An overview of the 2022 NISO plus conference: Global conversations/Global Connections

3.1.The just transition

The first speaker was Rebekkah Smith Aldrich, the Executive Director of the Mid-Hudson Library System in the State of New York, and the current Chair of ALA’s Council Committee on Sustainability. She is also the sustainability columnist for the Library Journal. She talked about the need for a transition, not only of the economy, but of our mindsets, the work that we do, and how we do that work. She said that as we start to think about how we do our work and the frameworks in which we make decisions, we have to take a more global view than we have in the past about decision making and about how we control the future from our own sphere of influence. The work that Aldrich has been doing both in New York state with ALA and now with the national program, the Sustainable Libraries Initiative [8], is attempting to develop a methodology for working in libraries, whether they are public, academic, or school libraries, in order to create better decision-making processes that result in more ethical decisions by libraries as institutions and that create a more ethical and thriving future for the people that libraries serve.

She said that libraries cannot successfully do their work without recognizing and valuing diversity and pushing forth the idea that success will not come if there is no empathy, respect, and understanding for our neighbors, regardless of their backgrounds and where they come from. She added that no matter where we sit in the information profession, part of our work is to allow everyone to be heard through the work that we do in a variety of formats, industries, and sectors. Indeed, everyone in the information community is well positioned to be a powerful player in this transition to a brighter future for all, which requires an ethical framework for making decisions, both personally and at the institutional level. Sustainability has an urgency tied to it today, to the point where libraries need to embed it into the thinking of the profession and to that of the next generation of leaders. In fact, she noted that the resolution that made sustainability a core value of ALA also mandated that accreditation standards for library schools throughout the USA now teach sustainability in graduate school to facilitate a shift in mindsets. ALA actually adopted the triple bottom line definition of sustainability to help people understand that sustainability is not just talking about going green or the climate as it results and relates to the environment. Sustainability is the balance of environmentally sound choices that are (1) fair to all involved, (2) socially equitable, and (3) economically feasible because we can no longer continue to make decisions that are unaffordable for us both locally and globally. It is the balance of these three items that is the goal in decision making. That balance, she went on to say, will provide a mindset and a framework for making more ethical decisions as professionals, as institutions, and ultimately, as local and global communities. She noted that this may not be a radical idea, but when we understand the radical mind shift that is necessary to truly make change happen in our world, we understand that we are touching on a very delicate topic - economics. Her position is that we are in a transition to an economy and a way of thinking that is necessary for a brighter future for us all.

Aldrich said that the concept of a “just transition” has basis key elements to it that must be considered as we think through the future of our institutions and how we do our work: advancing ecological restoration as the natural world around us is suffering quite a bit; democratizing communities and workplaces so that more voices are heard; driving racial and social equity to make sure that past wrongs are righted; encouraging empathy and the gap bridging that is necessary to have more people involved in the decisions that affect their lives; thinking very heavily about your locale and really speak to the need to grow local economies; and retaining and restoring cultures and traditions as it is important to celebrate the wisdom of the past and to learn from that, either whether they be mistakes or achievements that have been made in the past, but to respect what has come before us (Note: this was a common theme among several presentations, especially with regard to indigenous knowledge). She emphasized that the more work that is done to strengthen the fabric of our communities, to help people understand, respect, and have empathy for one another, is going to build the resilience of those communities to withstand disruption.

In closing, she said that our institutions need to: lead by example from the inside out; make policy decisions that are good for all; treat their workers well; run their facilities in a way that is ethical and environmentally conscientious; and serve as a model for others in their community wherever they are geographically located. She suggested that those interested look at the roadmap [9] developed for the Sustainable Libraries Initiative.

3.2.The American Society of Civil Engineers, the Climate Change Knowledge Cooperative, and the SDGs

The second speaker in the session was Dana M. Compton, Managing Director and Publisher, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) who talked about how the ASCE has incorporated mission-based goals such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Climate Change Knowledge Cooperative (CCKC) into its publishing strategy. She noted that sustainability is a key strategic area for ASCE as an organization to the point where about a year and a half ago a chief sustainability officer was appointed. They have a committee on sustainability, as well as one focused on adapting to climate change. And they have a sustainability roadmap that frames sustainability as a strategic issue for practicing civil engineers that must be integrated into professional practice. The roadmap is really intended to transform the civil engineering profession with respect to sustainability. The roadmap has four main priorities with the first three inwardly-focused on civil engineering practice, and the fourth focused outward on communication as follows:

She pointed out that in the fourth priority, she sees that ASCE as an organization assumes a responsibility to communicate the need for transformational change to promote a sustainable infrastructure with all stakeholders - not just their membership, author base, or readership - but also the public, which is different from their priorities in other areas of what they do as a society. And ASCE is stating that its end goal for priority four on the sustainability roadmap is for both the membership and the public to demand a sustainable infrastructure to enable healthy and thriving communities (echoing Aldrich’s sentiment). But for our members and the public to demand something, they need to fully understand it.

Compton then drilled down into ASCE’s publication strategy that is organized around six guiding principles, two of which dovetail with the ASCE’s sustainability goals. The first is sustainability which for ASCE means positioning themselves as a leading publisher of sustainability and civil engineering content. Some of the goals here include assessing their existing content, developing content collections that raise the profile of the great volume of sustainability-related content that they already have, as well as guiding decisions about future acquisitions, ancillary content opportunities, etc. The other pertinent principle for them is accessibility. And this encompasses not just the typical technical aspects that you might think of, but also seeking opportunities to translate technical content for a less technical or a non-technical audience. This includes things such as synopsis statements, videos, infographics, podcasts, etc. They focus on finding channels to expose that accessible content to audiences outside their typical academic audience.

Compton noted that as with anything, ASCE faces a number of challenges in achieving their goals. They have a huge amount of applicable content. ASCE publishes thirty-five research journals and more than forty-six hundred articles per year. They have a book program with more than fifty front list titles per year and conference proceedings that add more than four thousand papers per year, and they also publish standards. Much of the content has an element of sustainability with sustainable infrastructure in it. Therefore, curating that content and making sure that the right pieces are discoverable to the right users is quite difficult. She said that they have made some progress with more granular taxonomy, primarily aligned around the UN SDGs. But in some cases, even an automated solution raises tens of thousands of search results. A manual, human curation element uncovers the most relevant, up-to-date, highest quality subsections of content, but that puts more burden on a small staff (just over thirty). And she admitted that ASCE staff are neither civil engineers nor subject matter experts, they are publishing professionals. So, the work would fall on their already-overburdened volunteers. They have begun relying on authors and editors to provide some practitioner-focused contextualization, but they are not positioned to translate content for multiple audiences, including the public. So that simply has not been happening. Also, ASCE’s reach within publications is primarily to academia. They do have some ASCE channels that reach their membership, which is largely practicing civil engineers. But for the most part, ASCE content is consumed within the profession.

She said that they had an opportunity to participate in the Climate Change Knowledge Co- operative (CCKC) [10]. It is a major, new collaborative initiative to help broaden the discovery and understanding of climate change research and accelerate its application towards a sustainable future. It is co-organized by KUDOS and Impact Science. There is a group of participating publishers and sponsors and the way it works is that CCKC offers several levels of participation at different price points based upon the number of research articles that a publisher wants to showcase. In return for the publisher’s investment, Impact Science creates the plain language summaries, the videos, or infographics via accessible content, to post in an overall cross-publisher showcase and in a branded publisher showcase if the publisher so chooses. The CCKC goal is to help publishers, societies, universities, etc. maximize their reach to broader audiences using understandable lay language, to offer publicity beyond academia at an accessible price point due to economies of scale, and to demonstrate how scholarly communication is instrumental in tackling climate change.

ASCE invested in this initiative knowing that it is a “product” that generates zero revenue. They justify their participation because it supports their publishing strategy. Compton went on to say that they measure success using metrics supplied by KUDOS such as social media mentions, engagement exposure, the press, etc. She noted that usage statistics are quite telling. Initially they put five articles into the initiative. They looked at overall usage in the first month after online publication and then compared that to the first month after the article summaries were added to the CCKC showcase. She pointed out that the articles are getting much more usage post-CCKC inclusion than they had upon initial release. She admitted that there could be factors other than CCKC, but she finds this compelling at least in terms of looking at the one factor

that she knows has changed for these articles and that is the CCKC posting. She said that the first two articles were both about three, to four months old at the time of being added to CCKC. And those articles have now been in there for about the same amount of time. So, what can be seen is that in the three or four months before being added to CCKC accounts for about 23% of the usage, and in the three to four months after, 77% of the usage. ASCE plans to add fifteen articles over time in batches of five. All have summaries and some will have videos or infographics.

In closing, Compton said that looking further ahead, her team has been creating curated collections that align to four additional UN SDGs. They plan to create landing pages for those on their own site, but she said that if anyone from Kudos or Impact Science is listening, ASCE would love for the CCKC initiative to continue. She also invited listeners to reach out to her if they want to learn more and provided her contact information ([email protected]).

3.3.Embedding SDGs in strategies and products

The third speaker in the session was Andy Robinson, Managing Director, Publishing at CABI (see: https://www.cabi.org). He said that CABI is an international not-for-profit organization that improves people’s lives by providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment. They help farmers grow more and lose less of what they produce, combating threats to agriculture and the environment from pests and diseases, and improving access to scientific knowledge. Robinson admitted that CABI is not a typical publisher. It is a not-for-profit owned by forty-nine member governments and is dedicated to solving problems in agriculture. He said that as a mission-driven organization, it is fair to say that everything CABI does should align with the United Nations’ SDGs and they do focus on eight of the seventeen SDGs in particular: #1, Eliminate poverty; #2, Eliminate hunger; #4, Provide quality education; #5, Gender equality; #12, Responsible Consumption and Production; #13, Climate action; #15, Life on land; and #17, Partnerships for the goals.

CABI’s first goal is to improve food security and the livelihoods of smallholder farming communities. He said that globally there are approximately five hundred million smallholder farmers who face many barriers to selling their produce, which restricts their earning power and keeps them in poverty, whether that be from production and post-harvest losses, to compliance with food quality standards, to accessing finance and credit. He added that nearly a billion people go hungry every day, while 30% to 40% of crop production is lost each year to pests and diseases. If crop losses can be reduced by 1%, millions more people could be fed. CABI contributes to this by strengthening national plant health systems. For example, they provide information resources, such as the Plantwise Knowledge Bank [11]. He said that farmers around the world will have to feed an estimated global population of nine to ten billion people by 2050, which means that they need to produce more food from the available land and water and reduce food loss and waste. He noted that food production is already responsible for a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions and that proportion will only increase.

