2021 miles conrad award lecture: Heather Joseph

This paper is based upon the 2021 Miles Conrad Award Lecture that was given by Heather Joseph at the second annual NISO Plus conference held virtually from February 22–25, 2021. The lecture provided a brief look back at the emergence of the Open Access (OA) movement in scholarly communication beginning with the E-biomed proposal in 1999 that was shortly followed by the Budapest Declaration released on February 14, 2002, through how far it has come in almost two decades. The author notes that the initial reaction to OA was often just a quick dismissal of it as an idealistic pipe dream and as the idea began to grow in popularity, skepticism changed into hostility. OA was criticized as being too disruptive to the then-existent publishing paradigm. Yet, far from disappearing, the movement towards the open sharing of knowledge steadily advanced. Today conversations about “why” or “whether” to open up the scholarly communication system have evolved into conversations about how best to do it. The author notes that the Budapest Declaration underscored that the end goal of OA is to empower individuals and communities around the world with the ability to share their knowledge as well as to share in accessing the knowledge of others. She warns that members of the global scholarly communication community must look critically at who currently can participate in the production of knowledge, and whose voices are represented in the “global intellectual conversation” that need to be facilitated. Whose voices are still are left out because structural barriers – be they technical, financial, legal, cultural, or linguistic – prevent them from joining?

Discoverability in (a) Crisis

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed a host of issues with the current scholarly communication system, one aspect being the discoverability of scientific knowledge. Observing the many shortcomings of discovery workflows in the course of COVID-19 confirms that discoverability itself is in crisis. In this article, we analyze the discoverability crisis and its root causes. We introduce open discovery infrastructure as a promising approach for the development of innovative discovery solutions. We present several efforts based on open discovery infrastructure that have emerged to provide better discovery of coronavirus research and discuss what is still needed to overcome the discoverability crisis.

SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL AS THE BASIS OF PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION: PROBLEMS OF MODERN DEVELOPMENT

An article in a scientific journal is the key element of modern scholarly communication system, in which scientific journals act as conductors of national science and researchers to the international level. Integration of Russian scientific journals into the global knowledge system and improving their competitiveness are necessary conditions for improving the competitiveness of Russian science itself.Today, we see a low quality of Russian scientific periodicals with an excessive number of journals. The highly competitive environment and the total use of bibliometric approaches in the research and assessment of science born unfair race for indicators, developing imitation science.The study aims to analyze, determine and propose solutions of topical issues of Russian scientific journals. The article is a case study of the oldest monthly scientific and production journal “Occupational Safety in Industry”. The transformation of the work of the editorial board is considered within the 2016–2019 period. We analyze the history of formation, development and the common problems of restructuring the activities of the editorial boards that have occurred in recent years.It is shown that the formalization of scientometric indicators and their impact on funding cause a sharp increase in the number of authors with multiple affiliations. In general, the use of bibliometrics in Russia has generated a number of systemic risks that threaten the development of national science.The study formulates the tasks and nearest prospects for the development of scientific journals as the basis for a changing scholarly communication system. It is necessary to develop the qualitative scientometrics with new scientometric indices and qualitative author-evaluating indicators (with more precise scientometrics, new tools will appear, including those for identifying dishonest scientists).To improve the evaluation system of Russian scientific journals, we propose: improving the generally accepted scientometric methods taking into account Russian specifics and introducing a system for assessing and monitoring the quality of Russian scientific journals, combining the use of bibliometric information and independent expert evaluation. The creation of high-quality scientometrics is possible with the use of artificial intelligence systems.The proposed steps will build a self-regulatory ecosystem on the Russian space of scholarly communication with well-functioning high-quality expertise, which will determine the future of scientific journals.

In the News

Welcome to the July/August 2019 issue of C&RL News. Following the ACRL 2019 conference this April, Recasting the Narrative is still on the minds of many ACRLers. In this month’s Scholarly Communication column “Renewing the system,” 2019–20 ACRL President Karen Munro discusses why it is important to examine the scholarly communication system in order to make it more equitable.

