This two-day hands-on course will serve as an introduction to Open Access (OA) and open educational resources with a specific focus on the needs and concerns of humanities scholars. The first day, we will delve into journal and monograph publishing and examine the advantages of making scholars’ work openly available. We will focus on author rights, on how to negotiate an open contract, on Creative Commons licensing, and on fair use. We will explore venues and opportunities for Open Access publishing in the humanities, and we will discuss the different types of “Open Access” publishing currently available.
On Day 2, we will focus on the original sense of “publish,” from the Latin publicare, to make public. We will look at the potential benefits and drawbacks of making work publicly available earlier in the research life cycle and of publishing non-traditional forms of scholarly communication: blogs, articles, presentations, and more. We will touch on different models and methods of open peer review and look at how institutional and disciplinary repositories and social sharing sites allow scholars to archive their work for future generations while also expanding its reach and increasing its impact.
Finally, we will spend some time exploring openly published course materials, learning objects, and other educational resources, discussing how humanities scholars can employ open thinking to increase student retention and engagement in the classroom while contributing to and benefiting from the expertise of a broader pedagogical community.
Intended audience: Early to mid-career humanities and social science scholars and graduate students.
Scholars are natural annotators, as the process of creating new knowledge requires building on what has come before. For decades web pioneers have imagined developing such a native and universal collaborative capability over the web. Annotation, particularly scholarly annotation, is distinct from current commenting systems in that annotations are addressed to a specific portion of a scholarly work, such as a statement, an object in an image, or a gene sequence. Engineered for the web and employing open standards, annotation becomes a ubiquitous and powerful layer on top of web content, allowing users to add to and interact over scholarly works in context. And, like the web itself, annotations are dynamic, sharable, and searchable across contexts.
In the last few years, web annotation has finally become a reality. Platforms such as Hypothesis allow users to create annotations on any web page or PDF. The W3C, the standards body for the web, has standardized web annotation, which means that an open standard for developing annotations is now available for web developers.
In this course, we will provide an introduction to web-based annotation and explore its current uses. We will also offer hands-on tutorials directed toward both those interested in annotation itself and developers who want to incorporate annotation into their platforms. After the introductory part of the course, students may split into one of two tracks: a non-technical track that will provide hands-on training with the Hypothesis platform, or a technical track, where technologists can learn how to use Hypothesis and the W3C standard for more-advanced annotation applications.
Proposed level: Intermediate. After the course introduction, students may follow a non-technical track or a technical track.
Intended audience: Anyone interested in open web annotation, technologists developing annotation applications.
Advancing better research policies and practices in our communities requires effective communication and strategic advocacy. This train-the-trainer course is an interactive and practical workshop to build skills in communication and advocacy with a focus on research transparency issues.
Over two sessions, the course will arm participants with the practice, resources, and community of support they need to improve their skills and to train their peers in the same areas. In the first session, we will share tools, tricks, examples, and frameworks. We will also practice profiling, mapping, and targeting content to audiences. In the second session, we will create and critique personalized plans for communicating, advocating, and evaluating success that will help you advance transparency in your community.
Participants in this course will:
Become familiar with essential information and resources on research transparency.
Create compelling and targeted messages that engage their audiences.
Learn effective communication and advocacy strategies.
Create a personal communication and advocacy plan with support and feedback.
Proposed level: Beginner. No previous knowledge is required.
Intended audience: Anyone with an interest in research, communication, or advocacy is welcome. This course is especially useful for those looking to become more involved in advancing research policy and practice in their organization, institution, or discipline.
Open practice can provide a competitive advantage for students, both early career researchers and those not planning to work in academics. Early engagement with open tools and practices can also seed a familiarity with openness that students will carry into all facets of their lives. This course introduces strategies for developing a reciprocal practice that makes open culture a tool for student success and makes authentic, interest-driven student engagement the cornerstone of a broad and diverse open culture driving research, creativity, and entrepreneurship.
The course will guide participants through hands-on work with open tools to develop a portfolio of their own as a model for practice. The session will begin with an overview of communities of practice on campus and discussion of strategies for connecting openness with these communities so that open practice is built into student life. The course will also offer case studies for connecting with students from diverse backgrounds and fields and demonstrating the value of openness in their lives and careers.
At the end of this session, participants will be able to:
Demonstrate the value of open practice for undergraduate and graduate students to build familiarity with tools and provide value that lasts a lifetime.
Describe the competitive advantage of openness for students as creators, collaborators, and job-seekers.
Offer a hands-on introduction to tools that build and promote early career researchers’ brand and identify new partners and collaborators.
Develop a portfolio of their own work that is shared openly, using a variety of tools from student journals and preprint services to GitHub repositories of code or multimedia works.
Proposed level: This course is appropriate for participants who are broadly familiar to the scholarly communications landscape.
Intended audience: Although geared toward undergraduate and graduate students and those who support them, the course will be of interest to anyone early in their career who wants to understand how open practice can create, build, and promote their brand.
With the growing demand for openness in research, more and more researchers are obliged to publish their datasets and processes in ways that are easily accessible, searchable, machine-readable, reusable, and citable. This requires organizations to strategize, define, and implement a robust open-data management system as a vital part of the research mechanism. This course will focus on some of the best practices to open up research processes and data. Participants will learn to develop and enhance open-data pipelines.
