The British Library’s Scholarly Communications Toolkit

Several software systems struggle with different contexts of use, e.g., due to a huge variety of end-user groups or various application scenarios. In some cases, the use of software systems may change due to external factors such as a pandemic. However, in other cases, software systems are known to be used in various contexts even before they are developed. In this case, it is crucial to consider as many different contexts of use as possible right from the beginning in order to avoid costly changes later on and, above all, user dissatisfaction. However, even when it is known that the software system will be used in different contexts, these contexts are often neither obvious nor easy to identify.We propose to use workshops with stakeholders as a mean to identify different contexts of use. These workshops can be conducted at different points in time, but in this paper, we present a workshop conducted before starting the development phase, that is, during the requirements elicitation phase (to identify the different contexts of use as early as possible). We conducted such a workshop in a large interdisciplinary research project with different institutions from research and practice. In this paper, we present the workshop structure and its results, our experiences, as well as take-aways highlighting how (online) workshops might support the requirements elicitation when different contexts of use are to be expected.KeywordsCrowdREElicitation workshopCreativity techniquesContext of usePandemicStakeholder identification

The emergence of new market spaces: Brokerage and firm cognitive endowment

This public conference pursues a theme that ICSTI started this year on Evaluation and Metrics. A preceding conference on a similar subject was held in January 2007 in London, associated to the ICSTI Winter Meeting. It was hosted by the British Library and was entitled: “User Behavior and Its Metrics: Monitoring the Needs of Scholarly Authors and Researchers”.1 Today’s conference addresses the main theme of assessing the quality and impact of research. It focuses on three aspects: Quality, Certification and Peer Review, Tools and Metrics, and Practices and Perspectives of Research Evaluation. A brief word about ICSTI, the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information: ICSTI provides a unique forum for interactions between organizations that create, disseminate and use scientific and technical information. ICSTI’s mission cuts across scientific disciplines, as well as international borders. It gives its members the benefit of a truly global community. ICSTI’s general assembly will follow this conference and will address a number of key issues in scientific and technical information. Many thanks to Herbert Gruttemeier of INIST for organizing this conference, to Isabelle Debano of INIST and Elisabeth Maitre-Allain of ICSTI secretariat in Paris for providing the logistics, Raymond Duval, INIST Director General for kindly providing the venue and all the speakers for accepting the invitation to come and share their knowledge and expertise.

Mobility coupled with the development of a wide variety of access devices has engendered new requirements for HCI such as the ability of user interfaces to adapt to different contexts of use. We define a context of use as the set of values of variables that characterise thecomputational device(s) used for interacting with the system as well as the physical and social environment where the interaction takes place. A user interface is plastic if it is able to adapt to context changes while preserving usability. In this paper, we present a process and a software mechanism that support context changes for plastic user interfaces. We propose to structure adaptation as a three-step process: recognition of the situation,computation of a reaction to cope with the situation, and execution of the reaction. Reactions are specified in an evolution model which, in turn, is executed by a context supervisor. This supervisor is notified of context changes by a software probe that automatically detects deviations from the current situation. When notified, the supervisor executes the evolution model, and, when possible, adapts the user interface to the new context of use.

Centres for teaching and learning at postsecondary educational institutions in Canada seek to serve the professional development needs of faculty members throughout the college or university. Recognizing the limits of conventional frameworks for faculty development, such as one-time workshops, pedagogical conferences, and lunchtime discussion sessions, this interpretive inquiry explores learning communities as an additional framework for serving faculty development and cross-institutional professional development needs. The study asks: what does it mean for faculty, educational developers, support staff, and administrators to participate in a learning community at a college in Canada? Data collected through individual inquiry conversations (semi-structured interviews) and research memos were used to develop narrative descriptions representing the participants’ respective experiences of a learning community in a large, urban college context in Canada. These narrative descriptions offer portraits of the meaning that learning community members made of their own experience, revealing that the learning communities served not only as sites for professional development, but also formed microcultures within the institution, which, over time, influenced educational (academic) and organizational (administrative) change, both in policy and in practice.

Concentrating Photo Voltaic (CPV) systems maximize energy harvested from the sun with multi-junction solar cells of less area, reducing related implementation costs and reaching energy production thresholds up to 38,9 %. Nowadays, CPV systems are generally implemented in solar energy farms in a permanent location, however, these systems could be used in other dynamic contexts, such as vehicles or portable devices. In this way, mechanical and geometrical parameters related to manipulation, transportation and installation should be carefully considered at the design stage. Besides, each condition of use presents different variables affecting these parameters. In all, there is not an established architecture for these systems, opening up the possibility of radically changing their use, geometry and components. Therefore, a concept of a methodical process for designing of CPV systems is proposed in order to predict their behavior in terms of implementation and energy production. This might allow the development of robust concepts that can be adapted to different context of use as required, providing an itinerant character and thus extending the field of implementation of these systems beyond a static use. The relevant variables for the use of CPV systems are determined through experimentation considering the implementation of Fresnel lenses as light concentrators. This allows generating a structured design guide composed of different methods of measurement, selection and development. The methodical process is based on a perspective of functional modules considering needs, technical aspects and particular usage conditions of each design and it would provide appropriate guidelines in each circumstance.

