AM1 Inside Scholarly Communications Today
Course Chairs: Cameron Neylon, PhD, Professor of Research Communications, Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University, Australia
Instructor: Cameron Neylon, PhD, Professor of Research Communications, Centre for Culture and Technology, Curtin University, Australia
Description: This course will provide an overview of the Scholarly Communications landscape of today, how we got here, and what we can tell about the current state of the field and how it is changing. The course will provide participants with a broad background on key topics along with knowledge of additional information sources to investigate issues further.
The course will provide a history of scholarly publishing and discussion of the information landscape, data availability, the economics of publishing and issues surrounding peer review. We will offer a broad overview of major trends for the future, but the focus is primarily on how things are.
There will be five half-day sessions offering a mix of lecture and practical work, particularly information gathering and analysis. The emphasis will be on providing frameworks within which information can be gathered and understood rather than on “fact teaching.”
Proposed level: Beginner
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: The course is aimed at people wanting an overview of the Scholarly Communications landscape and how it has evolved as a starting point for further exploration. This includes those interested in careers in Scholarly Communications in libraries, publishing or other areas; final-year undergraduates and early PhD students in general; research leaders who need an overview of the system; and researchers looking to expand their view from their existing disciplinary experience.
AM2 Reproducible Research Reporting and Dynamic Documents with Open Authoring Tools: Toward the Paper of the Future
Course Chairs: Gail Clement, Head of Research Services, Caltech Library
Instructor: Gail Clement, Head of Research Services, Caltech Library; Tom Morrell, Research Data Specialist, Caltech Library
Description: This interactive and hands-on program from Author Carpentry draws on open-source tools and open-science practices to create reproducible reports and dynamic documents using R Markdown. R Markdown is an open, powerful and easy-to-use authoring syntax for combining text, code, figures and other document features needed for publication, presentations and websites. Researchers across the disciplines are shifting to this approach, allowing them to “author once” and output to many, and also to create fully open and reproducible reports for human and machine reading and reuse.
Participants will gain proficiency authoring professional research communications (research reports, slides and web pages) that interweave explanatory narrative, code, data and citations for human and computer use. Participants will also survey models of dynamic, openly authored research publications and presentations produced using an open authoring pipeline, and discuss their advantages. Combining presenter demonstrations, hands-on sessions and expert guest lectures, the interactive sessions will take authors step-by-step through a workflow using readily available applications and proven recipes.
By week’s end, participants will:
- Identify the features of a reproducible and dynamic research communication that is fit to enter the scholarly record.
- Recognize at least three models of “Future Papers” now in publication.
- Describe the benefits of composing research reports with open authoring tools.
- Demonstrate a text-based workflow for creating a paper that combines dynamic text, code and software.
- Demonstrate an open-source workflow for automatically converting openly authored documents for publication, online posting and professional presentation.
- Demonstrate use of the RStudio GUI platform for authoring and producing professional-quality research reports.
Proposed level: Intermediate
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: Participants should be proficient in Windows, Mac or Linux OS. They should also be able to locate and install pre-compiled open-source software; have experience authoring and publishing research communication; be familiar with the command line; and be fearless about learning enough about the R software environment to follow step-by-step instructions.
AM3 Collaboration, Communities and Collectives: Understanding Collaboration in the Scholarly Commons
Course Chairs: Daniel O’Donnell, PhD, Professor of English, University of Lethbridge, Canada; Sergey Parinov, Central Economics and Mathematics Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences; Victoria Antonova, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia; Daniel O’Donnell, PhD, Professor of English, University of Lethbridge, Canada
Instructors: Maryann Martone, PhD, Professor of Neuroscience, UC San Diego; Daniel O’Donnell, PhD, Professor of English, University of Lethbridge, Canada
Description: This course will focus on how scholarly communication turns into collaboration. The course will have two parts: 1) the theory of collaboration and competition, and 2) the Scholarly Commons as a special case of collaboration.
Part 1: The Global Research Community as Collaboration
We will introduce a view on the global research community as a scholarly labor division system with collaborating and coordinating researchers. Then we will provide an introduction to the different types of such collaboration, and present a comparison of these types along several axes. We will introduce an abstract model of collaboration to analyze what distinguishes collaboration from communication and why people use many types of collaboration. Based on this model, we will look at scholarly collaboration mechanisms. We will discuss limitations of the scholarly publishing infrastructure, academic journals and traditional scholarly citation practice as a collaboration mechanism. We will analyze major requirements for scholarly communication tools and institutes needed to design a better mechanism for scholarly communication and more efficient collaboration.
There will be four short interactive sessions devoted to the following topics:
- What are collaboration and competition within the scholarly labor division system?
- What are incentives and expectations of researchers when they cite each other?
- How much collaboration is enough, and why might researchers not like extra collaboration?
- What are the ideal forms of scholarly communication and collaboration, and what are the main obstacles for them?
Part 2: The Scholarly Commons as Collaborative Collective
The second part of the course will consider the Scholarly Commons as a special case of collaboration.
The principles of the Scholarly Commons (https://www.force11.org/scholarly-commons/principles) are a Force11 initiative to define ways to practice open, inclusive and reproducible science and scholarship. The principles can function as an agreement among researchers and other stakeholders in scholarly communication to make research open and participatory. There are many “Open” manifestos, guidelines and statements; the Scholarly Commons leverages these by focusing on the implementation of such statements by individual actors.
