Jonathan Wheeler
Data Curation Librarian
University of New Mexico

Kevin S. Hawkins
Head of Publishing Production, MPublishing
University of Michigan

Hosting Open Access Journals for the University and Beyond: The University of New Mexico Open Journals Portal (Comerford, Wheeler)

Print publishing costs for small scholarly journals continue to increase, and even electronic publishing options are not without ongoing costs. University of New Mexico (UNM) Libraries has found that many research organizations in New Mexico would like to provide open electronic access to their group’s publications, but simply do not have the funding or the technical expertise to host their own journal server on the Internet. This presentation will discuss the UNM Libraries’ Open Journal Systems (OJS) initiative, designed to provide fee-free electronic publishing services to both institutionally sponsored and independent research organizations in the Southwest. UNM Libraries’ scholarly resources team works directly with journal publishers to build journal websites, prepare journal issues for publication, and train each journal’s staff how to implement their editorial, subscription and administrative processes online.

Presentation (Comerford)

mPach: Publishing Directly in HathiTrust (Hawkins)

HathiTrust, a shared digital repository, has been archiving and providing access to reformatted library holdings. Since libraries are increasingly involved in open-access publishing of new journals, HathiTrust is a natural place to archive and provide access to born-digital publisher content to ensure its long-term preservation and discoverability. This presentation will give an overview of mPach, a modular, end-to-end system being developed by the University of Michigan Library for publishing journals in the HathiTrust repository, which will be made available for use by other HathiTrust member institutions.

 http://ejournals.unm.edu/
http://www.lib.umich.edu/mpach
Presentation (Hawkins)

Susan Gibbons
University Librarian
Yale University

Damon Jaggars
Associate University Librarian for Collections and Services
Columbia University

Molly Tamarkin
Associate University Librarian for Information Technology
Duke University

In 2009, JSTOR began partnering with institutions in a pilot program to provide access to their alumni. A range of participants was selected for the pilot, including public and private institutions, universities in the US and abroad, and theological seminaries. After nearly three years of collecting quantitative and qualitative feedback on the efficacy of the pilot, and based on an enthusiastic response from pilot partners, the Alumni Access program is being made accessible to all JSTOR participating institutions.

In this discussion, librarians who participated in the pilot will discuss how this tool was used for engaging with alumni, and what was learned about the level of interest in access to scholarly resources after graduation.

Next steps for the Alumni Access program, and how this fits within JSTOR’s larger aims of extending access to scholarship, will also be discussed.

http://about.jstor.org/service/access-alumni
Presentation (Tamarkin)

This update from CNI Director Clifford Lynch includes discussion of the following topics and events:

• The Obama Administration’s announcement regarding a new “big data” initiative
  (http://www.cni.org/news/administration-big-data-research-and/)
• An e-journals summit hosted by the National Academies
• Developments in scholarly identity management, author ID’s, and related matters
• A new report from JISC on text mining
  (press release, containing link to the report:  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2012/03/textmining.aspx)
• OCLC’s study on social metadata
  (http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-01r.htm)
• The recent Sage Bionetworks  Commons Congress on bioinformatics (http://sagecongress.org/)

We hope you enjoy this program and we welcome your feedback.  For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at joan@cni.org.

While many libraries are moving to subscription or leasing models for electronic journals and books, the 21 libraries of the Ontario Council of University Libraries have collaborated to build shared facilities and services for housing and managing large collections of licensed content. The Books and Journals service of Scholars Portal contain over 25M digital articles and close to 400,000 electronic books, including digitized print books and born digital commercial ebooks. This session will describe the rationale behind this commitment to physical ownership of digital content and the maturing of the service from providing simple aggregation to supporting long-term digital preservation.

http://journals.scholarsportal.info
http://books.scholarsportal.info

Presentation (PowerPoint)

In the 15 years that JSTOR has been in existence, a wealth of logging data has been generated and archived.  This logging data represents many billions of user actions.  Until recently, this usage data has mainly been used for generating summary-level institution and publisher reports.  The sheer volume and complexity of these data made multi-dimensioned, longitudinal analysis impractical until just recently. Over the last year, Ithaka has made a significant investment in normalizing and organizing these data in the interest of better understanding user behaviors and trends in the consumption of academic materials.

