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All are invited to research nexus: widening participation in co-creating a complete scholarly record Recording
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All are invited to research nexus: widening participation in co-creating a complete scholarly record Recording
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Hello, everyone. Thank you for being with us today for this interesting session of the NISO Plus 2023 meeting "We are all invited to research nexus widening participation in co-creating a complete scholarly record" We have today four speakers, they will discuss the topic of metadata completeness and talk about inclusivity strategies that help expand the contribution into the overall global record of scholarship.
So I'm going to present you our speakers today First of all, we have Leena Shah from DOAJ. Leena Shah is a Managing Editor of the Directory of Open Access Journals. She is based in Singapore and manages the process of indexing regional journals in DOAJ. She is also a member of the DOAJ Quality team for assessing unethical publishing practices, and she also represents DOAJ on collaboration projects with other partner organizations, such as Crossref and C4DISC She has an experience of over six years in Scholarly Publishing, and is a keen advocate of Open Access and Open Science.
After Leena we will have Susan Collins Susan is a Community Engagement Manager at Crossref and works closely with the global community focusing on ways to help make membership benefits accessible, including the Crossref Sponsor and Global Equitable Membership programs She also works closely with colleagues at the Public Knowledge Project, PKP, on the development of OJS/Crossref collaborative projects After that, we'll have Mike Nason, from PKP Mike Nason is the Open Scholarship and Publishing librarian at the University of New Brunswick and the Metadata/Crossref liaison for the Public Knowledge Project.
Mike is a loud, passionate advocate of open scholarly infrastructure, and has been working in and around library publishing services for over 15 years. After Mike we will have Oscar Donde from the Pan-Africa Science Journal Dr. Oscar Omondi Donde is a Kenyan, currently a lecturer and Head of Environmental Science Department Egerton University, Kenya.
He is the Editor in Chief of the Pan-Africa Science Journal a Crossref African Ambassador and incoming Crossref Board Member I'll leave you with our fantastic panel! Thank you Hello, everyone. I work as a Managing Editor at DOAJ and I'm based in Singapore. My presentation today is about the role of DOAJ in building a complete scholarly record.
My presentation will begin with an introduction to DOAJ, followed by a quick look at the biblio diversity and why it matters to us We'll also see how DOAJ displays equity and diversity in its index We'll look at some of the steps DOAJ has taken to support Diamond Open Access And finally, I list out some of our initiatives for including underrepresented regions and the challenges I start with the introduction.
Many of you will be familiar with DOAJ and the work we do but if not, this is a quick introduction to DOAJ. We are a unique and extensive index of diverse, peer reviewed, open access journals. Having said that, we are not just an index but we have a mission to raise the profile, visibility and impact of all quality Open Access journals globally regardless of where the journals come from, the language they are in or their discipline All the journals that are listed in DOAJ go through a rigorous manual reviewing process and hence our standards have become an unofficial gold standard for OA journal publishing that is trusted across the scholarly community.
All of our services and metadata are provided completely free of charge. We are a small team with a global outreach supported by a network of volunteers, and we currently engage with about 100 volunteers from across the globe This is a quick peek at our home page The DOAJ index of Open Access Journals is dynamic, growing everyday and as of last week we listed 18,883 journals.
And it is good to point out that 70% of these journals do not charge any APCs. You can also note the diversity in the index with journals from 132 countries and 80 different languages. Let's take a look at the bibliodiversity and why its relevant to us Bibliodiversity is essential for building A complete scholarly record where there is space for different languages, publication outputs, research topics and business models where the record is not dominated by few larger publishers with emphasis on profitability because that discourages creativity and innovation.
Why are local journals important? Unlike larger international journals, local journals are embedded in local culture and context and they promote the visibility of local research. They publish research that is relevant to industries in that region. They also provide a connection between academia and practitioners of local customs, example, local medicinal practices Hence, these local journals form an important role in the scholarly ecosystem and building a complete scholarly record.
Bibliodiversity and DOAJ is important to DOAJ as it is our mission to support all high quality OA journals While PlanS has been criticised for supporting larger commercial publishers and leaving little space in terms of library budgets for smaller publishers and new models Local journals are also vulnerable because of the pressure for researchers as you all know, to publish in prestigious international journals And as I mentioned earlier, 70% of the journals listed in DOAJ do not charge APCs And we see it as our responsibility to increase visibility of these journals just as much as the larger publishers that are listed in the index DOAJ supports multilingualism One of the DOAJ's aim is to raise the profile of Open Access journals in languages other then English As mentioned earlier, we list journals in 80 languages.
DOAJ has joined OPERAS (Open Access in the European Research area) which promotes multilingualism. We are also a signatory of the The Helsinki initiative which states that disseminating research results in you own language creates impact And it is our mission to promote the quality of local journals so that research is published at home instead of sending their research to the traditional international journals A look at how DOAJ displays equity and diversity in its index.
The map here shows a geographic diversity in DOAJ listed open access journals with larger concentrations around Brazil the UK, US and Indonesia. Taking a deeper look at the OA distribution in DOAJ, it shows that 89% of the open access journals in DOAJ are from 35 countries So going forward, the strategy is to focus and improve the inclusion of OA journals from the underrepresented regions.
A look at how DOAJ supports non-English publishers We not only allow non-English publishers to apply to us, we also provide discoverability for them Our criteria for inclusion has been revised and published in a simple and informal language to support publishers who do not have English as their first language It has also been translated and is now available in 12 languages In addition to that, our editorial team works with a team of local volunteers with local language skills and context to support local publishers.
DOAJ Metadata promotes equity in open access publishing. Our metadata is free to download and reuse It is also integrated with various library discovery systems and gives users access to a diverse range of content Going forward. our strategy is to increase bibliodiversity in the index by participating in projects to promote more equitable publishing and partnering with organisations in regions which are underrepresented in our index, and enhancing our global outreach through our ambassador program.
Equitable publishing A look at some of the steps that DOAJ has taken to support Diamond OA journals The OA Diamond journals study which was published in 2021. indicated that institutional publishing represented 44% of articles that are published in fully open access journals It also identified a need to develop support and infrastructure for Diamond OA Following this study, there was a diamond action plan that was developed by Science Europe, CoalitionS OPERAS and the French National Research Agency.
DOAJ has endorsed this action plan In addition to that, we are also a partner in the Horizon Europe DIAMAS project - Developing Institutional OA Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication. We also continue to support Diamond journals to be indexed, for example our project with the Royal Danish Library and our support for digital preservation for Diamond OA with the JASPER project The Jasper project, which stands for Journals Are Preserved Forever This was a joint initiative that was launched by DOAJ, CLOCKSS Internet Archive, Keepers Registry and the PKP in November 2020 to preserve open access journal that do not charge any APC and are in DOAJ The study by Laakso and Matthias showed OA journals with limited financial resources are at risk of disappearing.
This project was triggered by this study It was aimed at raising awareness and offering affordable archiving options to these journals A pilot phase one has completed successfully it was self funded and a handful of journals are now successfully preserved in CLOCKSS. The project is now in its second phase DOAJ has initiated several projects and partnered with many organizations in different regions to increase biblio diversity in its index.
We have initiated some projects in Europe. We have piloted an approach with the Federation of Finnish Learned societies to help Finnish journals apply Starting with 29 Finnish journals today we have 63 journals from Finland. We also have similar programs in France, Denmark and Sweden.
Project China was initiated in 2021 and it was completed in Dec 2022 This was aimed at increasing Chinese language journals in DOAJ and to raise awareness of DOAJ in China. The approach here was to launch a pre valuation program for publishers along with webinars in local languages for journal editors.
So far 33% of the journals from this program has been accepted into DOAJ Project Africa In Africa, we have conducted training programs for journals listed in the African Continental open access platform in order for these journals to be compliant with DOAJ criteria Our staff has also participated in the African webinars series in March 2022 This was a series of seven webinars and we have given presentations on topics from copyright and licensing to DOAJ criteria in English and in French.
And as a result of this ASSAF which is the African Science Academy has expressed interest for 20 journals in joining us Further DOAJ was also included in the list of accredited journals for South Africa in feb 2021, thanks to the collaboration between DOAJ and the Academy of science, South Africa and the S African department of higher education and training.
For future plans we hope to work with AJOL African Journals Online, identify journals with star ratings, and encourage these journals to be DOAJ compliant and apply to us to be listed. Some of the challenges we have faced during these projects are that we require dedicated staff to drive these projects, bring structure It requires long term planning and initiative from local partners And measuring achievement is always difficult because progress is sometimes slow with journals taking time to make the required changes.