The course will begin by exploring how to plan an open-data pipeline. We will address key questions: What is open data? Why go open? Then we will look at the main data categories of the research process, major elements of the open-data life cycle, and open-data management plans and policies. We will move on to understanding key components of the pipeline, including documentation, open-data acquisition methodologies, metadata standards, open-data ontology, and open-data storage structures and schemas. We will discuss data analysis and outcomes, open-source codebase, and open-data visualization.
Next we will examine how to scale up an open-data pipeline. Topics will include open-data ethics, privacy, and security; open-data quality checks; publishing platforms; open-data licenses; open issues and bug tracking; indexing, searching, and reusing open data; and changelog and version controlling. We will then turn to examples and case studies, as well as how to measure success and failure and optimize sharing and collaboration. The course will wrap up with a summary, group activities, and a Q&A session.
If time allows, we will have targeted group discussions on topics including:
Sharing our struggles in opening up research, data, and process.
Exploring common best practices across streams for publishing open data, code, and analysis.
Collaborating with different research bodies to co-create open research and data, and understanding the hurdles and benefits of this collaboration.
Limits on participation: None.
Intended audience: Early-stage to experienced researcher scholars, data enthusiasts, data practitioners, data scientists, and data librarians.
A published paper can have a much wider influence if it is prepared in a machine-readable format. The objective of this course is to give participants the practical expertise they need to enhance biomedical papers with a semantic layer, including detailed tagging of specific terms such as chemical elements and proteins.
The course will explore how publishers of the future will enable literature-based discovery (LBD) with the help of the sci.AI system. Participants will learn to use the structured format in the publishing process and to link to the global knowledge network to enable discovery.
The course will go through the practices of:
Automatically adding a semantic layer to a publication.
Validation of the semantic layer by the authors and submission to a journal.
Improving the peer-review process through semantic preprints.
Generating publications based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and incorporating them into the editorial process.
Visualizing hints and interactions in a paper.
Increasing the visibility of a research paper and linking it to the global knowledge graph.
The course will cover both Open Access (OA) papers and publications behind a paywall.
Proposed level: Participants should be aware of the scientific editorial process and the concept of the Semantic Web.
Limits on participation: None.
Intended audience: Members of the editorial and innovation teams of biomedical publishers, text-mining specialists, experts involved in annotating research results in biomedicine, librarians.
Some see the system of peer review as flawed or not suited to its purpose. Others see peer review as a fundamental part of the scholarly communication furniture. The course will survey flaws and imbalances in the peer review system, as well as serious failures and abuses. We will also take a tour through innovations and research aiming to improve peer review, seeing how they relate to the broader world of scholarly communication. Finally, the course will explore how peer reviewers, authors, editors, and others can make the system work as it should.
Limits on participation: None.
Intended audience: Researchers, editors.
Altmetrics are at a crucial crossroads. Just seven years into the study of this nebulous and ever-changing category of non-traditional data, we now have recommendations for standardizing its definition and use, and a number of legitimate criticisms concerning data quality and collection. In addition, the rise of natural language processing and neural networks offer exciting potential for altmetrics’ future direction.
In this course, knowledgeable researchers and librarians who wish to deepen their expertise in altmetrics will have the opportunity to learn from field leaders about the current state of altmetrics and where the discipline is headed next. The course is being presented by Altmetric, the company on whose data most altmetrics studies are based.
The instructor will draw on current research literature and the company’s experience as a successful altmetrics aggregator to guide participants in answering these questions:
How are altmetrics relevant to my current work, and where can I improve and expand their application at my institution, within my department, and in my own daily research practices?
What are altmetrics’ strengths and limitations, and how can we promote a dynamic, complementary approach to assessing their scholarly impact?
What questions can altmetrics help me answer using the tools and data currently available?
What future questions might I be able to answer, given coming developments in the field?
Proposed level: Intermediate.
Intended audience: The course is open to all, but it is especially relevant to librarians, research administrators, and researchersThis course will discuss the technology landscape across scholarly communications programs and show participants how to become strategic tool adopters and maintainers. Scholarly communications programs are tied to key library systems that provide services to campus constituents. These tools can include institutional repositories, Open Access journal systems, researcher information management systems (RIM), open lab notebook tools, and identifier management services like ORCID and DOI.
The course will cover the most common types of tools, as well as how to select the appropriate technology for your clients based on their needs and your local institutional context. Topics will include how to elicit requirements and select a system, as well as how to assess needs and pain points. Partnering with IT is crucial for this type of work. The course will provide examples and walk through collaborative roadmap designs, refresh cycles, and role clarity. System administration and stewardship of digital objects will also be addressed.
The course will compare adoption processes for large enterprise systems like institutional and data repositories with those for one-off technology management to support digital scholarship efforts.
By the end of the course, participants will understand how to:
Identify technology needs.
Assess tools to find the best fit.
Partner with IT throughout the life cycle of a tool.
Integrate technology into program planning.
Build sustainability and assessment into tool management.
The course will also build awareness of digital object stewardship as part of the technology adoption process.
Proposed level: Intermediate.
Intended audience: Librarians, technologists, university administrators.
The current model of research is being transformed by the crowdsourcing of research ideas and health data. To provide value, research must be ethical, methodologically sound, and clinically safe, and it must lead to practice based on real-world evidence. In addition, funders increasingly require research teams to involve the public in multiple aspects of research. Yet evidence shows that research teams struggle to include the public in activities such as systematic reviews, priority setting, research design, and evaluation.