This part of the course introduces students to the concepts of the commons and some of the techniques and technologies we have developed to assist in their implementation. Because the commons focuses on the individual rather than the system, this work will be necessarily hands-on. Participants will survey their own disciplines and practice for compliance or non-compliance with the principles, as well as discuss what steps might be necessary to make more of their practice open, inclusive and reproducible. In addition to bringing the commons into their own practice, students can anticipate feeding their own practice back into the commons: what aspects of your practice, discipline, or linguistic or economic context could be leveraged by others to improve their practice of scholarly and scientific communication?
Proposed level: Beginner to intermediate
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: This course is suitable for all involved in scholarly communication, including researchers, librarians, publishers and funders.
AM4 Community, Collaboration and Impact: Open Scholarly Communication for Humanities and Social Sciences
Course Chairs: Nicky Agate, PhD, Assistant Director of Scholarly Communication and Projects, Columbia University Libraries
Instructor: Nicky Agate, PhD, Assistant Director of Scholarly Communication and Projects, Columbia University Libraries.
Description: This course will serve as an introduction to the tenets, tools and techniques of open scholarly communication for humanists and social scientists. Covering the full scholarly communications life cycle in humanities and social sciences, the course will begin with a discussion of working in the open, from creating a professional identity to building openly available reading and reference lists, and from blogging early-stage work to offering up one’s work for open peer review.
We will delve into disciplinary and other communities, and the various platforms that host them. We will cover Open Access (OA) venues and platforms for a wide variety of research outputs, including OA journals, new OA digital platforms from scholarly presses, different scholarly commons for research and teaching, and institutional and disciplinary repositories and preprint servers. We will get deep into the why and the how of working in the open: arguments for (and against); Creative Commons licensing and fair use; finding a publisher; negotiating open-author contracts; and getting started with open educational resources.
Finally, we will discuss metrics and altmetrics, as well as other ways of gauging the interest in and impact of your work. The course will be a combination of readings, discussion, board-game playing (The Publishing Trap) and hands-on interaction. Guest scholars and practitioners from across the scholarly communications ecosystem will help facilitate our work.
Proposed level: Beginner
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: The course is intended for graduate students and faculty researchers in the humanities and social sciences.
AM5 Building an Open, Fair and Sustainable Information-Rich Research Institution
Course Chairs: Allegra Swift, MLIS, Scholarly Communications Librarian, UC San Diego; David Minor, MLIS, Director, Research Data Curation Program, UC San Diego Library
Instructor: Allegra Swift; David Minor; Charlotte Roh, Scholarly Communication Librarian at the University of San Francisco; Rebecca Bryant, Senior Program Officer, OCLC: Dublin, OH; Anita De Waard, Research data management at Elsevier; Simon Porter, Digital Science, London
Description: Much of the work in the Scholarly Communications space involves advocacy as it applies to the many levels of the institutional hierarchy. Shifts in how research and scholarship happen have meant that institutions must collaborate across traditionally isolated units to provide infrastructure and services needed to support these shifts. In addition, institutions are navigating external pressures and a proliferation of research reporting and promoting services and products being marketed by prominent publishers and vendors. The continued success of all who are involved in this scholarly communication life cycle hinges on the ability to anticipate rapid changes in scholarly communication and to adapt to external and internal opportunities and challenges. This course will give participants an overview of the current state of infrastructure and tools with an eye toward implications for the future of scholarly communication and information-rich and responsive universities.
This course is based on the observation that systems of scholarly communication are reproducing rapidly and are being marketed to our campuses to address specific stakeholder needs or as an interoperable system in support of the entire scholarly communication ecosystem. We will learn about advances in the field through evaluation of models, systems (open-source or proprietary platforms), stakeholders and drivers. We will focus on where we can exercise our influence on the infrastructure providers (for-profit and non-profit) to shape a healthy, sustainable, fair and equitable research information and scholarly communication ecosystem.
Three of the five days will feature vendors (commercial and non- or not-for-profit) and university-grown systems providing deep dives into how they support the open and information-rich university. For example, each vendor will be expected to address topics such as: what they are doing to support the open and information-rich university, open access, preprints, guidelines, data management, equity and inclusivity, marketing, and impact measurement and communication tools, as well as actionable takeaways aside from the product. Each day will end with a designated institutional/use case person as the discussion facilitator addressing gaps and opportunities.
Proposed level: All levels
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: The course is aimed at stakeholders in the scholarly communications process: anyone who creates or curates, publishes, funds, and/or records and communicates productivity. No technological background is required.
Course Chairs: Natasha Simons, Program Leader, Skills Policy and Resources, Australian National Data Service
Instructor: Natasha Simons, Program Leader, Skills Policy and Resources, Australian National Data Service
Description: This course will develop an understanding of how data and other research outputs fit into Scholarly Communications workflows. The course will cover best practice in data management and communication and the range of options available for depositions and dissemination, as well as the landscape of policy requirements. State-of-the-art tools and technical infrastructures related to research data will also be discussed.
The course will be loosely based on the 23 (research data) Things program developed by the Australian National Data Service, and will offer a mixture of lecture and practical work. Topics explored will include: drivers for managing research data and related materials, data in the research lifecycle, data management plans, metadata and data discovery, rights, ethics and sensitive data, and data citation and impact.
Over the five half-day sessions, participants will be able to choose the level at which they want to engage: “getting started,” “know more” or “challenge me.” Along the way, we will get hands-on with data and tools. There will be opportunities for participants to learn from each other and to develop skills in data management and expertise in implementing good data practice at their home institutions.