With this I end my presentation If there are any questions, my colleague Dominic Mitchell will be available in the Q&A session later Thank you. Sorry hi, everyone. so that researchers publish at home instead Again, my name is Susan Collins and I am a community engagement of sending their research to the traditional international And as I mentioned, I work closely journals.
to help make membership benefits available to smaller And as part of today's discussion A look at how the region displays equity and diversity from across the world to participate in its index. I'm going to review our strategies that organizations face in joining crossref.
The map here shows a geographic diversity in listed open access and membership is open to organizations journals with the larger concentrations around Brazil, and content. the UK, US and Indonesia. commercial publishers, universities, libraries, Taking a deeper look at the open access distribution We have about 18,000 membership organizations in ideology, it shows that 89% of the open access And to date, our members have registered journals that are listed in the age are from 35 countries.
And these include journal articles, books and chapters, So going forward, the strategy is to focus and improve And all of these items contain a range the inclusion of Open Access Journals However, regardless of the type of content, from the underrepresented regions. the more valuable it is for the members and for the community. I look at how the DVD supports non-English publishers. for what we call the research nexus.
We not only allow non-English publishers to apply to us, of relationships connecting research organizations, people, we also provide discoverability for them. It's a scholarly record that the global community can build on Our criteria for inclusion has been revised and published So the value of cross doesn't just come from the metadata, in a simple and informal language capture the connections between authors and funding research to support publishers who do not have English In a crossref, we make our metadata as their first language.
through our open metadata and APIs. It has also been translated and is now this vision of a connected research nexus, available in 12 languages. must include input from all of the global community. In addition to that, our editor, our editorial team we can see that there are gaps in this community. works with a team of local volunteers with local language Our first members were mainly from the US and Western Europe.
skills and context to support local publishers. global. around the world who are members. Metadata promotes equity and open access publishing. seeing significant membership growth from all regions. Our metadata is free to download and reuse. came from Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe It is also integrated with various library discovery Collectively, some of the highest numbers systems and gives users access to a diverse range of content.
Korea. Going forward. most notably northern and sub-Saharan Africa and parts Our strategy is to increase biblio diversity in the index of new member applications coming from these regions by participating in projects to promote But we know there are organizations more equitable publishing, partnering with organizations to the scholarly research record.
and regions which are underrepresented in our index, of the possible barriers for why not every organization that and enhancing our global outreach through our ambassador So over the years we've heard from various communities program. and the regions the regions may the reasons some combination of financial language A look at some of the steps that AIG And we'll take a look at some of the examples of these.
has taken to support diamond open access journals. are probably the biggest barrier. which starts at $275 per year, as well as fees for content. The open access diamond journals study, vary based on the type of content and the publication which was published in 2021. Now for some, these amounts aren't terribly costly, Indicated that institutional publishing represented This might be a completely achievable amount, 44% of articles that are published in fully open access region, that may not be the case.
journals. As I mentioned, we have over 140 countries It also identified a need to develop support a lot of different languages. and infrastructure for diamond. in each of these languages. Following this study, there was a diamond action plan they may struggle to access the needed resources. that was developed by science coalition that lack the technical skills to know how to register content operators and the French National Research ANSI.
So often they don't have the resources And dg has endorsed this action plan. and this can certainly impact discoverability In addition to that, we are also a partner in the horizon Europe So attempt to address and reduce some of these barriers. diamond project. and I'll discuss a few of these today. The diamond stands for developing that offers relief from membership and content institutional open access publishing models to advance Our sponsor program, which aims to provide scholarly communication.
And then finally, there's our collaboration We also continue to support diamond journals We've been working with them now for a number of years to be indexed, for example projects. metadata. Our project with the royal Danish library. in a little bit more detail. We also support digital preservation we had a limited assistance program which way the content of diamond open access journals through the Jasper project.
arrangements. The Jasper project, which stands for journals, So learning from the experiences of these partnerships, are preserved forever. equity, ability and accessibility to organizations This was a giant initiative that was launched by dog locker's advantaged countries. Internet Archive keepers registry and the PKKP the content registration fees.
in November 2020 to preserve open access journal that do not based on the member's country and the list of countries charge any apks and are listed in doing. Association or Ida's list, which uses world World Bank income The study by Luxor and Matthias Schoen. a more granular blend of criteria Open access journals with limited financial resources And we discussed the program with the world bank, who are at risk of disappearing.
prioritize Ida countries in their own strategies And this project was triggered by this particular study. So the list will undergo an annual review. It was aimed at raising awareness and offering over time as economic situations change. affordable archiving options to these journals. organizations based in countries listed in our gem program A pilot phase one has completed successfully. their metadata to the scholarly record at no cost.
It was self-funded and a handful of journals So sponsors are organizations that generally aren't that are now successfully preserved in places. or publish on behalf of groups of smaller organizations that We are now in the second phase of this project. face some of these barriers to do so independently. to support filling technical and language issues for the sponsor Division was initiated several projects So the members that work with them and partnered with many organizations based in a certain geographic area in different regions in order to increase be part of a particular institution like a National biblio diversity in its index.
So by focusing on specific criteria, in that area. We have initiated some projects in Europe. in the member's local language and then can We have piloted an approach with the Federation of finish And then, of course, the financial benefits learned societies to help Finnish journals apply Each organization that works with a sponsor and starting with 29 Finnish journalists, a membership fee.
today we have 63 journals from Finland. covers all of the organizations that they sponsor, We've also initiated similar programs registration fees for their members rather than each member in France, Denmark and Sweden. And that allows the members to pay the sponsor Our program began about 10 years ago Project China was initiated in 2021 in South Korea and Turkey.
and it went on till the end of 2022. with about 1,300 members. This was aimed at increasing Chinese language were new sponsors. journals indexed in age and to raise representing close to 11,000 members. awareness of the age in China. there's still a lot of regions that lack sponsor and sponsor Awareness of digit within China.
So we continue to work with members, our ambassadors The approach here was to launch a pre valuation program that might fit into our sponsor program in those regions. for publishers, along with webinars is our collaboration with public knowledge program, PCP, in local languages for journal editors. oj's publishing software. And so far 33% of the journals from this program using oj's, it's one of the most widely used publishing has been accepted into the Beijing.
This map shows a number of journals in each region that Project Africa. And the countries with the largest uptake In Africa, we have conducted training programs And these are regions where we're for Germans that were listed on the African continental who are joining crossref. open access platform in order for these journals Because so many organizations were using.
to be compliant with DOJ criteria. began a collaboration to create a less technical method Doj staff has also participated in the African webinars and help publishers and journals take series conducted in March 2022. So we started with a daily XML export This was a series of seven webinars to crossref from oj's, and then later and our staff has given several presentations like reference linking and cited by service similarity, check on topics from copyright and licensing And then the Thunder registry and these to DOJ criteria in English as well as French.
that was sent to us that could ultimately be included And as a result of this ASF, which is the. PCP and crossref continue to work together Which is the African Science Academy that's provided within orgs and then has expressed interest for 2020 journals, would increase the metadata that can have expressed interest in joining us. So in conclusion, there isn't one solution So the DOJ was also included in the list of accredited journals What works for one region might not work for another for South Africa in 2021, Thanks to the collaboration Barriers are very general.
with between DOJ and the Academy of science, South Africa and the programs we've developed are really just a start. and the South African department of higher We have to work with the communities, education and training. and then how best that we can support them. For future plans, we hope to work with the African journals with our communities, but they're just a starting point. online, identify journals with star ratings, to help all organizations be able to contribute equally and encourage these journals to be compliant and apply And I'll just put a slide here that has links to us to be listed.
today. Some of the challenges that we have So thank you. Thanks to Susan, a long-standing friend of PKP for kicking things off. So, I'm going to talk a little bit about metadata, human beings and the idea of completeness. And, this is a bit of perspective from being both a librarian in this space and also someone who does this work with PKP.
I'm going to cover a lot of ground really fast and I apologise for how quickly i am about to go but that is who I am. So, I'm the open scholarship and publishing librarian, aka scholarly communications. At what, to most of you, would be a pretty small school in Atlanta, Canada, the University of New brunswick. My job, plainly, as you know, broadly is to make the research that happens at my institution as available to the public as possible.