This course shares solutions for starting from where we are to build research with public participation. We will offer practical methods to combine public involvement with science-based practice. Participants will learn manageable ways to invite the public to help prioritize, initiate, design, organize, and evaluate research.
The course will show researchers how to:
Write public involvement into the research protocol.
Use public involvement for funding applications.
Find, communicate with, and train research volunteers.
Meet with the public and manage expectations for a good working relationship.
Write the contributions of citizens into research results for publication.
Involving the public in scientific research offers untapped potential for improving public relations, science education, shared decision-making, and peer-to-peer knowledge. The time is ripe, the technology is ready, and the passion to engage the public is real!
Proposed level: Materials can be adapted for all levels and forms of research.
Limits on participation: None. People with hearing or visual impairments will be assigned a volunteer from the class or can bring in their own helper. The course will be segmented into manageable pieces, so handouts can be supplied for participants who miss part of the class. For those with information-processing issues, class materials can be provided ahead of time.
Intended audience: Anyone interested in public involvement, good scientific practice, and cooperation between scientists and the public.
This two-day hands-on course will serve as an introduction to Open Access (OA) and open educational resources with a specific focus on the needs and concerns of humanities scholars. The first day, we will delve into journal and monograph publishing and examine the advantages of making scholars’ work openly available. We will focus on author rights, on how to negotiate an open contract, on Creative Commons licensing, and on fair use. We will explore venues and opportunities for Open Access publishing in the humanities, and we will discuss the different types of “Open Access” publishing currently available.
On Day 2, we will focus on the original sense of “publish,” from the Latin publicare, to make public. We will look at the potential benefits and drawbacks of making work publicly available earlier in the research life cycle and of publishing non-traditional forms of scholarly communication: blogs, articles, presentations, and more. We will touch on different models and methods of open peer review and look at how institutional and disciplinary repositories and social sharing sites allow scholars to archive their work for future generations while also expanding its reach and increasing its impact.
Finally, we will spend some time exploring openly published course materials, learning objects, and other educational resources, discussing how humanities scholars can employ open thinking to increase student retention and engagement in the classroom while contributing to and benefiting from the expertise of a broader pedagogical community.
Intended audience: Early to mid-career humanities and social science scholars and graduate students.
Scholars are natural annotators, as the process of creating new knowledge requires building on what has come before. For decades web pioneers have imagined developing such a native and universal collaborative capability over the web. Annotation, particularly scholarly annotation, is distinct from current commenting systems in that annotations are addressed to a specific portion of a scholarly work, such as a statement, an object in an image, or a gene sequence. Engineered for the web and employing open standards, annotation becomes a ubiquitous and powerful layer on top of web content, allowing users to add to and interact over scholarly works in context. And, like the web itself, annotations are dynamic, sharable, and searchable across contexts.
In the last few years, web annotation has finally become a reality. Platforms such as Hypothesis allow users to create annotations on any web page or PDF. The W3C, the standards body for the web, has standardized web annotation, which means that an open standard for developing annotations is now available for web developers.
In this course, we will provide an introduction to web-based annotation and explore its current uses. We will also offer hands-on tutorials directed toward both those interested in annotation itself and developers who want to incorporate annotation into their platforms. After the introductory part of the course, students may split into one of two tracks: a non-technical track that will provide hands-on training with the Hypothesis platform, or a technical track, where technologists can learn how to use Hypothesis and the W3C standard for more-advanced annotation applications.
Proposed level: Intermediate. After the course introduction, students may follow a non-technical track or a technical track.
Intended audience: Anyone interested in open web annotation, technologists developing annotation applications.
Advancing better research policies and practices in our communities requires effective communication and strategic advocacy. This train-the-trainer course is an interactive and practical workshop to build skills in communication and advocacy with a focus on research transparency issues.
Over two sessions, the course will arm participants with the practice, resources, and community of support they need to improve their skills and to train their peers in the same areas. In the first session, we will share tools, tricks, examples, and frameworks. We will also practice profiling, mapping, and targeting content to audiences. In the second session, we will create and critique personalized plans for communicating, advocating, and evaluating success that will help you advance transparency in your community.
Participants in this course will:
Become familiar with essential information and resources on research transparency.
Create compelling and targeted messages that engage their audiences.
Learn effective communication and advocacy strategies.
Create a personal communication and advocacy plan with support and feedback.
Proposed level: Beginner. No previous knowledge is required.
Intended audience: Anyone with an interest in research, communication, or advocacy is welcome. This course is especially useful for those looking to become more involved in advancing research policy and practice in their organization, institution, or discipline.
Open practice can provide a competitive advantage for students, both early career researchers and those not planning to work in academics. Early engagement with open tools and practices can also seed a familiarity with openness that students will carry into all facets of their lives. This course introduces strategies for developing a reciprocal practice that makes open culture a tool for student success and makes authentic, interest-driven student engagement the cornerstone of a broad and diverse open culture driving research, creativity, and entrepreneurship.
The course will guide participants through hands-on work with open tools to develop a portfolio of their own as a model for practice. The session will begin with an overview of communities of practice on campus and discussion of strategies for connecting openness with these communities so that open practice is built into student life. The course will also offer case studies for connecting with students from diverse backgrounds and fields and demonstrating the value of openness in their lives and careers.
At the end of this session, participants will be able to:
Demonstrate the value of open practice for undergraduate and graduate students to build familiarity with tools and provide value that lasts a lifetime.
