Making Open Access Book Funding Work Fairly

In late 2020, COPIM, an Arcadia and Research England funded project, announced an innovative revenue model to sustainably fund open access (OA) monographs: Opening the Future. This initiative harnesses the power of collective library funding: increasing collections through special access to highly-regarded backlists, and expanding the global shared OA collection while providing a less risky path for smaller publishers to make frontlist monographs OA. We introduced this model at the 15th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing 2020 but this is no ‘story so far’ conference presentation proposal. Since Opening the Future launched, we’ve seen several other collective library funding models emerge in quick succession, including MIT’s Direct 2 Open, Michigan’s Fund to Mission, and Cambridge University Press’ Flip it Open. In the same year, the UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) new policy was announced, and it included OA requirements for monographs. The landscape is clearly changing rapidly - in this presentation we will appraise our model in the context of this changing environment. The programme has had success since its launch. Within a few months the first publisher to adopt the model, CEU Press, had accrued enough library support to fund their first three OA monographs. Soon thereafter the initiative was recognised by the publishing community and nominated for an ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. And the programme is growing; a second well-respected publisher, Liverpool University Press, launched with Opening the Future in June 2021. The COPIM project has now begun to turn its focus to the thorny problem of scaling up. But herein lies a tension. OA monograph publishing needs to be sustainable not just for publishers, but also for libraries. Opening the Future was designed to be low-cost and simple, slotting into acquisitions budgets and existing library purchasing workflows. However, as we bring the programme to more university presses and libraries, how do we ensure we are not just adding another circle to the OA labyrinth that libraries are attempting to navigate? How might Opening the Future scale without increasing the administrative and decision-making burden already on collections and scholarly communications teams, who are already picking through a tangle of transformative agreements, pay-to-publish deals, author affiliations, and legacy subscriptions? In this session, we will engage the audience through these questions, as well as discuss the role of the programme in the wider policy landscape and how it is positioned alongside other emerging OA collective funding initiatives.

GBIF Integration of Open Data

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) runs a global data infrastructure that integrates data from more than 1700 institutions. Combining data at this scale has been achieved by deploying open Application Programming Interfaces (API) that adhere to the open data standards provided by Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG). In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the GBIF infrastructure and APIs and provide insight into lessons learned while operating and evolving the systems, such as long-term API stability, ease of use, and efficiency. This will include the following topics: The registry component provides RESTful APIs for managing the organizations, repositories and datasets that comprise the network and control access permissions. Stability and ease of use have been critical to this being embedded in many systems. Changes within the registry trigger data crawling processes, which connect to external systems through their APIs and deposit datasets into GBIF's central data warehouse. One challenge here relates to the consistency of data across a distributed network. Once a dataset is crawled, the data processing infrastructure organizes and enriches data using reference catalogues accessed through open APIs, such as the vocabulary server and the taxonomic backbone. Being able to process data quickly as source data and reference catalogues change is a challenge for this component. The data access APIs provide search and download services. Asynchronous APIs are required for some of these aspects, and long-term stability is a requirement for widespread adoption. Here we will talk about policies for schema evolution to avoid incompatible changes, which would cause failures in client systems. The APIs that drive the user interface have specific needs such as efficient use of the network bandwidth. We will present how we approached this, and how we are currently adopting GraphQL as the next generation of these APIs. There are several APIs that we believe are of use for the data publishing community. These include APIs that will help in data quality aspects, and new data of interest thanks to the data clustering algorithms GBIF deploys. The registry component provides RESTful APIs for managing the organizations, repositories and datasets that comprise the network and control access permissions. Stability and ease of use have been critical to this being embedded in many systems. Changes within the registry trigger data crawling processes, which connect to external systems through their APIs and deposit datasets into GBIF's central data warehouse. One challenge here relates to the consistency of data across a distributed network. Once a dataset is crawled, the data processing infrastructure organizes and enriches data using reference catalogues accessed through open APIs, such as the vocabulary server and the taxonomic backbone. Being able to process data quickly as source data and reference catalogues change is a challenge for this component. The data access APIs provide search and download services. Asynchronous APIs are required for some of these aspects, and long-term stability is a requirement for widespread adoption. Here we will talk about policies for schema evolution to avoid incompatible changes, which would cause failures in client systems. The APIs that drive the user interface have specific needs such as efficient use of the network bandwidth. We will present how we approached this, and how we are currently adopting GraphQL as the next generation of these APIs. There are several APIs that we believe are of use for the data publishing community. These include APIs that will help in data quality aspects, and new data of interest thanks to the data clustering algorithms GBIF deploys.

Publishing is evolving, but are we? Developing talent for the future

At the APE 2020 Pre-Conference in Berlin, a group of talent development and HR experts from across the scientific research and publishing community came together to discuss the future of talent development in the scholarly publishing industry. We heard from an excellent group of speakers who shared with us a rich and diverse range of expertise and experience. We set ourselves the challenge of imagining what the world of scholarly academic publishing would look like in 2030, and asked ourselves the question: how can we work together to develop the talent we will need now, and for the future, in a rapidly changing world? Are we keeping pace, and are we prepared for the challenge ahead? Based on our discussion, three key themes emerged: the importance of supporting increased diversity & inclusion within scholarly publishing, interorganizational leadership development initiatives for leaders across the publishing ecosystem to exchange experiences and ideas, and greater research and publishing career mobility to encourage more fluid movement between research and publishing jobs. We believe these things are all very achievable if we commit to investing in the kind of culture change and new ways of thinking that will lead us to success in 2030.

The big leap: How to move from what is agreed and done to what needs to happen

In this article, I tell about the key findings and action points from the Global sustainable development report 2019 – Future is Now (GSDR2019) - and raise, based on the report, messages and recommendations for the academic publishing community for consideration and action. The Agenda2030 for sustainable development was signed by all UN member countries in 2015. It is an ambitious political framework to transform the world into a safe and just place. Based on the GSDR2019, only little progress had taken place until 2019. To speed up the progress in a way that makes durable changes towards sustainable development, there is a need to identify the interlinkages between the various goals and targets and push transformation in six key societal systems side by side. To make this happen, four types of levers need to work in an integrated manner. To ensure this, universal science capacity is required, with an emphasis on sustainability science. The academic publishers play an important role here. Open access, searchable databases and syntheses are highly needed.

Scholarly Voice and Academic Identity

This chapter presents the results of a systematic review of the current scholarship into doctoral student agency from a U.S. perspective. In past work, the authors and others have explored doctoral student and research supervisor agency from the perspective of scholar-practitioner agency within the doctoral learning community as well as the post-doctorate practice-based research agenda. This chapter focuses on a systematic analysis of the current scholarship published since 2019 that has continued to examine the aspects of doctoral student voice, agency, academic identity, and dissemination of graduate student research. Theoretical perspectives are drawn from the scholarship of situated learning theory and other theories that define how and why doctoral students are able to move from the periphery of the doctoral learning community to entrance into the scholarly academic and publishing community.

Assessment of Factors Causing Bias in Marketing- Related Publications

The present paper aims at revealing and ranking the factors that most frequently cause bias in marketing-related publications. In order to rank the factors causing bias, the authors employed the Analytic Hierarchy Process method with three different scales representing all scale groups. The data for the study were obtained through expert survey, which involved nine experts both from the academia and scientific publishing community. The findings of the study confirm that factors that most frequently cause bias in marketing related publications are sampling and sample frame errors, failure to specify the inclusion and exclusion criteria for researched subjects and non-responsiveness.

Aligning GBIF and the Atlas of Living Australia

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) are two interconnected leading infrastructures serving the biodiversity community. Recognising that significant overlap exists in the function of the systems run by both organisations, and that advancement in technology allows GBIF to offer more functionality, we have initiated a process to align these infrastructures. Such a move is expected to bring the benefits of consistent data handling, improved bibliographic citation tracking, coordinated deployment of new features across the entire data publishing community, better reuse of modules and an overall reduction in cost of development, deployment and operation. This year, work has commenced to align these two infrastructures, focussing initially on data ingestion pipelines. The GBIF and ALA teams are collaborating closely, working on the same codebase, developing common working practices and agreeing on tools and coding standards. This focus on collaboration will lead to a defined model for the Living Atlas community to provide contributions. This work will also further the efforts to hand ownership of core ALA systems to the Living Atlas community and pave the way for the Living Atlas community to transition to the adoption of GBIF systems. Later this year, efforts will move towards use of a common registry for organisations, collections, datasets and associated metadata, which will reduce the effort spent in curating content, while also improving consistency by removing the need for synchronisation.

The impact of COVID-19 on scientific publishing

This article proposes an analysis on the impact that COVID-19 pandemic is having on the process of scientific publishing in academic journals. It will specifically describe the response of the scholarly publishing community to meet the pressing demand from authors and researchers wishing to disseminate, as rapidly as possible, information on the virus. Its aim is to provide an overview for the community of librarians and information specialists about publishing in the COVID-19 era.

Publishing Community-Preserving Attributed Social Graphs with a Differential Privacy Guarantee

We present a novel method for publishing differentially private synthetic attributed graphs. Our method allows, for the first time, to publish synthetic graphs simultaneously preserving structural properties, user attributes and the community structure of the original graph. Our proposal relies on CAGM, a new community-preserving generative model for attributed graphs. We equip CAGM with efficient methods for attributed graph sampling and parameter estimation. For the latter, we introduce differentially private computation methods, which allow us to release communitypreserving synthetic attributed social graphs with a strong formal privacy guarantee. Through comprehensive experiments, we show that our new model outperforms its most relevant counterparts in synthesising differentially private attributed social graphs that preserve the community structure of the original graph, as well as degree sequences and clustering coefficients.

Anticipating the Future of Biomedical Communications

The National Library of Medicine is poised to launch its third century of providing library services to serve science and society. The nature of scientific communications is changing, with rapid growth in archival literature, new artifacts of communication artifacts such as preprints, pipelines and data sets, and a scholarly and social public greater attuned to video and sound productions than to the printed word. The NLM Director will describe the exciting steps the NLM is taking to prepare for this future, and identify critical challenges that can only be solved through partnerships between the NLM and the publishing community.