Pretty straightforward. I also work for PKP as a member of their publishing services team, where I'm the crossref and metadata liaison. I ended up in this role because I have a lot o fopinions and like a lot of people with abundant opinions, I look like this. I'm a white, CIS settler from the unceded a.k.a. stolen territory of the mi'kmaq-wolastoquey peoples. Just a short hop from the wolastoq river, a much cooler name than the settler-crowned St. John river, If you ask me. that river is up here next to Maine, a state you rarely think about unless you are mad at Senator Susan Collins.
not to be confused with my pal and co-presenter, Susan Collins. Susan Collins the Senator is exceptionally great at finding excuses for you to be mad at her so you may have many reasons to know where she is from. I'm about to rocket through the following. I'm going to talk a little bit about my life as sort of a metadata wonk in librarianship My life is a metadata support worker for PKP and the efforts we're going through at pkp to make sure that our metadata is good And coming to terms with reality maybe a little bit of Real Talk at the end here.
So! unsurprisingly, I spend a frankly upsetting of time thinking about metadata problems, things like how you can incentivize more diligence with metadata Is the problem literacy? is it time? Is it labor? do I wish metadata were better So that my job were easier? Absolutely! Who decides what's important in metadata is the metadata we want.
equitable? is the metadata we want anglo-centric or euro- centric. Bigtime it is! Uhh, There should be only one citation style, a thing I think about often Like in the fetal position at night, that names should be single strings, and what might be possible if we were not sort of beholden to the iron grip of citation styles Boy, why does anybody still care about citation styles?
It is clear from the conference schedule that this is an affliction many of us share. there are roughly 47 sessions and about 14 of them are about metadata hygiene. How do we have complete records? How do we make sure our metadata is good? That's, like, 30% of the conference schedule. about this particular problem. so what we know is that a lot of us wish metadata fidelity were better than it is.
Imagine all the cool things we could do if we were omniscient. a diligent, accurate world without typos, an accurate world with a clear view of the whole lifecycle of any research projects and products properly attributed, And, a world where people listen to librarians. or a world where people care about metadata as much as we do. hopefully. A world where people have time. So, let's talk a little bit about being a librarian in this space.
I spend a tonne of my time explaining to researchers how their metadata gets passed between publishers and systems ORCID, repositories, openaire, crossref, datacite, and CRIS platforms. and a lot of that time is explaining the ways in which metadata happens TO them. the subtle way in which they enter metadata but metadata just sort of happens around them. Like ROR for example. you never really need to know your own ROR ID, but it's something that's happening to them behind the scenes.
And folks are generally very receptive about this. When I'm talking about publishing services or journal hosting, scholar profiles, repositories, pids, funder mandates, assessing publications I spend all of my time in this sort of publishing space talking about publishing and metadata literacy And like so many others, I've also spent the better part of the last 10 years of my career and life trying to convince people to engage in a public good (open access), and finding hooks that prove that this is good for their careers.
Because I know that "it's good" is not necessarily a motivator for a lot of people. who want to have an important, real, result to their research. ... who want something a little more material. Researchers do, I think, care about all of this stuff, But they also have a lot of things to care about! I think it's important that we square that no amount of being right about how important metadata is, for example, will change the reality that the demands on researchers are more intense or elaborate or complicated than they've ever been.
They've got job, precarity, extensive competition committee and service work, increased teaching workloads All of this pressure to publish, neoliberal administration cutting money and boiling people down to numbers. ChatGPT! is really freaking people out. that's legitimate! There's a lot of bureaucracy and some people are paying out of pocket to publish at the same time I mean, obviously you don't need to, but some folks sure are.
And everybody is trying to do more with less. So when I'm talking about why metadata needs to be good, I'm saying that to these people, and they have a lot going on. So I say things like, well, if you just jump through these hoops, your work is going to be compliant with policies. it's going to be more discoverable. it'll be more ethical. it'll be easier to track and cite. it'll be accessible.
You can preserve it. you won't have to worry about APC charges. And with every single one of these things where I try to help them, it comes with a caveat. Here are the things you need to know about making your work more compliant. Here are the things you need to know about discoverability. they all come with one more thing. and then I say, remember, I'm here to help, which they obviously need, because I've given them a boatload of things they don't really know about that they now need to think about.
So I think about this about this a lot from the perspective of my job and the impact I have with researchers My job is to stand on the end of a dock and throw rocks at a cruise ship. And I'm trying to make that cruise ship change direction. And, any day I hit the boat, is a good day. Often I'm thrilled just to be heard. "a world where people actually listen to librarians" This means I see a lot of nods of acknowledgment when I talk to faculty.
And if about 10% to 20% of that results a meaningful change, I have sure Hit the boat. That's a great day for me. I guess what I'm saying is if I let my expectations get ahead of me, I'm setting myself up to resent both myself and the researchers I work with. So, what capacity exists for widening participation in this space? this space where researchers are doing a lot of the hand holding and work.
So, we have this expression. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. because we're talking to an international audience I converted this to 28.35 grams of prevention is worth .45 kilograms of cure. It's not quite as zippy. Let's talk a little bit about prevention. So the work that we do at PKP. Folks know PKP, I assume, but I'll talk a little bit about it.
PKP is a not for profit organization at/with Simon Fraser university in british columbia, canada. We produce free, open source software To disseminate reasearch and manage the entire scholarly publishing workflow. So, from preprints with open preprint systems, to monographs (open monograph press) and journals (open journal systems). As susan mentioned, we have roughly 34,000 journals worldwide using OJS. the ones we know about, anyway.
And in 2021, our own beacon data indicated that that there was 1.36 million documents published in OJS in 2021. That's a lot of content for something published by free, open source software. PKP also turns 25 this year. Happy birthday, PKP! So we're very good friends with crossref. we do a lot of work with Crossref.
We're a sponsoring organization, as Susan mentioned. And we can act as a membership representative for people who are part of our hosted group or folks who are eligible using the GEM program. People who are using OJS but not able to join directly do to financial, administrative, or technical battiers. We currently sponsor about 156 crossref memberships. Most of MY work in this space with PKP is related to metadata, persistent identifiers and OJS support.
So helping our users handle all of these things. OJS is software that is built to meet the needs of journals in any country, language or discipline. There are a lot of languages and most of them aren't english, So, there's a lot of stuff to consider when we're talking about the way that we talk about metadata. On top of that, every discipline (You may not really think about this a lot) but every discipline has their own unique publishing culture.
They have their own unique baggage around publishing, and they think about their requirements for publishing a little bit differently. So, as you might guess this means I spend spend a lot of time explaining how metadata works to folks who operate journals. And it turns out those folks are also the same folks who are researchers and the people I talk to day-to-day as a librarian.
I also advocate for better metadata internally, which our developers absolutely love. In particular, this means explaing why good metadata important and also the ways that metadata is consumed downstream. in practice, This means I read a lot of emails that say things like "no, I don't recommend putting a DOI in your article title field. I know you want it to appear in the table of contents, but it would be disastrous for a variety of reasons." A great deal of the mistakes I see in metadata come from the following mistaking metadata for styling elements.
Carrying disciplinary or citation style baggage into metadata elements. required fields forcing people to make up metadata. like an email required field, for example when the person doesn't have email or if the person is long-since dead. Names are generally very terrible metadata. creative applications of multi-lingual metadata. and a lack of literacy with the platform and available options.
So that really boils down to about three categories. Users trying to do something unrelated to the metadata. They're trying to change how things look on a website. Vestigial practices from print media, which are all around us in academic publishing. And users making do with the fields they're given to express meaning that isn't covered by the actual metadata field. Maybe they're trying to write their name in a specific way that isn't actually something they can fill out in the form.
many of these journals are small operations with minimal staff. So this idea, this promise of open access and open source to sort of wrest control of scholarly communications from major publishers and back into the hands of researchers. but now those same researchers are responsible for the labor of publishing. the question of completeness making sure the metadata is accurate. So PKP's approach in this space is really to kind of get out of the way and empower our users.
We want to make sure the software as good as we can get it without raising more barriers. So we don't want to, say, REQUIRE metadata completeness because that's going to make people either make up metadata or stop and not fill it out at all. We want to make sure that we try to get out of people's way to record as much metadata as possible. We provide documentation for better practices and recommendations. We have a community support forum where people can ask questions about the software We try to empower users and look for avenues to make users more capable Metadata contributors.