By the end of the course, participants will be able to:
- Articulate drivers, barriers and challenges for improved research data management.
- Understand relationships between the research data life cycle and scholarly communications workflows.
- Consider how rights and ethics impact data sharing and refer to strategies for managing sensitive data.
- Use basic hands-on experience with data and tools to enrich data quality and discovery.
Proposed level: Beginner to intermediate
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: The course is aimed at individuals working with or expecting to work with data as researchers, publishers, librarians, or in research support, especially those seeking to develop their skills in managing data in practice and to understand the tools that can support them in doing this.
AM7 The Basics and Beyond: Developing a Critical, Community-Based Approach to Open Education
Course Chairs: Sarah Hare, Scholarly Communication Librarian, Indiana University Bloomington
Instructor: Sarah Hare, Scholarly Communication Librarian, Indiana University Bloomington; Lillian Rigling, Program Coordinator – eCampus Ontario, Canada; Ali Versluis, Open Educational Resources Librarian, University of Guelph, Canada
Description: The average full-time undergraduate student now pays almost $1,300 per year for new textbooks (CollegeBoard, 2017). A survey of over 2,000 students on 150 different campuses found that if students cannot afford course materials, 65 percent of them will avoid renting or buying texts even though they know not having texts may impact their overall success in a course (Senack, 2014). Open Educational Resources offer a potential solution to this problem. OER are learning objects shared under an intellectual property license that explicitly allows others to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute the materials freely (Wiley, 2014). Examples of OER include (but are not limited to) textbooks, syllabi and lectures shared under a Creative Commons license.
The concept of Open Education (OE) has been heavily discussed in the last few years, with the discourse centered on improved student retention and the transformation of teaching and learning approaches in higher education. Outreach and programming in the OE/OER area are quickly becoming core components of scholarly communication work, given that this work intersects with copyright, licensing, open access and open data with the aim of creating barrier-free research outputs that can be disseminated into the global knowledge base. Despite these developments, there is still a lack of awareness among librarians, faculty members and administrators about what OE is, how OER can be used and why this matters. For example, the Babson Survey report noted that only 10 percent of faculty reported that they were “very aware” of OER, and 56 percent were not at all aware of OER (Seaman & Seaman, 2017).
This course aims to fill in the gaps, providing an intensive opportunity to become conversant in foundational topics related to OE. Although the course will have a lecture component that will provide a topical overview, the majority of the content will be devoted to in-class activities, role-playing scenarios and discussions. These active learning approaches will be scaffolded to build on each other, ensuring that students have “takeaways” relevant to their own context. This structure will provide much of the foundation for an outreach plan (the culminating exercise for the course), which students will build on and finalize at a later date.
By the end of the course, students will be able to define and explain core concepts related to open education. They will be able to identify resources used to find and create OER and will be familiar with methods for evaluating relevance and suitability. Learners will also be able to identify key stakeholders within their local context and craft meaningful, persuasive pitches that will resonate with these individuals. Students will critically engage with the open education movement, tackling issues such as underrepresented voices, accessibility and labor.
Proposed level: Beginner
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: The course is most appropriate for librarians, administrators, or researchers who have a strong interest in using or creating Open Educational Resources (OER) or want to encourage the use of OER in their own context. No prerequisite knowledge is required. While a working knowledge of instructional design and Creative Commons licensing would be useful, it is not a requirement to take the course. Participants will be expected to do introductory readings beforehand so that class time can be dedicated to application of concepts and discussion.
Course Chairs: Anita Bandrowski, PhD, RRID Project Lead
Instructors: Anita Bandrowski, PhD, RRID Project Lead; Maryann Martone, Editor-in-Chief Brain and Behavior; Daniel S. Katz, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Lenny Teytelman, CEO Protocols.io
Description: This course will focus on issues of reproducibility in research from a broad perspective. It will include an introduction to the differing types of reproducibility and the philosophy that underpins them. The course will look at reproducibility in several contexts, including collecting and communication in experimental research, providing a robust record of computational research, and the limitations and debates around these approaches. We will introduce several tools and approaches to support reproducible research practice, including the RRID portal, Zenodo, Jupyter Notebooks, the Open Science Framework, and best practice in research and data management, communication, and open sharing.
There will be five half-day sessions offering a mix of lecture and practical work, particularly information gathering and analysis. The emphasis will be on providing frameworks within which information can be gathered and understood rather than on “fact teaching.”
Proposed level: Beginner
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: The target audience is researchers seeking a deeper understanding of reproducibility in a variety of contexts, as well as those with a need to support researchers – for example, staff from research offices, libraries, service providers or publishers. Participants should be seeking an introduction to working toward reproducibility in practice and to the tools that can support them in doing this.
MT1 The Art of Transforming a Research Paper into a Lay Summary
Course Chairs: Nilam McGrath, PhD, Research Communications and Uptake Manager, COMDIS Health Service Delivery Research Programme, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Instructor: Nilam McGrath, PhD, Research Communications and Uptake Manager, COMDIS Health Service Delivery Research Programme, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Description: Over two sessions, this course aims to give participants more confidence to share their research evidence beyond their traditional and “safe” academic networks. The course is particularly suitable for anyone working in a low-resource setting (such as a low- or middle-income country), or those with limited access to editorial and/or design support.
This is a hands-on course. In Session 1, we will cover some plain English writing techniques, identify the core messages to share from your research papers/reports and begin drafting the content of the lay summary. In Session 2, we will cover some design principles, and begin using Canva or other free, suitable software to design the lay summary. The skills learned over the two sessions will help participants translate the contents of a research paper so that it can be more easily understood by non-specialists, as well as other research stakeholders.