Meanwhile, smallholder farmers are already experiencing climate disruptions due to weather patterns and, as climate changes, there are far-reaching implications for what crops can be grown where, along with the migration and spread of crop pests. In the face of shifting pest outbreaks, an example of how CABI supports farmers is the Pest Risk Information Service (PRISE) [12], which is funded by the UK Space Agency, where CABI delivers text alerts to farmers on pest outbreaks based on geospatial data and the modeling of climatic conditions and pest epidemiology.

Robinson noted that CABI also focuses on reducing inequality for women and young people. He said that women make up 43% of the global agricultural workforce. In some areas, farming is almost entirely carried out by women as men migrate to cities to find work. But women’s production levels are about 20% to 30% lower than men’s because of lack of access and control over land, labor, credit, knowledge, and market opportunities. Also, young people do not see agriculture as an attractive career option for many of the same reasons. CABI now explicitly builds gender considerations into all of their development projects. More specifically, they tailor information, training, and communication channels for women and young people according to local custom and practice.

Robinson went on to talk about a case study to show just how CABI has started to address one of the big SDG challenges via their products - the problem of invasive species, which cost the world $1.4 trillion dollars every year. The Fall Armyworm, for example, hopped on a boat from the Americas and decimated maize crops as it ate its way across Africa and Asia. Invasive species undermine food security and economic growth, contribute to population migration, and cause massive loss of biodiversity. Therefore, it is not surprising that invasive species are a specific SDG target as part of SDG 15, life on land. But they impact almost all the SDGs. Parthenium, for example, also known as famine weed, causes dermatitis and respiratory problems in humans. Seventy percent of schoolchildren leave school during peak weeding times to control invasive plants. And in Africa, one hundred million women spend twenty billion hours weeding every year. Invasive species undermine water supplies and energy production. They de-oxygenate aquatic environments. And the challenge is only growing due to increased trade, travel, and climate change.

To address this, CABI has launched an Action on Invasives Program [13] in 2018. And one of the enduring outputs from that project was the Invasive Species Compendium (ISC) [14]. This is an encyclopedic resource that supports decision making in invasive species management, and it focuses on the global invasive species that have the greatest impacts on livelihoods and the environment. It contains twelve thousand curated data sheets on their distribution, pathways of entry, their natural enemies, and five thousand practical guides to identification and management, which means it is useful to researchers, to risk assessors, land managers, and plant protection officers. The species distribution data has been abstracted from thousands of research articles over decades and that distribution data powers the horizon scanning tool. It is a decision support aid that helps to identify species that might enter a particular country or area from another country. Literally, it helps to predict what invasive species might be just over the horizon.

In closing, Robinson said that in recognition of SDG 17, Partnerships for the goals, that he would like to thank the many supporters of the ISC who made its creation possible. He said that he could have mentioned many other CABI knowledge initiatives and said that some of them are highlighted on the website of the International Publishers Association (IPA) [15]. He also encouraged the publishers in the audience to sign up to the SDG Publishers Compact [16] that was launched by the United Nations and the International Publishers Association in 2020, and to embed action into their organizational and product development strategies.

3.4.Sustainability, scholarly ethics, and North-South divide: A search for connection

The final speaker in this excellent session was Dr. Md. Haseeb Irfanullah, an Independent Consultant on the Environment, Climate Change and Research Systems and a visiting research fellow of the Center for Sustainable Development at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. He spoke about sustainability, research, and scholarly ethics, and how these relate to what he called the north and south divide - basically the divide between institutions enjoying healthy economies (the North) and those in countries that are poor (the South). He noted that if we look at the world around us, we can see that there are many societal and environmental challenges, social inequity, etc. We see poverty and food and water insecurity. He said that these challenges are not only for now, but for the future and have a transgenerational dimension component. That is why when the world came together in 2015 to develop and agree upon United Nation Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it bound us together in all the different dimensions, - the social, economic, and environmental.

He went on to say that to achieve the SDGs we need research and access to information, and he then summarized the research workflow. A researcher needs to access past research through journal articles, theses, books, databases, etc. They then design their proposed research project; seek funding; perform experiments; collect, analyze, present, and interpret data; and then draw conclusions, Finally, they communicate their findings via research reports, PhD/Master’s Theses, journal articles, peer-review, etc. Then their work becomes part of the body of past research for others to build upon. He asked that if we keep this framework in mind, where does the ethical dimension fit in? The obvious areas are in research communication. There are ethical concerns when we talk about authorship, editorial editorship, editorial board makeup, peer review, risk reduction investigation, etc. But what about ethical concerns when it comes to the North/South Divide?

He said that some progress has been made and as an example he mentioned the Research4Life [17] initiative that provides institutions in lower income countries with online access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content. The initiative aims to improve teaching, research, and policy-making in health, agriculture, the environment, and the life, physical, and social sciences. He went on to say that when we talk about publishing research there is some criticism regarding Open Access publishing because sometimes there are very high Article Processing Charges (APCs). However, publishers can (and do) waive fees, or offer discounts to the researchers from the global south. And when we talk about publishers supporting the global equity there are regional Open Access journals that are enhancing global or geographical equity among different geographical regions. But there are some situations which might not be quite that ethical.

As an example, he mentioned that publishers ask peer reviewers to offer their service for free while the publisher, in parallel, charges thousands of dollars for institutions to subscribe in order to read those peer reviewed articles. The same goes for authors (who are often peer reviewers). When a researcher wants to publish their article in a good peer-reviewed, Open Access journal, they must pay thousands of dollars. He said that he himself often serves as a peer reviewer from the global south, but if his institution does not have access to that particular journal, he is unable to read the final version of the paper that he peer-reviewed for free. Similarly, if there are pieces of research done on his country and it has been published in a journal which is not Open Access, his country as a whole will not be able to access that research.

The final scenario that he presented is the following. He said that the lower- and middle-income countries are progressing economically. His country is a lower-income country that hopes to become a lower middle-income country in a few years. As a citizen of a lower-income country he enjoys access to thousands of journals for free through the Research4Life for program. But when his country graduates from a lower-income country to a lower middle-income country that few access will stop. This is problematic because while his country’s economy is improving, their investment in research systems is not progressing at the same pace. Suddenly stopping support from an initiative such as Research4Life will seriously impact science in his country.

He went on to ask two broad questions: (1) Can we have an ethical information or research community without reducing the North-South divide while meeting the SDGs? and (2) Are we contextualizing the ethical considerations of the North for the South? He did not answer them, but went on to ask some specific questions to get the audience to think about the issues. Here are three of the questions:

He went on to say that if we really want to make our scholarly society more ethically aware and ethically active, we need to do three things.

In closing, he said that we need to change the way we narrate ethics in scholarly communication. But that change will not be made by the North. The North should not call out the South to please join them to change the system. Of course, the South should not wait for a call from the North to make those changes. We, the North and the South, need to come together, meet in the middle, collaborate, and create a more fiscally-responsible global scholarly system and information community.

Note: There was a parallel session in this time slot entitled, “The Importance of Investment in Open Research Infrastructure” that I wanted to attend. I tried to access the recording afterwards, but to this day I keep getting blocked. One of the speakers, Ana Heredia, an independent consultant, gave an overview of Latin America’s current scientific information infrastructure, highlighting its key role in the adoption of Open Access and Open Science in the region. Ana submitted a manuscript based on her presentation, “A tradition of open, academy-owned, and non-profit research infrastructure in Latin America” that appears elsewhere in this issue of Information Services and Use. I am sorry that I did not get to hear her speak, but I thoroughly enjoyed her informative paper - worth a read!

4.1.Increasing visibility of Indigenous knowledge from Africa

The first speaker was Joy Owango, Executive Director, Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa) at the University of Nairobi and a Board Member for AfricArXiv [18], a community-led platform for African scientists of any discipline to present their research findings and connect with other researchers. The goal of her presentation was to demonstrate how the visibility of Indigenous knowledge from Africa is being increased through the collaborative activities of AfricArXiv and TCC Africa [19]. TCC Africa is a fifteen-year-old research trust. It is an award-winning organization that has trained more than ten thousand early-career researchers. They have worked in more than forty African countries and have over eighty institutes. And they have a research mentorship group of nine-hundred plus researchers from two continents who they support in their research lifecycle from idea, through research to publishing.

In October 2021, TCC Africa formalized their partnership with AfricArXiv, with the objective of providing a financial and legal framework for the organization such that it could increase its support and build its community in the continent. In order not to duplicate effort they have partnered with six repository partners - Open Science Framework, ScienceOpen, Figshare, Zenodo, PubPub, and Qeios. African researchers submit their research results through AfricArXiv, and in turn, their output is shared in any of these platforms, thus increasing discoverability. Owango went on to explain how this supports Indigenous knowledge.

She said that Africa has fifty-four countries and more than two-thousand languages. As a result, the African Union mandated the use of integration languages. And the integration languages that somewhat unify regions in Africa are French, Arabic, Swahili and, to a certain degree, English. However, in Africa there are countries in which their Indigenous Language is also their national and business language, and this means that their research output is produced in that Indigenous Language. If a research output cannot be seen in these traditional languages, society is missing the diversity of the output that is being produced by the continent.

As a result, TCC Africa and AfricaArXiv are trying to create an awareness of the language diversity in science. She said that they understand that English is the language of science, but noted that we live in a diverse society, and it is good to recognize and acknowledge the research output that results from the diversity within the society. They know that there is a need to have a common language to connect, and that is why so far English has been used, but this is at the detriment of loss of diversity. She went on to say that while we need a common language to connect, we also need to share our diversity - we need to have a bit of a balance of both, and they have found that technology can help them find the balance. They are using technology to help increase the visibility of the diversity of the research output coming out of the continent, particularly focusing on research output that is produced in Indigenous Languages. Their efforts have increased the digital discoverability of African research, built scientometrics based on measurable outputs, and by working with established repositories they can provide long-term digital storage. This has been achieved through a partnership with Masakhane [20], a grassroots organization whose mission is to strengthen and spur research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans. Their main objective is to translate Indigenous Language into the various integration African Union languages, which would in time increase the visibility of the research output. This type of partnership has never existed in Africa before, because it was simply assumed that research output that has been done in Indigenous Language would remain at the national or local level. That assumption can no longer exist.

