LoomWare

Revisiting Potential Research-Support roles for the Library

Why We Need to Embrace Research

Richard Akerman continues to be one of the few bloggers I follow in a full day full of meetings that has no opportunity for me to read, let alone write, tweets and posts. In this piece Richard highlights 3 key areas where academic libraries can take a leadership role in the research domain, redefining what we do and how the research enterprise can best be supported. It will come as no surprise that I think this is the only emerging service for academic libraries which will allow us to grow and prosper. Without this we will fade slowly into the world of print embalming and coffee shop-equipped study halls. Don't get me wrong - these traditional and newer functions are and will remain critical to our mission, but they will not help us remain a healthy and core part of the academic institution. The Library needs to be the information crossroads for all information management functions on campus: research, learning and administration. For now all the low-hanging fruit are in the research landscape, so go there we must.

I had the pleasure of speaking with external reviewers looking at our Chemistry department from a couple of perspectives (accreditation and new program) and it is clear to me from our discussions that that our research-intensive faculty colleagues want our expertise and support, but we are not responding. While some institutions in Canada, like UPEI, are responding with extensive partnerships between researchers and the library, we are failing from a community perspective to develop a clear and effective strategy. Where is the leadership in the Canadian library community for these efforts? Richard points to CISTI's Research Data Canada initiative, an important project which we should all support, but there is nothing else beyond individual efforts. I would suggest what we need is a national summit which pulls all the players together with the specific goal of developing that national approach. The ICSTI Conference in Ottawa may well be the best place to try and plan something, so I would hope that the academic library community is able to attend.

Good Thing We Have Libraries

Academic Information as Safe as the Banks

The latest pending sale of a key academic publisher. All I can say is that it is a good thing we have libraries to hold everything together when the businesses go bad.

OLA Presentation Online

Disrupting the Library Transporter Beam

I have loaded a copy of my OLA talk on my blog (32 MB). I ranted and ruffled a few feathers using the Star Trek transporter (a malfunctioning one at that) and the Transmogrifier from Calvin and Hobbes as the key to commenting on: vendor vs Open Source ILSs; dysfunctional Big Deals for journals; cyberinfrastructure and virtual research environments; community-based digitization; and a global open library system. After some examples from the UPEI labs, I summed it up by using another recent scientific discovery, the cloak of invisibility: We can don our cloak of invisibility and fade into the background, or we can, like the murder of librarians who faced down Donald Rumsfeld over the Patriot Act, wear the cloak so we can become more radical and activist to protect the information commons. Given all that has happened of late with rapacious journal publishers like Sage trying to gouge educational institutions and OCLCs boneheaded move to own the world's bib records, I was feeling a bit punchy, like libraries were losing their identity and forgetting why we are here. Maybe I'll record the next rant :-)

IslandScholar Launch a Success

The Robertson Library at UPEI launched our new institutional repository, IslandScholar, on December 2nd, 2008. Unfortunately, I didn't have much time to make the announcement on my blog until now :-( Bad Blogger... I will say that the launch was a great success, with a keynote from Dorothy Salo that helped set the stage, a presentation from me on the approach of IslandScholar and presentations from UPEI faculty who are publishing open access journals: Godfrey Baldacchino and Annabel Cohen. We are now in the process of adding full text to the repository, a process which will also be facilitated with an upcoming version of IslandScholar, which will add additional workflow tools.

IslandScholar is a little different than the average IR:

• at launch we had close to 7000 records, almost all of which were citation only data;
• it uses an open source module we developed called Islandora, which is currently a Drupal 5/Fedora 2 implementation (a Drupal 6/Fedora 3 version is imminent);
• it incorporates a live look-up with SHERPA/RoMEO to display (where available) the publisher policy with respect to open access;
• the system is COINS compliant, providing a place for your OpenURL linker icon so your users can discover alternate fulltext, or before we load it up;

  automatic conversion of documents submitted to a specific PDF format, with storage of the original file;

• implementation of a simple and flexible security/workflow model that makes it easier for authors/collaborators to submit material.

A little more of the philosophy behind IslandScholar and how we designed it might be of use. We decided to harvest the research output of our faculty as a first step, as this would not only provide us with a complete set of records, but also a kernel with which to launch a more efficient and effective workflow. For example, with the harvested citation data we can send a request to SHERPA RoMEO for a policy record and present it on the fly to the user. We also separate the data from the metadata from the workflow, providing a more modular and flexible architecture. The additional bonus is that we can provide RSS feeds or special widgets for faculty that would provide their citations (or their department, faculty, etc.) in a web mash-up - an additional incentive to help us complete the data.