Our life is characterized by the presence of a multitude of interactive devices and smart objects exploited for disparate goals in different contexts of use. Thus, it is impossible for application developers to predict at design time the devices and objects users will exploit, how they will be arranged, and in which situations and for which objectives they will be used. For such reasons, it is important to make end users able to easily and autonomously personalize the behaviour of their Internet of Things applications, so that they can better comply with their specific expectations. In this paper, we present a method and a set of tools that allow end users without programming experience to customize the context-dependent behaviour of their Web applications through the specification of trigger-action rules. The environment is able to support end-user specification of more flexible behaviour than what can be done with existing commercial tools, and it also includes an underlying infrastructure able to detect the possible contextual changes in order to achieve the desired behaviour. The resulting set of tools is able to support the dynamic creation and execution of personalized application versions more suitable for users’ needs in specific contexts of use. Thus, it represents a contribution to obtaining low threshold/high ceiling environments. We also report on an example application in the home automation domain, and a user study that has provided useful positive feedback.

This paper shows a technique that allows adaptive user interfaces, spanning multiple devices, to be rendered from the task specification at runtime taking into account the context of use. The designer can specify a task model using the ConcurTaskTrees Notation and its context-dependent parts, and deploy the user interface immediately from the specification. By defining a set of context-rules in the design stage, the appropriate context-dependent parts of the task specification will be selected before the concrete interfaces will be rendered. The context will be resolved by the runtime environment and does not require any manual intervention. This way the same task specification can be deployed for several different contexts of use. Traditionally, a context-sensitive task specification only took into account a variable single deployment device. This paper extends this approach as it takes into account task specifications that can be executed by multiple co-operating devices.

According to Robin P. Peek, co-founder of the Open Access Directory and associate professor at the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science, scholarly communication through the dissemination of journals was first reported in 1665 (Peek & Newby, 1996, p. 5). However, it took 337 years for the scholarly community to formalize a global initiative declaring research a public good, with unrestricted, free access for everyone. The 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative ushered in a paradigm shift in the way scholars create and share knowledge. The launch of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in 2003 formalized an alternative venue for scholars to publish their work. From 2004 to 2010, the number of titles listed in the DOAJ rose from 1,250 to more than 5,200(Walters & Linvill, 2010, p. 372). Today, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) continues to work as a catalyst for new models of scholarly communication, working in the fields of author rights, digital repositories, and open data.As the model of scholarly communication evolves and shifts, so too has the field of bibliometrics. The Open Citation Project, a joint NSF-JISC International Digital Libraries Research Programme funded initiative, has been analyzing citation counts in open access repositories, impact factors of open access journals, and the role of preprints in the dissemination of knowledge since 1999. The growing field of altmetrics is currently developing alternative models to traditional citation indices, such as the h-index, and beginning to study the role of Zotero and Mendeley within the context of scholarly communication. These new approaches to scholarly metrics are uncovering the broad intellectual networks contributing to a single journal article, well beyond the bibliography. As a corollary, the persistent myth of the lone scholar working in a silent, secluded office surrounded by books and articles is slowly eroding.Academic libraries have been at the center of many of these endeavors, often pushing open access initiatives on their campuses, building digital repositories, hosting Zotero workshops for faculty and students, and assisting scholars in negotiating author rights for their work. Libraries are pivotal nodes in almost every intellectual network. However, even with the development of new metrics in paratextual evaluation, the work of libraries and librarians continues to be obscured. This is because the libraries lurk in the most overlooked paratextual element: the acknowledgement.What this paper argues is that the acknowledgments are a crucial but overlooked aspect of scholarly communication and bibliometrics. Not only would a comprehensive analysis of acknowledgements provide a more accurate description of intellectual networks, further eroding the myth of the lone scholar, but it would also quantify and illuminate the importance of libraries and librarians in the scholarly communication process. As a corollary, tenure-track librarians should include research acknowledgments in tenure and promotion reports in order to demonstrate their contributions to scholarship.History of Paratextual ScholarshipThere has been a growing interest in the paratextual elements of scholarly communication in the last decade. Formal elements of documentation, footnotes and citations in particular, have become the subject of entire treatises on expressions of intellectual debt.(Grafton, 1997; Hauptman, 2008; Zerby, 2002). Marginalia, written comments or annotations in the margins of manuscripts, in addition, have been examined quite thoroughly by H.J. Jackson's Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (Jackson, 2001). Scholars in this field have largely focused on the functional attributes of paratextual elements as expressions of intellectual debt. As Sir Anthony Grafton writes about the use of footnotes in historical scholarship, First, they persuade: they convince the reader that the historian has done an acceptable amount of work, enough to lie within the tolerance of the field. …

