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Ebook: Let's Put Data to Use: Digital Scholarship for the Next Generation
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The ways in which research data is used and handled continue to capture public attention and are the focus of increasing interest. Electronic publishing is intrinsic to digital data management, and relevant to the fields of data mining, digital publishing and social networks, with their implications for scholarly communication, information services, e-learning, e-business and the cultural heritage sector.
This book presents the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ELPUB), held in Thessaloniki, Greece, in June 2014. The conference brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss the many aspects of electronic publishing, and the theme this year is 'Let's put data to use: digital scholarship for the next generation'. As well as examining the role of cultural heritage and service organisations in the creation, accessibility, duration and long-term preservation of data, it provides a discussion forum for the appraisal, citation and licensing of research data and the new developments in reviewing, publishing and editorial technology.
The book is divided into sections covering the following topics: open access and open data; knowing the users better; researchers and their needs; specialized content for researchers; publishing and access; and practical aspects of electronic publishing.
Providing an overview of all that is current in the electronic publishing world, this book will be of interest to practitioners, researchers and students in information science, as well as users of electronic publishing.
The main theme of the 18th International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ELPUB) is the openness and use of research data as well as new and innovative publishing paradigms. Specifically, it aimed to bring together presentations and discussions that demonstrate the role of cultural heritage and service organizations in the creation, accessibility, curation and long term preservation of data. We aimed to provide a forum for discussing appraisal, citation and licensing of research data. Also, what is new with reviewing, publishing and editorial technology in a data-centric setting?
ELPUB brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss data mining, digital publishing and social networks along with their implications for scholarly communication, information services, e-learning, e-businesses, the cultural heritage sector, and other areas where electronic publishing is imperative.
ELPUB 2014 received 32 paper submissions. The peer review process resulted in the acceptance of 13 research papers and 9 posters. These papers were grouped into sessions based on the following topics: Open Access and Open Data; Know the Users Better: Researchers and Their Needs; Specialized Content for Researchers; Publishing and Access; Practical Aspects of Electronic Publishing.
The conference held 2 pre-conference workshops and one tutorial on June 18. Andreas Rauber and Kresimir Duretec (Technical University of Vienna, Austria) led the tutorial “Digital Preservation Lifecycle: from challenges to solutions”. Pierre Mounier (EHESS/OpenEdition, France) and Victoria Tsoukala (National Documentation Centre, Greece) led the workshop “Non-profit Open Access ventures of significant scope in Europe” and Carla Basili (Sapienza University in Rome, Italy) led the workshop “Information Literacy in the context of scientific information”.
The main program on June 19–20 features two keynotes. Herbert van de Sompel (Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA) will deliver a keynote entitled “Towards Robust Linking and Referencing for Web-Based Scholarly Communication”. Mahendra Mahey (British Library Labs, UK) will deliver a keynote entitled “How the British Library's Digital Scholarship department is putting data to use for researchers through its Digital research Team and British Library Labs project”.
We believe that the topics featured in the program of this year's ELPUB conference are diverse and exciting. Firstly, we would like to thank the members of the ELPUB Executive Committee who, together with the Local Advisory Committee, provided valuable advice and assistance during the entire process of the organization. Secondly, we would like to thank our colleagues in the Program Committee who helped in assuring the quality of the conference throughout the peer reviewing process. Lastly, we acknowledge the Local Organization team for making sure that all efforts materialized into a very interesting scientific event. Thank you all for helping us maintain the quality of ELPUB and deserve the trust of our authors and attendees.
We wish you all a good conference and we say farewell hoping to see you again in Malta for the next edition of the conference in 2015!
Panayiota Polydoratou and Milena Dobreva (editors)
In this paper we will address the questions of what and where the value of open access to research data might be and how libraries and related stakeholders can contribute to achieve the benefits of freely sharing data. In particular, the emphasis will be on how libraries need to acquire the competence for collaboration to train and encourage researchers and library staff to work with open data. The paper is based on the early results of the RECODE project, an EU FP7 project that addresses the drivers and barriers in developing open access to research data in Europe (http://www.recodeproject.eu).
The aim of the present study is to report the results of a meta-synthesis of the empirical literature on scholars' attitudes towards Open Access (OA) journals. A total of 16 articles published in scholarly journals since 2002 (when the Budapest Open Access Initiative was released) were included in the study and five major themes emerged from their examination and analysis. The literature indicates that attitudes and perceptions of OA are varied across countries and across disciplines. Free access, which is perceived to facilitate wider dissemination of research outputs, is a strong incentive for publishing in OA. However, quality and reputation are the most important factors in selecting a journal and take priority over the availability of free access. Although OA is perceived to have many advantages over the traditional publication model, it raises some concerns too, especially in regard to the author-pays model, the quality of peer-review and the impact of the journals.