Proposed level: All levels
Limits on participation: The class will have a maximum of 20 participants for effective group work, and to allow the instructor to deliver one-to-one support where necessary.
Intended audience: This course is aimed at anyone who has an interest in translating evidence into lay summaries. Students should come with at least one research article, working paper or report (either published or final version) that they wish to develop into a lay summary.
Course Chairs: Gimena del Rio Riande, PhD, Researcher, Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas y Crítica Textual (IIBICRIT), National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
Instructor: Gimena del Rio Riande, PhD, Researcher, Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas y Crítica Textual (IIBICRIT), National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina; Wouter Schallier, Chief, Hernán Santa Cruz Library, UN/ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, United Nations), Santiago, Chile; April M. Hathcock, Scholarly Communications Librarian, New York University; Daniel O’Donnell, PhD, Professor of English, University of Lethbridge, Canada
Description: Among the actors in the scientific field that have gained strength in recent decades, Latin America and the Caribbean stand out in a sense that the concept of “commons” is generally accepted all over the region.
In the case of the knowledge commons, Peru, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico have shown real advances in terms of national laws that seek to make scientific knowledge produced with public funds a common good managed by the academic community. We can also highlight regional projects such as Scielo and redalyc.org that have played a unique role in making the scientific production published in Ibero American and Latin American journals available free of charge. Open Access is now established in Latin America and the Caribbean as the most extended communication model in the academic community, giving visibility and value to scientific production at a regional and global level.
Nevertheless, Open Access in Latin America and the Caribbean still faces a few challenges that need to be tackled in order to consolidate the model and to make it fully interoperable with global Open Access models.
The course will analyze these challenges and will highlight initiatives and explore options to advance Open Access in Latin America and the Caribbean. The course will also analyze and debate the aforementioned national laws and specific cases that illustrate the progress and challenges of Open Access in the region, as well as in the global context, and will present a practical approach to deal with the “different open accesses in the world.”
Furthermore, the course will highlight the relevance, challenges and opportunities of Open Research Data for institutions and researchers in Latin America and the Caribbean. Through the results of the LEARN project (http://www.learn-rdm.eu/), the course will present a set of good practices, examples of institutional policies and practical recommendations from Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Finally, the course will put Open Access to publications and to research data in the context of the larger Open Science movement, which is changing the face of academic research and society in a profound way. This vision of Open Science is creating a global environment where researchers, innovators, companies and citizens can publish, find, use and reuse each other's data, tools, publications and other outputs for research, innovation and educational purposes.
In addition to people interested specifically in the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, this course will be of interest to people working in other regions in both the Global South and the Global North. We will encourage participants to engage reflectively with the material, bringing their own experiences to bear.
Proposed level: Beginner
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: Information professionals, researchers, students and anybody interested in innovation in scientific information from all disciplines are invited to participate in this workshop. No previous knowledge or experience in the topic is needed. Preparatory work won't be required, but we will offer suggested material for attendees to read and/or watch before the course.
MT3 and WT3 Pre- and Post-Publication Peer Review: Perspectives and Platforms
Course Chairs: John Hilton, Editor, Cochrane, London
Instructor: John Hilton, Editor, Cochrane, London
Description: Peer review is an established and much debated part of scholarly communication, with differing models and challenges across disciplines and publishing venues. Post-publication peer review and commenting represent a more diverse, more dispersed and less “essential” set of activities that nonetheless reflect a fundamental element of scholarship. With the growth of preprint servers and intermediary platforms and services, the lines between “pre” and “post” are blurred.
This course will take a broad view of peer review and commenting, considering them as interventions and systems. What is their purpose? Who are they for? Who do they benefit? What are the incentives and disincentives? Can post-publication peer review thrive, or is it “simply unrealistic to expect informed, well-argued opinions from those who have not been specifically tasked with the job of supplying them”? (Nancy McCormack, Law Library Journal, 2009).
The course will also survey flaws and imbalances in peer review and commenting models and processes, addressing challenges such as bias, fraud, anonymity and personal attacks. Participants will also take a tour through innovations and research in this area, seeing how they relate to the broader world of scholarly communication. Finally, the course will explore how scholars, editors and others can engage most effectively with peer review and commenting systems to achieve the most desirable outcomes for scholarship.
Proposed level: Intermediate
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: This course assumes some experience of peer review for scholarly publications.
MT4 and WT4 Detection of Questionable Publishing Practices: Procedures, Key Elements and Practical Examples
Course Chairs: Tom Olijhoek, PhD, Editor in Chief, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Netherlands
Instructor: Tom Olijhoek, PhD, Editor in Chief, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Netherlands; Ivonne Lujano, DOAJ Ambassador for Latin America
Description: On Day 1 of the course, we will first explain in detail the criteria used by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) for assessment of good publishing practice in Open Access publishing. These criteria have been accepted as de facto standards for good publishing practice by many governments and organizations, including Science Europe.
We will have a practical session where participants evaluate journals using the DOAJ quality criteria. Criteria most important for the detection of questionable publishing practices will be discussed. Among these are peer review practices and how to check these, editorial board quality and article quality.
