Scholarly Publishing Commons^™

Accessibility In The Academic Library: Assessing The Web Accessibility Of Neflin Member Library Websites, Cody Michaels

Publications

Web accessibility has been a topic of discussion in organizations for decades. Much ink, physical and digital, has been spilled urging developers, designers, and web administrators to build their online environment so that users of all abilities can access their content. Despite this, web accessibility remains out of reach across swathes of the Internet. The organization WebAIM conducts annual studies reviewing the accessibility of the 1,000,000 most popular websites’ homepages.1 The results for 2025 found that these pages had an average of 51 errors per page. While this represents a decrease from the previous year, there remains much work to …

Towards Agile Academia: An Approach To Scientific Paper Writing Inspired By Software Engineering, Tyler Procko

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The construction of scientific papers is performed in service of the greater scientific community. This iterative process is, in effect, an academic economy, where all members benefit from well-written papers. However, many published scientific papers are poorly written; they often lack sufficient detail to allow replication, there is improper usage of citations or a lack of regard to relevant work, reporting is vague or without linked empirical data to allow verification, figures do not correspond to text or are non-sensical, literary elements, e.g., bulleted lists, are used ineffectively, formatting renders certain sections unreadable, and grammatical errors abound. The issues of …

Attention To Detail, Attention To Value: Building Additional Repository Assessment Tools For In-House Reporting, Aajay Murphy, Heather Hankins

Digital Commons Southeastern User Group (DC SEUG) 2019

With the bepress repository management software comes some of the most in-depth tools for value assessment among platforms, these include automatically populated data on downloads, metadata page hits, works posted, readership distribution, and referrers. Recent integration with PlumX has allowed for even more granular opportunities for assessing the value of the repository. However, this left us at Kennesaw State University longing for some additional metrics of success. We are housed in the University Library System, where monthly and annual reports are limited to data used to satisfy accreditation needs, such as quantitative reporting on instruction, one-on-one consultations, and brief qualitative …

Analysis Of Tools Used To Streamline Institutional Repository Workflows, Ashley D.R. Sergiadis

Digital Commons Southeastern User Group (DC SEUG) 2019

East Tennessee State University has been using the reference manager Zotero, the copyright database SHERPA/RoMEO, and the open access locator Unpaywall to add faculty publications into a Digital Commons institutional repository. The presentation provides an analysis of the availability and accuracy of records generated by Zotero, SHERPA/RoMEO, and Unpaywall. Specifically, the analysis compares how effective the tools are when using them on journal articles in four disciplines: Arts and Humanities, Education, Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Medicine and Health Sciences. Results from other studies will be incorporated into the presentation in order to supplement the analysis by the presenter. Although …

Connecting Knowledge Silos: Tying Together Institutional Repositories For Research Cohesion And Inclusive Information Access, Bebe S. Chang, Sunghae Ress

Digital Commons Southeastern User Group (DC SEUG) 2019

Since the first free research-sharing site, arXiv, appeared in 1991, the push for open access to combat exorbitant subscription models has seen the number of institutional and research repositories jump to over 4,000. However, with each encased in its own architectural edifice, how is robust research synergy being achieved if researchers are consulting these storehouses of knowledge separately rather than as a collective?

Writing in The Atlantic in 1945, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush, observed that the “publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.” …

Today Crossref, Tomorrow The World: Managing Xml Crosswalks With Altova Mapforce, Jeffrey M. Mortimore

Digital Commons Southeastern User Group (DC SEUG) 2019

Altova MapForce is an intuitive graphical mapping tool for manipulating and converting any structured data, including OAI-PMH XML, into any scheme without specialized knowledge of XML or XSLT. With Altova MapForce, repository managers who lack dedicated XML programming or development support can streamline creation of XML stylesheets and simplify XML conversions. During this session, we will look specifically at crosswalking bepress journal metadata to Crossref Deposit and DOAJ Native XML.

Navigating Content And Peer Review In An Online Journal, Kelley F. Rowan

Digital Commons Southeastern User Group (DC SEUG) 2019

This session explores the use of Digital Commons as both a hosting site and peer review and management tool for the creation of an online journal. In 2018 Florida International University (FIU) Libraries launched Athenaeum: Scholarly Works of the FIU Libraries Faculty and Staff. Athenaeum is meant to collect both published and unpublished articles, conference posters, and presentations of library faculty and staff as they pertain to librarianship. The goal is to provide librarians with another discovery layer for their scholarly work and to help new librarians acquire peer reviewed articles by offering peer review before inclusion in Athenaeum. …

Digital Commons: Harvesting, Integrations, And Latest Developments, Aaron Doran, Simone Polgar, Ann Connolly

Digital Commons Southeastern User Group (DC SEUG) 2019

Representatives from the bepress Digital Commons Product and Consulting Services teams will present the latest in Digital Commons developments. Topics include, but are not limited to, integrations, the new native streaming feature, and the latest in automated harvesting development. The presentation will be followed by open Q&A.

Database Review: Sao/Nasa Astrophysics Data System, Laura Pope Robbins

Publications

Laura Pope Robbins is an advisor for The Charleston Advisor, and the review below is included in Scholarly Commons with the permission of the publisher.

The Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is the premier Open Access research database for astronomy and astrophysics containing over 13 million bibliographic records. These records include journal articles, books, conference proceedings, historical observatory bulletins, and other gray literature. An exceptional feature of ADS is the visualizations it creates, showing author networks, overlapping citations, and frequently occurring terminology giving researchers new ways to explore the literature. It is a unique resource that is as easy for a …

Repository Review: Nasa Pubspace, Laura Pope Robbins

Publications

Laura Pope Robbins is an advisor for The Charleston Advisor, and the review below is included in Scholarly Commons with the permission of the publisher.

