Ebook: Positioning and Power in Academic Publishing: Players, Agents and Agendas

Running a technology-informed conference such as the International Conference on Electronic Publishing (Elpub) for the twentieth time could be taken as a sign of saturation and maturity. However, if we consider technology as only one cultural aspect of our current scholarly communication ecosystem, we have to note that we continue to be in the middle of a digital transformation. Technologies come and go due to social reasons; the positioning of stakeholders and the distribution of economic, technological and discursive power continues to be negotiated. And at times a seemingly given fact of publishing like the transfer of intellectual property rights to third parties gets heavily questioned – as the recent discussion around the shadow library Sci-Hub indicates. To provide room for discussion beyond technology and embed technology in its social and cultural framework, Elpub 2016 will open the floor for emerging alternatives in how scholars and citizens interact with scholarly content and the role dissemination and publishing plays in these interactions. What is the core of publishing today? How does agenda-setting in emerging frameworks like Open Science work and what is the nature of power of the surrounding scholarly discourses? How does this relate to the European and world-wide Open Science and Open Innovation agenda of funders and institutions, and what does this look like in publishing practice? Asking such questions promises to widen our horizons.

Elpub reaches a great milestone with its 20th anniversary this year, to be held in Göttingen, Germany. Since its beginnings twenty years ago, the conference has been a leading forum for electronic publishing topics, attracting people from around the world and facilitating active collaboration and knowledge exchange. Twenty years on, the conference brings together leading stakeholders such as academics, practitioners, policy makers, students and entrepreneurs from a wide variety of fields and countries.

The conference once again has an exciting programme in store for attendees and readers of the proceedings alike. The conference opens with a reflection and celebration of the last twenty years. This year, 17 research papers and 9 posters will be presented. The programme covers a wide variety of topics, including how to maintain the quality of electronic publications, modelling processes, and implementation issues regarding open access. These subjects, and especially the latter, become even more prevalent with reforms such as Britain's Research Excellence Framework rule which allows only open access articles to be eligible for submission – and on this basis, deposit in repositories (as a core element of institutional research information systems) becomes the norm. At Elpub, there will be several new publishing systems and repositories presented and tested, as well as datasets for the delegates to examine.

In addition, four workshops will offer delegates the opportunity to explore “Open Peer Review: Models, Benefits and Limitations” (co-organized by OpenAIRE), “Opening up the collection – reuse and publishing” (LIBER), “Entering the publishing system – Junior Scientist Day (FOSTER)” and “OJS 3.0 and OMP 1.2: The latest in open source software for academia-controlled publishing (PKP)”.

We are delighted to have three captivating keynote talks this year: Jean-Claude Guédon from the University of Montréal, Canada, will speak on the topic of “Whither Open Access? Four scenarios and four choices”, and our second keynote speaker, Tara Andrews from the University of Bern in Switzerland talks on the topic of “After the Spring: digital forms of scholarship and the publication ecosystem”. The third speaker Prateek Mahalwar shares with us his views on opportunities and challenges for early career researchers in the context of Open Science. Finally, a panel of experts will investigate the conference topics in an open forum with short stakeholder perspectives and the opportunity for the audience to engage with the discussion.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all members of the Elpub Executive Committee who, together with the Programme Committee, helped us to bring together such a diverse and exciting programme. We would also like our sponsors – Altmetric, MDPI and Copernicus Publications (at the time of writing) – for their support as well as their openness to discussion and cooperation in bringing forward the Open Science agenda.

We wish everyone an inspiring conference and a happy 20th Anniversary with many more to come. We look forward to continuing the discussion and seeing you again at the 21st edition of the conference in Cyprus!

Fernando Loizides and Birgit Schmidt

1 June 2016

On the one hand, libraries are at the forefront of the digital transformation and digital information infrastructures, on the other, they manage and curate cultural heritage collections. This brings about new ways of engagement with information and knowledge and the need to rethink skills and competency profiles – which enable librarians to support e-research all along the research cycle. This paper presents findings of the joint Task Force on Librarians' Competencies in Support of E-Research and Scholarly Communication.

SCOAP³ is a global partnership which converts high-quality subscription journals in the field of High-Energy Physics to Open Access through redirection of existing subscription funds. Since January 1, 2014 the SCOAP³ Gold Open Access Repository is providing free access to scientific articles in high quality journals in the field of High Energy Physics. This article describes this international pilot which flips the current subscription-based financing of scientific publication to an output-based financing model (fair share). This includes a description of the unique mechanisms of SCOAP³ as well as its governance structure and short view on the national German contributing partners, especially the German universities (SCOAP³-DH).