Describe the competitive advantage of openness for students as creators, collaborators, and job-seekers.
Offer a hands-on introduction to tools that build and promote early career researchers’ brand and identify new partners and collaborators.
Develop a portfolio of their own work that is shared openly, using a variety of tools from student journals and preprint services to GitHub repositories of code or multimedia works.
Proposed level: This course is appropriate for participants who are broadly familiar to the scholarly communications landscape.
Intended audience: Although geared toward undergraduate and graduate students and those who support them, the course will be of interest to anyone early in their career who wants to understand how open practice can create, build, and promote their brand.
With the growing demand for openness in research, more and more researchers are obliged to publish their datasets and processes in ways that are easily accessible, searchable, machine-readable, reusable, and citable. This requires organizations to strategize, define, and implement a robust open-data management system as a vital part of the research mechanism. This course will focus on some of the best practices to open up research processes and data. Participants will learn to develop and enhance open-data pipelines.
The course will begin by exploring how to plan an open-data pipeline. We will address key questions: What is open data? Why go open? Then we will look at the main data categories of the research process, major elements of the open-data life cycle, and open-data management plans and policies. We will move on to understanding key components of the pipeline, including documentation, open-data acquisition methodologies, metadata standards, open-data ontology, and open-data storage structures and schemas. We will discuss data analysis and outcomes, open-source codebase, and open-data visualization.
Next we will examine how to scale up an open-data pipeline. Topics will include open-data ethics, privacy, and security; open-data quality checks; publishing platforms; open-data licenses; open issues and bug tracking; indexing, searching, and reusing open data; and changelog and version controlling. We will then turn to examples and case studies, as well as how to measure success and failure and optimize sharing and collaboration. The course will wrap up with a summary, group activities, and a Q&A session.
If time allows, we will have targeted group discussions on topics including:
Sharing our struggles in opening up research, data, and process.
Exploring common best practices across streams for publishing open data, code, and analysis.
Collaborating with different research bodies to co-create open research and data, and understanding the hurdles and benefits of this collaboration.
Limits on participation: None.
Intended audience: Early-stage to experienced researcher scholars, data enthusiasts, data practitioners, data scientists, and data librarians.
A published paper can have a much wider influence if it is prepared in a machine-readable format. The objective of this course is to give participants the practical expertise they need to enhance biomedical papers with a semantic layer, including detailed tagging of specific terms such as chemical elements and proteins.
The course will explore how publishers of the future will enable literature-based discovery (LBD) with the help of the sci.AI system. Participants will learn to use the structured format in the publishing process and to link to the global knowledge network to enable discovery.
The course will go through the practices of:
Automatically adding a semantic layer to a publication.
Validation of the semantic layer by the authors and submission to a journal.
Improving the peer-review process through semantic preprints.
Generating publications based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and incorporating them into the editorial process.
Visualizing hints and interactions in a paper.
Increasing the visibility of a research paper and linking it to the global knowledge graph.
The course will cover both Open Access (OA) papers and publications behind a paywall.
Proposed level: Participants should be aware of the scientific editorial process and the concept of the Semantic Web.
Limits on participation: None.
Intended audience: Members of the editorial and innovation teams of biomedical publishers, text-mining specialists, experts involved in annotating research results in biomedicine, librarians.
Some see the system of peer review as flawed or not suited to its purpose. Others see peer review as a fundamental part of the scholarly communication furniture. The course will survey flaws and imbalances in the peer review system, as well as serious failures and abuses. We will also take a tour through innovations and research aiming to improve peer review, seeing how they relate to the broader world of scholarly communication. Finally, the course will explore how peer reviewers, authors, editors, and others can make the system work as it should.
Limits on participation: None.
Intended audience: Researchers, editors.
Altmetrics are at a crucial crossroads. Just seven years into the study of this nebulous and ever-changing category of non-traditional data, we now have recommendations for standardizing its definition and use, and a number of legitimate criticisms concerning data quality and collection. In addition, the rise of natural language processing and neural networks offer exciting potential for altmetrics’ future direction.
In this course, knowledgeable researchers and librarians who wish to deepen their expertise in altmetrics will have the opportunity to learn from field leaders about the current state of altmetrics and where the discipline is headed next. The course is being presented by Altmetric, the company on whose data most altmetrics studies are based.
The instructor will draw on current research literature and the company’s experience as a successful altmetrics aggregator to guide participants in answering these questions:
How are altmetrics relevant to my current work, and where can I improve and expand their application at my institution, within my department, and in my own daily research practices?
What are altmetrics’ strengths and limitations, and how can we promote a dynamic, complementary approach to assessing their scholarly impact?
What questions can altmetrics help me answer using the tools and data currently available?
What future questions might I be able to answer, given coming developments in the field?
Proposed level: Intermediate.
Intended audience: The course is open to all, but it is especially relevant to librarians, research administrators, and researchersThis course will discuss the technology landscape across scholarly communications programs and show participants how to become strategic tool adopters and maintainers. Scholarly communications programs are tied to key library systems that provide services to campus constituents. These tools can include institutional repositories, Open Access journal systems, researcher information management systems (RIM), open lab notebook tools, and identifier management services like ORCID and DOI.
The course will cover the most common types of tools, as well as how to select the appropriate technology for your clients based on their needs and your local institutional context. Topics will include how to elicit requirements and select a system, as well as how to assess needs and pain points. Partnering with IT is crucial for this type of work. The course will provide examples and walk through collaborative roadmap designs, refresh cycles, and role clarity. System administration and stewardship of digital objects will also be addressed.
