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AIS Teaching Resource Fair

Source: AIS Teaching Resource Fair

The History of Higher Education in California: A Big Data Approach

Thursday, April 6 10am -11:30am 180 Doe Library Zach Bleemer discusses how he used data science — thousands of computer-processed versions of annual registers, directories, and catalogs —  to reconstruct a near-complete database of all students, faculty, and courses at four-year universities in California in the first half of the 20th century, including the UC … Continue reading →

Source: The History of Higher Education in California: A Big Data Approach

Berkeley commits to accelerating universal open access, signs the OA2020 Expression of Interest

The University Library at UC Berkeley took a major step today in its commitment to achieving universal open access for scholarly journal literature by signing the OA2020 Expression of Interest, in collaboration with UC Davis and UC San Francisco. OA2020 is an international movement, led by the Max Planck Digital Library in Munich, to convert … Continue reading →

Source: Berkeley commits to accelerating universal open access, signs the OA2020 Expression of Interest

Announcing New Dash Features- April 2017

The Dash team is pleased to announce the release of our newest features. Taking in requests from users as well as standards in the field, we have now adapted the platform with the following releases: Private for Peer Review (Timed-Release of Data), ORCiD integration, email capture for corresponding authors, user friendly downloads, and a variety of search and view enhancements.

Private for Peer Review (Timed-Release of Data)

As mentioned in a previous post, this was formally referred to as embargoing data but we are releasing this feature in the context of keeping data private for the length of peer review. We have now implemented a feature to allow researchers to keep data private, for the purposes of peer review, for up to six months. If a researcher decides to use this option they will be given a private Reviewer URL that can be used by an external party to download the data.

This URL will redirect to the landing page with available data for download as soon as the data are public. If external parties have any questions or would like to request a download they will also now have the ability to reach the corresponding author.

Corresponding Author Email Capture & ORCiD Integration

Corresponding authors (and contributing authors) will now have the ability to enter their email address and ORCiD iD which will both appear on the landing page beneath author name. Just as article publications have, we believe Data Publications should have a corresponding author contact who can be reached with questions about the dataset.

User Friendly Downloads & Interface Improvements

What one uploads is what another may download. When choosing to download the data files, only the files uploaded by the corresponding author will be downloaded.

Some other fixes and features include:

• the wording our our search filters and browse option
• a checkbox at the file upload stage to ensure researchers are not uploading sensitive or identifying information
• explanatory information within the metadata submission for usage notes and related work
• a preview of how large the dataset is on the download button

What’s up next?

• Next Feature: large file upload and bulk file upload
• Future Feature: a curation layer that will allow for administration capabilities

For more information or if you have any questions please check for updates on the @uc3cdl twitter feed, or get in touch at uc3@ucop.edu.

Embargoing the Term “Embargoes” Indefinitely

I’m two months into a position that lends part of its time to overseeing Dash, a Data Publication platform for the University of California. On my first day I was told that a big priority for Dash was to build out an embargo feature. Coming to the California Digital Library (CDL) from PLOS, an OA publisher with an OA Data Policy, I couldn’t understand why I would be leading endeavors to embargo data and not open it up- so I met this embargo directive with apprehension.

I began to acquaint myself with the campuses and a couple of weeks ago while at UCSF I presented the prototype for what this “embargo” feature would look like and I questioned why researchers wanted to close data on an open data platform. This is where it gets fun.

“Our researchers really just want a feature to keep their data private while their associated paper is under peer review. We see this frequently when people submit to PLOS”.

Yes, I had contributed to my own conflict.

While I laughed about how I was previously the person at PLOS convincing UC researchers to make their data public- I recognized that this would be an easy issue to clarify. And here we are.

Embargoes imply a negative connotation in the open community and I ask that moving forward we do not use this phrase to talk about keeping data private until an associated manuscript has been accepted. Let us call this “Private for Peer Review” or “Timed Release”, with a “Peer Review URL” that is available for sharing data during the peer review process as Dryad does.

• Embargoes imply that data are being held private for reasons other than the peer review process.
• Embargoes are not appropriate if you have a funder, publisher, or other mandate to open up your data.
• Embargoes are not appropriate for sensitive data, as these data should not be held in a public repository (embargoed) unless this were through a data access committee and the repository had proper security.
• Embargoes are not appropriate for open Data Publications.

To embargo your data for longer than the peer review process (or for other reasons) is to shield your data from being used, built off of, or validated. This is contrary to “Open” as a strategy to further scientific findings and scholarly communications.

Dash is implementing features that will allow researchers to choose, in line with what we believe is reasonable for peer review and revisions, a publication date up to six months after submission. If researchers choose to use this feature, they will be given a Peer Review URL that can be shared to download the data until the data are public. It is important to note though that while the data may be private during this time, the DOI for the data and associated metadata will be public and should be used for citation. These features will be for the use of Peer Review; we do not believe that data should be held private for a period of time on an open data publication platform for other reasons.

