Showing posts with label COUNTER. Show all posts
Showing posts with label COUNTER. Show all posts

Thursday, 15 September 2016

Industry Updates: RedLink, PaperHive, COUNTER, Crossref, Coko and OA Mega-Journals

The 2016 ALPSP Conference Industry Updates session provided a round up of the latest new developments, major project and industry standards updates. Chaired by Louise Russell from Tutton Russell Consulting, here's a round-up of the projects that were covered.

Improving the Standard for Credible, Compatible and Consistent Usage Statistics

COUNTER usage statistics are an essential tool for librarians in their evaluation of online resources and are used to demonstrate of the value of the library. Lorraine Estelle, Director at COUNTER, updated the audience on the latest release. After feedback from publishers that told them that they are eager to support librarians, but that the COUNTER standard can be complex and costly to implement, they have used this insight to inform the development of Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice, to be published in the summer of 2017. The new release will see COUNTER move to a mode of continuous maintenance, will reduce the number of reports required, clarify definitions and remove ambiguities. Further information about the release will be made available on the COUNTER website. https://www.projectcounter.org

The RedLink Network

Libraries and publishers face challenges managing their IP, Shibboleth, and link resolver information in order to ensure access for their mutual customers – researchers, students, and academics. RedLink’s CEO Kent R Anderson outlined how the RedLink Network provides a free, networked solution that allows library and site administrators to manage their IP addresses and authentication tokens in one location. The Network broadcasts changes to publishers and publishing platforms with one click, monitors uptake of changes and sends reminders, updates and broadcasts their branding, connects with contacts and peers, and manages hierarchical relationships among partner libraries (consortia relationships and departmental libraries, for example). https://www.redlink.com

PaperHive: A co-working hub for researchers that makes reading collaborative

PaperHive is a new web-platform for collaborative reading and a cross­-publisher layer of interaction on top of research documents. It lets researchers communicate in published documents in a productive and time-saving way. Co-founder Dr André Gaul explained how PaperHive puts academic literature, which is integrated with the platform, in the limelight and increases reader engagement. It extends the concept of a living document and offers an innovative way of displaying content without hosting it, enabling readers to stay in touch with the articles of interest beyond just saving them in an offline folder. Transforming reading into a process of collaboration incentivises researchers to return to the content and discover new enrichments they can benefit from. In addition, functionality like hiving, deep linking, and the PaperHive browser extension embeds communication in the researcher’s workflow. https://paperhive.org

What you Thought you knew about Crossref is Wrong

Ginny Hendricks, Director of Member & Community Outreach at Crossref, updated delegates on how they have recently reshaped in order to meet the new dynamics of their community. They’ve added new staff, new members, new affiliates, and are shifting their focus to scale up and do more. There are new and imminent developments coming. They also give a glimpse into the changing world of scholarly metadata from the viewpoint of a registry for it, introducing you to the new kinds of publishers that are emerging, and the surprising consumers of their metadata. http://www.crossref.org

Re-imagining Publishing Workflows

Scholarly publishing today is a convoluted, expensive and slow process that is mired in print paradigms and the final product is missing key components such as the data, protocols, code and materials needed for other scholars to reproduce the work. Adam Hyde, Co-Founder of The Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (Coko) explained how they are building open source tools for a digital-first workflow in which all aspects of the editorial, peer review and production work are done in a collaborative webspace. http://coko.foundation

Open Access Mega-journals: Research in progress

Stephen Pinfield, Professor of Information Services Management at the University of Sheffield provided an over of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project investigating open-access mega-journals and the future of scholarly communication. The project, which is a partnership between the universities of Sheffield and Loughborough, is cross-disciplinary and international in its coverage. Key features of mega-journals, such as their broad scope and their novel approach to peer review, have given rise to controversy, and are central considerations. The different strands of the project are contributing to an emerging picture on the role of mega-journals now and their potential impact on the wider scholarly communication environment in the future. The project incorporates quantitative analysis, including a bibliometrics study, and qualitative research, including interviews with senior figures from the publishing industry. http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/is/research/projects/openaccessmegajournals

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Thursday, 26 November 2015

Standards: chaos minimization, credibility and the human factor


Standard, standards, standards. One is born, one conforms to standards, one dies. Or so Edmund Blackadder might have said.

