Meet the Members on Crossref

Meet the members, Part 3 (with INASP)

Christine Cormack Wood — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Next in our Meet the members blog series is INASP, who isn’t a direct member, but acts as a Sponsor for hundreds of members. Sioux Cumming, Programme Specialist at INASP tells us a bit about the work they’re doing, how they use Crossref and what the future plans for INASP are.

Can you tell us a little bit about INASP?

INASP is an international development organisation working with a global network of partners in Africa, Latin America and Asia. We have a vision of research and knowledge at the heart of development, so are working to support individuals and institutions to produce, share and use research and knowledge, which can transform lives.

Our work includes strengthening research communication, which we do via AuthorAID (supporting researchers, especially early-career researchers, in getting their research published); improving information access (supporting library consortia with access to international journals and other online resources); supporting evidence use in policy making; working with higher-education institutions to improve critical thinking skills; improving gender equity in research systems; and my area, which I’ll talk more about below, supporting academic publishing in the Global South.

INASP’s approaches are based on the core pillars of capacity development, convening, influencing and working in partnership. INASP promotes equity by actively addressing the needs of both men and women across all our work and addressing issues of power within the research and knowledge system.

What’s your role within INASP?

I’m a Programme Specialist and since I started at INASP 15 years ago I’ve been responsible for our academic publishing work. This work supports increased visibility, accessibility and quality of peer-reviewed journals published in developing countries so that the research outputs that are produced in these countries can be found, shared and used more effectively.

We recognize two big challenges for Southern journals in playing their part in global research systems. The first is awareness of Southern journals, many of which were until recently only available in print. Supporting editors and national organisations to put their journals online on central platforms (the Journals Online platforms) has helped increase their visibility.

We have also provided support to the local management teams in communicating about the platforms, the journals and the research they publish, and we recently published a Handbook for Journal Editors - www.inasp.info/editorshandbook. This is intended to be a free resource for editors worldwide that can be used as a stand-alone handbook or as an accompaniment to the journal quality online course that we are currently developing.

The second challenge is supporting publishing quality and enabling Southern journals to demonstrate their quality so they will be regarded as credible. In the early days, this, for me, was largely about providing training and mentoring for journal editors and Journals Online platform managers about standard publishing practices.

More recently, as local handover progressed, our role shifted towards helping journals to demonstrate their credibility. Last September INASP and African Journals Online launched our Journal Publishing Practices and Standards (JPPS) framework for assessing the quality of Southern publishing processes. This has been really well received by the international publishing sector and by the journal editors we work with.

Tell us a bit about who you support, and how you support them

We support others communicating their research and finding out about the research of others.

The five Journals Online platforms that were handed over to local management at the end of March collectively host 397 journals from Bangladesh, El Salvador, Honduras, Mongolia, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sri Lanka.

These platforms help the research from these countries to become even more integrated in the global research community. Some fascinating and valuable research is published in the journals on these platforms. You can see some examples of this research in this article about a small piece of work we did with these platforms to commission and disseminate press releases of some of the research.

What’s your participation level with Crossref?

INASP has been a Crossref Sponsor for the Journals Online platforms since 2008 and all articles on the sites have DOIs assigned to them (approximately 50,000 articles). All the in-country training sessions for journal editors publishing via the JOL platforms have included sessions to explain how DOIs work and why they are important. We have also trained editors on how to find and include the DOIs for the references of their articles. More recently, in 2015, we provided access to the Crossref Similarity Check service to editors, which enabled them to improve the quality of their submissions by identifying instances of plagiarism before the articles were published.

What trends are you seeing in your part of the scholarly communications community?

Demonstrating credibility of journals is an important part of journal publishing today. There are so many journals worldwide and it is a tough challenge for authors and readers to navigate this sector – a challenge that we often see through the discussions in our AuthorAID network. But it is important that researchers don’t simply turn to the handful of well-known publishers in the Global North that have dominated scholarly discourse to date.