Verified, Shared, Modular, and Provenance Based Research Communication with the Dat Protocol

A scholarly communication system needs to register, distribute, certify, archive, and incentivize knowledge production. The current article-based system technically fulfills these functions, but suboptimally. I propose a module-based communication infrastructure that attempts to take a wider view of these functions and optimize the fulfillment of the five functions of scholarly communication. Scholarly modules are conceptualized as the constituent parts of a research process as determined by a researcher. These can be text, but also code, data, and any other relevant pieces of information that are produced in the research process. The chronology of these modules is registered by iteratively linking to each other, creating a provenance record of parent and child modules (and a network of modules). These scholarly modules are linked to scholarly profiles, creating a network of profiles, and a network of how profiles relate to their constituent modules. All these scholarly modules would be communicated on the new peer-to-peer Web protocol Dat, which provides a decentralized register that is immutable, facilitates greater content integrity than the current system through verification, and is open-by-design. Open-by-design would also allow diversity in the way content is consumed, discovered, and evaluated to arise. This initial proposal needs to be refined and developed further based on the technical developments of the Dat protocol, its implementations, and discussions within the scholarly community to evaluate the qualities claimed here. Nonetheless, a minimal prototype is available today, and this is technically feasible.

La percepción de investigadores brasileños sobre el depósito de la producción científica en repositorios institucionales de acceso abierto

Este artículo tiene como objetivo presentar y discutir los resultados de la investigación sobre la percepción de los investigadores acerca del depósito de la producción científica en repositorios institucionales de acceso abierto. Los resultados presentados son parte de los resultados de una investigación mayor que tuvo como objetivo proponer las directrices para el depósito de la producción científica en repositorios institucionales de acceso abierto con base en la percepción de los distintos actores que participan del sistema de comunicación científica. Desde el punto de vista metodológico el estudio tiene un propósito descriptivo y un abordaje metodológico cualitativo, dado que la propuesta de las directrices tuvo por base las percepciones de los actores involucrados. Como método de investigación fue adoptado el levantamiento de información, el cual, por su parte, fue operacionalizado con la adopción de la técnica de la entrevista semiestructurada. Entre las conclusiones destacan que las principales motivaciones para depositar la producción científica en repositorios institucionales son diversificadas en función de las áreas del conocimiento. Entre ellas están la conciencia de los beneficios del acceso abierto, la obligatoriedad del depósito, los estímulos institucionales y la vinculación a las disciplinas culturalmente propensas al depósito. Palabras clave: sistema de comunicación científica, repositorios institucionales, acceso abierto.The Perception of Brazilians Researchers on the Deposit of Scientific Production in Open Access Institutional RepositoriesAbstractThis work aims to present and discuss results of research about the perception of researchers regarding the deposit of scientific production in open access institutional repositories. The results presented compose results of a larger research whose purpose was to propose guidelines for the deposit of scientific production in open access institutional repositories based on the perception of the different actors that participate in the scholarly communication system. From the methodological point of view, the study has a descriptive purpose and a qualitative methodological approach, since the proposal of the guidelines was based on the perceptions of the actors involved. As a research method, the survey was adopted, which was operationalized with the adoption of the semistructured interview technique. Among the conclusions, the main motivations for depositing scientific production in institutional repositories are diversified according to the areas of knowledge. Among them are the awareness of the benefits of open access, compulsory deposit, institutional incentives and the link to culturally deposit-prone disciplines.Keywords: Scholarly communication system, institutional repositories, open access.

Reciprocity in Book Reviewing among American, British and Canadian Academics

Books and their reviews have been historically central to knowledge dissemination in the social sciences and humanities. Despite this perceive importance, few studies have assessed the relative importance of these document types in the dissemination of knowledge. This paper aims at better understanding the place of book reviews in the scholarly communication system and to shed light--through the analysis of books on Canada, United Kingdom and United States and their reviewers--on the international circulation of ideas in the social sciences and humanities. Based on 1,675,999 book reviews indexed in the Social Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index over the 1975-2016 period, our results show that book reviews are decreasing in importance in all disciplines—especially those where books have historically been peripheral. We also observe a high rate of homophily between reviewers and reviewed books, with researchers being primarily interested in the books that have been written by someone from their own country. Hence, despite the now widely held assumptions of the globalization of science, social science and humanities remains a highly localized activity.