Open and Equitable Scholarly Communications: Creating a More Inclusive Future

Using a framework of care to design experiences in formal or informal learning does two things. It acknowledges intentions of reflective learning through open communication and meets expectations of scholars seeking knowledge within a learning community. This proposed framework was developed from programs involving popular education, community development, open communication, critical reflection, and democratic participation. It can be applied to most instructional contexts, where relationships between facilitators and participants are valued as part of an active learning environment. This framework of care builds on the work of Myles Horton, Paulo Freire, Nel Noddings, and Fergal Finnegan. When planning programs, we recommend both understanding participants’ learning goals and then being attentive to care, community, communication, critical reflection, equality, and democracy. Through these approaches, educators can create a caring experience for learners.

Reviewed by: The Future of Scholarly Communication, edited by Deborah Shorley and Michael Jubb Jeffrey Beall The Future of Scholarly Communication, ed. Deborah Shorley and Michael Jubb. London: Facet Publishing, 2013. 188 pages. $80.00 (ISBN 978-1-85604-817-0) The thirteen essays in The Future of Scholarly Communication are divided into two parts called Changing Researcher Behavior and Other Players: Roles and Responsibilities. They cover most of the hot topics in scholarly communication, including open access, institutional repositories, data mining, and the future roles of libraries in the scholarly communication ecosystem. A better title might have been The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Scholarly Communication, as few of the authors really make any definite predictions; they seem to have the same uncertainty that most of us share regarding scholarly communication’s future and instead primarily identify and describe past and present trends. While the work purports to be about the future, many of the authors spend a large number of words expressing their disdain with the present. An example is David C. Prosser’s chapter titled “Researchers and Scholarly Communications: An Evolving Interdependency.” Much of this chapter actually focuses on the past, and the author bemoans the fact that the Internet has had little impact on the essentials of journal publishing. He seems more interested in forcing change than in analyzing it or letting it occur organically. Similarly, Mark L. Brown’s chapter, “The Role of the Research Library,” is probably the most relevant one for the readers of this journal, but the chapter again focuses disproportionately on the past and present instead of the future. Brown concludes that research libraries are leaders of innovation in scholarly communication, that they serve as centers of experimentation and advocacy, that they work to provide access to all the different types of scholarly communication, and that they generally work in collaboration and as consortia to achieve economies of scale. On the other hand, the book’s final chapter, “The Library User’s View,” presents a perspective that essentially devalues libraries as simple acquisitions departments. Author Roger Schonfeld describes how he believes science faculty experience the library: “The scientist, for whom the experience is indeed frequently seamless, has little recognition that he is using the campus library, other than in its role as a purchasing agent.” (p. 172) Fortunately, the book’s other authors do not share Schonfeld’s [End Page 121] cynical view of academic libraries, instead affirming research libraries’ role as centers of innovation in science communication. Of course, this work’s elephant in the room is the fact that it purports to describe the future of scholarly communication using a technology developed in the fifteenth century—the printed book. Is the future not yet here? Some of the contributors are advocates of open access, yet they allowed their work to be published as a hardcopy monograph. Moreover, most of the discussion revolves around the scholarly article; monographs are largely ignored, so it is ironic that the authors choose to disseminate their work not only in an old technology but also in a form they neglect to even describe as being a part of scholarly communication’s future. Finally, the book is excessively centered on the United Kingdom and insufficiently treats how research libraries are organized and how research is funded in North America. Published in April 2013, this work is already becoming dated. Much of it deals with scholarly open-access publishing, a topic best covered in open-access works themselves—works published in the many new and open scholarly communication venues the book itself describes. Jeffrey Beall University of Colorado Denver jeffrey.beall@ucdenver.edu Copyright © 2013 Johns Hopkins University Press

Science in the early modern world depended on openness in scholarly communication. On the other hand, a web of commercial, political, and religious conflicts required broad measures of secrecy and confidentiality; similar measures were integral to scholarly rivalries and plagiarism. This paper analyzes confidentiality and secrecy in intellectual and technological knowledge exchange via letters and drawings. We argue that existing approaches to understanding knowledge exchange in early modern Europe--which focus on the Republic of Letters as a unified entity of corresponding scholars--can be improved upon by analyzing multilayered networks of communication. We describe a data model to analyze circles of confidence and cultures of secrecy in intellectual and technological knowledge exchanges. Finally, we discuss the outcomes of a first experiment focusing on the question of how personal and professional/official relationships interact with confidentiality and secrecy, based on a case study of the correspondence of Hugo Grotius.

