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

Towards a new relevance for research libraries

Leo Waaijers — Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 +0200

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.

Nautilus

Pit Schneider, Yves Maurer, Ralph Marschall — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

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

Nolasko Mwinami, Frankwell W. Dulle , Wulystan Pius Mtega — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

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.

The Platformisation of Scholarly Information and How to Fight It

Lai Ma — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0200

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.

Organising the ERUA Open Science Meet-Ups

Maximilian Heber — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0100

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.