Showing posts with label Jisc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jisc. Show all posts

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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Tuesday, 16 June 2015

The University of Liverpool - ‘institution as e-book creator’ project with Jisc

Andrew Barker: Beatles fan. And librarian.
Andrew Barker is Head of Academic Liaison on Special Collections and Archives at the University of Liverpool. He talked through a partnership between Liverpool University Press and Liverpool University Library, with support from Jisc, that focused on finding a new way of fulfilling student need via a desire to challenge and complement long established scholarly publishing practices through the in-house creation of two bespoke e-textbooks.

Barker established a relationship early on in his time at Liverpool with the University Press (and ALPSP Council member) Anthony Cond. They tried to establish early on discussions about how they can move the discussion on to something more useful.

From a librarian's point of view, he has met a lot of publishers. They get on well with them, but there's always a suspicion they are trying to rip them off and not let them do what they want to do: that it's an unhappy relationship. What a publisher might say is that librarians just moan at publishers.

They have tried to get beyond the cynicism and suspicion of working with each other. There must be things they can do to generate a good partnership. Anthony Cond came to them to discuss an idea about setting up Modern Languages Open - an online OA journal. The was discussed with the Advisory Board. They then began to consider whether they should collaborate on monographs. The backdrop to this is that there is a growing perception that teaching and learning is not the most important thing with this view supported by the growing resources online. As a result, they decided monographs were not the right area to collaborate on.

So where was the real need? Student expectation is key. Every book on a reading list is available in the library in sufficient numbers at point of need. Why does it matter? The student experience as reflected in the National Student Survey combined with £9,000 fees. They have almost miraculous 82% of books on reading lists available. This is very high and is a real challenge.

For Barker, student experience is key, the survey results will follow. Their users tell them resources are out of date or unavailable, there are limited resources. Expectations are sky high. Students will voice frustrations about seeing new buildings, but not being able to get library resources.

When a student can't understand why the library doesn't just buy an ebook, it is hard to explain that it is because the publisher won't sell it to them in the way the student wants it. They are not interested in that level of detail. Often, ebooks are also very flat PDF type. Publishers need to produce slightly more engaging ebooks.

When the Jisc call for proposals came out, they came together. They sent the proposal to the humanities and social sciences faculty. The LUP team put a call out to academics across the university. They turned round two bids for HSS in time.

The first project was a Financial Management book for a module that has 900 students in remote locations. The students currently use a book retailing at £56 and there was some dissatisfaction with it. The module is also taught in the Chinese partner university. Much of the material exists in lecture notes and VITAL. it will be OA and print on demand. They are using a platform called Xerte and should have a massive impact on a lot of students who won't have to chase access of one print copy of a book.

The second book is about primary sources that makes use of the special archives they have. It is one of the unique selling points they have (e.g. Roger McGough, Cunard archives). It will be used across taught schools. They are using Biblioboard tool which is good for images with sections on how to use primary sources. They are currently working at the writing stage.

Academics will create the text, the Press will select, shape, edit, credentials, produce POD, market and distribute. It plays to both their strengths. So far it has been well received by the Pro-Vice Chancellor and University Librarian. This will prove crucial to ensuring sustainability for the approach in the long term.

Andrew Barker spoke at the Personalised Learning and Publishing Partnerships seminar.
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The institution as e-textbook publisher

Hazel Woodward (L) and Lorraine Estelle (R)
All students expect access to the core text that will support their studies whether they study on campus or via online distance learning. While e-books have been a qualified success across further and higher education, how can librarians meet this expectation in an effective and sustainable way?

Lorraine Estelle, Executive Director for Content and Discovery and Divisional CEO at Jisc Collections, outlined a number of institutional initiatives that are trying to tackle this dilemma at the Personalised Learning and Publishing Partnerships seminar.

The national ebooks observatory project 2007-10 was established to see what would happen when all UK students had access to 36 core textbooks for 18 months. Within this limited timeframe, there was no conclusive negative impact on UK print sales. In one or two cases, print exceeded. The findings come with the usual caveats. The resulting report encouraged publishers to make all their course texts available to libraries electronically.

The economist Mark Perry on the American Enterprise Institute blog in 2012 calculated the price of primary college textbooks from 812 per cent since 1972.

A recent report published in Insights UKSG's journal by S Duan and C Grace identified what librarians like including multi-concurrent access option, clear and easy to understand options for printing multiple pages, no personal login needed, books downloaded to mobile devices, clear options for purchasing additional copies when usage limits reached, ePub format, fully accessible platform and content, excellent MARC records and data available in Open URL resolve and discovery. When these requirements aren't met, it is deeply frustrating.

