CNI: Coalition for Networked Information

Building the Better Ebook and Beyond

Alex Humphreys
Director, JSTOR Labs
JSTOR

Charles Watkinson
Director, Press; Associate University Librarian
University of Michigan

Lisa Macklin
Director, Scholarly Communications Office
Emory University

Barbara Rockenbach
Associate University Librarian for Collections and Services, Interim
Columbia University

Monographs are increasingly making the print-to-digital shift that journals started twenty years ago, yet many of the popular platform options for accessing scholarly books simply mirror the existing discovery structure for journals: books are presented as a sequential list of “journal article”-sized chapter files for downloading, a practice that “journal”-izes the book and arguably fails to take full advantage of the rich long-form argument that unfolds across chapters. In some cases monographs are also starting to morph into long form works of digital scholarship that could never be represented on the printed page; a phenomenon that not only presents technology challenges but also impacts publisher processes and workflows.

This session brings together several initiatives that are exploring the evolution of the monograph: (1) JSTOR Labs, an experimental platform development group, convened at Columbia University by a group of scholars, librarians, and publishers in October 2016. Together, they tackled this design question: if we applied data visualization and design thinking techniques to the existing corpus of digitized monograph files, how could we improve the discovery and user experience for scholars, students, and general readers? The first presentation will discuss the design principles and challenges that the expert group identified, demonstrate the working prototype created during a “flash build” at Columbia in November by JSTOR Labs, and explain how CNI attendees and others can take advantage of this openly available development. The lean, user-oriented product design process used for this project will also be outlined; a design process that any library or publisher can take advantage of for their own technology and innovation projects. (2) Emory University and the University of Michigan are working together on interrelated projects supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that explore how publishers can best support and sustain digital scholarship. Emory is leading a project to create a “Model Contract for Digital Scholarship” that can be used to set out roles and responsibilities around the selection, production, marketing, and preservation of a publication that takes full advantage of digital affordances, including open access. Michigan is developing a publishing platform optimized for digital scholarship, Fulcrum, built on the Hydra/Fedora framework. To ground the conversation, a concrete example of one new work of digital scholarship published by University of Michigan Press will be presented (“A Mid-Republican House from Gabii”). This is a multimodal work that cannot be presented in print and involves integrated narrative, datasets, and 3D models.

http://labs.jstor.org/monograph/
http://labs.jstor.org
http://web.library.emory.edu/news-events/news/archives/2016/mellon-grant-emory-model-publishing.html
http://fulcrum.org/
http://www.publishing.umich.edu/projects/mapping-the-free-ebook/

Presentation (Macklin)
Presentation (Rockenbach)

Building Tools and Services to Support Research Software Preservation and Sharing

Fernando Rios
CLIR Research Data Management Fellow
Johns Hopkins University

Jeffrey Spies
Co-Founder, CTO
Center for Open Science

Rick Johnson
Co-Program Director, Digital Initiatives and Scholarship
University of Notre Dame/Association of Research Libraries

Micah Altman
Director of Research
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Software produced as part of the academic research process is an important part of the scholarly record since it is a manifestation of the creative process that enables discovery. Therefore, ensuring that its intrinsic scholarship value is not lost is of great importance. The last five years have seen a significant increase in activity by university libraries and community-driven organizations towards supporting the preservation of the scholarship value of research data. However, the same cannot be said for the software created or used to work with that data. From the lens of reproducible research and open science, this project briefing highlights challenges and current work at each speaker’s organization around providing services and tools to support the preservation and sharing of research software. The Center for Open Science (COS) is developing the free, open source Open Science Framework (OSF) that focuses on managing, curating, sharing, and preserving research workflow. The research lifecycle often includes software at various stages. By taking an approach centered on integration with other services, software preservation and sharing can be added to a researcher’s workflow rather than being appended to it thus increasing preservation efficacy.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries is investigating lifecycle models for software curation and is conducting an environmental scan of software repositories, and of journal and funder policies. The University of Notre Dame is investigating research software environment capture and reproducibility through the DASPOS (Data and Software Preservation for Open Science) project, and has partnered with the COS to better unify the research lifecycle through implementation of OSF for Institutions (OSFI) integrated with university resources such as high performance computing and repository services. Through OSFI, Notre Dame and Johns Hopkins University (JHU) have also partnered to develop research data archiving tools for the OSF and Fedora repository. Finally, the Data Management Services group at JHU is addressing an institutional gap in consulting and archiving service provision for supporting reproducible and reusable computational research as well as supporting current and future data/software sharing requirements from funders and publishers.

http://osf.io

Presentation (Altman)

Capstones: Internet Identity Begins to Fill the Gaps

Ken Klingenstein
Identity Evangelist
Internet2

There has been notable progress in the landscape of Internet identity in the last year as gaps that have impeded deployment at scale begin to fill in. Technology advances in integrating protocol approaches, addressing attribute release and informed consent, and scaling to the exponential growth in metadata are all critical to moving Internet identity from immaturity into infrastructure. Policy developments such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the new National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-63 are providing requirements and clarity that mark a better understanding of what needs to be governed and how. Even business models are taking shape, as users and companies begin to understand the economics of security and privacy. This session will cover these and related developments and what the whole cloth may look like.

Presentation

Collaborations to Improve Collections Management and Access with CollectionSpace, an Open Sourced Software Solution

Robert Miller
Chief Executive Officer
LYRASIS

David Greenbaum
Director, Research IT (RIT)
Office of the CIO
University of California, Berkeley

Ann Baird Whiteside
Librarian and Assistant Dean for Information Resources, Frances Loeb Library
Harvard University

The current patchwork of homegrown databases, proprietary systems, spreadsheets, and paper files used to manage object collections at many academic institutions is an inadequate solution to a growing problem. Objects suffer from lack of proper documentation and care, and their use is limited to those who have knowledge of and access to the often non-networked resources describing them. These limitations do a disservice to the faculty and curators who create and maintain these collections, and the students, researchers, and members of the public who would benefit from exposure and access to them. With a single platform, CollectionSpace, an open-source solution for collections information management, allows collections of all sizes and disciplines to benefit from proper management and higher-quality data. The benefits of improved management are myriad; for example, faculty and curators may engage in initiatives that require high quality information, e.g. web-based portals for discovery and sharing, accelerated digitization projects, and object inventories. Webapps and APIs provide a method for integrating object collections information into the broader digital ecosystem of library and archival collections. This session will include project briefings from the University of California, Berkeley, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and LYRASIS. It will also include discussion of relevant elements of code contribution, governance, and overall end-to-end cost and fiscal sustainability.

http://www.collectionspace.org

The Cost of Open Access to Journals: Pay It Forward Project Findings

MacKenzie Smith
University Librarian
University of California, Davis

To succeed, the “gold” open access (OA) model, paid for with article processing charges (APCs), must be financially viable for academic research institutions and other stakeholders in the scholarly publishing system. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded “Pay It Forward” project examined the viability of gold OA by looking at institutional costs, faculty and graduate student opinions, and various models for funding APCs. The Pay It Forward research teams gathered a variety of qualitative and quantitative data from publishers, research libraries, and faculty and students including: current APC charges, current subscription charges, journal publication costs, opinions and behavior of graduate students and faculty members regarding publishing, reading, and OA. Previous presentations at CNI described the project plans and provided updates on the work. This session will discuss the final findings of the research and its implications for the viability of the gold OA model.

http://icis.ucdavis.edu/?page_id=286

Presentation

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