The Victoria & Albert Museum “Persistent Identifiers for the Humanities (workshop report)”, 20th January 2017…

“… the British Library and the DateCite organisation (as part of the THOR project) organised a workshop before Christmas on this issue of ‘Persistent Identifier Services for the Humanities’.

It was apparent from the discussions in the workshop that the implementation of this infrastructure in the humanities is still very much in its infancy in all institutions. Some of the basic concepts inherited from scientific research do not seem to map directly across. For example, do humanities’ researchers consider their source material ‘data’. Or should we even be referring to ‘data’ as a ‘dataset’? It is not immediately obvious what the distinction between the two terms is. Is an individual museum object a dataset or is a set of museum objects a dataset in the same way as a set of data points in scientific research can be?

A separate point of discussion is how to distinguish between the physical object, its digitised version, its associated catalogue record and different versions of this record, (as knowledge is accumulated/revised) as this is not currently clear in DataCite. Although a similar situation was mentioned in the sciences with ice-core samples, where different digital datasets continue to be published from the same physical ice-core samples.”

Now updated and available as a Microsoft Office Excel .xls file (750kb)…

“Surfmarket [has] made a list of more than 7,400 journals in which […] Dutch universities and academic hospitals can publish in open access for free or with a substantial discount.”

570 of the titles fit the arts & humanities category, and these are all published by a small handful of establishment publishers.

It’s not possible to separate out the list’s eco/nature titles, since the “Natuur” category is too broad. At one end it ranges from New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research through to Potato Research, and at the other end goes spinning off into chemistry, maths and physics titles like Polymer Bulletin, Probability Theory and Related Fields, and Progress in Nuclear Energy.

I thought the list might be a useful source of some new URLs for JURN. But there doesn’t yet seem to be any way to filter journals by their “hybrid OA” / “wholly OA” status. Random sampling of the list of the 570 humanities titles suggests most are hybrid, and that as yet they only have a few OA articles in them. Thought doubtless that will start to change, once mandates start to operate fully.

“Are Open Access Monographs Discoverable in Library Catalogs?”, Libraries and the Academy, Volume 17, No. 1, January 2017…

The analysis indicates that only a small percentage of college and university library catalogs in the United States and Canada consistently enable discovery and access for the test sample.

“The open access aggregators challenge: how well do they identify free full text?”, Medium article-post, 7th January 2017. Looks at BASE and CORE…

when OAI-PMH (which is the standard way of harvesting open access repositories [was established,] no provision was made to have a standard way or a mandatory field to indicate if the item is free to access.” [But today] “many have in fact more metadata-only records than full-text records.

[BASE] “is only able to see 75 free records in National University of Singapore’s IR, 654 free records in Nanyang Technology University’s IR, 143 free records in Singapore Management University’s IR. I did not do a check to see if there were false positives in BASE’s identification of full text but [assuming] they are 100% correct, we see only a full text identification ratio of 0.6%, 3.8% and 2.7% respectively!” […] “the results for CORE are as dismal as BASE.

See also: “From open access metadata to open access content: two principles for increased visibility of open access content”, conference paper presented at Open Repositories 2013, 8th-12th July 2013, Charlottetown, Canada.

… only 27.6% of research outputs in repositories are linked to content that can be downloaded by automatic means and analysed (e.g. indexed). […] the median repository will only provide machine readable content for 13% of its deposited resources. [but] it is likely that these statistics are in fact rather optimistic …