Tag: umd

University of Maryland Libraries becomes the institutional home of SocArXiv

the word 'sustainable' over an image of green beans.
photo flickr cc: https://flic.kr/p/7T3X56.

This announcement comes from the UMD Libraries.

The University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries is pleased to announce that it has become the institutional home of SocArXiv, an interdisciplinary, open access repository of scholarship. The new partnership between the Libraries and SocArXiv ensures the future development and sustainability of the repository, which had previously received seed funding from the libraries at the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with additional support from the Sloan Foundation, the Open Societies Foundation, and the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at UMD. Working with partners, the UMD Libraries will sponsor SocArXiv to help sustain shared infrastructure for open scholarship and to provide equitable access to this diverse collection of research for scholars at UMD and around the world.

Founded in 2016, SocArXiv is a digital repository of research papers which is free for authors and readers alike. SocArXiv is governed by a volunteer steering committee of scholars and library community leaders, with University of Maryland sociology professor Philip N. Cohen as the founding director. As of April 2021, the repository holds almost 8,000 papers in all fields of social and behavioral sciences, arts and humanities, education, and law. It provides a shared platform for social scientists and other scholars to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link data and code. Papers in multiple languages are moderated by an international team of volunteer academic researchers. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the pace of new papers posting at SocArXiv has increased, and there are now more than 500 papers related to the pandemic.

SocArXiv is based on the Open Science Framework (OSF) platform of the nonprofit Center for Open Science (COS). This arrangement will continue under the new partnership between the UMD Libraries and SocArXiv. Eric Olson, Institutional Product Owner at COS, said: “We believe that transparent and reproducible research and research products lead to better outcomes. By helping to sustain SocArXiv, UMD Libraries and its partners will continue to advance the shared platforms, tools, and systems that promote open science and open access in the research community.”

“We are delighted to be joining the Libraries at UMD, which is a leader in the growing movement for open scholarship,” said Cohen. “As the first preprint service available on the COS platform, SocArXiv has been an innovator in this arena during an exciting period. We are grateful for the Libraries’ support and look forward to working with the team here to build the future of academy-owned scholarly communication infrastructure.”

“SocArXiv fits into the UMD Libraries’ strategies related to enhancing open access and supporting academy-owned infrastructure for scholarly communication,” added Adriene Lim, Dean of Libraries. “It has an outstanding reputation in the field and we’re proud to be the institutional home and sustain this valuable resource for the entire research community. We look forward to working with Dr. Cohen, COS, and SocArXiv’s steering committee in the future to enhance equitable access for research, teaching, and learning.”

The Libraries also manages the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM), which hosts material from UMD researchers, including theses and dissertations as well as research articles. In the future, SocArXiv hopes to integrate submission of Maryland researchers’ content with DRUM, extending the reach of UMD’s research output, as well as leveraging other benefits offered by SocArXiv.

To learn more about SocArXiv, visit SocOpen.org and SocArXiv.org.

ABOUT THE UMD LIBRARIES
As the largest university library system in the Washington D.C.-Baltimore area, the University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries serve more than 41,000 students and 14,000 faculty and staff of the flagship College Park campus. The Libraries’ extensive collections, programs, and services enable student success, support teaching, research, and creativity, and enrich the intellectual and cultural life of the community. A member of the Big Ten Academic Alliance and the Association of Research Libraries, the UMD Libraries was honored with the 2020 Excellence in Academic Libraries award in the university category from the Association of College and Research Libraries.
Last update: May 05, 2021

Where SocArXiv is now

We just completed our first O3S conference, and we’re wrapping up our first year of support from the Sloan and Open Societies foundations. So it’s a good time to sum up our progress.