Really, we just want to hit the boat with a rock, right? We want to make small changes to the ways people think about metadata as they go. And on top of that, practically, we have a documentation interest group that's written a ton of documentation in our hub about better practices in metadata. Specifically, a project that we did with coalition publica though CFI funding in canada to create better practices documentation for journals.
so that they understand a little more about the hoops they should be trying to jump through. and also we've been working with crossref to make DOIs as sort of automagical as possible. things you don't have to really think about instead of kind of of wrestling with and putting up a lot of barriers to contributing in that space. Lastly, coming to terms with reality, We expect a lot from really exhausted people!
I think this is an important thing to think about. I know we're all tired but researchers have a lot on their plate. Completeness requires labour And the question for me is for whom? whose job is the completeness of the metadata we're talking about? will completeness require more effort for non-english-speaking researchers?
Absolutely! We have a lot of journals that are based in South America that index, their metadata in english, spanish, and portugese just to make sure that it's indexed and accessible. english journals do not have to jump through the same kinds of hoops. When we discuss "widening participation", what shape does a fair distribution of labor take? Whose going to be handling more participation?
Who are the participants and what responsibilities do they carry? Is worrying about metadata, more my job or the responsibility of researchers? That's a great question. Maybe we're projecting! Ultimately, we can, as service providers and librarians, we can educate. We can provide resources and guidance. We can promote better practices.
We can find ways to make the work easier. We can get out of the way. Uhh, that's useful, I think. We can be patient, which is vital. You know we think about metadata all the time, every day, and we care a lot about it. And then other people are just sort of stepping in and getting a deluge of our fascination with metadata. Metadata is really not, uhh, super fun for people.
and we can also assess our own personal expectations. so these are the things we can do to try to think about helping people contribute without maybe having our expectations be a little too intense. So that was me. Thank you very much. And I'm sorry about how quickly I've spoken. primary publishers themselves, but work with I'm going to make a talk on title, including or publish on behalf of groups of smaller organizations that in the global Scholarship records, its benefits want to join crossref, but otherwise To begin with.
face some of these barriers to do so independently. which is going to be a little bit more And sponsors work directly with crossref that I will need to provide an understanding of where I'm to support filling technical and language issues for the sponsor in Africa. members. Down to progress and way forward. So the members that work with them based on my education.
might fit a specific criteria like being called Egerton university, moved to China for my PHD, based in a certain geographic area and fisheries research institute, and currently or with a certain language, or might be part of a particular institution like a National as an editor in chief and also at crossfire as an ambassador Library.
And as an incoming board member come March 20, 23. So by focusing on specific criteria, Now share with you this particular slide. this also helps to increase coverage, adoption and support Metadata the second one metadata. in that area. I will pick the middle one, which is metadata. Sponsors are able to provide technical support Metadata in an African perspective in the member's local language and then can a presentation on metadata from an African perspective liaise with our support team when needed.
From that hour. And then, of course, the financial benefits and its metadata. are probably one of the key factors. has just taken a rising trajectory, meaning Each organization that works with a sponsor researchers, most librarians are taking doesn't have to join independently or pay and efforts to improve the quality, the quantity and even a membership fee.
from metadata to the community brings The sponsors pay one annual fee that If I want to again share this particular slide. covers all of the organizations that they sponsor, It's a slide that indicates how low as at the year that they and then we invoice the sponsor for all of the content And for sure, it's an indication that Africa as a continent, registration fees for their members rather than each member beginning to pick up research and metadata having to pay us directly.
As much as the membership to some And that allows the members to pay the sponsor organization like crossref is still moving forward in the local currency. Asmuch as the blue color that represent Our program began about 10 years ago But as I said, it is taking a rising trajectory. with four sponsors and about 100 members, primarily to other regions in Africa is low in South Korea and Turkey.
the membership to crossref. A few years later, it grew to 17 sponsors as far as matters of metadata management, with about 1,300 members. But again, moving forward, we will This time, Brazil, India, South Korea, turkey and Ukraine are organizations that are being put in place to ensure were new sponsors. into the future.
And then at the end of last year, we had over 100 sponsors a picture of an Africa in itself in terms of its membership representing close to 11,000 members. just but very few countries. But although the program is growing, I'll pick Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, South there's still a lot of regions that lack sponsor and sponsor the need to strengthen metadata management by ensuring coverage.
deal with metadata management. So we continue to work with members, our ambassadors that, again, help them strengthen their metadata. and the community to help identify organizations of another organization that come that might fit into our sponsor program in those regions. It's called agile in full African journal online. Then of course, our third program is almost depicting the same trend is our collaboration with public knowledge program, PCP, Again, these are an indication of the low or the rising with the developers of open journal systems, metadata management and data security in Africa oj's publishing software.
We those are from an African perspective. So with over 34,000 journals and millions of items published having a well established, a well managed and well secured using oj's, it's one of the most widely used publishing This will make research output in Africa platforms. It will also promote reproducibility This map shows a number of journals in each region that And again, research and editorial integrity uses oj's.
And the last one, again, reporting and assessment And the countries with the largest uptake As I said, I noted previously that. include Indonesia, Brazil, Ukraine, India, Colombia. at the heart of the development stage. And these are regions where we're The lack of. seeing an increase in organizations and generation in Africa has been who are joining crossref.
as having limited funding, inadequate infrastructure, Limited skills are very important. Because so many organizations were using. is made up of over 50 nationalities speaking A few years back, crossref and PCP We even have Arabs in Africa, we have French speaking began a collaboration to create a less technical method and therefore a language barrier within that region for oj's uses to register metadata with us management for the region.
and help publishers and journals take inadequate information to the librarians, inadequate advantage of crossref services. to the institutions that stores that store or generate So we started with a daily XML export And due to these challenges, it has plugin that sent basic metadata directly and scholars do face challenges in creating and maintaining to crossref from oj's, and then later And again, these do limit the visibility and impact several additional plug-ins were created for additional metadata like reference linking and cited by service similarity, check I just.
and authenticate. And then the Thunder registry and these Metadata management, metadata security in Africa allowed for an increase in the amount of metadata I will also note that there are progress that are currently that was sent to us that could ultimately be included that. in the scholarly record.
discoverable and accessible. PCP and crossref continue to work together is the African metadata initiative, to improve the level of overall support and accessibility of metadata in the region. that's provided within orgs and then and guidelines. to also create new pluggable ins that that is coming in to ensure that metadata specifically would increase the metadata that can will ensure that its security, its accessibility is promoted.
be sent from oj's to crossref. On again. So in conclusion, there isn't one solution are geared towards strengthening research to overcome all of the barriers. And there's been an improved data collection and management What works for one region might not work for another There's been increased use of digital technologies or might not even be applicable.
There is a promotion of collaborations Barriers are very general. There are also efforts to improve access They don't apply to all communities and the programs we've developed are really just a start. Institutions or organizations that also exist or and that And we can't make assumptions about what a community needs. to contribute to metadata security in the region.
We have to work with the communities, This African data consensus is a policy framework turn to the challenges that they face, what resources they need, Commission and the African Development Bank and then how best that we can support them. and infrastructure in the continental Africa. So the programs I've mentioned were created in collaboration which is a digital infrastructure initiative that with our communities, but they're just a starting point.
across the region. And we continue to seek additional input and feedback Alliance Africa, the Research Data Alliance Africa study, to help all organizations be able to contribute equally aims to promote the use of data in Africa to our vision of the research and access. We have the African research data center network. And I'll just put a slide here that has links That aims to.
to some of the programs that I mentioned in my presentation by providing data storage, preservation and sharing today. The last one we have the African research universities alliance. And I said, thank you. is a network of African researchers and universities So thank you. by supporting the development of research, data management And Thanks to Susan, a long standing friend of PCP, for kicking things off.
need to strengthen metadata management stations like what So I'm going to talk a little bit And organizations visibility in Africa. about metadata, human beings and the idea of completeness. institutions within the region, but those And this is a bit of a perspective So they need to increase their visibility from being both a librarian in this space and also as well as librarians would have knowledge of their existence someone who does this work with PCP.
And through that, they will either I'm going to cover a lot of ground really fast In terms of. and I apologize for how quickly I am about to go, I also would recommend that African publishers, librarians, but that is who I am. To register their content with metadata management So I'm the open Scholarship and publishing librarian, a.k.a. scholarly communications.
us to contact the metadata management institutions. At what to most of you would be a pretty small school with their data. in Atlanta, Canada, the University of New brunswick? And above all, they need to continue My job plainly, as we know broadly, on metadata management and its benefit. is to make the research that happens Literally that's my contact.
at my institution as available to the public as possible. Pretty straightforward. Thank you, everyone. I also work for PCP as a member of their publishing services
Segment:0 .