Two years after the publication of the European Commission recommendation on open access to scientific information, the critical threshold of accessibility to fifty percent of papers has been crossed. However, this figure is an average and the implementation of the EC recommendation varies from one country to another. The topical issue now is to observe the different steps of implementation and to wonder about the reaseons of such a disparity. In order to suggest many elements of the response, this research compares the different levels of implementation in the EU28.
This article presents a literature review whose aim was to identify the reported infonnation needs of researchers when they consult bibliographic databases. Initially, 192 articles were retrieved using Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar databases. After applying the criteria for exclusion, the number of articles was reduced to 16, which is already an indicator of the small number of studies on this specific topic. The results show that it is hard to identify thc information needs of researchers. They also show that the researchers have been requiring information with a higher degree of granularity. We conclude that although the available studies provide important infonnation about the researchers' information necds and hints on how to address thcm, there is a necd for more indepth studies. Thc results of these decper studies may be useful to scrvc as an indication for the creation of new procedures and tools, including those based on new metadata elements drawn to improve search results on Linked Open Data tools.
This paper presents an analysis of the user behavior of two different domain-specific repositories. The web analytic tool etracker was used to gain a first overall insight into the user behavior of these repositories. Moreover, we extended our work to describe an apache web log analysis approach which focuses on the identification of the user behavior. Therefore the user traffic within our systems is visualized using chord diagrams. We could find that recommendations are used frequently and users do rarely combine searching with faceting or filtering.
Research Object (RO) repositories extend traditional forms of scholarly communication by providing scientists the means necessary to store, share and reuse datasets generated at various stages of the research process. Yet this shift to digital publication does not guarantee that outputs, results or methods are reusable. Data quality is absolutely vital for the dissemination, reuse and sharing of digital resources. Manual metadata quality control is practically impossible and as a result, many quality criteria, both semantically and structurally get overlooked and digital objects may become problematic. The aim of the research reported on this paper was to identify the data quality problems associated with the Dryad research data repository. In particular, three metadata elements (Creator, Date and Resource Type) were analysed and quality issues associated to these elements were identified. The paper concludes with some recommendations for improving the quality of metadata in research data repositories.
The Greek Reference Index for the Social Sciences and Humanities (GRISSH) is a service that collects, documents, stores and, where possible, provides access to peer-reviewed publications in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH) by Greek publishers. It also provides long-term preservation for the digital and print files of the publications. The GRISSH was conceived by the National Documentation Centre (EKT) and the documentation and access platform is developed by the organization itself (OpenABEKT). The GRISSH is, in essence, a collaborative project that advances with the assistance and active participation of the publishing and scholarly community in Greece. It is intended as an essential reference service for the research and publishing community in Greece and abroad. The present contribution presents the goals, objectives and key benefits of the project; the evaluation criteria for the selection of content; the specifications for the development of the index; the methodology of documentation; the emerging collaborations with stakeholders. It also, present how the GRISSH project is aligned with the national and international agendas in view of a coordinated development and e-infrastructure that will support the sectors of academia, research and academic publishing.
The overall majority of books are currently being made with primarily a printed outcome in mind. To make a digital version of these books, most manuscripts need to be re-processed, which usually results in customary built e-books. This need for a customized authoring workflow for every electronic version of a book makes it impossible to build e-books in a cost-effective way. In this paper, we propose a novel workflow that incorporates both print and digital book authoring.
By charting the currently most widespread workflow Flemish publishers use to author print books and e-books, we are able to identify the most pressing problems. These are the print-first approach, the vendor lock-in situation of the e-reader market, and the high cost of updating and/or maintaining the content of an (e-)book. To overcome the aforementioned problems, we devise a new workflow that follows a digital-first approach using Open Web standards, separating content, structure, and layout. We evaluate the proposed workflow by building a proof-of-concept authoring environment.
Using this new workflow, both digital and print books can be built without significant additional costs. The proof of concept is evaluated using an experts group of Flemish publishers, and received general positive reception, with concerns on how to incorporate the proposed workflow into production environments. By not limiting the proof of concept to a fixed data model, it could handle content from more content providers, facilitating further research into the possibilities and future requirements of the EPUB 3 specification.
This paper delineates the main characteristics of the Episciences platform, an environment for overlay peer-reviewing that complements existing publication repositories, designed by the Centre pour la Communication Scientifique directe (CCSD
CCSD is a joint service unit between the CNRS, Inria and the University of Lyon
Research output is not only research articles. To provide outlets for publishing other outputs than articles, Copernicus Publications, an innovative open access publisher based in Göttingen, Germany, currently publishes the journals Earth System Science Data and Geoscientific Model Development. The first journal is dedicated to the peer-reviewed publication of articles on original research data sets in the Earth System Sciences. The second journal is dedicated to publish the description, development and evaluation of numerical models of the Earth System and its components. Both journals apply an innovative interactive open access peer-review with public referee reports, public comments from the community prior to editor's decision, and public author's responses. The motivation is to make the whole research output from data, to models, to the scientific findings and novel interpretations freely accessible, to foster scientific discussion, to increase transparency in scientific quality assurance, and to give credit to all involved contributors.