Through the adoption of technology by the partnership of TCC Africa, AfricaArXiv, and Masakhane, Indigenous Languages are translated into the African Union integration language, which helps to increase the visibility of the research output coming out of the continent. AfricArXiv has been in existence since 2018 and it is also an award-winning organization with more than thirty-six partners. The most exciting thing about AfricArXiv is that since its inception it had received submissions from thirty-three African countries by the end of 2021. This is the highest submission that any repository has ever had in the continent which is why Owango proudly says that they are a continental platform supporting research results coming out of the continent. In addition, there are more than ten countries outside of Africa who have submitted material - researchers who are doing research on Africa, but who are not based in Africa.

In closing, Owango said that she views this initiative as a major steppingstone. So far there have been more than six hundred submissions and with the AfricArXiv partnership in building the community, she believes that they can triple or even quadruple the numbers, because it is free for individuals (Note: institutions have to pay a community fee).

Owango gave a more detailed presentation on the preprint services provided by AfricArXiv at the 2021 NISO Plus Conferences and her slides are available on figshare [21].

4.2.Indigenous knowledge and information systems from a publisher perspective

The other speaker in the session was Darcy Cullen, the founder of RavenSpace [22] and an acquiring editor and the head of acquisitions department at the University of British Columbia Press (UBC Press), which is a long-standing scholarly publisher of Indigenous studies in the humanities and social sciences. It is located on the Point Grey Campus in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral territory of the Musqueam First Nation.

Cullen’s focus was on the work that they are doing at RavenSpace, which was founded at UBC Press with global partners from publishing, Indigenous technology, museums, and libraries, with financial support from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. RavenSpace is a platform and a model of publishing that challenges scholarly communication to develop ways of integrating support for Indigenous voices and authority in the presentation and publication of Indigenous scholarship and Knowledge.

Cullen said that as academia is undertaking changes to address colonial legacies, the structures of knowledge sharing and dissemination need to reflect these changes and empower communities to locate and reclaim their voices in the academic and public record. She said that while there is a robust body of resources for community-engaged research practices, there is little to guide the way the results of that research are then shared and made available for the benefit of Indigenous partners and communities in today’s traditional formal modes of publishing. Publishers, librarians, and other professionals in scholarly communications are grappling with questions that are both ethical and methodological about how Indigenous representations and information are handled in their production, presentation, circulation, and through systems of review, cataloging, discoverability, access, and use. In turn, readers and audiences are seeking trustworthy sources and guidance in how to engage and interact respectfully with Indigenous cultural heritage and knowledge. Cullen said that at UBC Press they asked themselves how publishers can support multiple modes of expression instead of just text. How can they support collaborative authorship and extend the relationships of trust that are formed through the research activities? And how, then, can they make these works widely and openly accessible while respecting Indigenous protocols for heritage and knowledge? For UBC Press RavenSpace was the answer.

The platform supports various media formats and features text, music, digital art, video, maps, animations, interactive mapping, annotations, etc., and can stream content from media-sharing resources around the world. With its built-in and customizable tools, Indigenous creators can assert how their cultural heritage and intellectual property can be accessed and shared. The various contents can be shaped in different ways to appeal to and meet the needs of different audience groups. And Indigenous languages are supported, both on the authoring side and on the audience side, with a keyboard for searching in different orthographies. And with a process for community consultation and co-creation between knowledge holders and authors, as well as artists, media producers, web developers, and others, RavenSpace is seeking to extend the research relationships and productive creation relationships. It also seeks to represent Indigenous worldviews, to highlight the marginalized voices and experiences, and to re-contextualize archival materials on Indigenous peoples and challenge the materials’ colonial underpinnings. To do this, they draw on the best practices guidelines of the Association of University Presses for peer review, which she said is the gold standard in academic book publishing. But they have also expanded the definition of peer review to recognize the expertise that resides in communities.

Another facet of their work is around the engagement of their audiences. While direct audience engagement is part of their strategy to bring dynamic works to Indigenous source communities and audiences around the world, part of their work now is also to link up with the other nodes in the research lifecycle, namely with libraries and distributors. For example, they have succeeded in obtaining a cataloging and publication data record for the publication, and a process for doing these functions. More complicated seems to be categorizing the work, which is at once a long form peer-reviewed publication and also a dynamic online resource, and does not fit neatly into existing categories.

They are also finding that metadata is a useful, but complex tool in this work. They are dealing with information about information, information about content, and in this case, invaluable and Indigenous digital co-creations. They have integrated Indigenous knowledge fields in order to power different tools in the publication so that Indigenous authors can provide valuable context and information about their material and where they can assert their rights in cultural property or knowledge and raise awareness with readers about how to interact respectfully with that content.

Cullen went on to say that they hope to include libraries - post-secondary, tribal, and public - as partners in their work to identify ways of bringing these web-based, community-driven publications into the discovery and access systems in ways that will preserve their unique features. There are questions worth exploring between libraries and publishers about the roles that we all play in the presentation, access, and circulation of Indigenous knowledge and doing so in tandem with authors and source communities. She then showed a short video that provided an overview of RavenSpace in a visual form (worth a look because it provides concrete visual and audible examples of their important work) [23].

She said that digital infrastructures carry the bias of all the other systematic frameworks around them. And they found that when Indigenous names, protocols, rules, and permissions are added, there were no data fields for that information. They had to create new fields and new labels. It will take a long time to correct the missing provenance information, but at least they are creating space for that to happen.

In closing, Cullen said that as they have moved the project into different spaces, they came to understand that researchers and institutions each need their own specific tools. The work of both the researcher and institution is to ensure that Indigenous interests are transparent to other users. And that is where the use of the labels and the ability of the communities themselves to approve those labels and say what they mean to them comes in. She said that one of the most powerful things that they have experienced as a community is the gifts that have come back from their ancestors (Note: the conference closing keynote referred to and praised this work).

I very much enjoyed this session. It reminded me of a keynote given at the 2021 NISO Plus by Margaret Sraku-Lartey, Principal Librarian, CSIR-Forestry Research Institute of Ghana. She talked about the importance and value of local Indigenous Knowledge and how it is being threatened in today’s modern world rather than being leveraged by the global information community to catalyze development. An article based upon that presentation appears on Information Services and Use [24] and is worth a read.

6.1.Perspectives from a blind disability rights scholar

The first speaker was Anna Lawson, a Professor of Law and Joint Director of the Centre for Disability Studies [27] at the University of Leeds in the UK. Lawson described her experience in college when she was in the process of losing her sight and reading print had become almost impossible for her. At that stage, she accessed all of her studying materials through cassette tape. The Transcription Centre at Leeds organized volunteers to record material for her and for other visually-impaired and print-impaired students. She said that this was transformational to her learning experience and had a positive impact on her grades. After doing graduate work elsewhere she returned to Leeds as a member of staff and all of her reading today is done electronically via a screen-reader. The Transcription Centre still transcribes books for her, but she also has an assistant who helps her locate other electronic recordings, which are already available in accessible formats.

Lawson went on to talk about a new journal, the International Journal of Disability and Social Justice [28], which, along with her co-director of the Centre for Disability Studies, she co-founded as an editor. Launched in December 2021, the goal of the journal is to tackle the barriers that they know exist to opening up access and inclusion to ensure inclusion. These challenges include the following:

She then went on to talk about the problems that she faces when attempting to access and use information and these are related to PDFs, e-books, e-journals, and behind-the-scenes scholarly spaces. PDFs do not scan well, and this often results in messy documents that are difficult to navigate. E-books are not as readily-available as one would assume, and they are not easy to read, especially if they have images that are not described - also annotating and making notes is difficult. With e-journals the problems are with page numbers when she needs to cite something. Page numbers are not always made apparent in a text-based way. Her “behind-the-scenes” obstacle relates to the fact that the believes that there is often an assumption, not only by publishers, but also by many people in academia, that accessibility is important to students, but that staff in different capacities will not be disabled. So, although some things that are geared at students might be accessible, if there are things that only staff are expected to access, such as grant reviewing systems or online marking systems, accessibility is often just not there.

In closing, Lawson said that when we think about Open Access it is important to remember to whom we are opening up access and that must include disabled people. It is also important to remember that different disabled people will have different access needs and preferences not only depending on their impairment type, but also depending on their disciplinary expertise. It is important to integrate and embed accessibility at all phases and all stages, from procurement right to the final end; to envisage the people who need accessibility not only as being students, but also as being disabled staff in all capacities; and finally, we are never going to get it completely right, so we need to make sure that there are always options for people to ask questions, to let us know of problems, and request help and assistance to access the information that they need.

6.2.Providing access to instructional and reference materials in post-secondary education

The second speaker in the session was Jamie Axelrod, Director, Disability Resources, Northern Arizona University. Axelrod basically echoed all of Anna Lawson’s comments, for example - not all materials are commercially-available in an accessible format. Also, there is an assumption that because something is in an electronic format, that it is accessible. And that is simply not the case. The same type of formatting requirements will exist in an e-book that are necessary in an accessible version of what otherwise might be print material or an electronic file. “Electronic” does not mean “accessible”. What makes materials accessible are really important - things such as the markup of headers and other formatting features, alternative text to describe images and graphs, notification of page breaks, marginalia, etc. - these are details that we do not always think about when we are creating an accessible version or access to the primary text. The accessible file must replicate the structure of the document as well as the content of the document itself.

Like Anna before him, Axelrod said that his number one problem is with PDF-based documents. And one thing that he often finds, as he and his team are preparing materials for their students, faculty, and staff, is that they will receive electronic versions of materials as one large PDF. It is not broken up into any way in which someone can navigate around it quickly and easily. And they must take that very large PDF and break it up into chapters or sections to make it more usable for the person who needs it. The document is oftentimes not appropriately structured or tagged, so it may only be readable by someone who is a skilled screen-reader user. When a document is not appropriately structured or tagged, for those who do not have a lot of technical know-how, it can be very difficult to navigate. And while it may be readable, it is very difficult to move around without those features.

As Anna noted, pagination is also a problem. Page numbers can be missing. Or what often happens in those large PDF files if books that he receives from a publisher, page one is the cover because this is a file. And therefore, the page numbers do not match up to the text itself. And when a student is being told that they need to read a certain page range this is problematic. He went on to mention other issues such as in STEM fields the symbols, e.g., mathematical symbols, Greek symbols, section symbols for the law, etc., are often not represented appropriately and as a result cannot be read and accessed appropriately.