The course will compare adoption processes for large enterprise systems like institutional and data repositories with those for one-off technology management to support digital scholarship efforts.
By the end of the course, participants will understand how to:
Identify technology needs.
Assess tools to find the best fit.
Partner with IT throughout the life cycle of a tool.
Integrate technology into program planning.
Build sustainability and assessment into tool management.
The course will also build awareness of digital object stewardship as part of the technology adoption process.
Proposed level: Intermediate.
Intended audience: Librarians, technologists, university administrators.
The current model of research is being transformed by the crowdsourcing of research ideas and health data. To provide value, research must be ethical, methodologically sound, and clinically safe, and it must lead to practice based on real-world evidence. In addition, funders increasingly require research teams to involve the public in multiple aspects of research. Yet evidence shows that research teams struggle to include the public in activities such as systematic reviews, priority setting, research design, and evaluation.
This course shares solutions for starting from where we are to build research with public participation. We will offer practical methods to combine public involvement with science-based practice. Participants will learn manageable ways to invite the public to help prioritize, initiate, design, organize, and evaluate research.
The course will show researchers how to:
Write public involvement into the research protocol.
Use public involvement for funding applications.
Find, communicate with, and train research volunteers.
Meet with the public and manage expectations for a good working relationship.
Write the contributions of citizens into research results for publication.
Involving the public in scientific research offers untapped potential for improving public relations, science education, shared decision-making, and peer-to-peer knowledge. The time is ripe, the technology is ready, and the passion to engage the public is real!
Proposed level: Materials can be adapted for all levels and forms of research.
Limits on participation: None. People with hearing or visual impairments will be assigned a volunteer from the class or can bring in their own helper. The course will be segmented into manageable pieces, so handouts can be supplied for participants who miss part of the class. For those with information-processing issues, class materials can be provided ahead of time.
Intended audience: Anyone interested in public involvement, good scientific practice, and cooperation between scientists and the public.
This course will be a combination of lecture, discussion, and exercises. It will present the case for software citation and introduce recently developed and published software citation principles (https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86). We will discuss what benefits and challenges participants initially see in using the principles.
Participants will then assume a variety of roles (software developer, software user, funder, publisher, archivist/librarian, university administrator, or science historian) and test how the principles help them in that role and what the consequences to the researcher are. Because the principles are high-level, the exact way they are applied can vary widely, but some standard practices seem likely to emerge, and the role-playing exercises will help illustrate those practices. As part of the course, participants will have the opportunity to prepare software they have coauthored for software citation, and they will cite software using their preferred tool.
At the end of the course, participants will be able to apply the principles in their work and to explain to others why they should apply the principles, too. In cases where there are problems in applying the principles, participants should completely understand why and what changes need to be made.
Proposed level: No prior experience writing software is required.
Limits on participation: None.
Intended audience: Software developers, software users, funders, publishers, archivists/librarians, university administrators, science historians.
This hands-on course teaches researchers the skills and best practices they need to effectively manage their publications, scholarly identity, and professional reputation on the open scholarly web. The course draws on the curriculum from the newly developed AuthorCarpentry initiative, which adapts the successful instructional design principles of the global Data Carpentry community. The Carpentry approach to researcher training utilizes hands-on methods, live coding, case studies, authentic datasets, carefully designed learning outcomes, and formative assessment to provide a high-impact and immediately applicable learning experience.
The specific AuthorCarpentry lessons covered in the course include:
Persistent access for research outputs with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and associated metadata.
Establishing scholarly identity with Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCIDs).
Enhancing scholarly reputations with ORCID and trustworthy scholarly sharing sites.
Using Markdown and GitHub to author for web and print.
Sustainable authorship with Markdown and Pandoc.
Management of open-citation data and references.
By the end of the course, participants will have applied command-line and open-source tools to retrieve their publication data in open formats. They will be able to associate the data with unique digital identifiers, including DOI and ORCID; integrate the data with trusted open scholarly sharing sites; and develop their own GitHub websites that include their publications lists and other author content.
Proposed level: Advanced beginner to intermediate. Participants should have basic proficiency with the Unix command line and experience installing select open-source software according to provided instructions.
Limits on participation: Each participant should have a laptop (Windows, Mac, or Linux) for hands-on exercises.
Intended audience: Researchers, librarians, and other professionals with some publishing experience.
Scholarly communications is a shifting problem space that can be difficult to navigate. Design thinking takes an iterative approach to generating ideas in any problem space by using user research and low-cost brainstorming techniques. This approach can help to bring clarity to complex problems that change over time. It also keeps projects on track and user-centered by building consistent testing of ideas into the life cycle of a project, be it the development of a tool, a service, or an event.
This course will introduce the concept of design thinking and identify ways in which applied user research can help focus efforts around scholarly communications as a problem space. The course will also address methods for data gathering and project management that support an iterative and user-centered design workflow.
At the end of this session, participants will be able to:
Articulate what design thinking is and how it supports investigation into scholarly communication as a problem space.
Apply user research methods in the scholarly communications environment to support the design of interventions.
Apply common user research strategies (such as semi-formal interviews) to a problem space.
Implement a project life cycle that applies design thinking strategies to the identification of a subset of the scholarly communications problem space and selects common user research strategies to support user-centered design to address the problem.