In our case we harvest the metadata with RefWorks, using all the advanced features of this rich metadata tool. Generally that means we trawl databases for specific authors and then add to RefWorks, or we copy and paste from a CV sent to us. The editing tools in RefWorks provide a vert nice and powerful way to enter repeating data, etc. From there we ingest the records into Fedora using the RefWorks XML as the input format, storing the raw RefWorks record in the Fedora object as a datastream. We also do a conversion from RefWorks to Dublin Core, which accommodates our DC/QDC Lucene indexing model. When the user wants to edit the metadata we present a Drupal form for editing the RefWorks record and we also sync the changes to the DC datastream.

On the security side we implemented a simple model that says a user can have one or more of View/Create/Edit/Delete permissions (thanks to Matt Zumwalt for his "simplify" mantra) and we assign those permissions based on their username and home department. So for example, any user from the Biology Department can edit metadata or upload full text to any item where the primary or secondary author is from that department. This simplifies editorial access by assuming that anyone from a specific department can carry out those tasks. The roles are stored in the Drupal user database and are harvested from our institutional LDAP server when the user logs in. we can also create/assign roles in Drupal if needed. A Java servlet filter acts as the security cop, checking roles in Drupal and sending them to Fedora, allowing a comparison to the Fedora XACML policies attached to that object. This provides a robust security layer that can be controlled via Drupal roles and Fedora XACML, becoming as granular as needed: unique security policies at the collection (e.g. Department of Biology) or object (e.g. article) level.

The beauty of the IslandScholar model is that it saves the faculty most of the work: all they have to do (he says, with a wink on the ALL) is upload the appropriate version of their research article. With the help of the SHERPA RoMEO record and the link to our resolver, that task is fairly simple. Users who login and have the appropriate permissions automatically see the upload form, which presents buttons/checkboxes for: document version (pre, post, etc.); use permission (contact publisher/author, CC by-nc-nd); I have the right to upload. When they click the Upload button the system will auto-convert the article (if not PDF) using a headless version of Open Office 3, which does a great job of transforming most commons formats (except for WordPerfect). The system stores both the original WP version and the PDF, so we can always go back and do a little QA if the conversion was not good. With that the job is done.

Over the coming months we will be working with individual faculty to load their articles into IslandScholar and with the success of the launch, we have lots of volunteers. Over the next 2-3 months we will also be developing a more detailed rights workflow and adding it to a future release of the Islandora code, which is the base of IslandScholar, and all our digital projects. We will be announcing more collections and code developments on our IslandArchives.ca site. Many thanks to the entire Robertson Library team for their hard work on this project, but especially: Paul Pound, Gerry Forsythe, Melissa Belvadi, Dawn Hooper, Peter Lux, Grant Johnson, Alexander O'Neill.

On a more personal note, the one thing that makes me incredibly sad, having gone through a sample of the 7,000 citations to look for those allowing deposit of the publisher PDF, is how much of the farm academics have given away. It really comes home when you look at an institutions intellectual output and the restrictions publishers place on other people's hard work and intellectual property. Any academic that sees this should be concerned and immediately cross off any journal publisher that does not allow open access. My rough guess would be that less than 10% of the articles in IslandScholar would fit this category, with variation by discipline. Why have we been so lax and keen to give up our publicly-funded research record? Why do so few faculty care about this one? I know the answers but felt that I had to ask the questions because I still don't believe that we can be so cavalier about an issue so critical to our success as a society: free and unfettered access to publicly funded knowledge. What a loss.

Is the Web Dumbing Down Research?

Interesting Research on Research

An interesting Economist post on research done to look at the citation impact of having more and more scholarly output available to researchers.

What he discovered was that, for every additional year of back-issues of a journal available online, the average age of the articles cited from that journal fell by a month. He also found a fall, once a journal was online, in the number of papers in it that got any citations at all. Indeed, he predicts that for the average journal today, five extra years’ worth of online availability will cause a precipitous drop in the number of articles receiving one or more citations—from 600 to 200 a year. Rather than measuring the length of the tail, then, it seems that modern science is actually focusing on a tiny bit of it.

The original article (needs a Science subscription) is worth reading, as the Economist piece does over-simplify the conclusions. For example, the author also discusses other work that disagrees with the article under discussion - science in action :-)

Also worthwhile is this user comment from the perspective of a student doing research in the modern library

Why Does This Make Me Nervous?