Axelrod brought up another serious issue. He noted that once his team has remediated a document to be usable by a visually- or otherwise-impaired student - a not insignificant task - it cannot always be shared. The U.S. copyright law through the Chafee Amendment permits the distribution of remediated accessible files to qualified users. And he believes that the Marrakesh Treaty [29] does that internationally as well. However, when institutions such as his receive files directly from a publisher or a third-party service, the contracts to which they need to agree to in order to receive those files prohibit them from sharing any of those remediated files with other institutions who need them for their disabled students. And in fact, Axelrod said that prohibition against sharing requires him to request the same book again if another student needs it even in the same year or term or potentially the next term. The contract requires him to make a new request and not use the previously-provided file until express permission is provided. If he wants to request material from a publishing house or a third party, it can take some time before the material is received - weeks or even months - far too long for him to be able to provide the material to the student in a timely manner. Often, he needs to re-purchase the same materials.

In closing, Axelrod showed a photo of their Alternative Format Production Office where there are multiple desks, multiple workstations, and where a crew of student workers continuously and regularly work to make materials usable by disabled students which once it is completed cannot be shared. He went on to say that most universities around the United States have a similar production facility doing the same work and, as we all heard the prior speaker, they are doing the same work at her institution. He said that in post-secondary education, much of the materials are the same from institution to institution. Not all, but many. So why we are all repeatedly doing the same work is a real conundrum and question for us.

6.3.FRAME: Federating repositories of accessible materials for higher ed: A new collaborative framework

The speaker in this session, Bill Kasdorf, Founder of Kasdorf and Associates, a consulting firm, segued nicely from Axelrod’s presentation because he talked about an initiative that will hopefully resolve the duplication of effort around the world to make the same materials accessible to and usable by disabled students. Kasdorf described the multi-institutional project at the University of Virginia that was established to address the problem described by the prior speaker. With a two-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University initiated an effort to create a web-based infrastructure allowing Disability Service Officers to share remediated texts, to reduce the nationwide duplication of effort, and thereby make it possible for the staff in these offices to achieve better outcomes for students in higher education. The initiative is known as FRAME: Federating Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education. And its mission is to eliminate as much as possible of wasteful, redundant work by enabling remediated resources to be discovered and shared between responsible parties.

Kasdorf said that The FRAME project was never intended to benefit only the seven participating universities. Once Phase Two has been completed thanks to the Mellon grant, they need to have a membership model in place. Their goal is to establish a dues structure that recognizes the differences in resources between schools of different sizes, as well as the contributions of remediated content that they provide. Their hope is that FRAME and the repository being built to store the remediated material can be self-sustaining with a dues structure that comes close to being offset by the savings a participating university realizes by having access to already-remediated resources. Ideally, their goal is for members to come out ahead in the long run as the number of participating institutions increases and the corpus of remediated content grows.

Kasdorf has written an article based upon his presentation that appears elsewhere in this issue of Information Services and Use. I highly recommend that you read it if you want to learn the details of this worthy project.

6.4.Accessibility in the scholarly information space: A technical perspective

The final speaker in this session was Oliver Rickard, Product Director for HighWire Press. Rickard said that it is very important to HighWire Press that content is delivered in an accessible way as possible. From a technical perspective, the key guideline is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) [30]. Version 1.0 was adopted in 1990, 2.0 in 2008, 2.1 in 2018 and version 2.2 is expected in December 2022. Over the years laws regarding accessibility have changed, hence the constant evolution of the Guidelines. He said that basically the Guidelines is a list of success criteria that online sites strive to meet. And every one of these success criteria is mapped to a certain conformance level A, AA, or AAA, with AA being the highest. So, if your accessibility is absolutely perfect you will have hit AAA. He said that in reality it is extremely difficult to reach AAA. And fortunately, most of the laws understand that it is difficult, and he has yet to run across a law that says you must meet the AAA level.

To demonstrate the differences between the levels he provided some criteria that are related to color. Level A one states that color cannot be the only means of conveying information. The AA criteria is concerned about the contrast of color, so it provides a contrast ratio that needs to be hit. The AAA one is an even higher contrast ratio. So, these are the kind of things that are included in the WCAG standard. Pickard said that as a person responsible for website development, he cares about the whole world and that means that there are a lot of different laws and countries that he has to consider. Fortunately, most of the laws tie back to WCAG 2.1, so as long as you are meeting WCAG 2.1 AA level, he said that “you are good to go”.

Another consideration that has emerged is something called the “VPAT [31]”. The “V” stands for “voluntary”, so this is yet another step. It is not required legally, but many people want and expect it, which means that he must conform. This is a document that he fills out that explains exactly how his client’s website meets whatever laws or guidelines with which they are trying to comply. His completion of the document allows his publisher clients to deliver the template to their customers and universities, etc., so that they can prove that they are meeting the guidelines and laws with which they need to comply. These are the challenges on which all technology providers must focus.

Unfortunately, standards evolve and laws and technology change. He cannot make everything accessible and then walk away. This is a continuous process, especially now that it is normal that, as for any website, that he and his staff do not build all the code. They use fantastic tools developed by other people, and those tools evolve as well. They can never assume that their site remains accessible just because it was on day one. Another challenge is that accessible versions of features can be more expensive. Financial decisions also need to be made so in reality decisions on features are made all the time with money as a factor. And the final one is that it is really hard to achieve full compliance.

Rickard then went on to describe the process that they go through to test a site. It sounds like a nightmare! They always do accessibility testing while building a website, not just at the end. Everything is tested against WCAG 2.1, level AA. They use a certain amount of automated testing, but even that has challenges. He provided an example that is one of the WCAG guidelines and it is about non-text content. The criterion is that all non-text content that is presented to the user must have text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose. So non-text content, such as an image, must have alt-text so that for someone who is using a screen-reader, the device will read out that alt text instead of showing the image. He showed a picture of a nurse taking someone’s pulse and the alt-text said just that - “nurse taking a person’s pulse”. He then went on to talk about the problems that this causes. They can readily fix problems when it is their own content with which they are dealing. But when they need to fix problems with content that they receive from other publishers it gets much more difficult (listen to the video and sympathize!).

In closing, Rickards said that despite automated tests you must do manual tests afterwards. And to summarize everything, if you are worrying about the law and the guidelines, the thing to focus on today is WCAG 2.1, level AA. As he already said, if you are meeting that, you are good to go. In addition, make sure accessibility is part of your regular testing processes. Whether you are making a site for yourself or someone else is making one for you, you need to make sure that that accessibility testing is ongoing all the time. And then finally, use manual testing on top of the automated testing as much as possible to ensure that the site is as accessible as possible.

7.1.Applied digital preservation and risk assessment

The first speaker was Leslie Johnston, Director of Digital Preservation for the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). She opened by saying that the discipline of digital preservation covers any digital object, whether born-digital or digitized. Digital preservation encompasses all format types: texts and images, databases and spreadsheets, vector or raster images, software, email and social media, games, movies, music and sound, and the web. With every new Information Technology innovation, digital preservation managers must respond by devising effective strategies for ensuring the durability and ongoing accessibility and usability of new digital materials, so digital preservation will remain an always-emerging challenge. Johnston noted that there are several digital preservation standards and models and, although listed on her slide along with the url’s for access, she did not go into them (note: her slides are available in the NISO figshare repository) [32]. She asked a rhetorical question - Which one is “The Best?” and her response was none of them, all of Them, and the standard NARA response - it depends on your goals for assessing your digital preservation program and the risks related to your collections.

She then proceeded to talk about the applied work at NARA. The first step was to develop a guiding policy/strategy which they initially did in June of 2017 as a guide to its internal operations and it is publicly-available [33]. It outlines the specific strategies that NARA planned to use in its digital preservation efforts, and specifically addresses: infrastructure, format and media sustainability and standards, data integrity, and information security. The policy applies to born-digital agency electronic records, digitized records from agencies, and NARA digitization for access and preservation reformatting.

Johnston then when on to talk about the file format risks at NARA. She noted that an integral part of NARA’s work is the issuance of guidance on all aspects of Federal electronic records management and transfer to NARA, including media types, file formats, and metadata [34]. By regulation, NARA cannot be 100% proscriptive in the formats it accepts. When records are transferred, they are validated to ensure that they are uncorrupted, and, if possible, meet NARA’s format guidance. There are “Preferred” and “Acceptable” formats, but sometimes NARA must take in records in the format that the agencies have because those are the tools and formats that they use to do their jobs, and there must always be exceptions. The work of the diverse federal agencies can be hugely different. NARA created a collections format profile so that they could see what types of material they have (email messages is the largest proportion of content at more than seven hundred and seventy-six million electronic mail messages!) and she highly recommends that every organization undertake such an effort. She said that the government memorandum known as M-19-21 [35] has stated that after the end of 2022, NARA will no longer accept physical transfers. They will only accept material that is either born-digital or has been digitized, as well as their own digitization for preservation reformatting and access of records that have come to them.

Johnston went on say that the creation of the format profile of their holdings was critical for undertaking the risk assessment. In 2018 NARA created an extensive risk assessment matrix, designed to apply a series of weighted factors related to the preservation sustainability of the file formats in the collection. Each question has a relative weighting that maps to the level of risk for each question and, to the extent that it can be defined, resource costs (staff time or budget). The matrix also includes high level factors that assess the preservation actions that could be taken vis-à-vis their current environment and capabilities. The Matrix calculates numeric scores, which are mapped to high, moderate, and low risk and the risk thresholds are subject to review and revision over time. She added that risk assessment is not enough - it must be translated into actionable plans to mitigate the risks. Their plans identify essential characteristics for electronic records held by NARA, document file format risk, and collate links to specifications and other digital preservation resources. The recommended preservation tools and actions for formats included in the plans are based on current NARA decisions and capabilities. The plans consist of two sets of documents: (1) record type plans which document the characteristics of different categories of records, e.g., audio, video, navigation charts, e-mail, etc. and (2) preservation action plans that is a single spreadsheet containing almost seven hundred file formats across all record types. NARA released these plans in 2020 to the public. Their digital preservation framework, which is their risk matrix, the record type, and the Preservation Action plans are all available on GitHub [36], and these are updated quarterly.

In closing, Johnston noted that in 2021 and 2019, NARA completed a self-assessment of their programs and systems using the PTAB (Primary Trustworthy Digital Repository Authorization Body) instrument based on ISO 16363:2012 [37]. She acknowledged that they had gaps in their documentation, but when they did their second self-assessment things had improved and she recommended that organization regularly undertake self-assessments. In fact, at NARA they intend to do such assessments every two years.

Johnston gave a similar talk at the NISO Plus 2020 conference and published a paper in Information Services and Use which you might find interesting [38].