Joshua Harding in a 2013 issue of Insights asked for a ebook 'study buddy' to help him with his work. Student expectation have changed enormously with advent of £9,000 per year fees. Not only students, but also parents as well. Coventry University tried to become a 'no hidden extras' university. There are a number of challenges around physical distribution. They are still persevering and exploring more e-texts.

What do librarians really really want?
UCL Press has just been launched again with a particular call for textbooks for their open access business model. Open SUNY Textbooks is another open access text publishing initiative established by the State University of New York. Their associate provost, Carey Hatch, identified the annual cost for core texts ($1,200) as a driver. Their aim was to bring this down and save students money.

Inspired by some of these projects, Jisc Collections set up the HEI as e-text book publisher project. It's aim is to provide evidence for higher education institution to assess the feasibility and economic benefits (if any) of the HEI as an e-text book publisher and to assess the impact on authors' and students' satisfaction. It will run for several years and includes the University of Liverpool, Nottingham University, University of Highlands and Islands and Napier University, and University College London.

It's not specifically about open access, but a variety of business models are being explored including OA, freemium, Amazon self publish etc.
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Thursday, 15 May 2014

Open Access: what does the librarian or customer community need and how do we install new plumbing?

John Norman
John Norman is Director for the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies at the University of Cambridge. He kicked off the afternoon sessions at The Mechanics and Reality of Open Access seminar.

At Cambridge, they conducted research into getting published. The experience doesn't split STEM/Humanities so much as single researcher (author) versus team research (multiple authors). Positive emotional states are associated with publication and impact. Negative emotional states are associated with making publishing decision, rejection and using publisher system.

Researchers are the ultimate customers. What do they need? Access to all important research relevant to their field. They don't always get it. What they want is access to be timely and convenient. And they want the same for the production of their articles.

When RCUK policy came into force, they took a service model of 'tell us about your article and we'll tell you what options are available.' They tried to keep it simple as it is so complex so they could take the burden of complexity off the author. It has proved to be a very popular approach.

The overall number of articles is c. 8,000 per annum. They have c. 500 publishers they deal with annually. From enquiries, they made 277 payments (invoices which they authorised). There were 72 articles submitted to the institutional repository. Interestingly, 40% of articles had some sort of publishing problem and 296 articles were available in a satisfactory form for RCUK at 4 April 2014. There were 364 APCs authorised; £724k committed; with an average APC c. £1800. Full data on Cambridge's APC payments is available on figshare).

They find it most helpful to use a diagram of the publishing value chain to explain to authors (article submission; initial review by publisher / article rejected; peer review / article accepted, Copyright Transfer Agreement signed / Article rejected; publishing / typesetting / copyediting / article published; public review / withdrawal, modification, altmetrics.) There is no doubt in Norman's mind that the Version of Record is considered more important by authors.

Multiple mandates to comply with can be tricky
The complexity of understanding multiple funder information shouldn't be underestimated. They average around 30 minutes per enquiry for their team.

One example is an article that acknowledges funding from BBSRC and the British Heart Foundation. The relevant Open Access policies are HEFCE, BBSRC, BHF, publisher and institution. That's five different sets of mandates to comply with, some of which are contradictory.

What would help? Simple, unambiguous, machine readable published information from publishers on key elements of an OA option.

  • Version: are we talking about the publishers Version of Record or the Author Accepted Manuscript (and can we limit options to these two). 
  • Licence: can we make explicit the licence options that apply to the article and limit the range (CC useful for this)? 
  • Embargo: make explicit a single embargo in months from known publication date. 
  • Price: it may be free, but does the price exclude tax for each version/licence combination? 

Some simple things publishers can do to help libraries (John's wish list) are a notification to the institution that an author has had an article accepted. Provide a free print copy of accepted article version in PDF form on acceptance and a free print copy of accepted article version in PDF form with licence.

Norman's final point was don't forget the reader. Creative Commons licences express permissions in a way the reader can easily understand.

Jisc's Neil Jacobs
Neil Jacobs from Jisc talked about 're-plumbing' infrastructure. It needs to be more flexible and scaleable in a time when universities and funders have new roles. What do universities need to know? Questions such as how do I know if author papers have been submitted to journals? What authors have published? What have we paid for APCs? Have we complied with funder policies? What are our financial liabilities?

He reflected on the complexity in the publishing content cycle and metadata requirements. It is not sufficiently scaleable or accessible. If you take standards and identifiers, there are some clear gaps including Publisher and APC identifiers.

Other emerging areas for standards and identifiers are research data and software. In the future, there will likely be a requirement for relationships such as attribution, contribution, affiliation and citation. Jacobs closed with a mention for the OA Implementation Group's guide to Gold for Open Access for Learned Societies.
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