With the aid of figures and maps from the existing literature, we will highlight the geographical and numerical distribution of questionable publishing. We will also put the problem into perspective by providing evidence that questionable publishing is especially a problem in the Global South, and we will show that the overall problem is usually very much exaggerated in existing publications and reports on the subject.
n addition, we will show that the existing scholarly publishing system, inclusive of Open Access, is markedly biased in a kind of neocolonial way toward publishing research from the Global North. Policy makers in the Global South also tend to prefer publications in journals listed in Web of Science and Scopus (mostly from the North). All of this makes it difficult for scholars in the Global South to publish in local journals or to publish on local knowledge.
On Day 2, the course will offer a detailed look at properties of questionable publishing using practical examples from different regions of the world.
In a second practical session, participants will form groups and evaluate a number of suspicious journals with the aid of a checklist that we will provide. The findings will be discussed, and new detection criteria may emerge from this exercise.
The last part of the course will investigate, with the help of participants, how detection methods may be standardized and even partly automated with specific software implementations
Proposed level: Intermediate
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: The course is for researchers, librarians and students of library sciences. Programming skills are not required but welcome. Participants should have basic knowledge about scholarly publishing.
MT5 and WT5 Open Data Visualization: Tools and Techniques to Better Report Data
Course Chairs: Gaurav Godhwani, Technical Lead and Advisor, Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA India) and Chapter Leader, DataKind Bangalore
Instructor: Gaurav Godhwani, Technical Lead and Advisor, Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA India) and Chapter Leader, DataKind Bangalore
Description: There is an increasing need among the research community to make data and research more accessible and easier to understand. This is bringing a tactical shift in the way researchers communicate their data and its relationships. The emerging styles of charts, tables, graphics and visuals are changing the course of how data visualizations explain research and its context. In this session, we will explore some simple open-source tools and design techniques to create interactive data visualizations so participants can better report their data and analysis. We will draw a parallel from the tech and media world to determine if some of these data visualization techniques can be applied in scholarly communications.
This course will have two components:
The first part will offer a detailed introduction to a few existing techniques of data visualization along with an overview of various data visualization tools, which researchers can easily adopt in their work cycle.
The second part will dive into a hands-on experience of visualizing a few datasets. Participants are encouraged to bring their own datasets or pick a few from the samples designed for the session. We will divide into groups to build, iterate and refine a few interesting data visualizations and stories.
Proposed level: Intermediate
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: The ccourse requires preliminary knowledge of communicating with data and its challenges, along with motivation to install a few open software applications on laptops. Installation notes will be shared with the participants.
MT6 and WT6 Public Humanities as Scholarly Communication
Course Chairs: Micah Vandegrift, Open Knowledge Librarian, North Carolina State University Libraries
Instructor: Micah Vandegrift, Open Knowledge Librarian, North Carolina State University Libraries; Samantha Wallace, PhD candidate in English, University of Virginia, and affiliate with Public Humanities Lab, Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures
Description: Conversations about the humanities and scholarly communication tend to focus on the evolution of the monograph through digital publishing platforms and tools; on why Open Access applies in the humanistic disciplines (or why it does not); or on how digital humanities are the bridge to an open future. This course will focus instead on exploring Public Humanities as a possible method and model for advancing scholarly communication across the humanities. Establishing a dialogue between Open Access and the Public Humanities will encourage a re-evaluation of what counts as meaningful scholarly communication.
Topics of discussion may include:
- How does the “open” of Open Access interact with the “public” of Public Humanities? What are the conceptual and practical overlaps between them? How can we interrogate these two terms by putting them in conversation with each other?
- What is the relationship between Public Humanities and new directions in scholarly communication?
- How do media and target audiences interact to shape the production of scholarship?
- How can scholars, especially early-career researchers seeking tenure, receive professional recognition for their work in the Public Humanities or other nontraditional forms of work?
- Can we draw a line between scholarly communication, Public Humanities and Open Access, and then advocate for them as important criteria for scholarship worthy of institutional support?
The two three-hour sessions will be broken down into several sections in order to:
- allow the participants to choose a framing topic, a list of which will be supplied by the instructors with attendant brief readings/resources;
- examine the topic through participants’ expertise and experiences (shared discussion);
- break out into small groups for hands-on brainstorming (for example: design thinking, think-pair-share, etc.);
- reconvene to combine our efforts into actionable directions, which could take the form of a white paper, position statement, manifesto, toolkit or some other utility.
The first day of the course will focus loosely on defining and exploring the field/concept/idea of Public Humanities. On Day 2, we will tie that to new methods in scholarly communication.
We aim in this course to collaboratively tackle a challenging topic and to push our community toward seeing that challenge in a new light.
Proposed level: Beginner
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: The course is open to all, but it is aimed at anyone who works in the humanities or adjacent to the humanities.
MT7 Integrating Wikidata with Your Research and Curation Workflows (Part 1)
Course Chairs: Daniel Mietchen, PhD, Data Scientist, University of Virginia
Instructor: Daniel Mietchen, PhD, Data Scientist, University of Virginia. Members of the Wikimedia community will contribute to the course.
Description: Wikidata is becoming a hub for structured data across a wide range of research fields, from cultural heritage to biomedicine. Since Wikidata is also multilingual, it has been described as the Rosetta Stone of the linked open-data age. This course aims to introduce participants to Wikidata and to highlight how it can and does contribute to workflows in or near the participants' fields of research. Prototyped at FSCI 2017, the course builds on similar workshops given in the past to various audiences – from librarians to economists to scientists and museum professionals – on how research workflows can be integrated with Wikimedia workflows. Since the launch of Wikidata in late 2012, the potential of integrating it with research and curation workflows has been explored through a number of activities, including initiatives that are using Wikidata to collect and curate information about paintings, pathways, politicians, proteins or publications as well as workshops or grant proposals.