7.2.A model preservation policy for digital publishers and preservers

The second speaker in this session was Alicia Wise, the Executive Director of CLOCKSS. This is a collaborative effort of the world’s leading academic publishers and research libraries to provide a sustainable dark archive to ensure the long-term survival of digital scholarly content [39]. Wise opened by saying that digital preservation is not just a technology issue, even though we tend to talk about it that way. It is a commitment of resources over the long term - time, attention, and active management. It is actually a series of decisions. A preservation policy documents those commitments and decisions, helps you make deliberate, transparent choices about what aspects of a publication is being preserved and how and, just as importantly, what aspects of a publication is not being preserved. A preservation policy makes choices explicit, not implicit or, perhaps, unintended. A preservation policy is a long answer to two short questions: (1) if I publish with you or cite this work, what will a future reader see? and (2) how close will that be to what I see now?

Wise went on to say that we probably cannot preserve everything - echoing the prior speaker. To do so would be expensive, and resources are finite. But a policy forces you to think about the following:

She said that the NASIG [40] Digital Preservation Committee conducted a survey in 2018, the results [41] of which showed that many organizations in scholarly communications lack policies for preservation. Out of that survey came a recommendation to develop a model policy or template as a resource for the development of a preservation policy, so the committee set up a model policy working group in August of 2020 of which Wise ultimately became a member. She talked briefly about the process that the working group used in developing the policy which, at the time of the 2022 NISO Plus Conference, was still a work-in-progress. She said that they envisage that libraries and publishers will use the policy to get started in digital preservation to really document their organization’s mandate and how their commitment scope and goals for digital preservation support that organization’s mandate. The policy will not go into much detail. There will be additional need for platform level or repository level policies and procedures. She cautioned that it is not possible for the model policy to be “one size fits all” because context, resources, and content/collections vary from institution to institution and therefore policy approaches will differ as well.

In closing, she noted that the policy was to be officially launched at NASIG’s 37th Annual hybrid Conference that was scheduled to take place in June of this year. I can add that it was announced and that the NASIG Model Digital Preservation Policy [42] is now publicly-available.

7.3.COPIM WP7: Archiving and digital preservation

Then final speaker in this session was Miranda Barnes, Research Assistant, Archiving and Preserving Open Access Books, Loughborough University, UK. She said that COPIM [43] (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) is an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers, and infrastructure providers who collaborate to build community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable Open Access book publishing to flourish. They have seven work packages and COPIM WP7 [44] is focused on the archiving and preservation of Open Access monographs.

Barnes said that some of the questions being addressed are what are the boundaries of a book? how are complex digital monographs preserved? and what are the risks to archived content? In terms of the policy landscape, it must be said that while COPIM is an international project, Barnes was framing her comments within the UK context, because the UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) [45] has announced a new Open Access policy for all their funded projects. That policy now includes monographs, so any monographs published on or after January 1, 2024 must be made Open Access within twelve months of publication. This is very influential, and it is expected that the U.K. Research Excellence Framework (REF) may follow with their own Open Access policy that will require a similar Open Access mandate for monographs. This will include digital monographs that are born-digital and cannot be easily replicated in print form. Such digital monographs may interact with different parts of the content on other parts of the internet, they may link to content on a video platform, they may have embedded content within them. They are beyond the traditional idea of what a book is, but they are an important part of digital humanities or creative practice works where these boundaries are being pushed. They may include embedded content, e.g., images, videos, audio files, geospatial data, 3D models, QR codes etc. She said that we need to identify the boundaries for preservation. Whose responsibility is it to preserve this content? how is it preserved? where is it preserved? This is particularly an issue for the smaller scholarly publishers who do not have a supporting organization to archive their content and we are looking at these issues from their perspective even though these questions impact all publishers. It is certainly not as complicated as what Leslie Johnston described earlier.

In terms of the formats that publishers tend to use, the primary one is PDF, and it is the one most widely-adopted. However, it closely mimics the traditional book format and has serious negative implications for embedded files (It seems that most of the speakers on the first day have problems with PDFs!). In many cases, PDF is not recognized as a container by the software that scans files in archives. While an XML or a zip file will be recognized as a container and all the files within it will be scanned, the PDF does not have that benefit. Also, there are many different PDF formats (Johnston said that NARA has sixteen). XML is often preferred by key preservation players. It integrates data, metadata, and infrastructure. It is more ideal for long-term preservation than PDF, and relationships between content can be defined, but the problem is that many small publishers simply do not have the technology, resources, or staff resource to convert monographs into XML on a regular basis.

Barnes said that in terms of what they have learned so far key issues are related to file format. How they are packaged and how they are preserved will directly influence each other. And the fact that PDFs are widely-used presents complications to preservation that they plan on digging into much more thoroughly, particularly the differences in functionality between the different PDF formats.

In closing, she asked what are the longer-term solutions? What can the community build for all levels of monograph publishers because this is a part of the scholarly record that absolutely must be preserved for future scholars and future publishers.

8.1.AI and Machine Learning: Less theory and more practice - a few examples

The first speaker in this session was Andromeda Yelton, an adjunct faculty member at the San Jose State University School of Information. Basically, she gave almost the same presentation that she gave at NISO Plus 2021, First she talked about Teenie Week of Play, so-called because it was a week of investigating various computational approaches to the Charles Teenie Harris Archive. He was a famous photographer for The Pittsburgh Courier. The projects used AI to automatically shorten titles, extract locations and personal names, and look for the same person in different photos across the collection [46].

Yelton again spoke about Transkribus [47], a comprehensive platform for the automated recognition, transcription, and searching of historical documents. It is a project of READ-COOP [48], which is a European Union (EU) cooperative society organized for social benefit rather than for profit. It is open to non-EU members as well and it has been used in the Amsterdam City archives and the Finnish archives. It supports Arabic, English, old German, Polish, Hebrew, Bangla, and Dutch, and it can be trained to handle more languages and scripts. There is a demo on the READ-COOP website along with an option to download the software and install it to have a full set of features. Yelton said that as with the Teenie Collection, this can help accelerate the human labor that is involved in archiving.

She again spoke about a project that she herself created entitled “Hamlet [49]” that she used to explore a database of graduate theses. The algorithm was trained on a corpus of about forty-three thousand Master’s and PhD theses, mostly from science, technology, and engineering-type subjects. There was some metadata associated with it, but not much. It did not have subject access, nor did it have full-text search capabilities. While one could look at all the documents that came from the same department and hope that they had something in common, the fact is that there can be thousands of theses from the same department that do not have much in common. Two documents can be in the same department and have very unrelated topics. For example, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has some electrical engineering theses that could be basically mechanical engineering, and computer science theses that could be basically math. This problem was interesting to her because if you are a graduate student, you probably know about research that your lab group has done recently, but you do not necessarily know about research that was done a couple of decades ago or was done in other departments. The ability to find things that are related to your work, but are not co-located by the metadata that is available, is very useful. And, because, under the hood, Hamlet is putting things closer together or further apart based on similarity, it lends itself to a visual display of information. But Hamlet did, in fact, find interesting ways to group documents that are more or less similar to one another.

I suggest that you read my Overview of the 2021 Conference - there was not much new here, although Yelton is brilliant [50].

8.2.Why explainable AI is sometimes not explainable

Barry Bealer, the Chief Revenue Officer of Access Innovations, Inc. was the second speaker. He opened with a rhetorical question - what is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? He noted that there are a lot of words that describe it so it can be very confusing when talking to people. Is it artificial intelligence? Is it assisted intelligence? Is it advanced algorithms? You need to know the context of AI as seen by the person with whom you are having the conversation. Gartner has hype cycles for pretty much everything, and within the AI umbrella they track thirty-four different technologies [51]. He noted that AI is evolving, and as more and more people invest in it, it will keep on improving and there will be more clarity around how it can help your organization.

He then showed a slide (his slides are on the NISO figshare site) from an MIT class came that asks fourteen different questions. And as you go down through the tree structure list, it attempts to determine if you are actually using the technology. Bealer then said that the point of the slide is that it is important to ask questions when you start implementing or evaluating AI technology. Ask a lot of questions to figure out what is going to be explainable to you in your environment. Why? Bealer then showed a slide that listed eight definitions of AI, and said that this is leading to frustration on the industry. In many cases organizations are talking past each other. He noted that we do not even have a common definition of what Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML) are. He then displayed the definition of AI that is in the Oxford Dictionary:

He agreed that this is a straight-forward definition and went on to display the standard Venn diagram [52] of AI/ML/Deep Learning with which most of us are familiar and said that from a simplistic standpoint, these are the three main areas that are discussed when talking about AI and these seem to resonate with everyone. He referred to a White Paper that was published in 2022, The Future Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Publishing Industry [53]. The first thing that jumped out at him when he was reading it was the following statement: “As discussions on AI increase so does the hype and therefore the confusion surrounding it”. And he went on to say, that is the problem today. We just make up new phrases every day about what AI truly is.

The fact of the matter is that AI has penetrated the entire publishing life cycle - from author, content creation, whether it is in word or some other form, to editorial, to production, to aggregation and distribution, to the end-user experience. The above-mentioned White Paper makes it clear that AI can be applied anywhere in publishing and even predicts the departments where the benefits will be most visible. But the important question to answer is where it can be most beneficially applied in your organization. (I scanned the White Paper. It looks like it is worth a read).

Bealer said that he did an informal survey of half a dozen executives in the publishing industry, three from very large global publishers and three from smaller publishers, just to get a sense of where they thought things are going with respect to the impact of AI. In 2020, for both large and small organizations, their comments were all about fiscal responsibility and making sure that they were surviving because of uncertainty about how long the pandemic was going to last. By the end of 2021 though, many of them were seeing an uptick in revenue because everything was moving online or more people were subscribing to databases. The larger publishers told him that they are starting to invest in AI-based technologies and already testing things out or implementing them in their production cycle. The smaller publishers, however, are still sitting on the sidelines and, for the most part, are not investing in AI-based technologies. Which, he said, is unfortunate because early adoption, while not necessarily for everyone, can help you prove out specific use cases.

In closing, Bealer said that he believes that AI is explainable, but that it is complicated, and that you need to know your audience. Also, if your organization is using AI, you need to verify and measure the results.

8.3.A knowledge discovery system integrating knowledge organization & machine learning

The final speaker in this session was Jiao Li from the Agricultural Information Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS). She opened by saying that Elsevier’s 2019 report, Trust in Research [54], stated that on average, researchers spend just over four hours a week searching for research articles, and more than five hours reading them. The rate is five to six articles per week, and half are considered useful. In addition, compared to year 2011, researchers read 10% less literature, but spent 11% more time finding the articles. She asked how we can help researchers with search and discovery and went on to describe the semantic search system that is under development by her organization. She reviewed the technological underpinnings that are being put in place with the objectives of this new system:

If you are interested in the technical design, I suggest that you watch the video - no way that I can do it justice. I also recommend that you take a look at the Elsevier report - very interesting.