Hello, everyone. Thank you for being with us today for this interesting session of the NISO Plus 2023 meeting "We are all invited to research nexus widening participation in co-creating a complete scholarly record" We have today four speakers, they will discuss the topic of metadata completeness and talk about inclusivity strategies that help expand the contribution into the overall global record of scholarship.
So I'm going to present you our speakers today First of all, we have Leena Shah from DOAJ. Leena Shah is a Managing Editor of the Directory of Open Access Journals. She is based in Singapore and manages the process of indexing regional journals in DOAJ. She is also a member of the DOAJ Quality team for assessing unethical publishing practices, and she also represents DOAJ on collaboration projects with other partner organizations, such as Crossref and C4DISC She has an experience of over six years in Scholarly Publishing, and is a keen advocate of Open Access and Open Science.
After Leena we will have Susan Collins Susan is a Community Engagement Manager at Crossref and works closely with the global community focusing on ways to help make membership benefits accessible, including the Crossref Sponsor and Global Equitable Membership programs She also works closely with colleagues at the Public Knowledge Project, PKP, on the development of OJS/Crossref collaborative projects After that, we'll have Mike Nason, from PKP Mike Nason is the Open Scholarship and Publishing librarian at the University of New Brunswick and the Metadata/Crossref liaison for the Public Knowledge Project.
Mike is a loud, passionate advocate of open scholarly infrastructure, and has been working in and around library publishing services for over 15 years. After Mike we will have Oscar Donde from the Pan-Africa Science Journal Dr. Oscar Omondi Donde is a Kenyan, currently a lecturer and Head of Environmental Science Department Egerton University, Kenya.
He is the Editor in Chief of the Pan-Africa Science Journal a Crossref African Ambassador and incoming Crossref Board Member I'll leave you with our fantastic panel! Thank you Hello, everyone. I work as a Managing Editor at DOAJ and I'm based in Singapore. My presentation today is about the role of DOAJ in building a complete scholarly record.
My presentation will begin with an introduction to DOAJ, followed by a quick look at the biblio diversity and why it matters to us We'll also see how DOAJ displays equity and diversity in its index We'll look at some of the steps DOAJ has taken to support Diamond Open Access And finally, I list out some of our initiatives for including underrepresented regions and the challenges I start with the introduction.
Many of you will be familiar with DOAJ and the work we do but if not, this is a quick introduction to DOAJ. We are a unique and extensive index of diverse, peer reviewed, open access journals. Having said that, we are not just an index but we have a mission to raise the profile, visibility and impact of all quality Open Access journals globally regardless of where the journals come from, the language they are in or their discipline All the journals that are listed in DOAJ go through a rigorous manual reviewing process and hence our standards have become an unofficial gold standard for OA journal publishing that is trusted across the scholarly community.
All of our services and metadata are provided completely free of charge. We are a small team with a global outreach supported by a network of volunteers, and we currently engage with about 100 volunteers from across the globe This is a quick peek at our home page The DOAJ index of Open Access Journals is dynamic, growing everyday and as of last week we listed 18,883 journals.
And it is good to point out that 70% of these journals do not charge any APCs. You can also note the diversity in the index with journals from 132 countries and 80 different languages. Let's take a look at the bibliodiversity and why its relevant to us Bibliodiversity is essential for building A complete scholarly record where there is space for different languages, publication outputs, research topics and business models where the record is not dominated by few larger publishers with emphasis on profitability because that discourages creativity and innovation.
Why are local journals important? Unlike larger international journals, local journals are embedded in local culture and context and they promote the visibility of local research. They publish research that is relevant to industries in that region. They also provide a connection between academia and practitioners of local customs, example, local medicinal practices Hence, these local journals form an important role in the scholarly ecosystem and building a complete scholarly record.
Bibliodiversity and DOAJ is important to DOAJ as it is our mission to support all high quality OA journals While PlanS has been criticised for supporting larger commercial publishers and leaving little space in terms of library budgets for smaller publishers and new models Local journals are also vulnerable because of the pressure for researchers as you all know, to publish in prestigious international journals And as I mentioned earlier, 70% of the journals listed in DOAJ do not charge APCs And we see it as our responsibility to increase visibility of these journals just as much as the larger publishers that are listed in the index DOAJ supports multilingualism One of the DOAJ's aim is to raise the profile of Open Access journals in languages other then English As mentioned earlier, we list journals in 80 languages.
DOAJ has joined OPERAS (Open Access in the European Research area) which promotes multilingualism. We are also a signatory of the The Helsinki initiative which states that disseminating research results in you own language creates impact And it is our mission to promote the quality of local journals so that research is published at home instead of sending their research to the traditional international journals A look at how DOAJ displays equity and diversity in its index.
The map here shows a geographic diversity in DOAJ listed open access journals with larger concentrations around Brazil the UK, US and Indonesia. Taking a deeper look at the OA distribution in DOAJ, it shows that 89% of the open access journals in DOAJ are from 35 countries So going forward, the strategy is to focus and improve the inclusion of OA journals from the underrepresented regions.
A look at how DOAJ supports non-English publishers We not only allow non-English publishers to apply to us, we also provide discoverability for them Our criteria for inclusion has been revised and published in a simple and informal language to support publishers who do not have English as their first language It has also been translated and is now available in 12 languages In addition to that, our editorial team works with a team of local volunteers with local language skills and context to support local publishers.
DOAJ Metadata promotes equity in open access publishing. Our metadata is free to download and reuse It is also integrated with various library discovery systems and gives users access to a diverse range of content Going forward. our strategy is to increase bibliodiversity in the index by participating in projects to promote more equitable publishing and partnering with organisations in regions which are underrepresented in our index, and enhancing our global outreach through our ambassador program.
Equitable publishing A look at some of the steps that DOAJ has taken to support Diamond OA journals The OA Diamond journals study which was published in 2021. indicated that institutional publishing represented 44% of articles that are published in fully open access journals It also identified a need to develop support and infrastructure for Diamond OA Following this study, there was a diamond action plan that was developed by Science Europe, CoalitionS OPERAS and the French National Research Agency.
DOAJ has endorsed this action plan In addition to that, we are also a partner in the Horizon Europe DIAMAS project - Developing Institutional OA Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication. We also continue to support Diamond journals to be indexed, for example our project with the Royal Danish Library and our support for digital preservation for Diamond OA with the JASPER project The Jasper project, which stands for Journals Are Preserved Forever This was a joint initiative that was launched by DOAJ, CLOCKSS Internet Archive, Keepers Registry and the PKP in November 2020 to preserve open access journal that do not charge any APC and are in DOAJ The study by Laakso and Matthias showed OA journals with limited financial resources are at risk of disappearing.
This project was triggered by this study It was aimed at raising awareness and offering affordable archiving options to these journals A pilot phase one has completed successfully it was self funded and a handful of journals are now successfully preserved in CLOCKSS. The project is now in its second phase DOAJ has initiated several projects and partnered with many organizations in different regions to increase biblio diversity in its index.
We have initiated some projects in Europe. We have piloted an approach with the Federation of Finnish Learned societies to help Finnish journals apply Starting with 29 Finnish journals today we have 63 journals from Finland. We also have similar programs in France, Denmark and Sweden.
Project China was initiated in 2021 and it was completed in Dec 2022 This was aimed at increasing Chinese language journals in DOAJ and to raise awareness of DOAJ in China. The approach here was to launch a pre valuation program for publishers along with webinars in local languages for journal editors.
So far 33% of the journals from this program has been accepted into DOAJ Project Africa In Africa, we have conducted training programs for journals listed in the African Continental open access platform in order for these journals to be compliant with DOAJ criteria Our staff has also participated in the African webinars series in March 2022 This was a series of seven webinars and we have given presentations on topics from copyright and licensing to DOAJ criteria in English and in French.
And as a result of this ASSAF which is the African Science Academy has expressed interest for 20 journals in joining us Further DOAJ was also included in the list of accredited journals for South Africa in feb 2021, thanks to the collaboration between DOAJ and the Academy of science, South Africa and the S African department of higher education and training.
For future plans we hope to work with AJOL African Journals Online, identify journals with star ratings, and encourage these journals to be DOAJ compliant and apply to us to be listed. Some of the challenges we have faced during these projects are that we require dedicated staff to drive these projects, bring structure It requires long term planning and initiative from local partners And measuring achievement is always difficult because progress is sometimes slow with journals taking time to make the required changes.