The course consists of two parts. The first afternoon will
- provide an introduction to research- and curation-related workflows on Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource and Wikidata;
- zoom in on Wikidata and on extracting research-related information from it.
- The second afternoon will
- focus on participants contributing or otherwise curating some research-related Wikidata content in their domains and languages of choice;
- explore how various aspects of Wikidata (such as Wikidata identifiers, APIs, SPARQL endpoint, multilinguality, the Wikibase software, apps and tools) can be integrated with research-related workflows, drawing on scenarios provided by course participants.
The course will be taught on the basis of materials provided at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/FSCI_2018
While MT7 is about the roles of Wikidata in research and curation, WT7 is focused on its roles around education. Both sessions will have an introductory part about Wikidata, and participants of MT7 who also attend WT7 will lead this introduction for the WT7 course.
Proposed level: Beginner
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: The course assumes no prerequisites other than some familiarity with research and curation workflows. It is aimed at researchers and librarians from any field; other curators of digital information; anyone interested in workflows; and students of any of the above. The course is intended to be taken along with WT7: Integrating Wikidata with Your Educational Workflows, but can be attended separately as well.
MT8 How Much Does Open Access Cost? A Hands-on Approach to Tracking and Analyzing Article Processing Charges
Course Chairs: Katie Shamash, Scholarly Communications Analyst, Jisc, London
Instructor: Katie Shamash, Scholarly Communications Analyst, Jisc, London
Description: As Open Access grows, so do its costs. Article processing charges (APCs) are becoming an increasingly large part of many libraries’ already tightly squeezed budgets. Membership schemes and prepayment agreements are touted as a solution to rising costs, but these schemes can have the drawback of making payments both more difficult to manage and less transparent to report.
Despite these challenges, initiatives have sprung up internationally to collect standardized, open data on the costs of Open Access in order to make the market transparent, to the benefit of all. Data on APCs allows negotiating bodies to negotiate better, fairer deals with publishers on behalf of libraries. It allows publishers to set APC pricing in a way that accurately reflects the market’s willingness to pay. It allows libraries to manage costs and set targets, and to compare themselves with their peers. It allows funders and Open Access advocates to track the growth of Open Access and model strategies to increase uptake in a sustainable way.
This workshop will introduce ways to track Open Access costs. Participants will be asked to talk about which data on Open Access costs they currently track and which they would like to have, and what the barriers are to collecting these. The presenter will then take the students through one possible data collecting workflow, including a brief introduction to cleaning messy data in the free open-source tool OpenRefine. Students will also be introduced to the basics of how an application programming interface (API) can allow them to enrich their data using external sources such as Crossref or Directory of Open Access Journals.
In the second half of the class, participants will learn about the most recent findings and trends in the costs of Open Access. Participants will be given a set of cleaned APC data to analyze and draw their own conclusions from, with help from the instructor. At the end of the class, they will present their findings.
By the end of this workshop, participants will:
- Have identified methods of collecting APC data and be aware of possible pain points.
- Have identified external sources of data that can be used to enrich internal data.
- Have used OpenRefine to clean messy, hand-entered data.
- Have used an API to enrich data using external sources.
- Understand trends in APC data.
- Be able to identify open sources of APC data.
- Have worked with open APC data and presented their conclusions.
Proposed level: All levels
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: This course is primarily aimed at research managers, library staff, funders, publishers and Open Access advocates. No preparatory work will be required. Some knowledge of data analysis software (such as Excel, OpenOffice Calc or Tableau) is helpful but not required.
MT9 Publishing Reproducible Code and Data: A Hands-on, Bring-Your-Own-Code Course
Course Chairs: April Clyburne-Sherin, Outreach Scientist, Code Ocean
Instructor: April Clyburne-Sherin, Outreach Scientist, Code Ocean
Description: Creating research that is computationally reproducible is challenging but is increasingly expected and mandated by funders and journals. Fortunately, the process of publishing reproducible data and code has been made possible through new research tools. In this course, students will practice techniques for preparing a reproducible publication using their own data and code.
Over two sessions, this course will teach researchers how to create a Jupyter Notebook using their code and data, and how to publish their notebooks online so their code can be executed by anyone. In the first session, we will create Jupyter Notebooks following best practices for preparing data and code for sharing. In the second session, we will learn how to publish our Jupyter Notebooks using Code Ocean, an online computational reproducibility platform. Although we will focus on these tools for the course, the lessons generalize across platforms and languages.
After completing this course, students will be able to:
- Follow best practices for preparing code and data for publication.
- Overcome common barriers in preparing their own code and data for publication.
- Learn to use Jupyter Notebooks and Code Ocean to create a reproducible publication.
The audience for this course includes researchers and research support staff who are involved in the preparation and publication of research materials. Anyone with an interest in reproducible publications is welcome. This course is especially useful for those looking to learn practical steps for improving the computational reproducibility of their own research.
Proposed level: Intermediate
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: Students should have some experience working with data and code but can be beginners with reproducible publishing.
MT10 Opening the Research Enterprise: Partnering to Support Openness in Grant-Funded Faculty Research
Course Chairs: Nina Exner, Research Data Librarian, Virginia Commonwealth University
Instructor: Nina Exner, Research Data Librarian, Virginia Commonwealth University
Description: In the U.S. and many other countries, federal funding mandates are encouraging a culture of openness and reproducibility. Libraries have been working to support and advocate for these trends toward openness. But faculty researchers need training, and they may not think of the library first when thinking about grant compliance. So librarians must reach out to Sponsored Research and Research Development departments on campus. This session will help librarians new to working with Sponsored Research to understand the campus research enterprise.