Note: The moderator for this session was Clifford B. Anderson, Chief Digital Strategist, Vanderbilt University Libraries, who did not give a presentation, but spoke to me about “Data Lakes” - a term which I had never hear before. He told me that a data lake is a platform for delivering big, heterogenous datasets to library patrons. A data lake gathers datasets across an organization into a single location, allowing latent connections between datasets to be discovered dynamically. When deployed with appropriate metadata and access controls, data lakes become effective ways for libraries to utilize the text and data mining rights they have licensed for proprietary datasets. I asked him to submit a paper on the topic and it appears elsewhere in this edition of Information Services and Use. If you are unfamiliar with the topic it is well worth a read.

10.1.Visual-Meta

The main speaker in this session was Frode Hegland, Director, the Augmented Text Company supported by Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google (yes, that Vint Cerf!).

Hegland spoke about Visual-Meta, a new service from his company that addresses the problem that documents, particularly published documents, such as academic PDFs, lack access to digital features beyond the basic web link. The goal with Visual-Meta is to provide those documents with metadata to enable rich interaction, flexible views, and easy citing in a robust way. The approach is to write information at the back of a document. He said that it sounds simple and ridiculous, and it is. (To me it appears to be a very good answer to the problems with PDFs that several prior speakers highlighted).

He went on to say that in a normal paper book, one of the first few pages has information about the publisher, the title, etc. and that is metadata. It basically is the metadata that you need to cite the document. While PDFs currently could have metadata, it is too complicated to do it. What his company has done is take the metadata from the front of the book and moved it to the back of the document. He put on screen the proceedings of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Hypertext Conference from last year. At the end of each document, there is Visual-Meta. The formatting is inspired by BibTeX [56]. He said that not everyone knows what BibTeX is, but it is an academic format, part of LaTeX [57]. He then highlighted the BibTeX piece and pointed out (because the screen was cluttered with information) the term “author” equals, in curly brackets, the name of the author. The article title equals, in curly brackets, the title, etc. His approach is all based upon wrappers. There are start and end tags for Visual-Meta. Within those tags there is a header which basically says what version of the software is being used. Then there are the self-citation bits, what his group calls the actual BibTeX, because that is what someone would use to cite the document. Importantly, there is an introduction in plain text saying what the information entails. His company has grand goals of a document using Visual-Meta being readable for hundreds of years in the future.

The ACM Hypertext example uses the mandatory Visual-Meta. There is also an optional Visual-Meta that provides even more information. This includes document type and references. In a readable way, it provides everything that the document cites. Document headings provide the actual structure of the document. You can have a glossary and endnotes. He then visually collapsed the material and showed an appendix at the end of the document along with a “pre-appendix” which has content that verifies the importance of the document. It can also have three types of appendices afterwards. One is errata which he described as an old-fashioned piece of paper coming in saying there are errors in the document, which is a useful part of its history. Then you have another kind of history which is who has read the document and what have they done with it? That information could be part of an intelligence workflow of who has approved the document. And finally, there is information about augmented views, which he discussed later. The video [58] was fantastic. I cannot describe and do it justice - you need to see it.

The demo paused and Vint Cerf said that he wanted to talk about the implications of what Hegland has been able to do so far. The first observation he made was that by making Visual-Meta simply text at the end of the PDF, they have preserved the document’s utility. Over long periods of time, in theory, it could be printed physically. It could be scanned and character- recognized, etc., so users are not trapped into a specific computing representation of the material because it is in this fungible text form. The second thing is related to URL references. As we all know, if a domain name is no longer registered, then a URL that contains that domain name may not resolve, in which case, the reference is not useful. Therefore, the reference information that is incorporated into Visual-Meta is a much richer and probably a more reliable and resilient form of reference. The third thing Cerf observed is that Hegland has designed this to be extensible which is extremely important because it anticipates that there will be other document types such as programs or a Virtual Reality space that will require references. The extensibility of this design is also extremely important and its resilience as well.

Hegland said that one of the things that he is very excited about is how Visual-Meta can help Virtual Reality (VR), and this links back to the opening keynote about the potential importance of VR. When a researcher enters a workroom now, they can easily bring their laptops or their computer screen with them. But what they cannot do is take what is on their screen and lift it into the space to share it. It can be shared on a flat panel only. He went on to ask the audience to imagine a knowledge graph richly multidimensional being shared and manipulated. That can be done now - his group is experimenting with this using Visual-Meta because they know the headings and the structure of the document, and via the extra appendices there are the augmented views. All locations of every item are recorded, and all the attributes, etc. can be put into a new Visual-Meta at the back of the document so that when it is opened in a VR space, all of the information will be put back exactly where it was in the original document (mind-blowing!)

He said that his team uses the Oculus headset. They are not big fans of Meta (Facebook) because privacy is an issue, but he assumes that in about a year, Apple will release its own system. And, because Apple is good with consumer products, everyone within the next few years will have Apple VR headsets. But Apple is no angel either. All of these Big-Tech companies will try to own the whole space. Hegland believes that it is up to us as a community to make sure that we can own the data that goes in and out of VR (again, echoes of the opening keynote).

Vint Cerf added that there is another point to be made here apart from owning data, and that is regarding the interoperability of the various systems. Encouraging the producers of these products that interoperability is very important is not going to be easy to achieve. It was achieved almost by accident with electronic mail for the most part, but it never worked with instant messaging. That turned out to be walled garden products, and the operators of those applications did not agree to interconnect in an actionable way. Cerf believes that as a community we have a lot of work to do to persuade the makers of the products and the servers of the products to conclude that interoperability among their various systems is more valuable than isolation.

In closing, Hegland added that his company’s approach here is completely legacy safe, it does not add any data to a PDF other than text. And it can be printed, scanned, OCR’d, and nothing is lost. He believes that they have delivered on their goal of enabling rich interactions, flexible views, and easy citing for published documents in a robust way. And they are now looking to expand who uses the system and to build with the community in a completely open way so that the project can go where users want it to go. There is some interesting additional reading material if you want to learn more [59].

This was, for me, one of the most exciting presentations of the entire conference!

10.2.The state of open data

The second speaker was Ana Van Gulick, Government and Funder Lead at Figshare, who gave a summary of their state of open data survey from 2021. She said that they have been conducting the state of open data survey in collaboration with Springer Nature for six years. Over that period, they have had more than twenty-one thousand respondents from one hundred and ninety-two countries. And this has provided them with a great way to take a sustained look at the state of open data, data sharing, open science, and over that time period.

The 2021 survey was conducted in the summer of 2021, and they had nearly forty-five hundred responses that were analyzed as part of the results. The respondents came from all over the globe, with Europe, Asia, and North America represented most heavily, but also from the southern hemisphere. The fields of interest from the respondents included the biomedical sciences as well as many other scientific fields such as the applied sciences and physical and earth sciences as well as the humanities and social sciences and other fields. A majority of respondents were late-career researchers. However, nearly 30% were also early career researchers. She said that it is worth noting with a survey like this about open data that the survey population is probably likely to skew towards those already interested in open data, practicing data sharing, and being advocates of open science. However, this still gives them the best glimpse at a large population and what is happening with these practices.

Van Gulik said that an important thing to note in the 2001 survey results is the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlighted the importance of open data and open science and having scientific results shared quickly around the globe. Also, it showed that scientific results that have not been officially published and appear in preprints and in open data sets are reaching the mainstream media. About one-third of the respondents indicated that they had reused their own or someone else’s openly-accessible data more during the pandemic than before.

She then went through some of the key take aways from the survey.

In closing, Van Gulick noted that she has only presented a glimpse of the survey and she encouraged everyone to read the full report, look at the results and the expert essays that are included in the report, and really dig into it a bit more. The report and the raw data are freely-available on Figshare [61].

10.3.How the research nexus and POSI will help build a more connected scholarly community

The third speaker was Jennifer Kemp, Head of Partnerships at Crossref. She said that over the past several years at Crossref, they have adjusted their focus from talking about DOIs and persistent identifiers on their own to a broader view of the information that is associated with those identifiers, specifically better metadata. While DOIs are critical, so is the quality and completeness of the information that is included in each record. She added that more recently, they have evolved this further to concentrate on connections or relationships among their records, which now number more than one hundred and thirty-two 132 million. Of course, relationships of various kinds among different outputs have long been part of their shared work. Some of these relationships/connections are:

Kemp said these are only a sampling of the connection types, and they really need the information linked up in the metadata to know, for example, that there is a data set available that is associated with a journal article that may have had a preprint and has software and probably some funding associated with the research behind it. She went on to say that having information available in an openly-structured way as opposed to reading about it in a journal article is especially helpful because computers do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to using the metadata. But it also just makes a scholarly record much more powerful and accurate because it then mirrors all the outputs and all the contributors.

She said that at Crossref they have about a million and a half relationships in the metadata, and you can imagine what the full breadth of those connections would be for all of the one hundred and thirty million records (and growing) that they have today. With all this information she can picture a Research Nexus for which relationship metadata is the foundation.

She said that their vision is ambitious and largely aspirational as of today, but she gave two recent examples. First, in November of last year, Crossref made available the grant records that are registered by their funder members, which means, among other things that publishers can use this information in their own records for better linking between funding and published outputs. And second, last month, they announced that the persistent IDs from the Research Organization Registry or ROR IDs are now available in Crossref’s open APIs. She noted that Crossref is aware that collecting and including this kind of information and deposits is a necessary and a very welcome first step. But the information really needs to be linked together and made openly available and she knows that it takes work to build these connections and make use of them.

In closing, Kemp mentioned the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) [62], which is a set of guidelines around governance and sustainability for scholarly infrastructure, organizations, and initiatives. POSI makes explicit how a lot of organizations have already been working, but because the availability and persistence of all this information requires a healthy network of organizations, she hopes that it serves as a useful resource for understanding how the research support community can sustainably operate.

Kemp has submitted an article based upon her presentation and it appears elsewhere in this issue of Information Services and Use. Take a look because it includes a visual representation of Crossref’s vision of the Research Nexus.