Proposed level: This course is appropriate for participants who are broadly familiar with the scholarly communications landscape but have little or no familiarity with design thinking.
Limits on participation: Participants should have access to a computer with internet access.
Intended audience: This course is directed at a broad audience and is appropriate for anyone developing scholarly communication interventions, including designing tools or services, or developing programming around openness or other scholarly communications issues.
About one-fifth of current scientific papers are being shared on Twitter. With 230 million active users and 24 percent of the U.S. online population using the microblogging platform, hopes are high that tweets mentioning scientific articles reflect some type of interest by the general public and might even be able to measure the societal impact of research. However, early studies show that most of the engagement with scientific papers on Twitter takes place among members of academia and thus reflects visibility within the scientific community rather than impact on society. At the same time, some tweets do not involve any human engagement but rather are generated automatically by Twitter bots.
This course focuses on identifying audiences on Twitter and teaches participants how to collect, analyze, visualize, and interpret diffusion patterns of scientific articles on Twitter. The course will provide an overview of altmetrics research and present the challenges – including methods and first results – of classifying Twitter user groups, with a particular focus on identifying members of the general public and measuring societal impact.
The course will provide hands-on exercises and instructions on how to analyze by whom, when, and how scientific papers are shared on Twitter. This will include a description, instructions, and code on how to collect tweets and user data from the Twitter API using Python, and how to manipulate this data to construct networks of following/follower relationships among Twitter users with Gephi.
Although the course focuses on tweets mentioning scientific papers, methods of data collection and analysis are transferable to any content shared on Twitter and other social networks. Participants should have an interest in how research is communicated on social media. They are required to bring a laptop with Gephi version 0.9.1 installed.
Proposed level: Intermediate.
Limits on participation: A limited number of participants will allow the instructor to provide adequate help with data manipulation and analysis. One instructor will teach the course, and the second instructor will provide additional support remotely. Participants are required to bring a laptop with Gephi version 0.9.1 installed. Internet access is needed to obtain data and code used during the course.
Intended audience: Researchers interested in analyzing scientific discussions on social media and public engagement with science; university administrators interested in altmetrics beyond rankings; data scientists.
Wikidata is becoming a hub for structured data across a wide range of research fields, from cultural heritage to biomedicine. Since Wikidata is also multilingual, it has been described as the Rosetta Stone of the linked open-data age.
This course introduces participants to Wikidata and highlights how it can improve workflows in participants’ fields of research. The course builds on past workshops given for various audiences – from librarians and economists to scientists and museum professionals – on how research workflows can be integrated with Wikimedia workflows.
Since the launch of Wikidata in late 2012, the course instructor has explored the potential for integrating Wikidata with research and curation through a number of activities, including an initiative to collect on Wikidata the metadata of scholarly references cited on Wikimedia projects.
The course will have two parts:
The first part introduces the basics of research and curation workflows on Wikidata.
The second part is more hands-on, integrating examples of curation workflows drawn from experiences shared by course participants.
Proposed level: The first part of the course assumes some familiarity with research and curation workflows. The second part requires active participation in the first part.
Limits on participation: For the first part, a mobile web-enabled device (laptop, tablet, or smartphone) is recommended but not required. The second part requires a web-enabled device (ideally a laptop).
Intended audience: Researchers and librarians from any field, curators of digital information, anyone interested in workflows, students in related fields.
This course is about altmetrics and the strategies researchers should follow to improve their academic branding. Participants will learn about the traditional form of metrics in an academic environment and compare this form with new metrics. The course will present a step-by-step guide to exploring scholarly online environments so participants can understand how to get the most advantages from these environments to increase the impact of their research by utilizing the Open Access (OA) approach for their own publications.
The course will cover these topics:
New metrics and how to use them to build a research portfolio.
Supporting the research life cycle for researchers and administrators.
Evaluating new forms of research publication.
Proposed level: Intermediate.
Limits on participation: None.
Intended audience: Researchers, faculty members, and students with published papers.
The University of Edinburgh, like other research-intensive universities, is subject to a variety of Open Access (OA) policies imposed by funders and by the university itself. In response to these policies, the university is aiming to have all staff-authored journal articles and conference proceedings deposited in its Current Research Information System (CRIS) and made OA wherever possible.
This sudden, large-scale adoption of green (author-archived) OA has not been without its problems, but despite these obstacles, the university is now achieving high rates of OA publication. Currently around 85 percent of new journal articles and conference proceedings meet OA requirements, and we expect this to exceed 95 percent by the end of 2017.
Most universities have institutional repositories in place, and many also have OA accounts with publishers or funds available to pay article processing charges (APCs). However, many universities are still seeing low levels of OA publication. This course is aimed at giving university staff members the skills and knowledge they need to increase the number of OA publications.
The course will be of interest to librarians, repository managers, research administrators, and those involved with day-to-day implementation of OA. Topics covered will include:
Initial institutional assessment of OA.
Planning and implementing effective OA policies.
Developing workflows for gold (publisher-archived) and green (author-archived) OA.
Operating institutional repositories at scale.
Different models for implementing OA and planning effective workflows.
Managing cultural change.
Staffing resources and training.
Reporting on compliance and measuring success.
To help us make this course as useful as possible, we will ask those enrolled to complete a short questionnaire in the week before we meet.
Proposed level: Intermediate. The course assumes a knowledge of the basic principles of Open Access.
Limits on participation: None.