To really tackle global issues and increase equality in global research we need to work towards levelling the playing field and including all voices – and this challenge needs to be embraced across the global research and knowledge system. We have seen encouraging signs over the past couple of years of magazines, blogs, conference organizers and industry groups in the Global North approaching us to help bring in more global perspectives to scholarly discussions. However, there is plenty more to be done and we are particularly focusing on equity in our new areas of work.

Collaboration with Crossref over the past few years has been one of a number of ways that we have been able to connect small, scholar-led titles in the Global South with the latest global standards and approaches in scholarly publishing. This is important as it all helps to level the playing field.

Including DOIs in papers is one of the criteria for being awarded a JPPS star and thus the journals are incentivized to understand and use them more.

What are INASP’s plans for the future?

INASP has recently completed a major five-year programme of work with a significant focus on strengthening organisations in the countries we have been working in and handing over responsibility for managing things like the Journals Online platforms. We are now in a new phase of work, building on what has gone before but with a particular emphasis on improving equity both within and between research systems.

Many challenges remain – the global research system still tends to be biased towards the Global North. From an academic publishing perspective this is apparent both in terms of awareness of journals and also in terms of impressions of credibility. JPPS is intended to tackle the latter challenge but it is still early days – we only announced the first badges awarded a few months ago. Over the next few years we will be building on and strengthening this work and ensuring that it is an important part of the processes for journal editors and for authors and readers.

Thank you Sioux for your participation in our Meet the members series. If your organisation would like to feature in this series, please get in touch.

Meet the members, Part 2 (with protocols.io)

Christine Cormack Wood — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Second in our Meet the members blog series is Lenny Teytelman, co-founder and CEO of protocols.io, who gives us a bit of insight into his background and why he started protocols.io, what the future plans for protocols.io are, and how they use and benefit from being a Crossref member.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, and why you started protocols.io?

I am a computational and experimental biologist, and it was my struggle with correcting a published research method as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT that led me to co-found protocols.io. I spent a year and a half correcting a single step of a research recipe. Instead of 1ul of a chemical, it needed 5, instead of a 15-minute incubation, it needed an hour. But this was a correction of something previously published, not a new method, so absurdly, it was not a result that I could publish. That means I got no credit for this year and a half, and more importantly, every other scientist using this recipe is either getting misleading results or has to waste 1-2 years rediscovering what I know—rediscovering something that I’d love to share, but have no easy way of doing so.

So, I became obsessed with creating a central place where scientists can easily share and discover detailed research recipes. We’re open access, free-to-read and free-to-publish, with web & mobile apps that make these protocols dynamic and interactive.

What problem is your service trying to solve?

Currently, methods sections of research papers are full of things like “we used a slightly modified version of the method reported in paperX”. Here are two examples:

We are working to increase reproducibility, by encouraging precise detailing of methods and then making it easy to keep these methods up-to-date, long after the paper is published. More broadly, our mission is to accelerate science by getting the detailed knowledge out of paper notebooks, and getting it out in months, instead of years.

Tell us a little bit about what you publish and for whom.

Both the content, and the audience for it, has been expanding recently. When we launched in 2014, the protocols were almost exclusively wetlab biology recipes. In 2015, we added support for computational workflows and began to see bioinformatics methods. More recently, thanks to the referrals from PLOS ONE, we’ve started to see protocols for human trials, medical devices, psychology, and more. About half a year ago, we changed our landing page form “Open Access Repository of Life Science Methods” to the more general “Open Access Repository of Research Methods”.

The readership is also broadening, it’s no longer just professional researchers—we now have protocols and guidelines for undergraduate and high school students, instructions for citizen science projects, and even standard operating procedures for lab management. We’ve also been seeing more off-the-shelf use, with people sharing actual cooking recipes, and we recently began asking authors to classify whether they are sharing “research” or “non-research” instructions.

How would you describe the value of being a Crossref member?