10.4.Accessible discovery via mobile for an economically diverse world

This presentation had two speakers, Michael Napoleone, Vice President of Product Management at EBSCO Information Services and Dr. Monita Shastri, Chief Librarian at Nirma University (India). Napoleone opened by saying that EBSCO has been striving to improve research and discovery workflows for libraries and their users through mobile solutions. As part of that journey, they released a mobile app to address some specific problems that they had found in the market. Some of the problems/concerns were: (1) academic research is a nonlinear process with intermittent steps along the way; (2) it is a cross-device process with needs and expectations for seamless synchronization across the devices being used; (3) there is a need for ubiquitous access to research and making it easy to conduct some of the steps in an anytime, anywhere fashion; (4) the mobile downloading of e-books downloads is difficult; and (5) making research accessible to anyone with a smartphone.

Napoleone went on to say that EBSCO’s App serves as kind of a Swiss Army Knife in that it performs some key functions as a subset of desktop capabilities, but in a portable easy-to-use package. They consider this a start in a way for them to continue learning and iterating further as they continue their journey for improving research in the markets that they serve through mobile solutions. To learn more, they have made a pivot in their research and design approach. He said that in the past they had modeled their approach around role-based personas, e.g., undergraduate students, masters, faculty, librarians, professional, and researchers all with key variations across markets. This approach worked to an extent for identifying distinct solutions suited to each role. But when they look at today’s generation of academic and professional researchers across roles, those professionals share common expectations for an efficient and effective research experience, and from this perspective there is less variation across roles. But at the same time, it is a more complex world with huge variation within each role, based on factors such as their use and skills of technology, the differences in the environment in which they conduct their research, and their goals and intentions in conducting research. As a result, EBSCO has shifted to more of a needs-based persona model in order to draw distinctions and therefore design solutions between users with different types of needs. This transcends across roles and even markets.

He gave an example of a student with a high level of digital competency, who is very savvy with modern software apps and their functions, and who can adeptly conduct advanced searches in a discovery platform, but chooses not to, simply because they were not inspired by a particular class assignment. It was not a limit of technology, but rather just not something that suited their needs in that particular use case. The question here is how is EBSCO able to tap into the student’s savviness in a familiar way that might pique their curiosity a bit more and gain further engagement? Or how does EBSCO get them to use research apps, rather than Google, for researching topics in which they are interested in and therefore are more likely to use some of the advanced features for more robust searching? Perhaps that involves going to where they are, which could be other apps and hooking into those apps via interoperability.

He also gave an example of an enthusiastic researcher who might be so locked into their desktop habits for research that they dismiss or overlook opportunities for mobile to play a role in their research. Or maybe they are simply not aware. Again, it is not a limitation of mobile technology, but a matter of raising awareness and helping researchers understand where or how mobile can fit into their workflow in a seamless manner.

Napoleone then turned the session over to Dr. Shastri who opened by talking about the philosophy of librarianship in India. She said that Dr. S. R. Ranganathan [63] was the founder of library science in India and in 1931, he presented five laws of library science [64] which are applicable even today. First, books are for use. Second, every reader has his or her book. Third, every book has its reader. Fourth, save the time of the reader. And fifth, the library is a growing organism. She said that the term “book” can be information in any format, and the readers or the users are the techno-savvy generation that is comfortable with e-devices because they are portable and the devices’ search capabilities save them time (the 4th law of Librarianship).

She went on to say that during her information literacy sessions, she finds that she has to make students understand that while open sources such as Google are easy to access and use, the students will have to authenticate the information that is retrieved to ensure that it is correct. Since they are students, they are not subject experts, and they struggle to do this. However, her library has subscribed to academic products for them, and they should be able to easily access these products. In the past the students had to access these products through laptops, desktops, etc. and they found it clumsy. In 2021, Shastri introduced the EBSCO Mobile App and students found this a welcome change because wherever they go they are carrying their mobile devices. Now, with the mobile app, they can even easily search the academic resources at school. As a library professional, she believes that this kind of App will encourage students to use academic resources. She suggested that EBSCO also make the App usable on smartwatches or other wearable devices as ultimately the students will rely on them and not the hand-held devices.

In closing, Napoleone thanked Dr. Shastri, and went on to say that it is pretty clear to say that mobile devices are now the most used and most important computing platforms. And as EBSCO looks at the world of academic research, they still believe that mobile platforms are under-utilized and can be much more prolific in the research process going forward. It is an important area for them as they work to improve the research process.

10.5.Uber-like scholarly communication system

The final speaker in this session was Mohammad M. Alhamad, the E-resource Strategist at Missouri State University who presented on what he called an uber-like scholarly communication system. He noted that the current method of scholarly communication has its roots in the 17th century when the growth of experimental science led to the need to share the results of research with fellow scholars. Over time, publishing in scientific journals came to serve additional functions, including serving as a method for evaluating individual scientists’ performance and validating the quality of research via the Impact Factor and other metrics.

He said that the purpose of scholarly communication remains the same today. Publishing provides scholars the platform through which the can to share their theories and discoveries. However, the increased pace and specialization of research in the mid-20th century led to a rapid increase in the number of journals published, which attracted the attention of commercial publishers. This introduced a major defect in the current scholarly communication model. Publishers can make large profits by selling research to the very universities, taxpayers, and grant vendors that pay to produce them.: Furthermore, this model prevents research findings from being disseminated as equitable as possible.

In the current model, publishers set prices with little reference to economic realities. Subscription prices have no impact on demand. When specific journals are determined to be core as a discipline, libraries have little options but to pay for them. As a result, access is not equitable rather it is based on the ability to pay. The consequence of the current scholarly communication model is that the results of research are not disseminated as widely as they could or should be. While Open Access is a good solution to get the scholarly communication system back on track, there are challenges with the Open Access system, including high article processing charges, double-dipping, funding, predatory journals, copyright issues such as Sci-Hub [65], and the demise of small publishing societies (Sound familiar? Echo from the session on ethics).

He then asked a question. With all the technology currently available, why not rethink the scholarly communication system? And before launching into a possible solution, we should ask how many researchers still choose a specific journal when researching a topic search and why, since it is now common for users to go directly to the library discovery service and search or go to Google Scholar.

He then described his idea for an open scholarly communication system - a platform for communicating research outputs to the community and for sharing across disciplines. This system will include new tools to evaluate individual scientists’ performance and validate the quality of research aside from their impact factor and other existing metrics. Here, the focus would be on the articles rather than the repetition of individual journal titles. The quality of scholarly work, of course, would still be maintained through the peer-review process. In fact, reviewers will have profiles and gain scores for their review to maintain credibility and accountability. The new platform will not be a repository system for hosting preprints of research results. Instead, it will be a platform on which to publish original articles with a unique digital object identifier (DOI).

In closing, he said that the new system will not necessarily replace the current scholarly communication system. It will complement it. This may parallel the current scenario in which social media and streaming services enrich, complement, and in some cases, have overtaken older forms of media, e.g., radio, newspapers, and cable TV. – a scenario in which the news media technology has provided new methods for interacting with each other, managing our well-being, studying, and working. Most importantly, it provided us the freedom of choosing when, what, and how we want to read, listen, or watch. Also, it opened doors for entrepreneurs to innovate and thrive. There is also a great potential for big tech to step in and collaborate with libraries to make that happen, considering the success of Highwire, Google Books, and Google Scholar.

Note: Organizations around the world are already using blockchain technology for just such a system [66]. I am in the process of writing a White paper for the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) on the use of blockchain technology along the scientific research workflow and publishing is a hot area!

11.1.Design as a tool for producing authoritative information in online crowdsourcing

The first speaker in this session was Samantha Blickhan, the Humanities Lead of Zooniverse.org [67] and Co-director of the Zooniverse team at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, IL. She opened by saying that she is going to share her perspective on where questions of authority rise in the world of online crowdsourcing and the responsibilities of those who are creating spaces for this work to take place have to help ensure that the data being produced is at a quality level that meets the expectations of the people who are using it. She said that she is not a member of the information standards community, but she does believe that there are some valuable lessons from the field of crowdsourcing and public data creation that are extremely relevant to this question of responsibility and how to ensure that the information community is producing authoritative content.

Blickhan then gave some background information on her organization. Zooniverse is the world’s largest platform for online crowdsourced research. She said that they refer to themselves as a platform for people-powered research, and they do this by providing a space for researchers to build and run projects, which invite volunteers to help teams process data to aid in their research efforts. They work with hundreds of research teams around the world. Since the platform was launched in 2009, more than 2.4 million registered volunteers have collectively produced almost six hundred and fifty million classifications across more than three hundred projects. The main tool that supports this work is called the Project Builder [68], which is a browser-based tool that allows anyone to create and run a Zooniverse project for free. More than two hundred and fifty peer-reviewed publications have been produced using data from Zooniverse projects [69].

The main part of her presentation was about the ways in which authority can be a barrier to crowdsourcing and what some of her responsibilities are as a practitioner and platform maintainer to break those barriers down. She put up a quote from the Collective Wisdom handbook [70], which was written last year by a group of leaders in the field of cultural heritage crowdsourcing, herself included.

She said that the quote really sums up the most common barrier that she sees, which is authority as a barrier to trusting the data that is produced through crowdsourcing, generally because it is not coming from a typically-authoritative source. She believes that the question of whether crowdsourced data is trustworthy is not that straightforward for many projects and context is extremely important. She works with a broad range of data, and each tends to have its own method for determining quality. If it is not clear how a team is planning to use or evaluate their data from the onset of the project, that is when they end up with results that they are not able to use or that might be considered to be low quality. In the Collective Wisdom handbook, the authors defined the three main dimensions of data quality for cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects as fidelity, completeness, and accuracy. She went on to provide more information on what is meant by “fidelity” and gave the following example. A text transcription project might ask volunteers to type out the letters in a historical document as written, including preserving spelling mistakes. Therefore, a corrected transcription would have increased accuracy, but reduced fidelity to the original. So, if a desire for fidelity is part of a team’s goals, that data is going to require an adjustment of the methods that they would typically use to determine accuracy of the results.

She then went on to say that alongside the three main dimensions, the authors also talk about auditability, which is a particular consideration with crowdsourced data as well. Authority can be given to crowdsourced data by ensuring that information about how the data was produced is provided Such information allows users or reviewers of the data with the opportunity to audit the origin of the information in relation to the project through which the data was created.

Blickhan said that there are many publications which show the quality of data produced through crowdsourcing and she gave an example from the Gravity Spy project [71]. The team on this project works with data from LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, which detects gravitational waves in space. It is incredibly sensitive and therefore susceptible to a lot of noise known as glitches. The team is trying to identify what causes these glitches so that they can be removed from the data. The size of their data sets makes it extremely difficult for experts to examine the entirety of the data, so the project is aiming to train Machine-Learning algorithms to help with this work. However, they know that Machine-Learning algorithms do not always do a great job with unexpected features, and volunteers on a crowdsourcing project might not recognize new features without guidance, or if they do, they may be uncertain as to how to interpret them. The team is using both approaches, and an article [72] compares instances of volunteer-discovered and computer-discovered glitches and ultimately shows that Zooniverse volunteers can identify new glitches at a level similar to experts.