This presentation will include discussion of the technological approach that Ithaka has taken in dealing with the data volume and complexity issues, including Big Data challenges such as storage, processing, and analysis.  Some experiences from the original attempt to build this data warehouse using traditional relational database technologies and the decision to abandon this approach in favor of a solution based on the open source Hadoop infrastructure will be shared.  Hadoop provides a robust, scalable and cost-effective solution to managing Ithaka’s big data. Ithaka has combined Hadoop with an open source indexing technology (Lucene/SOLR) and some custom-built software providing a Web-based tool for the interactive exploration of this rich data set.  The presentation will also include some top-level observations on user behaviors and content discovery and consumption trends that have been identified using these tools.

Handout (PDF)

Robert Wolven
Associate University Librarian
Bibliographic Services
and Collection Development
Columbia University

E-journals have replaced the majority of titles formerly produced in paper format. Academic libraries are increasingly dependent on commercially produced, born-digital content that is purchased or licensed. The purpose of this presentation is to share the findings of a 2CUL study that assesses the role of LOCKSS and PORTICO in preserving each institution’s e-journal collections. The 2CUL initiative is a collaboration between Columbia University Library (CUL) and Cornell University Library (CUL) to join forces in providing content, expertise, and services that are impossible to accomplish acting alone.

Although LOCKSS is considered a successful digital preservation initiative, neither of the CULs felt that they fully understood the potential of the system for their own settings and collections. In support of this goal, a joint team was established in November 2010 to investigate various questions to assess how LOCKSS is being deployed and the implications of local practices for both CUL’s preservation frameworks. This study was seen as a high-level investigation to characterize the general landscape and identify further research questions. One of the practical outcomes was a comparative analysis of Portico and LOCKSS preservation coverage for Columbia and Cornell’s serial holdings.  A key finding was that only 15-20% of the e-journal titles in the libraries’ collections are currently preserved by these two initiatives. Further analysis suggests the remaining titles fall into roughly 10 categories, with a variety of strategies needed to ensure their preservation.

http://2cul.org/

Presentation

Mary Ellen Davis
Executive Director, Association of College & Research Libraries
Association of College & Research Libraries

Janice Welburn
Budget and Finance Committee Chair
Association of College & Research Libraries
Marquette University

Societies and associations that have relied on revenue from journal publications to fund programs and other activities have been striving to find a way to move to an open access (OA) model. Librarians who wish to live their principles have expressed loudly their desire to move professional publications to OA. This session presents a case study of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) journal, College and Research Libraries, and its transition to OA from member benefit/subscription-only through online pre-prints to full OA, which will begin in April 2011. The panelists will discuss ACRL’s commitment to OA principles and the challenges of making those principles a reality in practice including philosophical tensions, sensitivity to the concept of “member benefit,” the business model, and the question of whether to still have print. The case is offered not as a model of what other publications should do, but rather as an example of the kinds of considerations and decisions with which publishers must grapple.

http://crl.acrl.org

Handout (MS WORD)

This session will include a presentation and discussion of the concept of a safe harbor initiative. In such an effort, libraries would publicly commit to set aside—to safe harbor—journals in any serials cancellation process for a specific period of time (five years is proposed). To gain such a commitment, any publisher, commercial or non-profit, would need to publicly commit to placing all journal content in a public access platform no more than one year from date of publication. Advantages and concerns about this approach will be presented. Discussion will follow and input/reaction of attendees sought. Questions to consider will include:

• Does such a proposal seem viable?

• Would it have a chance at success?

• Would libraries participate?

• Would publishers participate?

PowerPoint Presentation

Large-scale digital resources such as JSTOR are core elements of the academic community’s emerging 21st-century infrastructure. Used primarily for ensuring preservation and easy access to scholarly materials, these resources are now becoming springboards for technological innovation using text-mining and other techniques. In the past two years, portions of the JSTOR dataset have been used by researchers around the world as a base for projects like developing algorithms to generate topic maps spanning hundreds of years of scientific research and exploring how key descriptive terms in disciplines like astronomy have evolved from the mechanics of building telescopes to the analysis of stellar and galactic lifecycles.

JSTOR is bringing together many of its new advanced technology initiatives in a site called Showcase, which will encourage text mining and other innovative uses of the JSTOR dataset, preview resulting developments and applications to users, and create a cross-institutional community for sharing project information, software, and ideas. This presentation will include a preview of Showcase as well as Data for Research, a set of Web tools designed to allow for the visual exploration of large-scale datasets beginning with JSTOR. The session will also include a description of some of the uses being made of these resources by various partner institutions including Princeton, University of Liverpool, and University of Washington.

http://www.jstor.org/

http://dfr.jstor.org/

Handout (PDF)

PowerPoint Presentation