Without a doubt, we would be nowhere close to the adoption and sharing that we have now if we were not members of Crossref, registering DOIs for all public protocols. This is an absolute prerequisite for being included in author guidelines of journals, and we wouldn’t have grown in 2017 from two to over 200 journals that encourage authors to detail their recipes on protocols.io.

In addition to the benefit to protocols.io, there is a benefit to the scientists in terms of the quality control that Crossref ensures among the members. Much of this is behind the scenes and invisible to the researchers visiting protocols.io.

For example, in the beginning, we used to simply delete spam protocols. However, once we started issuing DOIs, we realized that we would be violating the Crossref requirements for minted DOIs if we simply trashed these. As a result, we had to build “retraction” functionality that allows us to take down content, put up a notice explaining the reason for removal, and keep the record so that the respective DOI continues to resolve. This is the correct way to handle removals of scientific content and it is Crossref that made us mature and improve the platform. (We’ve since had to use the retraction functionality at the request of scientists, and we’re glad we implemented it to comply with the Crossref requirements.)

Another example is the resolution report that we routinely get from Crossref, showing us which DOIs are broken. It highlights errors for us and helps us to investigate, identify, and prevent problems with the journal partners.

What do you see as the value of Crossref, beyond protocols.io?

As I argued in my talk at the annual Crossref conference, we are finally in a position to connect scientists with the knowledge they need, automatically. Almost every scientist uses a reference manager such as Mendeley, Zotero, Paperpile, etc. to manage their literature bibliography. In turn, that means that in theory, when something happens to a paper or research objects connected to the paper (retraction, correction, update to the dataset accompanying the manuscript), the reference management platforms could notify every scientist who has that paper in their library.

The problem is that it isn’t feasible for every service like Mendeley to connect to every repository and publisher to track events connected to every paper. This is where Crossref is positioned so powerfully. By collecting the metadata linking papers to the research objects, Crossref can be the single source that the platforms need to query to see if there is news for their users related to any specific published paper. (More of this from my talk was captured really nicely in this blog post by the SMU librarian Aaron Tay.

What are the future plans for protocols.io?

Expanding protocols.io content to include chemistry workflows is an important goal for 2018-19.

We are also eager to start on connecting the protocols directly to the devices that the scientists use. Imagine you need to spin your cells for 30 seconds, but the centrifuge is accidentally set for 3 minutes. Our app should be able to connect to the equipment and alert the researcher to the wrong setting, asking if they are sure they want to proceed.

Meet the members, Part 1 (with Oxfam)

Christine Cormack Wood — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Introducing our new blog series Meet the members; where we talk to some of our members and find out a little bit more about them, ask them to share how they use our services, and discuss what their plans for the future are. To start the series we talk to Liam Finnis of Oxfam.

Can you tell us a little bit about Oxfam?

Around the globe, Oxfam works to find practical, innovative ways for people to lift themselves out of poverty and thrive. We save lives and help rebuild livelihoods when crisis strikes. And we campaign so that the voices of the poor influence the local and global decisions that affect them.

Oxfam’s Policy & Practice platform is the gateway to Oxfam’s knowledge, experience, and thinking. Policy & Practice aims to influence, enable and learn from others by sharing and collaborating online with professionals and practitioners.

What’s your role within Oxfam?

My name is Liam Finnis and I am the Website Manager for Oxfam GB’s Policy & Practice site and the Oxfam Digital Repository. In addition to maintenance and development of our platforms, my role focuses on raising the visibility of our programme work including approach and methodology, while also ensuring the availability and accessibility of our publications and resources.

What’s your participation level?

We joined Crossref in 2016, but only really began fully implementing DOIs this year. We have registered 139 content items as of October, with the majority assigned in 2017. While this only constitutes a small number of our total publications (roughly 6%), we’ve focused on current and future publications rather than retroactive application (with a handful of exceptions).

Tell us a bit about what you publish and for whom

We produce roughly 220 publications each year, with a library of 4,450 spanning 40 years. Roughly half of this would be considered grey literature and includes: research reports; evaluations; briefing papers; technical briefings; case studies; guidelines and toolkits. We also publish the Gender & Development Journal with Routledge/Taylor & Francis.