With this I end my presentation If there are any questions, my colleague Dominic Mitchell will be available in the Q&A session later Thank you. Sorry hi, everyone. so that researchers publish at home instead Again, my name is Susan Collins and I am a community engagement of sending their research to the traditional international And as I mentioned, I work closely journals.
to help make membership benefits available to smaller And as part of today's discussion A look at how the region displays equity and diversity from across the world to participate in its index. I'm going to review our strategies that organizations face in joining crossref.
The map here shows a geographic diversity in listed open access and membership is open to organizations journals with the larger concentrations around Brazil, and content. the UK, US and Indonesia. commercial publishers, universities, libraries, Taking a deeper look at the open access distribution We have about 18,000 membership organizations in ideology, it shows that 89% of the open access And to date, our members have registered journals that are listed in the age are from 35 countries.
And these include journal articles, books and chapters, So going forward, the strategy is to focus and improve And all of these items contain a range the inclusion of Open Access Journals However, regardless of the type of content, from the underrepresented regions. the more valuable it is for the members and for the community. I look at how the DVD supports non-English publishers. for what we call the research nexus.
We not only allow non-English publishers to apply to us, of relationships connecting research organizations, people, we also provide discoverability for them. It's a scholarly record that the global community can build on Our criteria for inclusion has been revised and published So the value of cross doesn't just come from the metadata, in a simple and informal language capture the connections between authors and funding research to support publishers who do not have English In a crossref, we make our metadata as their first language.
through our open metadata and APIs. It has also been translated and is now this vision of a connected research nexus, available in 12 languages. must include input from all of the global community. In addition to that, our editor, our editorial team we can see that there are gaps in this community. works with a team of local volunteers with local language Our first members were mainly from the US and Western Europe.
skills and context to support local publishers. global. around the world who are members. Metadata promotes equity and open access publishing. seeing significant membership growth from all regions. Our metadata is free to download and reuse. came from Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe It is also integrated with various library discovery Collectively, some of the highest numbers systems and gives users access to a diverse range of content.
Korea. Going forward. most notably northern and sub-Saharan Africa and parts Our strategy is to increase biblio diversity in the index of new member applications coming from these regions by participating in projects to promote But we know there are organizations more equitable publishing, partnering with organizations to the scholarly research record.
and regions which are underrepresented in our index, of the possible barriers for why not every organization that and enhancing our global outreach through our ambassador So over the years we've heard from various communities program. and the regions the regions may the reasons some combination of financial language A look at some of the steps that AIG And we'll take a look at some of the examples of these.
has taken to support diamond open access journals. are probably the biggest barrier. which starts at $275 per year, as well as fees for content. The open access diamond journals study, vary based on the type of content and the publication which was published in 2021. Now for some, these amounts aren't terribly costly, Indicated that institutional publishing represented This might be a completely achievable amount, 44% of articles that are published in fully open access region, that may not be the case.
journals. As I mentioned, we have over 140 countries It also identified a need to develop support a lot of different languages. and infrastructure for diamond. in each of these languages. Following this study, there was a diamond action plan they may struggle to access the needed resources. that was developed by science coalition that lack the technical skills to know how to register content operators and the French National Research ANSI.
So often they don't have the resources And dg has endorsed this action plan. and this can certainly impact discoverability In addition to that, we are also a partner in the horizon Europe So attempt to address and reduce some of these barriers. diamond project. and I'll discuss a few of these today. The diamond stands for developing that offers relief from membership and content institutional open access publishing models to advance Our sponsor program, which aims to provide scholarly communication.
And then finally, there's our collaboration We also continue to support diamond journals We've been working with them now for a number of years to be indexed, for example projects. metadata. Our project with the royal Danish library. in a little bit more detail. We also support digital preservation we had a limited assistance program which way the content of diamond open access journals through the Jasper project.
arrangements. The Jasper project, which stands for journals, So learning from the experiences of these partnerships, are preserved forever. equity, ability and accessibility to organizations This was a giant initiative that was launched by dog locker's advantaged countries. Internet Archive keepers registry and the PKKP the content registration fees.
in November 2020 to preserve open access journal that do not based on the member's country and the list of countries charge any apks and are listed in doing. Association or Ida's list, which uses world World Bank income The study by Luxor and Matthias Schoen. a more granular blend of criteria Open access journals with limited financial resources And we discussed the program with the world bank, who are at risk of disappearing.
prioritize Ida countries in their own strategies And this project was triggered by this particular study. So the list will undergo an annual review. It was aimed at raising awareness and offering over time as economic situations change. affordable archiving options to these journals. organizations based in countries listed in our gem program A pilot phase one has completed successfully. their metadata to the scholarly record at no cost.
It was self-funded and a handful of journals So sponsors are organizations that generally aren't that are now successfully preserved in places. or publish on behalf of groups of smaller organizations that We are now in the second phase of this project. face some of these barriers to do so independently. to support filling technical and language issues for the sponsor Division was initiated several projects So the members that work with them and partnered with many organizations based in a certain geographic area in different regions in order to increase be part of a particular institution like a National biblio diversity in its index.
So by focusing on specific criteria, in that area. We have initiated some projects in Europe. in the member's local language and then can We have piloted an approach with the Federation of finish And then, of course, the financial benefits learned societies to help Finnish journals apply Each organization that works with a sponsor and starting with 29 Finnish journalists, a membership fee.
today we have 63 journals from Finland. covers all of the organizations that they sponsor, We've also initiated similar programs registration fees for their members rather than each member in France, Denmark and Sweden. And that allows the members to pay the sponsor Our program began about 10 years ago Project China was initiated in 2021 in South Korea and Turkey.
and it went on till the end of 2022. with about 1,300 members. This was aimed at increasing Chinese language were new sponsors. journals indexed in age and to raise representing close to 11,000 members. awareness of the age in China. there's still a lot of regions that lack sponsor and sponsor Awareness of digit within China.
So we continue to work with members, our ambassadors The approach here was to launch a pre valuation program that might fit into our sponsor program in those regions. for publishers, along with webinars is our collaboration with public knowledge program, PCP, in local languages for journal editors. oj's publishing software. And so far 33% of the journals from this program using oj's, it's one of the most widely used publishing has been accepted into the Beijing.
This map shows a number of journals in each region that Project Africa. And the countries with the largest uptake In Africa, we have conducted training programs And these are regions where we're for Germans that were listed on the African continental who are joining crossref. open access platform in order for these journals Because so many organizations were using.
to be compliant with DOJ criteria. began a collaboration to create a less technical method Doj staff has also participated in the African webinars and help publishers and journals take series conducted in March 2022. So we started with a daily XML export This was a series of seven webinars to crossref from oj's, and then later and our staff has given several presentations like reference linking and cited by service similarity, check on topics from copyright and licensing And then the Thunder registry and these to DOJ criteria in English as well as French.
that was sent to us that could ultimately be included And as a result of this ASF, which is the. PCP and crossref continue to work together Which is the African Science Academy that's provided within orgs and then has expressed interest for 2020 journals, would increase the metadata that can have expressed interest in joining us. So in conclusion, there isn't one solution So the DOJ was also included in the list of accredited journals What works for one region might not work for another for South Africa in 2021, Thanks to the collaboration Barriers are very general.
with between DOJ and the Academy of science, South Africa and the programs we've developed are really just a start. and the South African department of higher We have to work with the communities, education and training. and then how best that we can support them. For future plans, we hope to work with the African journals with our communities, but they're just a starting point. online, identify journals with star ratings, to help all organizations be able to contribute equally and encourage these journals to be compliant and apply And I'll just put a slide here that has links to us to be listed.
today. Some of the challenges that we have So thank you. Thanks to Susan, a long-standing friend of PKP for kicking things off. So, I'm going to talk a little bit about metadata, human beings and the idea of completeness. And, this is a bit of perspective from being both a librarian in this space and also someone who does this work with PKP.
I'm going to cover a lot of ground really fast and I apologise for how quickly i am about to go but that is who I am. So, I'm the open scholarship and publishing librarian, aka scholarly communications. At what, to most of you, would be a pretty small school in Atlanta, Canada, the University of New brunswick. My job, plainly, as you know, broadly is to make the research that happens at my institution as available to the public as possible.
