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