O3S17 networking break
O3S networking break / photo PNC

Open Scholarship for the Social Sciences

More even than we had hoped, the O3S conference turned into a great mechanism for fundraising, outreach, and generating innovating ideas. We had about 20 presenters (many of them junior scholars, whose travel we paid for), and almost 50 registrants. Participants came from as far as Chile, California, Michigan, Minnesota, Toronto, and from the Washington area. They included sociologists, librarians, economists and other scholars, software developers, publishers, and open access advocates. UMD campus leaders and the library were very supportive, and we are optimistic about their continued support for an annual conference. The panels were all high quality, the audience was engaged, the keynotes were riveting, and the workshop was highly productive. In addition to the panels and registrants, a great group of graduate students volunteered to support the conference. (We’ll have more on the workshop and new ideas later.)

SocArXiv service

We have almost 1600 papers on SocArXiv, and October has been our biggest month yet (135 papers). We are small compared with the big disciplinary paper services, but growing more each month, with a widening community of users. Our high visibility launch last fall led to a burst of activity, and now 15 other community preprint services have followed us on the OSF Preprints server. This includes some key players, such as LawArXiv (which we were instrumental in bringing to the OSF system), PsyArXiv (which has developed a relationship with the American Psychological Association), the LIS Scholarship Archive for library science (which is making important connections to libraries), and others. We wouldn’t want to take all the credit for this healthy proliferation, but we should take some. (As an aside, I also note with some pride that nearly all the subsequent communities on OSF Preprints include librarians on their Steering Committees.)

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We are about to start using the OSF’s expanded moderation system, allowing us and the other communities to have a customized paper moderation workflow. This has already turned into a great way for us to recruit volunteers, and generated lively discussion about moderation principles and related governance questions.

At the American Sociological Association meetings this summer, we launched the Sociology Open Award Recognition program, which encourages sections of the ASA to run use SocArXiv for paper award nominations. This led to discussion with more than 10 sections representing thousands of sociologists, several of which adopted variations on our program, with others still considering proposals.

Fundraising

We were able to leverage our foundation grants to help motivate others to contribute to SocArXiv. This includes two gifts of $10,000 from libraries (MIT and UCLA), and about $25,000 from the Sociology Department, College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, and Libraries at the University of Maryland, for our conference (including in-kind contributions). We have also opened up a very promising dialogue with the Red OA group at ARL (which seeks upstream initiatives to strengthen open publishing), which may lead to additional support from libraries, and there are some other leads.

Peer review

Partly motivated by the Red OA initiative, our next project addresses the question of peer review. The Center for Open Science is working to integrate peer review capacity on the OSF Preprints platform (through partnerships and/or their own technology). While that proceeds, we want to figure out what our research community wants and needs most from an open peer review platform. Should we run our own “journals,” work with existing journals, create an open platform for overlay journals, or some other alternative? We have initiated conversations about convening researchers to address these questions, to include also research into peer review processes, which might entail surveys, focus groups, or experimental research. In this effort we are fortunate to have the leadership of Elizabeth Popp Berman, a sociologist on our steering committee who specializes in the sociology of knowledge, and science and technology studies. (Here is a recent essay I wrote on open peer review.)

Needs for the coming year

The peer review project will need funding in the coming year, for convening meetings and conducting research. Our other fundraising goals center on personnel and outreach. We’d like support for our research efforts, my time, and graduate assistants to handle paper moderation and research for the peer review project. And then we will need money for outreach (travel, marketing, materials), and the next O3S conference (especially travel for junior scholars). We are also in discussions with the Center for Open Science on a sustainability model for all the preprint services they host; while their service to us is free, we would like to develop a long-term plan by which the communities work together to secure the future of the system. This is an ongoing conversation.

 

Call for Papers is up for O3S: Open Scholarship for the Social Sciences

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SocArXiv’s will host the inaugural O3S: Open Scholarship for the Social Sciences symposium on October 26 and 27, 2017 at University of Maryland, College Park. The symposium will (a) highlight research that uses the tools and methods of open scholarship; (b) bring together researchers who work on problems of open access, publishing, and open scholarship; and (c) facilitate exchange of ideas on the development of SocArXiv.

The Call for Papers is now up, here, where you will also find information about our keynote speakers and the details for submitting your work. Registration information will is coming soon. We hope you can join us!