Pretty straightforward. I also work for PKP as a member of their publishing services team, where I'm the crossref and metadata liaison. I ended up in this role because I have a lot o fopinions and like a lot of people with abundant opinions, I look like this. I'm a white, CIS settler from the unceded a.k.a. stolen territory of the mi'kmaq-wolastoquey peoples. Just a short hop from the wolastoq river, a much cooler name than the settler-crowned St. John river, If you ask me. that river is up here next to Maine, a state you rarely think about unless you are mad at Senator Susan Collins.
not to be confused with my pal and co-presenter, Susan Collins. Susan Collins the Senator is exceptionally great at finding excuses for you to be mad at her so you may have many reasons to know where she is from. I'm about to rocket through the following. I'm going to talk a little bit about my life as sort of a metadata wonk in librarianship My life is a metadata support worker for PKP and the efforts we're going through at pkp to make sure that our metadata is good And coming to terms with reality maybe a little bit of Real Talk at the end here.
So! unsurprisingly, I spend a frankly upsetting of time thinking about metadata problems, things like how you can incentivize more diligence with metadata Is the problem literacy? is it time? Is it labor? do I wish metadata were better So that my job were easier? Absolutely! Who decides what's important in metadata is the metadata we want.
equitable? is the metadata we want anglo-centric or euro- centric. Bigtime it is! Uhh, There should be only one citation style, a thing I think about often Like in the fetal position at night, that names should be single strings, and what might be possible if we were not sort of beholden to the iron grip of citation styles Boy, why does anybody still care about citation styles?
It is clear from the conference schedule that this is an affliction many of us share. there are roughly 47 sessions and about 14 of them are about metadata hygiene. How do we have complete records? How do we make sure our metadata is good? That's, like, 30% of the conference schedule. about this particular problem. so what we know is that a lot of us wish metadata fidelity were better than it is.
Imagine all the cool things we could do if we were omniscient. a diligent, accurate world without typos, an accurate world with a clear view of the whole lifecycle of any research projects and products properly attributed, And, a world where people listen to librarians. or a world where people care about metadata as much as we do. hopefully. A world where people have time. So, let's talk a little bit about being a librarian in this space.
I spend a tonne of my time explaining to researchers how their metadata gets passed between publishers and systems ORCID, repositories, openaire, crossref, datacite, and CRIS platforms. and a lot of that time is explaining the ways in which metadata happens TO them. the subtle way in which they enter metadata but metadata just sort of happens around them. Like ROR for example. you never really need to know your own ROR ID, but it's something that's happening to them behind the scenes.
And folks are generally very receptive about this. When I'm talking about publishing services or journal hosting, scholar profiles, repositories, pids, funder mandates, assessing publications I spend all of my time in this sort of publishing space talking about publishing and metadata literacy And like so many others, I've also spent the better part of the last 10 years of my career and life trying to convince people to engage in a public good (open access), and finding hooks that prove that this is good for their careers.
Because I know that "it's good" is not necessarily a motivator for a lot of people. who want to have an important, real, result to their research. ... who want something a little more material. Researchers do, I think, care about all of this stuff, But they also have a lot of things to care about! I think it's important that we square that no amount of being right about how important metadata is, for example, will change the reality that the demands on researchers are more intense or elaborate or complicated than they've ever been.
They've got job, precarity, extensive competition committee and service work, increased teaching workloads All of this pressure to publish, neoliberal administration cutting money and boiling people down to numbers. ChatGPT! is really freaking people out. that's legitimate! There's a lot of bureaucracy and some people are paying out of pocket to publish at the same time I mean, obviously you don't need to, but some folks sure are.
And everybody is trying to do more with less. So when I'm talking about why metadata needs to be good, I'm saying that to these people, and they have a lot going on. So I say things like, well, if you just jump through these hoops, your work is going to be compliant with policies. it's going to be more discoverable. it'll be more ethical. it'll be easier to track and cite. it'll be accessible.
You can preserve it. you won't have to worry about APC charges. And with every single one of these things where I try to help them, it comes with a caveat. Here are the things you need to know about making your work more compliant. Here are the things you need to know about discoverability. they all come with one more thing. and then I say, remember, I'm here to help, which they obviously need, because I've given them a boatload of things they don't really know about that they now need to think about.
So I think about this about this a lot from the perspective of my job and the impact I have with researchers My job is to stand on the end of a dock and throw rocks at a cruise ship. And I'm trying to make that cruise ship change direction. And, any day I hit the boat, is a good day. Often I'm thrilled just to be heard. "a world where people actually listen to librarians" This means I see a lot of nods of acknowledgment when I talk to faculty.
And if about 10% to 20% of that results a meaningful change, I have sure Hit the boat. That's a great day for me. I guess what I'm saying is if I let my expectations get ahead of me, I'm setting myself up to resent both myself and the researchers I work with. So, what capacity exists for widening participation in this space? this space where researchers are doing a lot of the hand holding and work.
So, we have this expression. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. because we're talking to an international audience I converted this to 28.35 grams of prevention is worth .45 kilograms of cure. It's not quite as zippy. Let's talk a little bit about prevention. So the work that we do at PKP. Folks know PKP, I assume, but I'll talk a little bit about it.
PKP is a not for profit organization at/with Simon Fraser university in british columbia, canada. We produce free, open source software To disseminate reasearch and manage the entire scholarly publishing workflow. So, from preprints with open preprint systems, to monographs (open monograph press) and journals (open journal systems). As susan mentioned, we have roughly 34,000 journals worldwide using OJS. the ones we know about, anyway.
And in 2021, our own beacon data indicated that that there was 1.36 million documents published in OJS in 2021. That's a lot of content for something published by free, open source software. PKP also turns 25 this year. Happy birthday, PKP! So we're very good friends with crossref. we do a lot of work with Crossref.
We're a sponsoring organization, as Susan mentioned. And we can act as a membership representative for people who are part of our hosted group or folks who are eligible using the GEM program. People who are using OJS but not able to join directly do to financial, administrative, or technical battiers. We currently sponsor about 156 crossref memberships. Most of MY work in this space with PKP is related to metadata, persistent identifiers and OJS support.
So helping our users handle all of these things. OJS is software that is built to meet the needs of journals in any country, language or discipline. There are a lot of languages and most of them aren't english, So, there's a lot of stuff to consider when we're talking about the way that we talk about metadata. On top of that, every discipline (You may not really think about this a lot) but every discipline has their own unique publishing culture.
They have their own unique baggage around publishing, and they think about their requirements for publishing a little bit differently. So, as you might guess this means I spend spend a lot of time explaining how metadata works to folks who operate journals. And it turns out those folks are also the same folks who are researchers and the people I talk to day-to-day as a librarian.
I also advocate for better metadata internally, which our developers absolutely love. In particular, this means explaing why good metadata important and also the ways that metadata is consumed downstream. in practice, This means I read a lot of emails that say things like "no, I don't recommend putting a DOI in your article title field. I know you want it to appear in the table of contents, but it would be disastrous for a variety of reasons." A great deal of the mistakes I see in metadata come from the following mistaking metadata for styling elements.
Carrying disciplinary or citation style baggage into metadata elements. required fields forcing people to make up metadata. like an email required field, for example when the person doesn't have email or if the person is long-since dead. Names are generally very terrible metadata. creative applications of multi-lingual metadata. and a lack of literacy with the platform and available options.
So that really boils down to about three categories. Users trying to do something unrelated to the metadata. They're trying to change how things look on a website. Vestigial practices from print media, which are all around us in academic publishing. And users making do with the fields they're given to express meaning that isn't covered by the actual metadata field. Maybe they're trying to write their name in a specific way that isn't actually something they can fill out in the form.
many of these journals are small operations with minimal staff. So this idea, this promise of open access and open source to sort of wrest control of scholarly communications from major publishers and back into the hands of researchers. but now those same researchers are responsible for the labor of publishing. the question of completeness making sure the metadata is accurate. So PKP's approach in this space is really to kind of get out of the way and empower our users.
We want to make sure the software as good as we can get it without raising more barriers. So we don't want to, say, REQUIRE metadata completeness because that's going to make people either make up metadata or stop and not fill it out at all. We want to make sure that we try to get out of people's way to record as much metadata as possible. We provide documentation for better practices and recommendations. We have a community support forum where people can ask questions about the software We try to empower users and look for avenues to make users more capable Metadata contributors.