During the last decade, calls for structural and radical reform have inundated American schools (Lewis, 1989). Teacher educators, legislatures, and the general public question the value, productivity, and relevancy of teacher preparation programs (Goodlad, 1990; Stallings & Kowalski, 1990). Strengthening relationships between public schools and higher education through school-university partnerships is one strategy to improve education. Numerous collaborative groups are attempting such efforts (American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, 1996; Berg & Murphy, 1992; Glickman, 1993; Goodlad, 1990; Sizer, 1992). One of the most visible is a group of research institutions, initially called the Holmes Group (1990) and more recently called the Holmes Partnership. A central strategy of the Holmes Group/Partnership is the establishment of Professional Development Schools (PDSs). Diverse in structure, governance, and operation, (Fullan, Galluzzo, Morris, & Watson, 1996; Hardin & Kunkel, 1994), PDSs conceptualized by the Holmes Group are a new kind of public school that would serve itself and professional education the way teaching hospitals serve medical education (Murray, 1996, p. 29). The Holmes Group has established the following guiding principles for these partnerships: teaching and learning for understanding; creating a learning community; teaching and learning for understanding for everybody's children; continuing learning by teachers, teacher educators, and administrators; thoughtful, long-term inquiry into teaching and learning by school and university faculty working as partners; and inventing a new institution (Holmes Group, 1990, p. vii). Numerous institutions of higher education, including the College of Education at Auburn University, Alabama, seek to reach these ideals through school-university partnerships. Forming the Learning Coalition Auburn University initiated its Professional Development School (PDS) and extended collaboration by uniting with other institutions to establish a group of PDS partnerships. In 1993, the dean of the College of Education acquired funds from the Alabama Power Foundation to unite with four other institutions of higher education and their partner schools to form a coalition of PDSs called the Learning Coalition. The partners selected the word coalition because it signifies that partners are equal and able to decide how to organize and operate within a mutually agreed-upon framework (Tushnet, 1993). The aim of the Coalition was to create a community of learners sharing a common purpose, operating in a diverse manner, learning from one another, and being a change catalyst in the state. Initiating the Process of Collaboration The Auburn University dean invited deans of four other institutions to become part of the Learning Coalition by creating PDS relationships at each of their sites. They committed to sharing information, knowledge, and ideas over a 3-year period. The deans joined with superintendents, school systems, principals, and schools to begin the process of collaboration. PDS partnerships exist at five sites: Alabama State University/Carver Junior High School, Montgomery County Schools; Auburn University/Sanford Middle School, Lee County Schools; Jacksonville State University/Southside Elementary School, Piedmont City Schools; Troy State University at Dothan/Ozark and Dothan City Schools; University of South Alabama/E. R. Dickson Elementary School, Mobile County Schools. In addition to the Holmes principles, the partnerships are founded upon six guidelines: * Each partnership will include one or more schools and a university. * Each partner will be considered equal. * Open communication and support will be cornerstones of the relationship. * The partnership will be a long-term commitment. * Partners will meet, share, and support one another and the other four partners. …

This paper analyzes the current status of open access policies, publishing, and archiving in the field of medicine. Journals indexed in SCI are published by open access publishers such as BMC Ltd. and PLoS and then the research articles in those journals are archived in PMC and BMC. Also, funding institutions participate in developing open access as a new scholarly communication model and governments or independent funding institutions outside the country make policies for open access. But scholary communities in Korea do not develop their services in the level of a new scholarly communication model even though they open their journal articles on the homepages. This paper suggests several plans for the open access scholarly communication in the field of medicine in Korea.

OpenAIRE is the European Union initiative for an Open Access Infrastructure for Research in support of open scholarly communication and access to the research output of European funded projects and open access content from a network of institutional and disciplinary repositories. This article outlines the curation activities conducted in the OpenAIRE infrastructure, which employs a multi-level, multi-targeted approach: the publication and implementation of interoperability guidelines to assist in the local data curation processes, the data curation due to the integration of heterogeneous sources supporting different types of data, the inference of links to accomplish the publication research contextualization and data enrichment, and the end-user metadata curation that allows users to edit the attributes and provide links among the entities.

This paper examines how two contrasting academic publishers are responding to the opportunities and challenges of Web 2.0 to innovate their services. Our findings highlight the need to take seriously the role of publishers in the move towards a vision of more rapid and open scholarly communication and to understand the factors that shape their role as intermediaries in the innovation pathways that may be needed to achieve it.

The latest ALA Annual Conference in DC saw the unveiling of the action-oriented research agenda Open and Equitable Scholarly Communications: Creating a More Inclusive Future , developed with leadership from the ACRL Research and Scholarly Environment Committee. It is a key milestone in the association and in the profession by encouraging the community to make the scholarly communications system more open, inclusive, and equitable by outlining trends, encouraging practical actions, and clearly identifying the most strategic research questions to pursue. The report punctuates conversations that the association has been having for the past few years and provides a framework for how to approach institutionalizing and modelling these values.

The tension between publishing strategically to enhance standing in current academic culture and increasing the openness of scholarly communications is one I see regularly. Lizzie Gadd’s <em> My double life </em> blog post articulating this tension resonated for many Bibliomagician readers.

