Editor’s note: When we changed the 2020 Library Publishing Forum to a virtual conference format, we gave presenters the option of converting their presentations into blog posts. This is a guest post in that series.
By Julie Goldman, Sally Gore, Lisa Palmer, and Regina Raboin
This blog post is brought to you by the Editorial Team of the Journal of eScience Librarianship.
About the Journal of eScience Librarianship
The Journal of eScience Librarianship (JeSLIB) is published by the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. JeSLIB is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that explores the role of librarians in supporting scientific research through services such as research data management, data literacy, data curation, data sharing, and librarians embedded on research teams.
Launched in 2012 with funding from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the journal focuses on the development of eScience librarianship as a discipline, while also promoting open access and the transformation in scholarly communication. The journal emerged as an outgrowth of numerous eScience outreach projects and conference meetings that took place in New England among science and health sciences librarians, and continues now as a global effort with Editorial Board members from around the country, and a global readership.
Since 2012, the Journal of eScience Librarianship has published 135 articles, including four video articles, and has 163,950 downloads (as of February 28, 2020).
JeSLIB utilizes data from Altmetric and PlumX to track where readers are sharing articles to, and usage metrics are displayed for each article in the journal. In addition, JeSLIB is indexed in Google Scholar, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), The Informed Librarian Online, and is in the process of being reviewed for indexing by Scopus. Most articles are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to encourage maximum dissemination and re-use of JeSLIB content.
Currently, JeSLIB’s Data Sharing Policy encourages authors to make the underlying research data for their article available to the research community. The journal platform is able to accept data as supplemental files, or authors may choose to archive data in a secure repository. In 2019, JeSLIB teamed up with the Journal of the Medical Library Association to discuss best practices in data deposit for librarian authors during a New England Chapter of the Association for Information Science and Technology (NEASIST) webinar.
JeSLIB’s editors are dedicated to publishing open access and exploring the library as a scholarly publisher. Developing and implementing publishing infrastructure to release research has many benefits for the library. Running a publishing program can serve as a critical tool to help librarians cultivate new roles, new partnerships, and to engage with faculty, researchers and students who want to venture into publishing in emerging or underserved disciplines.
JeSLIB is evolving to continue to serve librarians faced with the many challenges of a data driven environment. Now in its eighth year, JeSLIB is proactively responding to shifts in community needs including publishing special issues on emerging areas such as data visualization, and partnering with the Research Data Access & Preservation Association (RDAP) to publish proceedings from the annual RDAP Summit.
The Open Access Directory
One of JeSLIB’s goals is to contribute to the Open Access and Library Publishing communities. There are many open access resources maintained by organizations around the world that are community driven. This means they depend on community input and crowd-sourcing.
The editors planned an interactive workshop, or edit-a-thon, to teach forum participants how to contribute to one of these community-driven platforms, The Open Access Directory (OAD). The OAD was co-founded by Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project. OAD is hosted by the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University, maintained by the OA community at large, and supervised by an independent editorial board.
“The Open Access Directory (OAD) is a compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD makes it easier for everyone to discover them, use them for reference, and update them.”
The OAD contains collections relevant to the Open Access community. These collections include lists of open access journals, data repositories, educational materials, and more. The easier the lists are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can disseminate useful, accurate information about open access. Therefore, the directory relies on the open access community to contribute to the development and maintenance of the inventory.
Being a wiki, anyone can edit the content and improve articles immediately. A typical contribution is to add, correct, or update an element to an existing list. Anyone may contribute by editing the wiki directly as a registered user, or suggest updates via a simple form, making it straightforward to contribute to this crowdsourcing effort.
Lists people may be interested in contributing to include:
Not sure how to edit a wiki? The OAD includes documentation and tutorials for getting started. We have also included instructions to ease your way into wiki editing!
On-your-own Edit-a-thon
Ready to contribute to the OAD? Navigate to The Open Access Directory at: http://oad.simmons.edu
Create an account at the OAD (note this site uses Flash, we suggest using Firefox)
- Click the “Request account” button in the top right hand corner
- Complete and submit the form to request a user account:
- Enter a username
- Enter your email address
- Type in your real name
- Write a brief professional summary about yourself
- Check the box to agree with the Terms of Service
- Do the math to prove that you are not a robot
- Click the “Request account” button
- When done, check your email account for the confirmation email and your OAD password
- You will be able to change the password that was given to you to one of your choice
Add or edit content at the OAD (note this site uses Flash, we suggest using Firefox)
- Click the “Log in” in the top right hand corner
- Add your username and password
- Click the “Log in” button
- Choose a list to add or edit content on
- Explore how to format and edit wiki pages
- Click the “Save page” button
- For a sneak peak click on “Show preview” button
- When you are done click the “Log out” button in the top right hand corner
Open Access and Community
As we mentioned, there are many community-driven open access resources maintained by organizations around the world that you can contribute to! Other inventories include:
- Big Deal Cancellation Tracking: Developed by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), this list tracks institutions that have cancelled publisher big deals. Community members are encouraged to add cancellations, or provide information to enhance or clarify any of the stories.
- Open Access Tracking Project: The OATP is a crowd-sourced social-tagging project running on free software, TagTeam, to capture new developments on open access to research. Participants can help in tagging OA-related news and comment, recruiting new taggers, and spreading the word.
We hope members of the Library Publishing Coalition and wider open access community will explore the Open Access Directory or other resources, and consider contributing to their inventories. Now more than ever, we must find or create new ways for us to stay connected and engaged. The Journal of eScience Librarianship is accepting submissions and peer reviewers, and the Editors wish everyone the best of health as we navigate the months ahead.
Follow us on Twitter @JeSLIBJournal
Julie Goldman, Managing Editor (Harvard University) @jgolds2
Sally Gore, Associate Editor (University of Massachusetts Medical School) @mandosally
Lisa Palmer, Distribution Editor (University of Massachusetts Medical School) @lapalmer14
Regina Raboin, Editor-in-Chief (University of Massachusetts Medical School) @RegRab77