PubSpace is a repository of full-text peer-reviewed articles resulting from NASA-funded research going back to 1961. The National Center for Biotechnology Information has integrated PubSpace into PubMed Central, a freely available repository of medical research. Using an established, stable, government-hosted platform for PubSpace seems to make sense. However, the lack of clear branding, an uneven application of phrase searching, and a missing thesaurus of NASA terminology highlights that this integration may not be the best.

Impact Of Declining Proposal Success Rates On Scientific Productivity, Ted Von Hippel, Priscilla Cushman, Todd Hoeksema, Chryssa Kouveliotou, James Lowenthal, Bradley Peterson, Keivan G. Stassun,

Publications

Over the last decade proposal success rates in the fundamental sciences have dropped significantly. Astronomy and related fields funded by NASA and NSF are no exception. Data across agencies show that this is not principally the result of a decline in proposal merit (the proportion of proposals receiving high rankings is largely unchanged), nor of a shift in proposer demographics (seniority, gender, and institutional affiliation have all remained unchanged), nor of an increase (beyond inflation) in the average requested funding per proposal, nor of an increase in the number of proposals per investigator in any one year. Rather, the statistics …

Open Access Through Institutional Repositories: The A3ir Con Experience, Brittany Blanchard

Aviation / Aeronautics / Aerospace International Research Conference

Institutional Repositories (IRs) are intertwined with the Open Access (OA) movement and are becoming a standard feature for research libraries. Utilizing the open web and indexing for search engines IRs increase visibility and access to scholarly works.

Since it’s creation in September of 2013 the Scholarly Commons currently holds over 4,000 works, that have been downloaded 136,548 times.

The Commons hosted the 2014 A3ircon Proceedings and will be the site hosting 2015’s proceedings. This poster shows how the proceedings were accessed as well as challenges for future conferences.

Erau Scholarly Commons, July 1, 2014-June 30, 2015, Anne M. Casey, Chip Wolfe, Brittany Blanchard

Annual Reports

Scholarly Commons continued to grow in 2014-2015, not only in content added and downloads, but in maturity of the process. At the beginning of the second year, many of the early challenges resolved as teams that oversee the administration and new development began to understand the system and each other’s strengths.

Members of the university community also developed a better understanding of Scholarly Commons and its value to many aspects of the research and academic mission. In particular, various departments turned to Scholarly Commons to host conferences and events. Also, members of the Oversight Team met with representatives of Sponsored …

The Library As Publishing House, James Day, Anne Marie Casey, Chip Wolfe

Publications

The academic library has taken on the new role of institutional publishing house, using institutional repository (IR) services to enable journal publishing and manage conference planning. Librarians taking on this new role as publisher must know the journal publishing work flow, including online article submission, peer review, publishing, marketing, and assessment. They must understand international identifiers such as the electronic International Standard Serial Number (eISSN) and Digital Object Identifier (DOI). To manage conference planning functions, librarians need to understand event functions such as presentation submission, program scheduling, registration and third-party payment systems, proceedings publishing, and archiving. In general, they need …

Product Review: Knimbus: Free Personal Edition, Laura Pope Robbins

Publications

Laura Pope Robbins is an advisor for The Charleston Advisor, and the review below is included in Scholarly Commons with the permission of the publisher.

Knimbus is both a search engine and a collaborative platform for scientists to find the information they need and connect them with other researchers in their field. As a search engine it provides a federated search of 32 Open Access resources and connects the researcher to the full text. As a collaborative platform, it provides a way for scientists to upload their documents and share them with their colleagues. Knimbus is an enterprising project that …

Erau Scholarly Commons, May 30, 2013-June 30, 2014, Anne M. Casey, Chip Wolfe

Annual Reports

ERAU Scholarly Commons, the institutional repository of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU), debuted to little fanfare but great hope on May 30, 2013. The implementation team had worked for five months with bepress, the vendor, to construct a home page that reflects the unique aerospace concentration of the university. From the outset, Scholarly Commons has proven to be an important university resource for faculty and student research as well as for the creation of new journals and the home of conferences and events. As the first year came to an end, faculty support continued to grow as did the requests for …

Product Review: Goodreader Or Pdf Reader Pro: Which Is Better For Reading And Annotating?, Laura Pope Robbins

Publications

Laura Pope Robbins is an advisor for The Charleston Advisor, and the comparative review below is included in Scholarly Commons with the permission of the publisher.

Today’s researchers are extremely mobile and are looking for ways to read and annotate documents when not in their offices. GoodReader and PDF Reader Pro are two apps that provide that capability for iPad users. Both apps can read multiple file formats and provide file management tools like rename, move, and delete. As well, they can both be linked to multiple cloud services to upload and download files. Neither app is integrated with an …

Product Review: Mendeley Or Zotero: Which Should The Mobile Researcher Use?, Laura Pope Robbins

Publications

Laura Pope Robbins is an advisor for The Charleston Advisor, and the comparative review below is included in Scholarly Commons with the permission of the publisher.

Today’s bibliographic managers provide cloud storage so that papers can be attached to citations and syncing services, in order for papers and citations to be available in multiple mediums. Mendeley and Zotero are two services that offer online storage of papers and citations, desktop applications, and tablet integration. Mendeley has an iPad application and an open API so that developers can create apps for Android tablets. Zotero is an open-source project that encourages developers …