Following the COAR-SPARC conference in Porto, the COAR Controlled Vocabularies Interest Group met on the 16^th of April 2015 and had a detailed discussion about the new set of COAR controlled vocabularies, while proposing detailed actions to solve the remaining issues (mainly in the Resource Type vocabulary). Echoing aspects discussed about sustainability and organization (long-term technical support), as well as dissemination and implementation of COAR controlled vocabularies, the immediate projection of these issues has seemed to be quite feasible on PHAIDRA International long-term ecosystem. Nowadays this OAI-PMH environment consists of fourteen Open Access repositories disseminating their contents to EUROPEANA, OpenAIRE, OAPENLibrary, e-infrastructures Austria, and national CRIS etc. PHAIDRA International is taking all necessary steps to be constantly aligned with Trusted Digital Repositories criteria and harmonized (technically and semantically) in line with COAR Roadmap: Future Directions for Repository Interoperability. The COAR Roadmap stresses that still many challenges remain with improving interoperability. These involve standardization of controlled vocabularies in use, as well as metadata and indicators, in connection with state-of-the-art interoperability approaches supporting Linked Open Data. There is an urgent need for PHAIDRA International to harmonize the encoding description (metadata properties) according to LOD-enabling strategies, and to adhere to multilingual COAR controlled vocabularies" shared registry (Knowledge Base) services. COAR Controlled Vocabularies can be easily implemented in PHAIDRA in fixed formats and mapped to related persistent RDF/SKOS versions.

With theses words (only “documents” substituted for the original “photos”) Vint Cerf, one of the ‘fathers of the internet’ and now Google Vice President, warned in 2015 that all our photos – and obviously, documents and research data, too – might disappear soon and that our century may become the “Digital Dark Age”. To avoid this, Cerf is working on a solution named “digital vellum”: It shall provide a platform that can preserve any documents, the software used to create and work with them, the operating system needed for this software and even an emulation of the appropriate hardware. But it may take quite some time before this platform will be available. In the meantime, the good old paper is the only medium that surely can and will survive more than 50 years – the maximum now expected for simple formats like .txt and .pdf files. Even Microfilms (also not usable without technical means) may not survive more than 200 years. But how do we print out digital documents created for and by research: short miscellanea, articles and papers, collections of them and monographs, and in recent years even facebook postings or twitter messages? We write these documents in a dedicated (text) program, sent them to the publisher, who may forward them after several transmissions forth and back with the author(s) to a layouter, again followed by some corrections requiring exchange of the file(s) …  and finally they may appear in print and / or online repositories. Taking into account that all participants in the process today are (or should be) well familiar with web-based Content Management Systems and – hopefully – the concept of markup languages, it is simply astonishing that there is no system yet combining the advantages of both. Such a combination could not only serve to shorten the publishing process but also provide the ecosystem for online repositories and web-based collaboration while the results – printable documents – could be updated regularly and made available via book-on-demand and as ePublications. There may be some solutions providing such a system used by publishers “in-house”, but if so, they are not available for free. The paper will propose such a system based on Free and Open Source Software with a simple proof-of-concept.

Besides providing open access to the article, Copernicus Publications provides open access to the peer review via its Interactive Public Peer Review™. In this process, a public discussion among the author, two independent referees, and interested members of the scientific community builds the core of the peer-review process.

Scientific publishing is not limited to text any more, but more and more extends also to digital audio-visual media. Thus services for publishing these media in portals designed for scientific content, oriented towards the demands of scientists and which comply with the requirements of Open Access Licenses must be provided. Among others, it is the goal of the Competence Centre for Non-textual-materials of TIB to collect, archive and provide access to scientific audio-visual media in the TIB AV-Portal under the best possible (open) conditions. This applies to older films, as for example the film collection of the former IWF Knowledge and Media gGmbH i. L. (IWF) and to new films. However, even if the acquisition of the necessary rights for audio-visual media is complex, the renegotiation of Open-Access-Licenses for older films is very successful. This paper focuses on the role of Open Access in the licensing strategy of TIB regarding scientific films, the respective experience of TIB and the presentation in the AV-Portal, but also touches upon prerequisites and procedures for the use of Orphan Works.