While our organisational focus is on inequalities and the eradication of poverty, this isn’t something we can achieve by looking solely at economic models. Our publications span a range of subject areas including: climate change; food and livelihoods; economics; gender; conflicts and disasters; land rights; and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH).

Our audience ranges from humanitarian and development practitioners to policy makers to researchers and academics. We publish the research that underpins our campaigns advocacy work; the evaluations of our emergency response efforts; reports outlining the methodologies we’ve applied; briefings on policy and recommendations; and, toolkits and guidelines for research, programme quality and responsible data management.

What do you think makes your publications unique?

Oxfam is one of the only NGOs that is actively sharing an extensive body of knowledge and experience. With 75 years of experience working on a global scale, our publications help to share learning and encourage best practice. Further to that, they showcase the changes (gradual or sudden) that we’ve seen in how development and humanitarian aid is defined and approached through the decades.

The Oxfam Gender Training Manual, published in 1991, remains one of our most frequently accessed resources; still widely regarded as a relevant, unique and valuable resource within the sector. Another of our key publications, Wealth: Having it all and wanting more, was published in 2015, outlining the methodology and data sources for Oxfam’s frequently cited fact ‘85 billionaires have the same wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population’.

The diversity in subject and format of our publications isn’t necessarily unique, but I’m reasonably confident that there is something in our publications that will relate to everyone.

What trends are you seeing in your part of the scholarly publishing community?

This is difficult to quantify as, while we have been lightly engaged with the scholarly publishing community in the past, we’ve been significantly more active in the past year. In addition to more actively applying DOIs, early in 2017 we were included in EBSCO Discovery and in March we made efforts to improve the visibility of our Digital Repository. Previously, the key route was through the Policy & Practice website, which brought together publications with blogs and pages focused on programmes, projects, approaches and methodology.

Since making these two changes we’ve seen a significant increase in access of our resources directly from the repository. This has come in addition to the general usage through Policy & Practice. We are also working with Research4Life, INASP and TEEAL to improve visibility and accessibility of our publications more widely.

How would you describe the value of being a Crossref member?

In the past two years, we’ve been looking into how we can ensure that our publications are visible and accessible to a wider audience. Becoming a member of Crossref and registering content with Crossref is a big part of that. It helps to give us a place in the discussions and events as well as enabling us to better understand and meeting scholarly publishing standards and implement best practice.

What are Oxfam’s plans for the future?

In terms of our work with Crossref and an active role in the scholarly publishing community, we’re still fairly new to it and we’re starting to see some of the benefits of our efforts. In the future, we’re looking to get a better idea of the opportunities available and build on our recent work.

Personally, I’m really interested in exploring Crossref Event Data in greater detail and seeing how it can help us map the impact of our work more effectively.

Thanks, Liam!

Meet the Members on Crossref

Meet the members, Part 3 (with INASP)

Can you tell us a little bit about INASP?

What’s your role within INASP?

Tell us a bit about who you support, and how you support them

What’s your participation level with Crossref?

What trends are you seeing in your part of the scholarly communications community?

How would you describe the value of being a Crossref Sponsor?

What are INASP’s plans for the future?

Meet the members, Part 2 (with protocols.io)

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, and why you started protocols.io?

What problem is your service trying to solve?

Tell us a little bit about what you publish and for whom.

How would you describe the value of being a Crossref member?

What do you see as the value of Crossref, beyond protocols.io?

What are the future plans for protocols.io?

Meet the members, Part 1 (with Oxfam)

Can you tell us a little bit about Oxfam?

What’s your role within Oxfam?

What’s your participation level?

Tell us a bit about what you publish and for whom

What do you think makes your publications unique?

What trends are you seeing in your part of the scholarly publishing community?

How would you describe the value of being a Crossref member?

What are Oxfam’s plans for the future?