Intended audience: Librarians, library assistants, repository managers, research administrators.
This course will explore the similarities and differences between advocacy and activism in scholarly communication. Both are necessary facets of the changing norms of scholarly publishing, and both roles can be filled by various stakeholders in the scholarly communication ecosystem. The course is aimed at anyone who has a solid understanding of the issues at stake and is ready to engage more deeply with the evolution of academic publishing.
The instructors will present examples within a framework for understanding common methods of both advocacy and activism, including:
Introduction to the theory and practice of grassroots activism.
Training on communication and messaging strategies.
Resources and tool kits.
Participants will discuss techniques and tactics for advancing an “open” agenda in their sphere of influence. The course will close with drafting a plan of action for increasing engagement with scholarly communication topics, issues, and conversations. Participants will receive tool kits for advocacy and activism to incorporate into their daily professional lives. The course will prepare them to implement a plan of action for their institution and community.
Proposed level: Intermediate.
Intended audience: Early career librarians and researchers, and anyone who identifies as an advocate of scholarly communication or open access.
This course will be a combination of lecture, discussion, and exercises. It will present the case for software citation and introduce recently developed and published software citation principles (https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86). We will discuss what benefits and challenges participants initially see in using the principles.
Participants will then assume a variety of roles (software developer, software user, funder, publisher, archivist/librarian, university administrator, or science historian) and test how the principles help them in that role and what the consequences to the researcher are. Because the principles are high-level, the exact way they are applied can vary widely, but some standard practices seem likely to emerge, and the role-playing exercises will help illustrate those practices. As part of the course, participants will have the opportunity to prepare software they have coauthored for software citation, and they will cite software using their preferred tool.
At the end of the course, participants will be able to apply the principles in their work and to explain to others why they should apply the principles, too. In cases where there are problems in applying the principles, participants should completely understand why and what changes need to be made.
Proposed level: No prior experience writing software is required.
Limits on participation: None.
Intended audience: Software developers, software users, funders, publishers, archivists/librarians, university administrators, science historians.
This hands-on course teaches researchers the skills and best practices they need to effectively manage their publications, scholarly identity, and professional reputation on the open scholarly web. The course draws on the curriculum from the newly developed AuthorCarpentry initiative, which adapts the successful instructional design principles of the global Data Carpentry community. The Carpentry approach to researcher training utilizes hands-on methods, live coding, case studies, authentic datasets, carefully designed learning outcomes, and formative assessment to provide a high-impact and immediately applicable learning experience.
The specific AuthorCarpentry lessons covered in the course include:
Persistent access for research outputs with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and associated metadata.
Establishing scholarly identity with Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCIDs).
Enhancing scholarly reputations with ORCID and trustworthy scholarly sharing sites.
Using Markdown and GitHub to author for web and print.
Sustainable authorship with Markdown and Pandoc.
Management of open-citation data and references.
By the end of the course, participants will have applied command-line and open-source tools to retrieve their publication data in open formats. They will be able to associate the data with unique digital identifiers, including DOI and ORCID; integrate the data with trusted open scholarly sharing sites; and develop their own GitHub websites that include their publications lists and other author content.
Proposed level: Advanced beginner to intermediate. Participants should have basic proficiency with the Unix command line and experience installing select open-source software according to provided instructions.
Limits on participation: Each participant should have a laptop (Windows, Mac, or Linux) for hands-on exercises.
Intended audience: Researchers, librarians, and other professionals with some publishing experience.
Scholarly communications is a shifting problem space that can be difficult to navigate. Design thinking takes an iterative approach to generating ideas in any problem space by using user research and low-cost brainstorming techniques. This approach can help to bring clarity to complex problems that change over time. It also keeps projects on track and user-centered by building consistent testing of ideas into the life cycle of a project, be it the development of a tool, a service, or an event.
This course will introduce the concept of design thinking and identify ways in which applied user research can help focus efforts around scholarly communications as a problem space. The course will also address methods for data gathering and project management that support an iterative and user-centered design workflow.
At the end of this session, participants will be able to:
Articulate what design thinking is and how it supports investigation into scholarly communication as a problem space.
Apply user research methods in the scholarly communications environment to support the design of interventions.
Apply common user research strategies (such as semi-formal interviews) to a problem space.
Implement a project life cycle that applies design thinking strategies to the identification of a subset of the scholarly communications problem space and selects common user research strategies to support user-centered design to address the problem.
Proposed level: This course is appropriate for participants who are broadly familiar with the scholarly communications landscape but have little or no familiarity with design thinking.
Limits on participation: Participants should have access to a computer with internet access.
Intended audience: This course is directed at a broad audience and is appropriate for anyone developing scholarly communication interventions, including designing tools or services, or developing programming around openness or other scholarly communications issues.
About one-fifth of current scientific papers are being shared on Twitter. With 230 million active users and 24 percent of the U.S. online population using the microblogging platform, hopes are high that tweets mentioning scientific articles reflect some type of interest by the general public and might even be able to measure the societal impact of research. However, early studies show that most of the engagement with scientific papers on Twitter takes place among members of academia and thus reflects visibility within the scientific community rather than impact on society. At the same time, some tweets do not involve any human engagement but rather are generated automatically by Twitter bots.
This course focuses on identifying audiences on Twitter and teaches participants how to collect, analyze, visualize, and interpret diffusion patterns of scientific articles on Twitter. The course will provide an overview of altmetrics research and present the challenges – including methods and first results – of classifying Twitter user groups, with a particular focus on identifying members of the general public and measuring societal impact.
