- mike nason | unb libraries, pkp

all images herein generated by dall-e for my amusement... try to guess what phrases i used to generate them!

this is my result for the phrase "a day in the life of a librarian yelling about open scholarly infrastructure"

i am a big fan

let's get this out of the way, first. i'm pretty enthusiastic about open scholarly infrastructure (osi). it's [a public] good for countless reasons!

a lot of those reasons are pretty hard to explain to discrete audiences/stakeholders!

some context

i'm the open scholarship & publishing librarian (aka, i guess, "scholarly communications") at what, to most of you, would be a pretty small school in atlantic canada (university of new brunswick).

my job, plainly, is to help make the research that happens at my institution as available to the public as possible.

i also work for pkp.

i look like this:

i am a [white, cis] settler from the unceded (aka, stolen) territory of the mi'kmaq-wolastoquey peoples just a short hop from the wolastoq river, a much cooler name than the settler-crowned “saint john river”, if you ask me.

that river is up here, next to maine – a state you rarely think about unless you are mad at senator susan collins.

susan collins is exceptionally great at finding excuses for you to be mad at her, so i'm sure you have a reason to know where – roughly – she is from...

my institution is, i think, typical (at least for canadian institutions)...

a spent a lot of time this week thinking about what points i wanted to make at a library conference regarding open infrastructure and interoperability

on one hand...

i think the pros/cons, ins/outs, ups/downs of open scholarly infrastructure are kind of obvious.

it's easier to "tell your research story" if you can tie the chapters together.

plus, sucking gobs of useful metadata from an api instead of typing them by hand feels pretty sweet.

and on this third hand

open scholarly infrastructure is inscrutable to so many. a lot of people don't even know how a doi works!

#1: interoperability is necessary to help us solve the problem of too many things

What to publish?

• Which versions am I sharing?
  • Preprints on a preprint server like arxiv?
  • Accepted manuscripts in our institutional repo?
  • Links to publisher PDFs I paid an APC to open up?
  • Links to publisher PDFs that most people can't read?
  • Subsets of my research data?
  • All of my research data?
• A presumption of access...
  • What am I allowed to share?
  • Which versions of things are open, and which aren't?
  • How open should my data be? Does it need to be?

​over the last two decades, a combination of the serials crisis, the burgeoning spread of open access, the immediacy of research sharing on the web, and efforts from schol-comms librarians to help make so many research products/byproducts available has meant that a single work can exist in myriad versions, in myriad places, with variable metadata, and probably unreliable or unclear relationships.

meanwhile...

the people in libraries, research offices, awards offices, or folks managing grants are trying to piece things together and making this face.

interoperability means

these systems/platforms can:

• share metadata
• expose relationships
• improve access
• improve retrieval
• elaborate the narrative of research
• disambiguate works
• save users time

interoperability means

and, because they're open...

• there's usually a public api
• many connected services are "free"
• you're not milked for usage data
• we can be less reliant on proprietary, for-profit infrastructure

​when i explain to people that pushing our institutional/data repositories, and ojs materials to openaire contributes to global visibility of institutional research – and may help wrestle a monopoly and/or oligopoly on public indexing away from one of the biggest tech companies on the planet – i feel like a kind of anti-capitalist wizard.

we (academia) have put a sort of profound amount of eggs in google’s basket. google loves cancelling support for its various baskets. it could go whenever...

https://killedbygoogle.com

#2: open scholarly infrastructure is not ~magic~

bad/lazy metadata

most of the time, metadata is mostly just a thing that happens to researchers. or, even if diligent, some researchers have to shoehorn meaning into anglo-centric metadata fields that don't quite fit their culture.

good metadata requires both accurate, specific schema and sufficient incentive to invest due diligence.

metadata is as important as it is boring.

osi isn't responsible for solving boredom.

a different pace...

competing with enormous, for-profit oligopolies is always going to be difficult. open scholarly infrastructure is made by people.

good-willingly creating open software is rarely as sexy and pocket-lining as working in private/vc-funded projects. budgets are smaller. swag is gentler.

we should not

be tempted to think of the providers of open scholarly infrastructure the same way we think of vendors or big-time service providers.

• staffing and resourcing are different
• some open infrastructure is maintained by just a few people!
• vendors work really hard to get our attention (and $$)

#3: the audience matters

code switching

talking about these interconnections can sometimes make a person jump to conclusions... i always try to consider my audience when i'm discussing open infrastructure.

• will they force people to use orcid?
• will they try to mandate dois in a repository so they can "get the metrics"?
• do they understand what a pid is?
• do they know that a doi isn't some secret proof of legitimacy?
• are they worried about where their work/information will go?
• are they worried their employer will try to boil them down into a pile of numbers?

code switching

every group is different. every group is a little used to being exploited.

"interoperability" sometimes just further muddies already unclear waters!

• is this good for my career?
• does this mean i'll never have to fill out a publications list again?
• will this be tracked?
• who can see it?
• what will implementation look like? will it require labor? how much? who will be responsible?

anyway, look...

as a canadian (and socialist menace), i think we should want infrastructure to be not-for-profit, public, and transparently governed.

and, these orgs need to cooperate.

open scholarly infrastructure is a public good

thanks!
mnason@unb.ca