When campuses talk about the “research enterprise,” they are referring to the infrastructure around seeking, administering and growing grant funding on campus. The departments that work with the research enterprise have their own structures, priorities and terminology. It can be hard for librarians to know who to talk to about getting involved in grant support because of the mismatch in terminology and jargon. Learning who to talk to and how to approach them is the first step in building relationships with the campus grant support infrastructure. After identifying and discussing with those teams, librarians face a second hurdle of explaining what they can do and how it aligns with the openness and sharing mandates under federal regulations. Making a workshop can be comparatively easy; aligning a workshop so that campus researchers and administrators understand its value is harder.
This course is aimed at librarians who want to support Sponsored Research but are not sure how to start. Participants in this course will come away with a better understanding of how grants work from two directions: the faculty perspective and the research administrator perspective. After learning these structures and processes, participants will then apply them to their own institutions by searching their campus to identify relevant contacts who they can reach out to for potential partnerships. Looking at the departments and research focuses involved on their campus, each will consider specific grantmaking agencies and priorities that are relevant to their campus.
Participants will then learn about the concepts and terms that are used in the grantseeking arena to discuss Open Access and Open Science. Finally, participants will combine what they have found about their campus research enterprise’s structure with their own expertise to plan support offerings. Together, we will workshop how to explain and offer these supports in a “grantseeker-friendly” way that aligns library scholarly communications skills with Sponsored Research perspectives. The result will be a strategy for reaching out to the Sponsored Research team and offering concrete ways the library can partner with them to support Open Access and scholarly communications skills among grant-funded faculty on campus.
Proposed level: Intermediate
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: This course is aimed at librarians who are at least somewhat familiar with scholarly communications, to help them market their scholarly communications skills to grant support.
WT7 Integrating Wikidata with Your Educational Workflows (Part 2)
Course Chairs: Daniel Mietchen, PhD, Data Scientist, University of Virginia
Instructor: Daniel Mietchen, PhD, Data Scientist, University of Virginia. Members of the Wikimedia community will contribute to the course.
Description: For background on Wikidata, see the MT7 course description. While MT7 is about the roles of Wikidata in research and curation, WT7 is focused on its roles around education. Both sessions will have an introductory part about Wikidata, and participants of MT7 will lead this introduction for the WT7 course.
Wikidata is an open educational resource of growing importance, but it has not found its way into many curricula, nor has curriculum-related information found its way into Wikidata at scale. In this session, we want to explore both of these avenues for interaction between the platform and educational workflows.
On the one hand, we will consider which options there are to enrich curricula with Wikidata-related activities. We will outline three main approaches to this and provide examples of attempts to implement them:
- Building generic Wikidata-based modules that can be inserted into coursework on a broad range of subjects with minimal customization.
- Adding a Wikidata component to existing courses that involve Wikipedia or some other Wikimedia-related activity.
- Building a largely Wikidata-based curriculum for data science or other data-centric fields.
In addition, we will explore how the indexing of curricula, syllabi and related information in Wikidata or Wikidata-federated Wikibase instances can be used to help instructors, students, administrators and others find information related to courses or curricula in their fields of interests.
While the focus of the session will be on tertiary education, perspectives from other educational contexts (such as secondary education, continuing professional development or language training) will be included as well.
The course consists of two parts. The first afternoon will
- provide an introduction to Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource and Wikidata.
- zoom in on Wikidata and on ways in which it can be used in educational contexts and to collect and curate education-related information.
- The second afternoon will focus on participants contributing or otherwise curating some education-related Wikidata content in their domains and languages of choice;
- explore how various aspects of Wikidata (such as Wikidata identifiers, APIs, SPARQL endpoint, multilinguality, the Wikibase software, apps and tools) can be integrated with education-related workflows, drawing on scenarios provided by course participants.
The course will be taught on the basis of materials provided at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/FSCI_2018
While MT7 is about the roles of Wikidata in research and curation, WT7 is focused on its roles around education. Both sessions will have an introductory part about Wikidata, and participants of MT7 who also attend WT7 will lead this introduction for the WT7 course.
Proposed level: Beginner
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: The course assumes no prerequisites other than some familiarity with basic educational workflows like teaching or curriculum development. It is aimed at educators from any field; other curators of digital information; anyone interested in data-centric workflows; and students of any of the above. It is intended to be taken along with MT7: Integrating Wikidata with Your Research and Curation Workflows, but it can be attended separately as well.
WT8 Walking the Walk: Promoting and Maintaining Best Practices in Fair and Open Evaluation
Course Chairs: Stefan Tanaka, PhD, Professor of Communication, UC San Diego
Instructors: Stefan Tanaka, PhD, Professor of Communication, UC San Diego; Daniel O'Donnell, PhD, Professor of English, University of Lethbridge, Canada; Allegra Swift, Scholarly Communications Librarian, UC San Diego
Instructor: TK
Description: As we are building tools, changing infrastructure, and creating new ways to disseminate and share scholarly output, we have been less focused one of the most difficult (because it is cultural) issues – the institutional reward and recognition system, including policies and practices regarding merit, promotion and tenure.
Current systems of evaluation and reporting remain entrenched in ages-old practices while falling further behind advances in scholarship, research methods, publication, impact measurement and reporting. Often uncertainty and misinformation are circulated through evaluators and the evaluated alike, and barriers to the evolution of scholarly communication make it more difficult to entice and retain the best and the brightest.