The course will provide hands-on exercises and instructions on how to analyze by whom, when, and how scientific papers are shared on Twitter. This will include a description, instructions, and code on how to collect tweets and user data from the Twitter API using Python, and how to manipulate this data to construct networks of following/follower relationships among Twitter users with Gephi.
Although the course focuses on tweets mentioning scientific papers, methods of data collection and analysis are transferable to any content shared on Twitter and other social networks. Participants should have an interest in how research is communicated on social media. They are required to bring a laptop with Gephi version 0.9.1 installed.
Proposed level: Intermediate.
Limits on participation: A limited number of participants will allow the instructor to provide adequate help with data manipulation and analysis. One instructor will teach the course, and the second instructor will provide additional support remotely. Participants are required to bring a laptop with Gephi version 0.9.1 installed. Internet access is needed to obtain data and code used during the course.
Intended audience: Researchers interested in analyzing scientific discussions on social media and public engagement with science; university administrators interested in altmetrics beyond rankings; data scientists.
Wikidata is becoming a hub for structured data across a wide range of research fields, from cultural heritage to biomedicine. Since Wikidata is also multilingual, it has been described as the Rosetta Stone of the linked open-data age.
This course introduces participants to Wikidata and highlights how it can improve workflows in participants’ fields of research. The course builds on past workshops given for various audiences – from librarians and economists to scientists and museum professionals – on how research workflows can be integrated with Wikimedia workflows.
Since the launch of Wikidata in late 2012, the course instructor has explored the potential for integrating Wikidata with research and curation through a number of activities, including an initiative to collect on Wikidata the metadata of scholarly references cited on Wikimedia projects.
The course will have two parts:
The first part introduces the basics of research and curation workflows on Wikidata.
The second part is more hands-on, integrating examples of curation workflows drawn from experiences shared by course participants.
Proposed level: The first part of the course assumes some familiarity with research and curation workflows. The second part requires active participation in the first part.
Limits on participation: For the first part, a mobile web-enabled device (laptop, tablet, or smartphone) is recommended but not required. The second part requires a web-enabled device (ideally a laptop).
Intended audience: Researchers and librarians from any field, curators of digital information, anyone interested in workflows, students in related fields.
This course is about altmetrics and the strategies researchers should follow to improve their academic branding. Participants will learn about the traditional form of metrics in an academic environment and compare this form with new metrics. The course will present a step-by-step guide to exploring scholarly online environments so participants can understand how to get the most advantages from these environments to increase the impact of their research by utilizing the Open Access (OA) approach for their own publications.
The course will cover these topics:
New metrics and how to use them to build a research portfolio.
Supporting the research life cycle for researchers and administrators.
Evaluating new forms of research publication.
Proposed level: Intermediate.
Limits on participation: None.
Intended audience: Researchers, faculty members, and students with published papers.
The University of Edinburgh, like other research-intensive universities, is subject to a variety of Open Access (OA) policies imposed by funders and by the university itself. In response to these policies, the university is aiming to have all staff-authored journal articles and conference proceedings deposited in its Current Research Information System (CRIS) and made OA wherever possible.
This sudden, large-scale adoption of green (author-archived) OA has not been without its problems, but despite these obstacles, the university is now achieving high rates of OA publication. Currently around 85 percent of new journal articles and conference proceedings meet OA requirements, and we expect this to exceed 95 percent by the end of 2017.
Most universities have institutional repositories in place, and many also have OA accounts with publishers or funds available to pay article processing charges (APCs). However, many universities are still seeing low levels of OA publication. This course is aimed at giving university staff members the skills and knowledge they need to increase the number of OA publications.
The course will be of interest to librarians, repository managers, research administrators, and those involved with day-to-day implementation of OA. Topics covered will include:
Initial institutional assessment of OA.
Planning and implementing effective OA policies.
Developing workflows for gold (publisher-archived) and green (author-archived) OA.
Operating institutional repositories at scale.
Different models for implementing OA and planning effective workflows.
Managing cultural change.
Staffing resources and training.
Reporting on compliance and measuring success.
To help us make this course as useful as possible, we will ask those enrolled to complete a short questionnaire in the week before we meet.
Proposed level: Intermediate. The course assumes a knowledge of the basic principles of Open Access.
Limits on participation: None.
Intended audience: Librarians, library assistants, repository managers, research administrators.
This course will explore the similarities and differences between advocacy and activism in scholarly communication. Both are necessary facets of the changing norms of scholarly publishing, and both roles can be filled by various stakeholders in the scholarly communication ecosystem. The course is aimed at anyone who has a solid understanding of the issues at stake and is ready to engage more deeply with the evolution of academic publishing.
The instructors will present examples within a framework for understanding common methods of both advocacy and activism, including:
Introduction to the theory and practice of grassroots activism.
Training on communication and messaging strategies.
Resources and tool kits.
Participants will discuss techniques and tactics for advancing an “open” agenda in their sphere of influence. The course will close with drafting a plan of action for increasing engagement with scholarly communication topics, issues, and conversations. Participants will receive tool kits for advocacy and activism to incorporate into their daily professional lives. The course will prepare them to implement a plan of action for their institution and community.
Proposed level: Intermediate.
Intended audience: Early career librarians and researchers, and anyone who identifies as an advocate of scholarly communication or open access.