ROAD, the Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources, is a new service implemented by the ISSN International Centre. ROAD provides a free access to a selection of worldwide, multidisciplinary scholarly resources in open access that have been identified by the ISSN Network. This paper will present ROAD background, its innovative concept and how it is positioned in the open access ecosystem.

In 2012, the University of Huddersfield Press presented a paper at the 16th International Conference on Electronic Publishing on its new open access journals platform. At the time, the Press was one of the only New University Presses (NUP) in the UK and one of the first to publish open access journals, open access monographs and sound recordings. This paper will develop Hahn's programme and publication level business plan and relate this to the sustainability of the Press. It will demonstrate how the Press has been able to show value to the University in order to secure funding. The paper will conclude with a discussion around the need for collaboration between library led NUPs.

Access to raw experimental research data and data reuse is a common hurdle in scientific research. Despite the mounting requirements from funding agencies that the raw data is deposited as soon as (or even before) the paper is published, multiple factors often prevent data from being accessed and reused by other researchers. The situation with the human genomic data is even more dramatic, since on the one hand human genomic data is probably the most important data to share - it lies at the heart of efforts to combat major health issues such as cancer, genetic diseases, and genetic predispositions for complex diseases like heart disease and diabetes. On the other hand, since it is sensitive and personal information, it is often exempt from data sharing requirements. DNAdigest investigates the barriers for ethical and efficient genomic data sharing and engages with all stakeholder groups, including researchers, librarians, data managers, software developers, policy makers, and the general public interested in genomics. Repositive offers services and tools that reduce the barriers for data access and reuse for the research community in academia, industry, and clinics. To address the most pressing problem for public genomic data: that of data discoverability, Repositive has built an online platform (repositive.io) providing a single point of entry to find and access available genomic research data.

In this paper we discuss the concept of open access in academic publishing with the focus on the right to mine the data once the right to read is granted. Thus we envisage the roles and types of the stakeholders in academic publishing from the perspective of the potential text and data mining (TDM) applications. Further on, we briefly introduce FutureTDM project that aims to improve TDM uptake in Europe.

Complex software environments, like virtual research environments or visualisation frameworks, are increasingly used to conduct research and present its results. While there is a growing amount for solutions facilitating the (granular) citation of publications and research data, the citation of complex software environments remains a challenge. This abstract outlines the challenges and introduces an approach for referencing software environments developed in the Humanities Data Centre project: the application preservation.

The BRIF is an ongoing initiative that encompasses reflections and actions from various stakeholders (researchers, funders, industrials, editors) towards i/ standardised identification schemes and reporting for better visibility and tracing of bioresources on the web; ii/ incentive policies from hosting institutions; iii/ creation of tools allowing follow up of their use. Tracing the use of bioresource is the first step in this process and for this purpose we have published the CoBRA (Citation of BioResources in journal Articles) guideline, launched the Open Journal of Bioresources and started developing new metrics. The CoBRA guideline aims to standardise the citation of bioresources in scientific articles in order to trace their use on the web. The Open Journal of Bioresources (OJB) was created in close collaboration with the open access publisher Ubiquity Press allowing both the resources and the OJB papers to be cited, and also providing authors with tools to get metrics on reuse and impact. New better adapted metrics are being worked out in a dedicated BRIF working subgroup. A first list of relevant parameters to take into account in the impact measure of bioresources has been provided. The tools proposed here foster easier access to samples and associated data as well as their optimised use, sharing and recognition for data producers. Input from the scientific editorial community would be highly appreciated at this stage.

Open Access' main goal is not the subversion of publishers' role as driving actors in an oligopolistic market characterized by reduced competition and higher prices. OA's main function is to be found somewhere else, namely in the ability to subvert the power to control science's governance and its future directions (Open Science), a power that is more often found within the academic institutions rather than outside. By decentralizing and opening-up not just the way in which scholarship is published but also the way in which it is assessed, OA removes the barriers that helped turn science into an intellectual oligopoly even before an economic one. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that Open Access is a key enabler of Open Science, which in turn will lead to a more Open Society. Furthermore, the paper argues that while legislative interventions play an important role in the top-down regulation of Open Access, legislators currently lack an informed and systematic vision on the role of Open Access in science and society. In this historical phase, other complementary forms of intervention (bottom-up) appear much more “informed” and effective. This paper, which intends to set the stage for future research, identifies a few pieces of the puzzle: the relationship between formal and informal norms in the field of Open Science and how this impact on intellectual property rights, the protection of personal data, the assessment of science and the technology employed for the communication of science.