Opening up data, publishing data, and giving credit to data are all important in emphasizing that data are a credible and necessary piece of scholarly work. Dash and other repositories will allow for data to be private through peer review (with the intent to have data be public and accessible in the close future). However, my hope is that as the data revolution evolves, incentives to open up data sooner will become apparent. The first step is to check our vocab and limit the use of the term “embargo” to cases where data are being held private without an open data intention.

California Digital Library Supports the Initiative for Open Citations

California Digital Library (CDL) is proud to announce our formal endorsement for the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC). CDL has long supported free and reusable scholarly work, as well as organizations and initiatives supporting citations in publication. With a growing database of literature and research data citations, there is a need for an open global network of citation data.

The Initiative for Open Citations will work with Crossref and their Cited-by service to open up all references indexed in Crossref. Many publishers and stakeholders have opted in to participate in opening up their citation data, and we hope that each year this list will grow to encompass all fields of publication. Furthermore, we are looking forward to seeing how research data citations will be a part of this discussion.

CDL is a firm believer in and advocate for data citations and persistent identifiers in scholarly work. However, if research publications are cited and those citations are not freely accessible and searchable- our goal is not accomplished. We are proud to support the Initiative for Open Citations and invite you to get in touch with any questions you may have about the need for open citations or ways to be an advocate for this necessary change.

Below are some Frequently Asked Questions about the need, ways to get involved, and misconceptions regarding citations. The answers are provided by the Board and founders of the I4OC Initiative:

I am a scholarly publisher not enrolled in the Cited-by service. How do I enable it?

If not already a participant in Cited-by, a Crossref member can register for this service free-of-charge. Having done so, there is nothing further the publisher needs to do to ‘open’ its reference data, other than to give its consent to Crossref, since participation in Cited-by alone does not automatically make these references available via Crossref’s standard APIs.

I am a scholarly publisher already depositing references to Crossref. How do I publicly release them?

We encourage all publishers to make their reference metadata publicly available. If you are already submitting article metadata to Crossref as a participant in their Cited-by service, opening them can be achieved in a matter of days. Publishers can easily and freely achieve this:

• either by contacting Crossref support directly by e-mail, asking them to turn on reference distribution for all of the relevant DOI prefixes;
• or by themselves setting the < reference_distribution_opt > metadata element to “ any ” for each DOI deposit for which they want to make references openly available.

How do I access open citation data?

Once made open, the references for individual scholarly publications may be accessed immediately through the Crossref REST API.

Open citations are also available from the OpenCitations Corpus , a database created to house scholarly citations, that is progressively and systematically harvested citation data from Crossref and other sources. An advantage of accessing citation data from the OpenCitations Corpus is that they are available in standards-compliant machine-readable RDF format , and include information about both incoming and outgoing citations of bibliographic resources (published articles and books).

Does this initiative cover future citations only or also historical data?

Both. All DOIs under a prefix set for open reference distribution will have open references through Crossref, for past, present, and future publications.

Past and present publications that lack DOIs are not dealt with by Crossref, and gaining access to their citation data will require separate initiatives by their publishers or others to extract and openly publish those references.

Under what licensing terms is citation data being made available?

Crossref exposes article and reference metadata without a license, since it regards these as raw facts that cannot be licensed.

The structured citation metadata within the OpenCitations Corpus are published under a Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication, to make it explicitly clear that these data are open.

My journal is open access. Aren’t its articles’ citations automatically available?

No. Although Open Access articles may be open and freely available to read on the publisher’s website, their references are not separate, and are not necessarily structured or accessible programmatically. Additionally, although their reference metadata may be submitted to Crossref, Crossref historically set the default for references to “closed,” with a manual opt-in being required for public references. Many publisher members have not been aware that they could simply instruct Crossref to make references open, and, as a neutral party, Crossref has not promoted the public reference option. All publishers therefore have to opt in to open distribution of references via Crossref.

Is there a programmatic way to check whether a publisher’s or journal’s citation data is free to reuse?

For Crossref metadata , their REST API reveals how many and which publishers have opened references. Any system or tool (or a JSON viewer) can be pointed to this query: http://api.crossref.org/members?filter=has-public-references:true&rows=1000 to show the count and the list of publishers with ” public-references “: true .

To query a specific publisher’s status, use, for example:

http://api.crossref.org/members?filter=has-public-references:true&rows=1000&qu ery=springer then find the tag for public-references. In some cases it will be set to false.

Contact

You can contact the founding group by e-mail at: info@i4oc.org .

Describing the Research Process

We at UC3 are constantly developing new tools and resources to help researchers manage their data. However, while working on projects like our RDM guide for researchers, we’ve noticed that researchers, librarians, and people working in the broader digital curation space often talk about the research process in very different ways.

To help bridge this gap, we are conducting an informal survey to understand the terms researchers use when talking about the various stages of a research project.

If you are a researcher and can spare about 5 minutes, we would greatly appreciate it if you would click the link below to participate in our survey.

http://survey.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_a97IJAEMwR7ifRP

Thank you.