and libraries.

Expanding my knowledge in spaces of personal interaction like this is very valuable, as I realized the value of knowledge, information, culture, language, reading, sources of information, media or mechanisms used to offer users access to information as the fundamental work of the librarian.

Finally, the Congress was a space for analysis and retrospective in library work.

Thank you to the IFLA staff, everyone who collaborated at the Congress, the participating librarians, attendees, the sponsors, Sage and Ex Libris and the host country. Thank you so much.

Anabelly Tinoco Altamirano

Institutional email: anabelly.tinoco@una.cr

Personal mail: anatinocoaltamirano15@gmail.com

 

IFLA WLIC 2023 Grant Winners Congress Experience

This post features Snehal Dilip Bhalerao, one of the 2023 IFLA ARL Grant winners from India.

I am Snehal Dilip Bhalerao and I studied at the Savitribai Phule Pune University. I currently work as a research fellow at the Centre of Publication Ethics at the Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India. I feel very lucky to have won this grant which gave me the opportunity to attend the IFLA Conference, which was held from 21st -25th August, 2023. IFLA gave me the opportunity to visit Rotterdam and experience another world of libraries.

After visiting IFLA Rotterdam venue, I realized I could gain some valuable knowledge about Libraries which are different from the Indian setting. I had the opportunity to meet, interact and network with many librarians from across the world at the Conference.

The conference was organized in sessions which represented the different interest in IFLA. I therefore attended sessions that were of interest to me. All the conference sessions were very useful to the development of libraries and provided a great source of knowledge to the participants. The various presentations included the sustainable development goal activities in the various countries of the presenters. Topics included the Green Libraries. Some other presentations also showcased the impact of artificial intelligence on libraries and how for instance ChatGPT is helping in all aspects of our lives, both personal and professional, and how to apply it appropriately and effectively.

Again, the conference educated me on the role of IFLA in the development of the LIS profession.

Then there was the Cultural Evening which was organised by IFLA for participants. This event was very exciting and was another avenue for me to meet many colleagues on an informal level. This event comprised partying, eating and dancing. There was also a photo session and I had the opportunity to meet and take photos with the IFLA President. The evening helped me get off my hectic personal life to have some fun and enjoy myself. Thank you IFLA for the cultural evening. It was a very memorable day.

On the last day, there was a Library visit to Belgium by bus. I joined other librarians on this trip. We visited two libraries in Belgium to see how they operate and manage them. These libraries were very beautiful and are currently using AI to enhance their library operations. I initially did not support the use of AI in libraries but after the tour, I got a first hand experience of AI at work and it changed my mind. I have therefore resolved to advocate for its use in Indian libraries. I hope to be able to share my experiences and knowledge with my colleagues in India.

A great thank you to IFLA, I am really grateful for this opportunity. I appreciate IFLA for giving me the learning experience which will help progress my career in the future. I also want to thank the IFLA President and all IFLA Members and Volunteers who guided us during the IFLA Congress -2023 in Rotterdam.

Snehal Dilip Bhalerao

Savitribai Phule Pune University, India

IFLA WLIC 2023 Grant Winners Congress Experience

This post features  Ezequiel Vallejo Ríos who is one of the 2023 IFLA ARL Grant winners. from México.

Attending the IFLA WLIC 2023 Congress certainly opened an opportunity for those of us who are not in mainstream librarianship to see the various aspects of the profession. I experienced this through my interactions with colleagues who are involved in the day to day activities of the profession, their challenges and successes and other experiences from their various perspectives.

The various presentations at the congress were another source of great experience for me as they provided me with the latest trends in the profession, as well as new ideas which I can implement in my own environment. Some general topics which were discussed included  open access, inclusive publication, copyright, adaptation of copyrighted materials to formats accessible with the Marrakesh Treaty, access to culture and the future roles of the librarian in the environment of access to information. Again, there were discussions that addressed how the role of the librarian changes as society demands it, the implementation of technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) or Chat GPT and with this the development of new digital skills to respond to the constant change in the knowledge society, and innovations in libraries.

Again, attending this congress has helped expand my panorama about the profession also to network with librarians from other institutions, as well as exchange ideas, knowledge, and success stories from their libraries which will help guide me in my work going forward.

Without a doubt, it is gratifying to have experienced professionals sharing their lives, and interests with the new generation of librarians who are barely getting involved in the relevant issues of the profession in order to be able to contribute to the discipline. In turn, it is gratifying that young professionals who came with fresh ideas were given the space to contribute to the profesión and also enrich themselves intellectually. Being in these congresses of global trajectory offers us an excellent environment to get involved with the dynamics of the profesión and thus contributing to the profession.

Inclusion, the theme and topics of the congress are a determining factor for more people to be involved in the development and participation of these congresses. As such, the congress organisers could be more open in their ideas, regardless of gender, religion, social status, political ideology or some kind of motor weakness. This would allow for a more inclusive congress.

 

Open access in Singapore

Author: Yeo Pin Pin, Head of Research Services, Singapore Management University Libraries

Academic libraries in Singapore support Open Access and Open Science trends in the world. Some of the trends can be seen in the ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit. Let me outline how we have supported these trends in Singapore.

Open access repositories

Starting from 2005 with the first institutional repository (IR) by the National Institute of Education (NIE), the academic libraries in Singapore progressively launched their own IRs: Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in 2009, National University of Singapore (NUS) and Singapore Management University (SMU) in 2010. The latest IR was launched by the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) in 2021.