Microsoft Rolls Out Publishing and Research Tools for Academics - Chronicle.com

With this announcement I can see the bright future of scholarly MS Publishing now: an academic fires up Word 2010 to write their new article (using MS NewVista as the required OS); collaborates with co-authors across the globe (who must also use Word 2010 to participate); loads it into the remote Microsoft Repository (proprietary and accessible only via Word); other scholars use nice tools to comment on the work (as long as they are using Internet Explorer 10); life unfolds in the new universe and all are happy. Do we really want to embrace anther decade of open-but-closed-without-our-tools suite of Microsoft products just when open access and open source are leading us out of that vendor quagmire? I hope not. As much as Microsoft's considerable research efforts are appreciated in the research landscape, I shudder to think where this will take us, promises of free and openness and all. See Peter Suber's post for an alternate view.

Create Change Canada

A Canadian Spin on Open Access

Create Change was launched earlier this year and provides a much-needed Canadian spin on scholarly publishing and ways that scholars can help move the academic publishing model to a more sensible spot. From the announcement:

The Create Change Web site focuses on the fact that the ways faculty share and use academic research results are changing rapidly and irreversibly. The site outlines how faster and wider sharing of journal articles, research data, simulations, syntheses, analyses, and other findings fuels the advance of knowledge. It offers practical ways faculty can look out for their own interests as researchers. Create Change Canada introduces the Canadian voice on policy issues and highlights Canadian researcher experiences in English and in French.

Proof Positive that Academic Publishing is Broken

This piece is from an article in the Chronicle of High Education and paints a grim picture of an alternative future without open access and common sense. Even the title gives me the shivers:

Elsevier Agrees to Let MIT Use Bits of Journal Articles Online

And what pray tell is "A Bit"? And will it become a new standard under which all copyright rules are written? I can see the new legislation now "Any individual may copy A Bit [as defined in the Definitions section] of any journal article, provided they are associated with an institution with a "Bit Use Agreement" with each publisher represented by the material being accessed. Creators of the published material are subject to the same "Bit Use" and may not distribute any part of the published item, ever." Ahhh...scientific progress in the post-DCMA world. Some extra bits from the article:

A major challenge for colleges that want to post lecture materials on the Web involves making sure they have permission to use the copyrighted images from journals and other sources that professors have put in their slides. Today the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it has reached a deal with Elsevier, one of the largest journal publishers, to allow a limited amount of material from its journals to be used in MIT's OpenCourseWare project. The publisher hasn't exactly given away the store: The agreement allows the project to use up to three illustrations per journal article, and up to 100 words of text. But that will save the OpenCourseWare staff members hours and hours of time, and allow them to include some material they might not have bothered to ask about in the past, says Steve E. Carson, external-relations director for the project. "This is not only a cost saver for us, but it also expands the range of things that we can publish," he says. Publishing 400 courses online each year involves tracking down permissions for about 6,000 copyrighted items, Mr. Carson says. (The project has one full-time and one part-time employee devoted to doing just that.) What if you're not at MIT? Mark Seeley, vice president and general counsel at Elsevier, says the company has also agreed to a new policy on copyright, set up by the International Association of Scientific, Technical, & Medical Publishers, allowing any college to post small bits of journal material online. The policy doesn't allow quite as much as the deal with MIT does, however.

Why do I feel like we have just defined away our fair-dealing/fair use rights?

Harvard Faculty Adopts Open-Access Requirement

The Start of a Trend

I have no doubt that the recent decision by Harvard faculty to allow the University to publish their journal articles for free on the Web will see similar efforts at other institutions in the U.S. and Canada, which is lagging behind our European colleagues.

The new policy will allow faculty members to request a waiver, but otherwise they must provide an electronic form of each article to the provost’s office, which will place it in an online repository.

The key issue here is that all faculty must send their article in for publication on the Web, which is a great policy for the development of IRs and associated collections.

Public Access Mandate Made Law

Bush Makes One Good Move

The new law requiring NIH-funded research to be open access within 1 year of publication has been signed. I still think 1 year is a bit long, but hey, who ever said compromise was a bad thing? From the blurb:

President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency. The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

A step in the right direction - combined with the recent backtracking from the Canadian government on the spooky new Copyright legislation, I would say 2007 hasn't been all bad for unfettered access to information essential to an open and healthy society: Happy New Year!