She said that this is an example of how the success of a project is contingent upon intentional and well-thought-out project design. On the Zooniverse platform, a multi-track approach to data collection is used as a quality control method. Basically, that just means multiple people will engage in the exact same task to produce many versions of the same data. And project teams must then aggregate the data together to determine a consensus response for a given task. But rather that wait until data is produced in order to implement quality control or validation steps on the results, they actually design [73] projects based on their own experiences and the experiences of others. And she went on to describe several examples.

In closing, her final point was about testing. Zooniverse, teams are required to go through a process of internal review by her team, as well as beta review by the Zooniverse community before their project can launch publicly. And teams are required to take this feedback very seriously, including demonstrating to the reviewers how they edited their project based on the beta feedback that they received. This requires that the teams put in more effort upfront to ensure the usability and reliability of the data being created through their project.

11.2.Open science and signals of trust

The second speaker in this session was Nici Pfeiffer, Chief Product Officer at the Center for Open Science, who talked about open science in the research lifecycle today. Transparency and openness is happening across all the lifecycle stages and this is a culture change for research and science that is happening across all disciplines. She said that her organization talks a lot about how the practice of open science can be pushed forward - what infrastructure is necessary to support it. She said that the key steps are making open science: (1) possible (need an infrastructure); (2) easy (offer a good user experience); (3) normative (via communities such as Zooniverse); (4) rewarding (offer incentives); and (5) a requirement (via policies).

Pfeiffer said that today incentives of individual success are based upon getting research published and not necessarily on getting it right. Research reproducibility is a big issue. If the end goal for a researcher is to publish results as a preprint or as an article and to share what they found in their study, they need to make sure that they provide all the information that is necessary for another researcher to validate and use the results. She then went on to question how open science and today’s scholarly publishing system fit together and said that we need new models to advance research rigor, transparency, and the rapid dissemination of results - certainly the idea of preprints where data can be uploaded and reviewed by others can only help the researcher to ensure reproducibility before submission to a journal for publication and she mentioned Peer Community [74], a non-profit organization of researchers offering peer review, recommendation, and publication of scientific articles in open access for free.

In closing, she briefly talked about the Center for Open Science’s pre-print service [75] that was lunched to meet the following goals:

11.3.Providing information and building trust

The third speaker was Dr. Bahar Mehami who holds the position of Reviewer Experience Lead, Global STM journals at Elsevier who opened by saying that the role of scholarly publishing and information hosting platforms is to provide trustworthy scientific information to the research community who then can build on top of the existing knowledge for the advancement of science. That is why journal publishers and platforms owners all try to ensure that the content that they are providing is trustworthy and this is done primarily through communication channels, workflow tools, best practices, information on the platform, collecting and analyzing data, and by providing more infrastructure to the users and the community.

But, she asked, does the community trust the information that it receives? Mehami said that according to a survey run jointly by Sense About Science and Elsevier in 2019, sixty-two percent of two thousand seven hundred and fifteen surveyed academics across the globe trust the majority of research output that they encounter, but a third doubt the quality of at least half of it.

She went on to say that Publishers and Societies are working together to improve the trustworthiness of their published content through being more transparent about their editorial and peer review processes and one example is the STM/NISO peer review terminology [76] that has been adopted in a pilot phase by several STM members. She also described the many steps that are now being taken to ensure that there is no intentional or unintentional bias introduced during the peer review process to ensure that marginalized groups receive a fair and transparent review of their manuscripts.

In closing Mehami briefly mentioned that Elsevier is working on a method to ensure that retracted articles are not cited in their journals and that such citations are identified at the time of manuscript submission so that they can alert editors and reviewers and reach out to the authors to determine if the citation is necessary.

11.4.Safeguarding the integrity of the literature - the role of retraction

Mehami’s closing remark was the perfect segue to the final speaker in the session, Jodi Schneider, Assistant Professor at the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she also runs the Information Quality Lab. Schneider gave several examples of retracted articles that continue to be cited long after the article was retracted. She said that she has been working for about two years now with a group of stakeholders to try to understand how the inadvertent spread of retracted science can be reduced and to develop recommendations for action. She added that she presented on this topic last February at the NISO 2021 conference and the draft recommendation that was presented then has recently been officially released in final form [77]. The goal is to develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure that the research community is provided with consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information.

In closing, Schneider said that because of those conversations last February, there is a new NISO Working Group that has been established - CREC [78] - to look at the communication of retractions, removals, and expressions of concern, which is meant to focus on the dissemination, the metadata, and the display of information. The Group will not focus on what a retraction is. It will focus on how the information is most effectively disseminated in the community once something is retracted. And she encouraged everyone to help them figure it out.

Schneider and other speakers in this session submitted an excellent article based upon this session and it appears elsewhere in this issue of Information Services and Use.

12.1.What is open science?

The first speaker was Shelly Stall, the Senior Director for Data Leadership at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and a familiar face at NISO Plus conferences. She opened by saying that the single-author paper is essentially disappearing. Today researchers need collaborators and a research network and a recent study by Nature showed that the majority of papers in a journal are authored by people from multiple countries. Such papers outnumber those authored by a group of authors from a single county, and this is really important to understand, especially for early career researchers.

She went on to say that for the future of research, scientists will work in global teams. Researchers will require good tools to find the research that is being done worldwide and look beyond their lab partner. They are going to need good documentation to understand other researchers’ data and software to determine if there is something relevant there for their own work. And they, too, will need to share data and software in a way that is easy for other researchers to consume it. Everything will need to be interoperable and accessible. No matter which research team is creating it, it needs to be accessible, understandable, and usable by others. Software will need to be something that is commonly-used in a given discipline. And then researches need to have licensing that supports reuse of data and software in a way that is supportive of the scientific ecosystem.

Stall went on to say that there is a lot of activity on Open Science today and that the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science [79] was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO at its 41st session in November 2021. She quoted one of the value statements from the document -“Increased openness leads to increased transparency and trust in scientific information”. She said that this is where the scientific community is headed. We really need to work collaboratively across our scientific community and know that we can all trust one another other because we are all working towards the same goal. This requires a cultural change, and we need to encourage all scientific cultures to move in this direction.

She then described the key pillars of Open Science as the following:

She went on to say that from the very beginning of the research process, the researcher both contributes to Open Science and takes advantage of the Open Science practices of other members of the research community. Researchers need to make sure that their research is discoverable and visible and to do that they need to think about persistent identifiers and make sure that the metadata is out there so that they can get credit for their work.

Stall said that at AGU they sometimes have a really hard time working openly because the cultures across global countries are not the same. She works with countries that are very willing to work openly, and with those who are not. The teams need to determine the minimal criteria for working together and that can be very hard. Working across disciplines can be even harder and require even more communication. Each researcher and each discipline and each country is adopting Open Science at their own pace, and we are definitely not all in the same place… yet.

In closing, Stall invited those interested to visit the AGU website as they have a lot of resources available on how to navigate Open Science [80].

12.2.Enabling open science with Dryad

The second speaker in this session was Jennifer Gibson, the Executive Director of Dryad, who opened with an overview of Dryad and characterized it as a not-for-profit data publishing platform and a community that is committed to the availability of all research data and its routine re-use. Dryad is for all research domains and exclusively handles fully-curated research. She said that as of today, Dryad has more than forty-three thousand data publications contributed by more than one hundred and seventy-five thousand researchers who are associated with more than thirty-two thousand international institutions, and twelve hundred academic journals. She stressed the importance of collaboration and working in concert with other organizations and provided several examples. She emphasized that with collaboration she is looking to reach around the world and get more people to the table than in the past. She is also looking to take whatever action that she can, as an individual, to make Dryad’s environment more inclusive and more equitable. She plans to showcase data through Dryad no matter where it is from. Her own personal ambition is to help make data from communities worldwide a first-class citizen in research and in research assessment.

Gibson has submitted an article based on her presentation and it appears elsewhere in this issue of Information Services Use.

12.3.Data standards and FAIR principles of open semantic dynamic publishing

The third speaker was Dr. Yongjuan Zhang, Senior Strategist at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences. She opened with a definition of “Smart Data”, quoting James Kobielus [81] as follows:

She said that smart data is a data format that is computable, self-explanatory, and actionable in a network environment and went on to explain the technical underpinnings of the system that they have developed as the foundation for providing researchers with information via the dynamic semantic publishing model [82]. If I heard correctly, the overall process is quite complicated and has six steps (the recording is not the best for a variety of reasons, but the slides that she used helped. Unfortunately, she did not deposit her slides with NISO). The process extensively uses Machine Learning, structured encoding, data linking, etc. on Big Data, ultimately creating Knowledge Graphs and resulting in what she called “smart data” that leads to informed decision-making and facilitates dynamic publishing.

I had never heard of dynamic semantic publishing until I listened to her presentation, and I find it fascinating. Apparently, it was developed by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) in 2010 when the Lead Technical Architect for the News and Knowledge Core Engineering department decided to move away from traditional publishing solutions and implement semantic web technologies for BBC’s FIFA World Cup coverage and it has been adopted by others since then. Zhang’s talk is worth watching because it gives you a good sense of what they are doing, and you will get even more out of it if you are tech savvy (which I am not!).

12.4.The F1000 publishing model

The fourth speaker in this session was Dr. Rebecca Grant, Head of Data and Software at F1000,

Grant presented a high-level overview of the F1000 publishing model which is fairly straight forward. Authors submit their article after some technical checks by the F1000 editorial team. The article is made available nearly immediately alongside any research data that underpins the conclusions of that article. Then all the peer review takes places completely openly on the F1000 platform. Peer reviewers provide their reports which are made public. Readers can comment. And then all the revisions are made public as well. Every revision of the paper, which has its own persistent identifier, and remains on the platform. She then went into finer details and their work with stakeholders in the publishing process.

Grant has submitted an article based on her presentation and it appears elsewhere in this issue of Information Services Use. An again, I recommend that you read Ana Heredia’s paper that appears elsewhere in this issue of Information Services and Use in which she gives an overview of Latin America’s current scientific information infrastructure, highlighting its key role in the adoption of Open Access and Open Science in the region. It is a perfect complement to this session.