The platforms used for the IRs are either open source on DSpace or commercial platforms like Digital Commons and Figshare. NIE, NUS and NTU use DSpace and engage a vendor to help them manage the technical side. SMU uses the hosted solution by Digital Commons and SIT uses Figshare. The library staff of the IRs in Singapore focus on supporting institutional policies, integration with internal systems, building content and promoting usage and engagement within the community.

Content in repositories

The IRs in Singapore showcase the research done at their institutions by having records, and the full text where possible, of publications by their researchers and faculty members. The IRs in Singapore also include theses and dissertations. The IRs in Singapore have good discoverability and downloads.

Some of the unique content available in NUS Digital Gems include the papers of Edwin Thumboo, Koh Kim Yam and the Earl of Cranbrook. The NIE IR has the manuscripts of Dr Muhammad Ariff Ahmad. The SMU IR has the oral history interviews and transcripts with the pioneers who set up SMU and the leaders who helmed SMU subsequently.

Historical newspapers from Southeast Asia published in Chinese, Jawi and English were digitised and made available open access in NUS Digital Gems. Recordings of musical performances from the NUS Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music are another unique offering in the NUS IR.

Growth in open access publications

Using the data in Lens.org, the growth in the number of open access publications in Singapore has been steady and has grown to 50% in 2021 from 11% in 2000.

Let us look at the breakdown by type of open access in Singapore using the data in Lens.org. Singapore started with more green open access publications than gold open access from 2000 to 2019. From 2020, the number of gold open access publications exceeded green open access. Bronze open access publications was 7% in 2021 with hybrid at 10%. We have not seen bronze open access increasing in proportion in Singapore, as found by Piwowar, et al (2018).

The above charts show the growth in percentage of open access publications over the past 20 years. The type of open access has also shifted, from mainly green with less gold open access to more gold and less green open access. From 2019, there were more gold open access publications than green open access publications in Singapore. This was possibly aided by funders allowing grant funding to be used for article processing charges and more awareness of the benefits of open access.

Open Data and Open Science

NTU was the first institution to have a research data policy which was effective in 2016. NIE also had their Data Management Plan and Research Data Management Policy in place by 2017 and revised by 2021. SMU crafted its research data policy in consultation with the library, the schools and the faculty and the policy was in effect from January 2020. SIT put in place their research data policy in 2021. The libraries in Singapore had worked with their respective research offices and key stakeholders to put in place the infrastructure to support the policies. The other institutions are working on their policies.

NTU Library has an Open Science & Research Services team to focus their efforts on creating awareness and advocating the best practices in open science among the NTU community. At SMU, we have a Data Services team to focus our efforts on providing services for accessing, managing and working with data for our community. The libraries in Singapore organise and conduct learning sessions about relevant topics on open science for their own community. Together we are also working to raise awareness about open science in Singapore through organizing events that are open to the academic community. Some examples were the webinar on Institutional repositories and sensitive data in 2020, and COAR Asia OA Meeting in 2021 organised by the Singapore Alliance of University Libraries’ Research Support Task Force.

Data repositories

NTU launched its data repository (DR) on the Dataverse platform in 2017, followed by NIE in 2018 using the same platform. In 2018, NUS enhanced its existing repository on the DSpace platform to take in datasets. In 2020, SMU launched its DR using the Figshare platform. In 2021, SIT launched its integrated repository for both papers and data using the Figshare platform.

There is recognition that not all data can be made open. Hence, NUS, NIE and NTU set up systems to store the data that was still in-progress or sensitive.

Research funders

The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) put in place an open access mandate in 2013 and set up an IR to support their researchers to comply with the mandate. In 2016, the major research funders in Singapore introduced a common clause that required that the publications arising from their funded research be made open access within 12 months of the official date of publication in a suitable repository. The funders then allowed the use of the grants for Article Processing Charges. These changes provided incentives to researchers to make their publications open access and even gold open access.

Publisher agreements

NUS Libraries had negotiated deals with several publishers for discounts on the Article Processing Charges (APCs) for NUS authors. The Singapore Alliance of University Libraries (SAUL) has a committee working on negotiating with selected publishers for better terms and conditions for the group and exploring whether transformative deals would work in the Singapore context.

Conclusion

In Singapore, we follow the trends closely and then work within our own institution to implement those that suit the needs of our institutions. We also collaborate and learn from each other about best practices. Open access is on a strong footing now after steady growth over a decade. We are trying out some deals with publishers to make publishing open access and gold open access easier for our researchers.  We are supporting and promoting Open Data and Open Science and this area is still new for us, but we hope to make further progress in this area.

 

References

Association of College and Research Libraries. (2022). Scholarly Communication Toolkit. Available at: https://acrl.libguides.com/scholcomm/toolkit

Conrad, Lettie. (2022, January). 5 scholarly publishing trends to watch in 2022. Available at: https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/scholarly-publishing-trends-2022/

Dempsey, Lorcan. (2022, April). Workflow is the new content. Presented at Digital initiatives Symposium. Available at: https://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/presentations/2022/workflow-is-the-new-content.pdf

Hayashi, Kazuhiro. (2021). How could COVID-19 change scholarly communication to a new normal in the Open Science paradigm. Patterns, 2 (1), 100191. DOI: 10.1016/j.patter.2020.100191

Ooi, Lian Ping. 2021. Open access and open science in Singapore. Presented at COAR Asia OA Meeting. Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/asiaoa2021/program/agenda/6/

Piwowar, Heather, et al. (2018). The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles. PeerJ, 6, e4375. DOI: 10.7717/peerj.4375

 

Links for repositories in Singapore