Really, we just want to hit the boat with a rock, right? We want to make small changes to the ways people think about metadata as they go. And on top of that, practically, we have a documentation interest group that's written a ton of documentation in our hub about better practices in metadata. Specifically, a project that we did with coalition publica though CFI funding in canada to create better practices documentation for journals.
so that they understand a little more about the hoops they should be trying to jump through. and also we've been working with crossref to make DOIs as sort of automagical as possible. things you don't have to really think about instead of kind of of wrestling with and putting up a lot of barriers to contributing in that space. Lastly, coming to terms with reality, We expect a lot from really exhausted people!
I think this is an important thing to think about. I know we're all tired but researchers have a lot on their plate. Completeness requires labour And the question for me is for whom? whose job is the completeness of the metadata we're talking about? will completeness require more effort for non-english-speaking researchers?
Absolutely! We have a lot of journals that are based in South America that index, their metadata in english, spanish, and portugese just to make sure that it's indexed and accessible. english journals do not have to jump through the same kinds of hoops. When we discuss "widening participation", what shape does a fair distribution of labor take? Whose going to be handling more participation?
Who are the participants and what responsibilities do they carry? Is worrying about metadata, more my job or the responsibility of researchers? That's a great question. Maybe we're projecting! Ultimately, we can, as service providers and librarians, we can educate. We can provide resources and guidance. We can promote better practices.
We can find ways to make the work easier. We can get out of the way. Uhh, that's useful, I think. We can be patient, which is vital. You know we think about metadata all the time, every day, and we care a lot about it. And then other people are just sort of stepping in and getting a deluge of our fascination with metadata. Metadata is really not, uhh, super fun for people.
and we can also assess our own personal expectations. so these are the things we can do to try to think about helping people contribute without maybe having our expectations be a little too intense. So that was me. Thank you very much. And I'm sorry about how quickly I've spoken. primary publishers themselves, but work with I'm going to make a talk on title, including or publish on behalf of groups of smaller organizations that in the global Scholarship records, its benefits want to join crossref, but otherwise To begin with.
face some of these barriers to do so independently. which is going to be a little bit more And sponsors work directly with crossref that I will need to provide an understanding of where I'm to support filling technical and language issues for the sponsor in Africa. members. Down to progress and way forward. So the members that work with them based on my education.
might fit a specific criteria like being called Egerton university, moved to China for my PHD, based in a certain geographic area and fisheries research institute, and currently or with a certain language, or might be part of a particular institution like a National as an editor in chief and also at crossfire as an ambassador Library.
And as an incoming board member come March 20, 23. So by focusing on specific criteria, Now share with you this particular slide. this also helps to increase coverage, adoption and support Metadata the second one metadata. in that area. I will pick the middle one, which is metadata. Sponsors are able to provide technical support Metadata in an African perspective in the member's local language and then can a presentation on metadata from an African perspective liaise with our support team when needed.
From that hour. And then, of course, the financial benefits and its metadata. are probably one of the key factors. has just taken a rising trajectory, meaning Each organization that works with a sponsor researchers, most librarians are taking doesn't have to join independently or pay and efforts to improve the quality, the quantity and even a membership fee.
from metadata to the community brings The sponsors pay one annual fee that If I want to again share this particular slide. covers all of the organizations that they sponsor, It's a slide that indicates how low as at the year that they and then we invoice the sponsor for all of the content And for sure, it's an indication that Africa as a continent, registration fees for their members rather than each member beginning to pick up research and metadata having to pay us directly.
As much as the membership to some And that allows the members to pay the sponsor organization like crossref is still moving forward in the local currency. Asmuch as the blue color that represent Our program began about 10 years ago But as I said, it is taking a rising trajectory. with four sponsors and about 100 members, primarily to other regions in Africa is low in South Korea and Turkey.
the membership to crossref. A few years later, it grew to 17 sponsors as far as matters of metadata management, with about 1,300 members. But again, moving forward, we will This time, Brazil, India, South Korea, turkey and Ukraine are organizations that are being put in place to ensure were new sponsors. into the future.
And then at the end of last year, we had over 100 sponsors a picture of an Africa in itself in terms of its membership representing close to 11,000 members. just but very few countries. But although the program is growing, I'll pick Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, South there's still a lot of regions that lack sponsor and sponsor the need to strengthen metadata management by ensuring coverage.
deal with metadata management. So we continue to work with members, our ambassadors that, again, help them strengthen their metadata. and the community to help identify organizations of another organization that come that might fit into our sponsor program in those regions. It's called agile in full African journal online. Then of course, our third program is almost depicting the same trend is our collaboration with public knowledge program, PCP, Again, these are an indication of the low or the rising with the developers of open journal systems, metadata management and data security in Africa oj's publishing software.
We those are from an African perspective. So with over 34,000 journals and millions of items published having a well established, a well managed and well secured using oj's, it's one of the most widely used publishing This will make research output in Africa platforms. It will also promote reproducibility This map shows a number of journals in each region that And again, research and editorial integrity uses oj's.
And the last one, again, reporting and assessment And the countries with the largest uptake As I said, I noted previously that. include Indonesia, Brazil, Ukraine, India, Colombia. at the heart of the development stage. And these are regions where we're The lack of. seeing an increase in organizations and generation in Africa has been who are joining crossref.
as having limited funding, inadequate infrastructure, Limited skills are very important. Because so many organizations were using. is made up of over 50 nationalities speaking A few years back, crossref and PCP We even have Arabs in Africa, we have French speaking began a collaboration to create a less technical method and therefore a language barrier within that region for oj's uses to register metadata with us management for the region.
and help publishers and journals take inadequate information to the librarians, inadequate advantage of crossref services. to the institutions that stores that store or generate So we started with a daily XML export And due to these challenges, it has plugin that sent basic metadata directly and scholars do face challenges in creating and maintaining to crossref from oj's, and then later And again, these do limit the visibility and impact several additional plug-ins were created for additional metadata like reference linking and cited by service similarity, check I just.
and authenticate. And then the Thunder registry and these Metadata management, metadata security in Africa allowed for an increase in the amount of metadata I will also note that there are progress that are currently that was sent to us that could ultimately be included that. in the scholarly record.
discoverable and accessible. PCP and crossref continue to work together is the African metadata initiative, to improve the level of overall support and accessibility of metadata in the region. that's provided within orgs and then and guidelines. to also create new pluggable ins that that is coming in to ensure that metadata specifically would increase the metadata that can will ensure that its security, its accessibility is promoted.
be sent from oj's to crossref. On again. So in conclusion, there isn't one solution are geared towards strengthening research to overcome all of the barriers. And there's been an improved data collection and management What works for one region might not work for another There's been increased use of digital technologies or might not even be applicable.
There is a promotion of collaborations Barriers are very general. There are also efforts to improve access They don't apply to all communities and the programs we've developed are really just a start. Institutions or organizations that also exist or and that And we can't make assumptions about what a community needs. to contribute to metadata security in the region.
We have to work with the communities, This African data consensus is a policy framework turn to the challenges that they face, what resources they need, Commission and the African Development Bank and then how best that we can support them. and infrastructure in the continental Africa. So the programs I've mentioned were created in collaboration which is a digital infrastructure initiative that with our communities, but they're just a starting point.
across the region. And we continue to seek additional input and feedback Alliance Africa, the Research Data Alliance Africa study, to help all organizations be able to contribute equally aims to promote the use of data in Africa to our vision of the research and access. We have the African research data center network. And I'll just put a slide here that has links That aims to.
to some of the programs that I mentioned in my presentation by providing data storage, preservation and sharing today. The last one we have the African research universities alliance. And I said, thank you. is a network of African researchers and universities So thank you. by supporting the development of research, data management And Thanks to Susan, a long standing friend of PCP, for kicking things off.
need to strengthen metadata management stations like what So I'm going to talk a little bit And organizations visibility in Africa. about metadata, human beings and the idea of completeness. institutions within the region, but those And this is a bit of a perspective So they need to increase their visibility from being both a librarian in this space and also as well as librarians would have knowledge of their existence someone who does this work with PCP.
And through that, they will either I'm going to cover a lot of ground really fast In terms of. and I apologize for how quickly I am about to go, I also would recommend that African publishers, librarians, but that is who I am. To register their content with metadata management So I'm the open Scholarship and publishing librarian, a.k.a. scholarly communications.
us to contact the metadata management institutions. At what to most of you would be a pretty small school with their data. in Atlanta, Canada, the University of New brunswick? And above all, they need to continue My job plainly, as we know broadly, on metadata management and its benefit. is to make the research that happens Literally that's my contact.
at my institution as available to the public as possible. Pretty straightforward. Thank you, everyone. I also work for PCP as a member of their publishing services
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