It is increasingly necessary for researchers in all fields to write computer code, and in order to reproduce research results, it is important that this code is published. We present Jupyter notebooks, a document format for publishing code, results and explanations in a form that is both readable and executable. We discuss various tools and use cases for notebook documents.

Openness in peer review is no longer a terra incognita. However, there remains a need for further experimentation and careful evaluation of its advantages and disadvantages in practice. OpenAIRE, the European digital infrastructure for Open Scholarship, offers a unique environment for such experiments. This paper describes the design and early results of three such experiments, which are currently under development in close collaboration with selected publishing and repository communities.

UCL Press was relaunched at UCL in June 2015, as the UK's first fully open access university press. It publishes scholarly monographs, textbooks, edited collections, scholarly editions and journals. All publications are made freely available online in open access form and print books are also sold via retailers at an affordable price. UCL authors are funded to publish open access with the Press. This article describes its activities in more detail and offers the model as one that other institutions can follow.

Scientific full text papers are usually stored in separate places than their underlying research datasets. Authors typically make references to datasets by mentioning them for example by using their titles and the year of publication. However, in most cases explicit links that would provide readers with direct access to referenced datasets are missing. Manually detecting references to datasets in papers is time consuming and requires an expert in the domain of the paper. In order to make explicit all links to datasets in papers that have been published already, we suggest and evaluate a semi-automatic approach for finding references to datasets in social sciences papers. Our approach does not need a corpus of papers (no cold start problem) and it performs well on a small test corpus (gold standard). Our approach achieved an F-measure of 0.84 for identifying references in full texts and an F-measure of 0.83 for finding correct matches of detected references in the da|ra dataset registry.

More than a decade after the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) declaration, Open Access has become a widespread phenomenon and a dominant topic in the academic publishing world. Several large-scale developments can be currently observed including (trans-)national efforts towards ‘full Open Access’ in a given year or ‘offsetting’ models when renewing library subscriptions. In this context, the Netherlands are believed to play a pioneering role as novel agreements with major academic publishers have been recently reached and Open Access was set prominently among the priorities of the Dutch Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the first semester of 2016. However, the negotiations between Dutch universities and Elsevier could be rather described as an ongoing battle that only recently has taken ‘a constructive turn’. As a rich case for investigation, the controversy will be examined using Adele E. Clarke's (2005) method of situational analysis and subsequently visualized with three kinds of maps.

The work in this article presents findings from a text mining exercise of over a decade of research into electronic publication. We give readers insights into the past, present and possible future directions in a structured way, and further allowing them access to the extracted data in order to produce their own analysis and conclusion. We also produce our working methodology which can be replicated to produce systematic similar findings over the years as well as comparisons to other data souces.

Article Processing Charges (APCs) have recently been studied as a means towards a sustainable Open Access (OA) environment for scholarly communications. However, APCs at any level represent a substantial economic barrier to the authors, institutions, funding agencies and governments that many of its advocates most wish to serve through OA initiatives.

Using web 2.0 capabilities in research fields have provided various facilities for scholars. By these capabilities, people can interact together and share their publications with large range of other scholars. Current research aim is study on presence of Presence of Shahid Beheshti University Scholars in Research Gate. Used approach in this paper is Scientometrics with Altmetrics method. For data gathering, page of Shahid Beheshti University in Research Gate was used. Findings indicated that courses of Chemistry, Laser and Plasma and Physics had the most presence in Research Gate. This paper revealed that Humanities courses in Shahid Beheshti University had not any serious activities in Research Gate. Establishing some workshops on using academic social networks can effect on knowledge of scholars, faculty member and students and direct their information seeking way for these people.

FOSTER is an EU project aiming at identifying, enriching and providing training content on relevant Open Science topics in support of implementing EC's Open Science Agenda in the European Research Area. During the previous two years a wealth of training resources have been collected, which are now presented in a dedicated training portal. The paper describes how to use the FOSTER training platform and the tools available to identify suitable training materials and create modular e-learning courses.

Over the past few years, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has established the initiative “Aligning Repository Networks” in order to foster global repository interoperability and align policies and practices internationally. This paper outlines several activities to align major repository networks across the globe strategically, technically and on the service level.