Library of Michigan

We explored the motivations of 588 university library patrons who chose to either have the library retain their checkout histories or not. We also examined associations between checkout history choice and both general data privacy concerns, and campus role. Over 90% opted to retain their histories. This group, compared to the no-retain group, had fewer privacy concerns, had greater trust in the library relative to the university, and were less likely to be librarians, archivists, or curators. We discuss how these findings add to the literature on privacy concerns of library users, and their possible implications for privacy policies.

ABSTRACT This study explores the incidence and nature of self-plagiarism across various disciplines. Using Retraction Watch data, we analyze retraction times, authorship patterns, disciplinary differences, and geographical origin of manuscripts retracted due to duplications of data, image, complete article or parts of text. We find that image and entire article duplications are primary causes of self-plagiarism-related retractions. Duplication of entire article is most prevalent in the social sciences and business. In biomedical fields, image duplication is the main issue, with the longest median retraction time of 4 years. In comparison, the median retraction time for all self-plagiarism cases is 3.2 years, and for all plagiarism-related retractions - 1.7 years. We find more authors on self-plagiarized than plagiarized manuscripts. Author counts are also higher when duplicated material is data or image than when duplication involves text or entire article. Our comprehensive analysis not only highlights critical issues but also offers insights for developing stronger policies to uphold academic integrity.

ABSTRACTLittle consistency exists in how individuals enter scholarly publishing, let alone advance their careers. More transparency and documentation can help increase diversity in an industry that wrestles with its privilege. In this article, we report on a project initiated by three publishing industry associations to aggregate, normalise, and analyse public job postings and internal position descriptions in scholarly publishing. After gathering more than 1000 unique descriptions, a group of knowledgeable volunteers qualitatively coded them. Researchers from the University of Michigan checked for data consistency and analysed the job description corpus. Preliminary visualisations highlight the skills that suit potential applicants for various publishing positions and the skills that are most important to build for advancement. The findings can inform the development of products to make publishing a more equitable industry, such as interactive tools to match individuals with types of publishing jobs, well‐formed template positions, and training programs that address skills gaps.

Combined conference reports for the Academic Business Library Directors (ABLD) meetings in 2023 and 2024. The 2023 meeting took place May 9th through the 12th, 2023 at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The 2024 meeting took place April 23rd through the 26th 2024 at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The were the first two meetings held in person after the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study explores the evolution of publication practices associated with the SARS‐CoV‐2 research papers, namely, peer‐reviewed journal and review articles indexed in PubMed and their associated preprints posted on bioRxiv and medRxiv servers: a total of 4,031 journal article‐preprint pairs. Our assessment of various publication delays during the January 2020 to March 2021 period revealed the early bird effect that lies beyond the involvement of any publisher policy action and is directly linked to the emerging nature of new and ‘hot’ scientific topics. We found that when the early bird effect and data incompleteness are taken into account, COVID‐19 related research papers show only a moderately expedited speed of dissemination as compared with the pre‐pandemic era. Medians for peer‐review and production stage delays were 66 and 15 days, respectively, and the entire conversion process from a preprint to its peer‐reviewed journal article version took 109.5 days. The early bird effect produced an ephemeral perception of a global rush in scientific publishing during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. We emphasize the importance of considering the early bird effect in interpreting publication data collected at the outset of a newly emerging event.

NISO recently updated the Open Discovery Initiative Recommended Practice (https://www.niso.org/publications/rp-19-2020-odi), which outlines best practices for working with library discovery services. It defines ways for libraries to assess the level of content provider participation; streamlines the process by which libraries, content providers and discovery service providers work together; defines models for “fair” linking; and suggests usage statistics that should be collected for libraries and for content providers. The recommendations in this document, created by members of the Open Discovery Initiative Standing Committee, enable libraries, discovery service providers, and content providers to work together to the full extent of their abilities - providing the most effective and rich experience to end users.

Abdullah Alqaseer was born in Salamiyah, Syria, and has published a number of essays as well as a short story collection, Nackt im AlAbbasseen, and a novel, Gebrauchte Alpträume.He now lives in Halle, Germany, and continues to write."A Lie Named Germany" was translated by Mustafa Al-Slaiman for Weiter Schreiben (Writing On), a project that seeks to provide a platform for authors originally from countries that are currently plagued by war or other crises, enabling them to continue writing, publishing, and finding readers for their work.Thus, Weiter Schreiben typically presents texts in multiple languages-in this case Arabic and German-enabling different points of linguistic entry.