RDM & Scholarly Communication News @ VIU Library

This essay by Lance Eaton discusses the matter of “academic fracking”, advocating for practices that might be seen as consistent with FAIR-ness:

If we are ever going to get the AI that we hope for—the kind that is insanely helpful, accurate, and insightful, then we are going to need to find a way to transfer all of our captured knowledge over to it. That should ideally be a process that honors and recognizes the countless authors who have something to contribute. It should be celebrated and honored; not hidden away and not mentioned by the companies doing it. 

More: 

https://aiedusimplified.substack.com/p/academic-fracking-when-publishers

Others, as in this post from The Conversation, have also been concerned with extraction, and the recolonizing potential and action, of LLM and unaccountable AI, contrary to the spirit of OCAP(R)  and CARE.

Implementing for Impact: Measuring Open Science for the SDGs 

Panel highlights include a range of practice and policy examples from different settings, together with 

• reflections on the effectiveness of incentives to work more openly, 
• implications of assessment for what we value, and 
• the wisdom of evaluating perhaps less, but more critically and carefully.

Watch the RECORDING 

Open science and open scholarship are the enabling environment through which all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) may be accomplished. However, there are a variety of approaches to the adoption and evaluation of open science and open scholarship; approaches that reflect a global imbalance in research and development and, in some cases, further grow and concretize such divides. UNESCO’s Open Science Outlook 1 warns that the “cultural shift to open science will only be possible with adequate monitoring of its impacts, including its possible unintended consequences for science and/or society.” 

It is within this context that the United Nations’ Dag Hammarskjöld Library convenes an official side event to the High-Level Political Forum. The UN Open Science Conference, convened biennially by the Dag Hammarskjöld Library and its partners, has repeatedly heard calls for academic institutions to move their focus away from metrics and instead return to their role as agents of social change, with research agendas driven by “global relevance rather than journal visibility.” How do policies, established to globally advance open science and the SDGs, impact local evaluation frameworks for research institutions? How do they impact individual researchers and their work? Do they help or hinder achievement of the SDGs? 

Speakers include:

Dr. Suchiradipta Bhattacharjee, International Water Management Institute

Dr. Yensi Flores-Bueso, Global Young Academy

Dr. Elizabeth (Lizzie) Gadd, Loughborough University, Coalition on Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA)

Dr. Geeta Swamy, Duke University, Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS)

Dr. Giannis Tsakonas, University of Patras, LIBER Europe

Moderator: Mx. Meg Wacha, Dag Hammarskjöld Library

The Bookseller reports:

Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year.

The agreement with Microsoft was included in a trading update by the publisher’s parent company in May this year. However, academics published by the group claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment for the use of their research by the tech company. 

The Society of Authors said it is "concerned to see publishers signing deals with tech companies without consulting authors and creators first".

More:

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/academic-authors-shocked-after-taylor--francis-sells-access-to-their-research-to-microsoft-ai

Or, according to another salty observer: “Academic authors shocked after for-profit corporation they gave their copyright to for free or peanuts maximised its market value.”

Watermark offers a guide to importing and maintaining publication data in your Faculty Success profile from ORCID as well as from various other sources. 

For this to work, the ORCID record must be affiliated with VIU's institutional membership. If you are not yet affiliated and would like to be, please contact me: dana.mcfarland@viu.ca

… faculty members can pull their publication citation information from their ORCID record directly into Faculty Success to then use for their numerous reporting needs rather than having to supply the same information over and over in different systems…

… During the process of importing publications from ORCID, additional data points (Abstract, Edition, Publisher, Status, etc.) may be pulled indirectly from other integrations that are enabled in your instance of Faculty Success.

• If the record has a WOSUID, additional data will be pulled from Web of Science
• If the record has a Scopus Identifier, additional data will be pulled from Scopus
• If the record has a PMID, additional data will be pulled from PubMed
• If the record has a DOI, additional data will be pulled from Crossref

Additionally, Faculty Success will only import records marked as "public" or "trusted-party" in ORCID. Any records marked as "only me" cannot be imported.

More: 

https://support.watermarkinsights.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409240052763-Publication-Import-Overview

To the Canadian RDM Community,

 

We are launching a new project within the Alliance’s Research Intelligence Expert Group (RIEG) to evaluate the state of FAIR and CARE Principle implementations by data repositories in Canada. We intend to reveal implementation progress thus far, plus opportunities and challenges going forward. We are seeking additional research team members for this effort. It is anticipated that the activity will take approximately one year to complete (by July 2025). 

 

If you have skills in conducting surveys and interviews, FAIR and CARE expertise, and knowledge about research data management or data repository infrastructures, we’d be keen to have you on board. We will evaluate responses for expertise and diversity (geography, organizational types, roles), and let respondents know the outcome in early September. 

 

Please submit a response to the google form (https://forms.gle/E5wWQzyMev4ib1727) to indicate your interest and rationale for wanting to participate by August 28, 2024. 