Research information infrastructure services require transparent criteria and guidelines to be considered trustworthy, i.e. sustainable, interoperable and ready for future challenges. The DINI Certificate for Open Access Publication Services (an English version is currently in preparation) supports these requirements. The community-developed, noncommercial certificate paves the way for open scholarly communication and supports the prerequisites for the free availability of scholarly information as an essential element of future-oriented research-related services. Launched in 2004 and now in its 7th revised version, the DINI certificate has undergone dozens of successful certification processes, and is still unique and can be considered a de facto standard for publishing services, at least in Germany, and a role model for other countries. It is therefore recommended as a guide for publication services by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The DINI Certificate is managed by a team of information experts from research libraries, research organisations and software developers who are organised in the “Electronic Publishing” working group of DINI e.V. DINI or the German Initiative for Networked Information (Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation) promotes the development of interoperable open and trustworthy information infrastructures and services at research institutions.The DINI Certificate is based on an elaborate set of criteria that takes into account international standards and reflects the current state of technical, organisational and editorial requirements. For certified institutions, the DINI certificate provides a quasiguarantee that their service complies with the requirements of open science and will continue to do so. For others, it provides guidance on implementing a state-of-the-art service. Feedback from the interested community is collected through an open call for comments and taken into account in the revision processes.In the latest certificate (2022), the focus is on supporting users as authors and recipients, the requirements of open science, the sustainability of the service infrastructure, and the desired internationalisation. As a first step towards internationalisation, the certificate has been extended to include the specific requirements for certification of Austrian publication services. Complementary tools and measurements support the effectiveness of the certificate.This presentation will highlight the “DINIverse” − the DINI Certificate and its complementary tools − as a central instrument and inspiration for establishing and maintaining trustworthy Open Access publishing services. In three chapters it will give a brief overview of the origin of the certificate and the continuous adoption of new established requirements as essential parts of the “DINIvolution”, the related workflows, the benefits for users as well as the related services and projects: e.g. supporting tools like the DINI OAI validator, a dynamic overview of publishing services from Germanspeaking countries developed in cooperation with BASE - Bielefeld Academic Search Engine as well as a specialised vocabulary to support compliance with international standards.

The recent success of open access across the scientific landscape may hide strong inequalities among scientific communities in terms of adoption of open scholarly communications. It is a fact that concerns regarding equity, diversity and inclusion are quite recent in the community. Then, how should we try to redesign open access to address these concerns? The talk will aim at suggesting potential solutions and open a discussion with the audience.

Decision letter for "Factors influencing the adoption and use of open access scholarly communication among researchers in India"

Purpose – The study seeks to investigate factors that affect the adoption and use of open access in Tanzanian health sciences universities. Design/methodology/approach – Based on a cross-sectional questionnaire survey, 415 faculty members were selected through a stratified random sampling from a population of 679 in all eight health sciences universities in Tanzania. The response rate was 71.1 per cent. Findings – Based on the social exchange theory (SET), and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), the study developed a model suitable for assessing open access adoption and usage in academic institutions. The study found that facilitating conditions, extrinsic benefits (professional recognition), behavioural intention and individual characteristics (professional rank, technical skills and number of publications) predicted actual usage of open access. Other factors related to contextual factors (attitude, and open access culture), and extrinsic benefits (academic reward, accessibility and preservation) determined behavioural intention to use open access. Fear to violate publisher's copyright policies and effort expectancy however de-motivated faculty to adopt open access, while copyright concerns inhibited faculty's actual usage of open access. Originality/value – This is the first comprehensive study focusing on the health sciences faculty's open access adoption and usage behaviour in Africa, and Tanzania in particular, and reveals findings that are useful for planning and implementing open access initiatives in other institutions with similar conditions.

To ensure the success of Open Science, we have to understand how it systematically changes the research system as a whole. This presentation focuses on the synthesis of the changing research landscape and the utilisation of policies, emerging tools, and practices into shaping end-to-end systems for embedding actionability in all research stages: planning, tracking, and assessing. Specifically, it will explore the designing of interconnected systems that involve Data Management Plans, Scientific Knowledge Graphs, and FAIR Assessors, all of which are essential components of research workflows.

The FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) constitute a guide whose aim is to improve the management of digital scholarly resources. Nevertheless, the literature regarding data services other than data repositories is still scarce.OpenEdition is a digital infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) that carried out an internal full review to assess the degree of FAIRness of its activities. The objective of this paper is to present the methodology employed by OpenEdition’s team and the recommendations for the FAIRification of a publishing system, and hence, the elements for the FAIR Publishing Toolkit. The FAIR review was conducted in three main phases: preparation, assessment, and result phase, which listed the recommendations for the FAIR principles implementation. The preparation phase gathered the available information to define the perimeter of the FAIR review. It comprised two steps: the landscape study and the exam of actual use cases. The assessment phase contextualized the FAIR principles according to the scholarly publishing context, defined the datasets to be analyzed, carried outa FAIR maturity review per dataset, and analyzed the state of the art of some important FAIR-related elements. The result phase produced the recommendations, organized as priorities and extended objectives. The priority recommendations regard persistent identifiers and licensing policies. The extended objectives focus on authors' information management, controlled vocabularies, machine-actionability, and Digital Management Plans.