A major requirement for electronic publishing systems is the availability of rich and intuitive mechanisms that enhance the user experience of viewing and searching online electronic documents such as books, monographs and journal papers. This work concerns a set of infrastructural components and their utilization for the creation of related coherent services and features for end users. We present a set of sophisticated platforms, tools and mechanisms that have been employed in real-life cases for implementing document viewing and full-text search features, shared among application instances of various types. Challenges encountered and the provided solutions are discussed.
This paper presents the ongoing efforts to further develop the ELPUB digital library, which highly supported the dissemination of published materials within the community in the past years. elpub.scix.net has been serving the ELPUB-community since a decade, predominantly aiming to archive the output of the annual conferences. Doubtless, there is still a need for a platform to maintain the “collective memory” of the association and so far over 700 entries from 17 conferences were recorded. The repository, which utilized the SciX-technology, delivered the user access to the individual papers and made the data available via an OAI-interface as well. However, in the course of time digital library technology evolved and an association dedicated to Electronic Publishing ought to be at the forefront of novel developments. For this reason a shift was performed towards the Architexturez platform (library.elpub.net) aiming to implement advanced semantic web features. Especially the display of evolving topics and their gradual development is appealing and moreover the aggregation of individual bibliographies. Many of the features were designed in consultation with research communities in, among others, architectural computing and real estate. While deploying features and capabilities are well established in the digital library domain, the system is designed to support further research by the ELPUB community and this paper will elaborate on the transition and deliver an overview on the current prospects along with the technical capabilities.
The present contribution concerns a case study of open access scholarly publishing in Greece, its history and effect in helping the local researcher community transition from a print-only mode of work to online working environments and in rendering Greek publications and scholarship more relevant to the international scholarly community. The paper elaborates on the goals of the project and the challenges that were encountered and addressed during its implementation. The project, which started in 2007 with the transition of three print journals in the humanities to an online and print format and online working environment, culminated in the development of an online platform that provides access to content and services from a single point in the web, ePublishing.ekt.gr. As part of the National Documentation Centre (EKT)'s services, we systematize and upgrade the journals' policies according to international standards, provide an online working platform and training, digitize and release in open access academic articles (more than 3,000 articles in established journals, published by small, non-profit, academic/scholarly society publishers, so far), provide DOIs, as well as concentrate on electronic books and conference proceedings – also to include purely online books in the future, starting with a born-digital monograph in a Humanities subject (onlineBook). In a nutshell, we have focused on providing publishers of scientific journals a range of comprehensive services which are constantly updated and improved in the light of the developments in scholarly communication, and which foster the internationalization, visibility, and preservation of research in these fields.
Information overload is a great problem for the scientific community. To deal with the abundance of new scientific articles there are methods of sophisticated information retrieval tools and text mining tools. Little is known about the relationship between document structure and the structure of thought. This paper describes a project in this matter.
One of the consequences of the “small language” phenomenon is that the Swedish book industry is prey to the negative effects of globalization, since books have an international market and a Swedish multilingual citizen can buy e-books from international online booksellers. Publications in the local language are potentially in competition with books in English, and a local publisher or bookseller is competing with international publishers and Amazon.com
Recently, sources of structured and unstructured data have been made available on the web, and gained attention among researchers from several areas. They are become more interested in using this global dataset due to its size and variety of information. In the Semantic Web field, many studies have translated structured data into unstructured data, and vice-versa, to make them comprehensible to machines and humans. However, we argue that we can take advantage of the existing information, in both text and RDF format. In this paper we focus on finding a way to compare them, and discovering which available text can represent an existing RDF. Hence, we propose a strategy to check whether a text represents the same knowledge that is shown in RDF format.
RECODE will leverage existing networks, communities and projects to address challenges within the open access and data dissemination and preservation sector, and produce policy recommendations foropen access to research data based on existing good practice. The open access to research data sector includes several different networks, initiatives, projects and communities that are fragmented by discipline, geography, stakeholder category (publishers, academics, repositories, etc.) as well as other boundaries. Many of these organisations are already addressing key barriers to open access to research data, such as stakeholder fragmentation, technical and infrastructural issues, ethical and legal issues, and state and institutional policy fragmentation. However, these organisations are often working in isolation or with limited contact with one another. RECODE will provide a space for European stakeholders interested in open access to research data to work together to provide common solutions for these issues. RECODE will culminate in a series of over-arching policy recommendations for a policy framework tosupport open access to European research data targeted at different stakeholders and policy-makers. (http://www.recodeproject.eu).