Research data management has become a critical issue for campus researchers, funding agencies, and libraries, who have made substantial investments of time, energy, and resources into support for managing and sharing data. As data management programs proliferate, however, assessment of research data services has become a notorious challenge for libraries. How can we know—and demonstrate—that our efforts are having an impact, and how can we learn to make them even more effective? In this session, we will present a survey of several frameworks for assessing research data management services. We will lead a discussion about the application of different frameworks for assessing or auditing existing skill sets, external facing services, and capacity to support an array of research data services. This discussion will be grounded in a demonstration of how we applied one framework to audit the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries’s “training ground” model, which serves the dual purpose of developing competencies within our librarians and supporting researchers in their needs to manage, preserve, and share research assets. Through an active discussion of our efforts, and the efforts of libraries around the world, we can chart a course for effective research data management that can help guide libraries already deep into the process as well as those just getting their feet wet. Note: This presentation and conference paper is derived in part from the following publication: Davis, H. M., & Cross, W. M. (2015).Using a data management plan review service as a training ground for librarians. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 3(2), eP1243.

Anatomy of use-inspired researchers: From Pasteur’s Quadrant to Pasteur’s Cube model

The issue this article aims to address is the fact that publications may nowadays be used to assess impact and quality of research in ways academics may not be fully aware of. During recent years, scholarly publications have gained in importance, not primarily as the traditional vehicle for the dissemination of new scientific findings, but as a foundation for assessing the production and impact of organizations, research groups and individual researchers. This means that publications as artefacts per se are starting to play a new important role in the scientific community and that researchers need to be aware of how publication and citation counts are being used to assess their research and the outreach, impact and reputation of their mother organization. University rankings, for instance, often have some parameters based on the publishing of the ranked institution. This article is thus not about scientific writing as such; it focuses on what happens to your publication after the publishing has taken place and on aspects to take into account while planning the publishing of your article, report or book.

The nature of the research endeavour is changing rapidly and requires a wide set of skills beyond the research focus. The delivery of aspects of researcher training ‘beyond the bench’ is met by different sections of an institution, including the research office, the media office and the library. In Australia researcher training in open access, research data management and other aspects of open science is primarily offered by librarians. But what training do librarians receive in scholarly communication within their librarianship degrees? For a degree to be offered in librarianship and information science, it must be accredited by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), with a curriculum that is based on ALIA’s lists of skills and attributes. However, these lists do not contain any reference to key open research terms and are almost mutually exclusive with core competencies in scholarly communication as identified by the North American Serials Interest Group and an international Joint Task Force. Over the past decade teaching by academics in universities has been professionalised with courses and qualifications. Those responsible for researcher training within universities and the material that is being offered should also meet an agreed accreditation. This paper is arguing that there is a clear need to develop parallel standards around ‘research practice’ training for PhD students and Early Career Researchers, and those delivering this training should be able to demonstrate their skills against these standards. Models to begin developing accreditation standards are starting to emerge, with the recent launch of the Centre for Academic Research Quality and Improvement in the UK. There are multiple organisations, both grassroots and long-established that would be able to contribute to this project.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most common still relentlessly progressive neurodegenerative disorder with a long period in which the pathophysiological process is already spreading but cardinal motor symptoms are not present. This review outlines the major developments and milestones in our understanding of PD that have shaped the way we define this disorder. Past criteria and definitions of PD have been based on clinical motor manifestations enabling diagnosis of the disease only in later symptomatic stages. Nevertheless, with advancing knowledge of disease pathophysiology and aim of early disease detection, a major shift of the diagnostic paradigm is being advocated towards a biological definition similar to other neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease and Huntington's disease, with the ultimate goal of an earlier, disease course modifying therapy. We summarize the major pillars of this possible approach including in vivo detection of neuronal α-synuclein aggregation, neurodegeneration and genetics and outline their possible application in different contexts of use in the frame of biological PD definition.

O objetivo deste estudo é analisar a desambiguação lexical durante a compreensão leitora em inglês como língua estrangeira. Sabe-se que, para desambiguar uma palavra, o leitor normalmente recorre ao contexto; assim, a pesquisa está fundamentada teoricamente em questões que dizem respeito à definição de contexto, e abarca uma teoria lexical denominada Hipótese da Qualidade Lexical (HQL) que explica como as características das palavras (aspectos fonológicos e semânticos, por exemplo), são parte fundamental da compreensão leitora. Este trabalho faz parte de um projeto maior, ainda em andamento, que aqui, traz um estudo de caso que analisa a ambiguidade das palavras record e track em diferentes contextos de uso. Os resultados preliminares mostram que as características das palavras, bem como os diferentes tipos de contexto não estão desvinculados do fenômeno da desambiguação, mas o leitor nem sempre tem a ciência de que precisa desambiguar, ainda que compreenda o que leu.