Existing team members: 

• Reyna Jenkyns (World Data System International Technology Office)

• Laurence Horton (Digital Curation Center)

• Minglu Wang (York University)

The Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) Sensitive Data Expert Group (SDEG) is currently seeking applications for new membership, for terms beginning in August 2024 and extending until July 2026.  

The SDEG is a community of practice and advisory group working to promote and develop resources and training for researchers and administrators working with sensitive data, as well as advising the Alliance and other stakeholders on issues related to sensitive data.

The SDEG welcomes active participation from early career to seasoned professionals engaged in RDM, analysis, legal, or infrastructure support in the area of sensitive data. This involves monthly meetings and progressing work undertaken by the SDEG and working groups between meetings. The SDEG offers members a supportive forum for discussion and information sharing around relevant topics and tools, presentations from guest speakers, events and workshops, and the ability to contribute to group activities and the development of shared goals and objectives. 

Please submit your application through the expression of interest form by end of day August 2, 2024. For more information, please contact Victoria Smith, Data Governance & Ethics Lead at victoria.smith@alliancecan.ca. 

More info and link to Expression of Interest:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfRDx5-rX91eRAM_8WKx58aIP8UkO5MTw4My5WDEMTY-6vbYw/viewform

In analyzing article metadata, where unusual patterns of citations and downloads had been found to occur, researchers found cases where “invisible” references, not cited in the article, had been embedded in article metadata, with the effect of artificially inflating citation counts for those cited articles. 

As a precautionary measure, in working with cited references, it is advisable to consult with multiple sources, and where possible, to understand how the citation information is derived.

From https://phys.org/news/2024-07-scientific-fraud-uncovering.html

Citation counts for certain researchers or journals have skyrocketed, even though these references were not cited by the authors in their articles…

Google Scholar found none, but Crossref and Dimensions did find references. The difference? Google Scholar is likely to mostly rely on the article's main text to extract the references appearing in the bibliography section, whereas Crossref and Dimensions use metadata provided by publishers.

Original post:

https://theconversation.com/when-scientific-citations-go-rogue-uncovering-sneaked-references-233858

Link to cited preprint:

Sneaked references: Cooked reference metadata inflate citation counts
Lonni Besançon, Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, Alexander Magazinov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02192

For a number of years VIU Library has supported Open Books Publishers as an interdisciplinary publisher of quality academic ebooks that pursues progressive and innovative models to promote access and sustainability. 

OBP is an independent open access academic press that publishes peer-reviewed, monographs, edited collections, textbooks, critical translations and more. Open Book Publishers welcome submissions from any field, with a particular focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences. Works may be shorter or longer than the ‘standard’ 80,000 words, and may be innovative in terms of format.
Works are open access, and also logged in student, faculty, and staff users of the library will be able to download for free, and keep, formatted digital editions (pdf, XML). Additional formats (epub) and print editions are available for purchase.
OBP does not charge authors to publish and authors retain full copyright.

Read about publishing with Open Book Publishers, and about their approach to accessible, reusable ebooks: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/about/our-vision

VIU Library access to Open Book Publishers

Boosting this item from today's VIU IT Weekly Maintenance email, since I wish I'd known this earlier myself!

Do you use Eduroam? There is a recent change you should know about!

How you sign into the Eduroam wireless network has changed. Previously you would sign in using your computer account name @viu.ca, now you will just use your regular VIU email address.  When signing into Eduroam, hypothetical employee “Bob Tester” would now use Bob.Tester@viu.ca instead of TesterB@viu.ca as his username.

Unfortunately, If you have already signed into Eduroam on a device before with the old username it will not connect. You will need go into the Wi-Fi settings on your device and forget the Eduroam network. After that is done, just reconnect using your VIU email as your username. More detailed instructions can be found in our IT Knowledge Base.

From the blog for SFU's Community-Engaged Research Initiative:

More: 

https://www.sfu.ca/ceri/blog/2024/community-scholars-program-highlight-cityhive.html

From the DMP Assistant support team at the Digital Research Alliance of Canada:

This minor version includes several enhancements to back-end features which will support the platform, some new features, and a fix for a known issue […]

New Features

Users can now select either a specific phase or all phases when downloading a plan to PDF, plain text, or DOCX formats

Additional translations have been added and translation has been improved across areas of DMP Assistant

Fixes

Fixed a bug that was affecting the visibility of some templates

From Cambridge University Press:

Cambridge University Press & Assessment has experienced a cybersecurity incident which has affected some of our systems. We take these matters very seriously and we took immediate precautionary action to minimise the impact of the incident on our systems. We have engaged external IT experts who are helping us understand the full scope of the incident.  

Some of our colleagues have faced technical disruption, including temporary loss of email access, as we continue to take a number of precautionary measures to keep our systems secure. We are making good progress in restoring access whilst prioritising safety over speed.

… there are several delays to be aware of:

Some parts of the publishing process are unaffected, including submission and peer review, but we are temporarily unable to publish new content on Cambridge Core.  We are working hard to address this soon 
We are currently unable to provide our normal set of publishing reports to institutions …

You may also check our website where we will be posting regular updates:
https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident