LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of the Association of European Research Libraries

The Communication Channels and their Potential Applicability in Enhancing Agricultural Research Data Sharing among Agricultural Researchers in Tanzania

Nolasko Mwinami — 2023-04-03

The goal of this research was to investigate the communication channels that enhance data sharing among agriculture researchers in Tanzania. Specifically, the study aimed to identify communication channels that are used by agricultural researchers in Tanzania, examine the extent to which such channels were used to enhance data sharing among agricultural researchers, and examine the factors that influence the choices of channels used in data sharing. A descriptive cross-sectional design, alongside quantitative, and qualitative approaches, was employed to collect data from 204 respondents. The Concentric Layered Model for the channel choices was used to guide this study. Results indicate that both mediated, and non-mediated channels existed and were used as data-sharing avenues and channels. The majority of the researchers (77.9%) preferred to use non-mediated channels. Also, the findings indicate that more than 50% of respondents agreed that timely delivery, the cost of the channel, and convenience of a channel were among the factors influencing researchers in their channel selection. It can be concluded therefore that research institutions should invest in mediated channels that have been underutilized to strengthen data-sharing practices among researchers.

Monitoring organizational Article Processing Charges (APCs) using external sources

Anna-Kaarina Linna — 2023-07-07

As open access publishing has become more widespread and required by research funders and the research community, the management and monitoring of article processing charges (APCs) have emerged as an important task in research organisations around the world. Within this tendency, a question of the comprehensiveness of organisational APC monitoring has become relevant. This case study demonstrates how the comprehensiveness of in-house APC monitoring can be evaluated using international bibliographic information sources like Web of Science and Scopus, where it is possible to identify the corresponding author, as well as Unpaywall and DOAJ, which contain information about the open access statuses and APCs of articles. Based on study results, it can be assumed that the organisation’s in-house bookkeeping has succeeded in registering 52 percent of APC invoices while 48 percent have not been identified. The results show that the number of unreported publications that have been openly published and whose corresponding author is affiliated with the university is almost equal to those registered in the university’s institutional APC report. The study describes the stages of data collection and processing in order of implementation, which allows a similar review to be feasible in another organisation. At the end of the article, development proposals are presented for both the organisations’ in-house data collection and the content of publishers’ invoices.

Organising the ERUA Open Science Meet-Ups

Maximilian Heber — 2023-02-28

The field of Open Science is subject to constant change and expansion. In order to stay up to date, exchange is paramount – not only within universities, but also within larger spheres, such as academic alliances. This paper analyses the development of a format of international Open Science-related exchange called “ERUA Open Science Meet-Ups” within the Re:ERUA project (research trajectory of the European Reform University Alliance). We will look at in which contexts the format came to be, how we got the format started and which measures of promotion and dissemination we took. Moreover, we will discuss the individual sessions’ scope and provide insight into which lessons we learned when performing the Open Science Meet-Ups. Specific recommendations for everyone wanting to set up a similar format as well as an outlook on future sessions will conclude the paper.

From Dusty Shelves to Dynamic Spaces

David Oldenhof — 2023-07-06

Many libraries face the challenge to deal with the often massive but very little used print collection. At the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), the library started the three-year project Re:Booking to repurpose the print collection in new and innovative ways in close collaboration with communities throughout the university. In this practice paper, we outline our unusual approaches and present the results from the first two years of the project. With our paper, we hope to inspire other libraries to take a fresh look at the value of their print collections.

Careers Library: Unconventional collaboration to boost learning

Tatiana Usova — 2023-08-30

The pressure on higher education institutions to produce employment-ready graduates is high, and academic libraries can contribute to this goal by collaborating with non-academic departments. The Georgetown University in Qatar library partnered with the Career Services Centre and the Alumni office in launching Careers Library programme that expanded on the idea of the Human Library by creating an online week-long event aimed at empowering senior students with the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in professional life after graduation.

This practice paper illustrates how the library can engage in broader activities beyond information literacy instruction and leverage alumni relationships to develop students’ competencies. The collaboration proved to be beneficial and it fits well within the framework of library outreach activities. The value to the academic community is that this event can be easily replicated and it offers an easy way to draw on the expertise of alumni willing to give back to their school.

Nautilus

Pit Schneider — 2023-04-26

When a digital collection has been processed by OCR, the usability expectations of patrons and researchers are high. While the former expect full text search to return all instances of terms in historical collections correctly, the latter are more familiar with the impacts of OCR errors but would still like to apply big data analysis or machine-learning methods. All of these use cases depend on high quality textual transcriptions of the scans. This is why the National Library of Luxembourg (BnL) has developed a pipeline to improve OCR for existing digitised documents. Enhancing OCR in a digital library not only demands improved machine learning models, but also requires a coherent reprocessing strategy in order to apply them efficiently in production systems. The newly developed software tool, Nautilus, fulfils these requirements using METS/ALTO as a pivot format. The BnL has open-sourced it so that other libraries can re-use it on their own collections. This paper covers the creation of the ground truth, the details of the reprocessing pipeline, its production use on the entirety of the BnL collection, along with the estimated results. Based on a quality prediction measure, developed during the project, approximately 28 million additional text lines now exceed the quality threshold.

The Platformisation of Scholarly Information and How to Fight It

Lai Ma — 2023-06-07

The commercial control of academic publishing and research infrastructure by a few oligopolistic companies has crippled the development of open access movement and interfered with the ethical principles of information access and privacy. In recent years, vertical integration of publishers and other service providers throughout the research cycle has led to platformisation, characterized by datafication and commodification similar to practices on social media platforms. Scholarly publications are treated as user-generated contents for data tracking and surveillance, resulting in profitable data products and services for research assessment, benchmarking and reporting. Meanwhile, the bibliodiversity and equal open access are denied by the dominant gold open access model and the privacy of researchers is being compromised by spyware embedded in research infrastructure. This article proposes four actions to fight the platformisation of scholarly information after a brief overview of the market of academic journals and research assessments and their implications for bibliodiversity, information access, and privacy: (1) Educate researchers about commercial publishers and APCs; (2) Allocate library budget to support scholar-led and library publishing; (3) Engage in the development of public research infrastructures and copyright reform; and (4) Advocate for research assessment reforms.

Towards a new relevance for research libraries

Leo Waaijers — 2023-05-10

The invention of printing in 1455 by Johann Gutenberg and the invention of the World Wide Web in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee have often been compared when it comes to making knowledge accessible. Both events marked a breakthrough with far-reaching social consequences. The printing press led to the disappearance of monastic libraries and their scriptoriums as sources of knowledge, to make way for university libraries and publishers. The Web is again a revolution in the distribution of knowledge, embraced by the academic community and culminating in the Open Science movement. This editorial is an exploration into the challenges that this development poses for the roles of publishers and libraries.