This course will unpack current practices. It will discuss official university requirements, examine best-practice statements of various disciplines, compare the varied application of these policies and explore strategies for updating promotion practices.
Proposed level: All levels
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: This course is aimed at students and researchers who must navigate the systems, academic leaders who need to understand past policy and new directions, and scholarly communication librarians who are often asked to inform the above.
WT9 Implementing Software Citation
Course Chairs: Daniel S. Katz, PhD, Assistant Director for Scientific Software and Applications, National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Research; and Research Associate Professor in Information Sciences, Computer Science, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Instructor: Daniel S. Katz, PhD, Assistant Director for Scientific Software and Applications, National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Research; and Research Associate Professor in Information Sciences, Computer Science, and Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Description: The course will be a combination of lecture, discussion, and exercises. It will present the case for software citation and introduce the Software Citation Principles (https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86), along with more recent developments in the field. We will discuss what benefits and challenges participants see in using the principles.
Participants will then assume a variety of roles (software developer, software user, funder, publisher, archivist/librarian, university administrator, or science historian) and test how the principles help them in that role and what the consequences to the researcher are. Because the principles are high-level, the exact way they are applied can vary widely, but some standard practices seem likely to emerge, and the role-playing exercises will help illustrate those practices. As part of the course, participants will have the opportunity to prepare software they have co-authored for software citation, and they will cite software using their preferred tool.
At the end of the course, participants will be able to apply the principles in their work and to explain to others why they should apply the principles, too. In cases where there are problems in applying the principles, participants should completely understand why and what changes need to be made.
Proposed level: All levels
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: This course is for people interested in software citation, and while it should be accessible for everyone, people will get different things out of it depending on their experience.
WT10 Mentoring the Next Generation of Open Scholars: Approaches, Tools and Tactics
Course Chairs: Robyn Hall, Scholarly Communications Librarian, MacEwan University, Edmonton, Canada
Instructor: Robyn Hall, Scholarly Communications Librarian, MacEwan University, Edmonton, Canada
Description: Those who teach and supervise students can play an important role in shaping the future of scholarly communications. Drawing students’ attention to the myriad of ways that research and scholarship can be shared openly online can provide valuable opportunities for students to disseminate their own work, engage with the work of others, and develop copyright literacy and improved academic writing and communication skills. Additionally, exposing students to the socioeconomic processes that shape access to knowledge can influence where these budding academics choose to publish and how they approach scholarly activity overall in their future careers.
On Day 1 of this course, participants will be asked to reflect upon their own early experiences with scholarly communications as students and how these experiences have shaped their professional values and practices concerning both teaching and research. As a group, we will then explore and discuss a variety of assignment designs and initiatives from across disciplines where instructors have mentored and involved students in areas of scholarly communications and open research, and review some easy-to-use, free software options and platforms that can facilitate these activities.
On Day 2, participants will have the opportunity to begin building their own assignment, initiative or lesson plan that aims to engage students in open practices and educate them on scholarly communications topics and issues. By the end of this course, participants will have constructed a comprehensive and actionable plan to involve the students that they teach or supervise with open research practices that will both benefit student learning presently and contribute positively to the future of academic publishing and research dissemination.
Proposed level: Beginner
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: This course is for anyone with an interest in educating and engaging students, particularly at the undergraduate level, with the scholarly communications landscape. This includes faculty instructors, graduate students and librarians. Course participants should have a basic understanding of academic publishing and Open Access. No preparatory work is required.
WT11 Structural Biology: A Prototypical Case for Publishing Big Data
Course Chairs: Gustavo Durand, Technical Lead/Architect, Dataverse, The Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University
Instructor: Gustavo Durand, Technical Lead/Architect, Dataverse, The Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University; Pete Meyers, PhD, Research Computing Specialist, SBGrid Consortium, Harvard Medical School
Description: The general public, funding agencies and researchers are increasingly recognizing the significance of publishing biomedical research data. This process can improve research efficiency, and it is essential for reproducibility and validation of scientific research.
However, the characteristics of these datasets can present problems when it comes to publishing them in a manner that is easily usable, citable and verifiable. In particular, biomedical datasets can require significant amounts of storage; can comprise several hundred to several thousand files; and need to be accessible to automated validation pipelines at multiple storage locations. The process of depositing, publishing and verifying datasets needs to be as efficient as possible for researchers operating under time and effort constraints.
This course will explore some of the currently existing platforms, from domain-specific repositories in structural biology and how they handle data deposition and validation to more general-purpose repositories and how they have shown to be a poor fit. We will discuss the students’ own experiences and also see if these problems are shared with other domains.
The course will then explore recent enhancements made to Dataverse, a data repository framework to share and publish research data, in order to support these processes. These enhancements include depositing big datasets comprising tens to hundreds of gigabytes, ensuring the integrity of these datasets via checksum algorithms and replicating datasets close to compute resources.
The instructors will also address how design decisions made during this process could impact use in other domains. Lastly, the class will discuss what big-data repositories of the future should look like.
The course will combine lectures and hands-on work to walk participants through the process of depositing and publishing datasets with this framework. At the end of this course, each participant should have a clear understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of working with big data and direct user experience with Dataverse’s approach to addressing these challenges.
Proposed level: Beginner
Limits on participation:
Intended audience: This course is for researchers, publishers and repository managers. It does not require any specialized knowledge.