And yet, as David Sommer and his panel of experts demonstrated earlier this month, standards underpin our scholarly publishing infrastructure. Without them, we could not appoint editorial teams, enable the review process, tag or typeset articles, publish in print or online, catalogue, discover, or even assess the quality of what we published – assuming, that is, we had been allowed through the office door by our standards-compliant HR departments. We couldn’t determine the citation rates of our publications, sell said publications to libraries (all of them naturally sceptical of our unstandardized claims for high usage) or even contact our high-profile UCL author (is this the UCL in London, Belgium, Ecuador, Denmark, Brazil or the USA?). Resolution, disambiguation, standardization is the order of the day.

‘We are’, as Tim Devenport of EDItEUR said, ‘in the chaos minimization business’.

Speakers at the seminar offered overviews of the roles played by CrossRef, Ringgold, ORCID, COUNTER, Thomson Reuters, EDItEUR, libraries (in the guise of the University of Birmingham) and JISC, considering content, institutional and individual identifiers, plus usage, citation, metadata and library standards.

Audio of all talks is available via the ALPSP site, but here are some broader conclusions from issues discussed on the day.

Humans make standards

But we’re remarkably good at breaking them too. The most foolproof systems are those that don’t allow much human intervention at all (ever tried to accurately type a sixteen-digit alphanumerical code on less than eight cups of coffee?). Vendors should build systems that not only pre-populate identifier fields, but actively discourage users from guessing, ignoring or simply making up numbers.

Be the difference

Publishers, funders and institutions need to actively assert their need for standards at every stage of their workflows. Break one part of the article supply chain and something, somewhere, is bound to be lost. (And the worse part? We don’t know where.) That means that the entire supply chain must inform and develop standards, not just 'free ride' on existing ones.

Standards help authors find their voice

If an article can be found by DOI, funding source, award number or ORCID iD – in other words, if one or more of the key standards is applied to a particular publication – then research gets heard above the online ‘noise’. Authors can help themselves by claiming their own iDs, but it’s up to publishers and institutions to show them why it matters.

Identifiers enforce uniqueness

They not only help with functionality (disambiguating data and eradicating duplication), but they ensure correct access rights, help understand a customer base and build stronger client relationships. All of this adds immense value to your data.

Standards build credibility everywhere

We tend to think of publishing standards as being the building blocks of the standard workflows – and they are. But the latest development from ORCID encourages involvement in peer review, with journals and funders now collecting reviewers’ iDs to track review activities. That’s a startling contribution to tenure decisions and research assessments. And what about the prospect of using iDs in job applications to verify your publications?

The Impact Factor is a number, not a standard

OK, so we knew that. And we probably had an opinion on it. But coming on a day when Thomson Reuters announced they were ‘exploring strategic options’ for the Intellectual Property & Science businesses, it was good to hear from the horse’s mouth.

Even the ‘standard’ standards need, well, standardizing

Given the significance of COUNTER usage statistics for library negotiations, the possibility for inaccuracy seems startlingly high. Over 90% of users still require some form of manual intervention, and that means greater likelihood of error. There is a role for standardizing and checking IP information to improve the accuracy of COUNTER data - but for now, no one seems to be claiming that ground.


Slow is good

If a publisher/funder/institution is a late standards adopter, that’s OK. Better to start slow and get it right than to implement poorly and leave a (data) trail of tears. But start. Organizations such as ORCID make available plenty of information about integrating identifiers into publisher and repository workflows.

Standards are not anti-innovation

On the contrary, they facilitate innovation. And they provide the information architecture for innovation to flourish in more than one place.

Share it

Since we can't predict when/where (meta)data will be used, let’s make sure everyone knows as much as possible. Make it open source, or at the very least, make it trustworthy.

And finally…

The mobile charging area at the British Dental Association front desk is a perfect example of the need for rational standards. How many wires?


Martyn Lawrence (@martynlawrence) is Publisher at Emerald Group Publishing and attended the recent ALPSP Setting the Standard seminar in London. He can be contacted at mlawrence@emeraldinsight.com.
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