The falling autumn leaves have reminded us to take a look back at all the articles we have published since the heady days of summer. In their powerful article, Yohana Anderson and Cathal McCauley explained how the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated an e-book crisis and the #ebooksos campaign for reform. Their article sets out the problems with the e-book market and describes the work of #ebooksos, a librarian-led campaign for a fairer e-book market for libraries. Dominic Broadhurst, Ruth Dale and Jason Harper note that the frustration felt by the library sector and a lack of alternatives led to the #ebooksos campaign. They take a deep look into the issues around e-book and textbook supply. Their article, Perspectives on e-books and digital textbooks and the way ahead, examines the situation from the library and the publisher lens and provides thought-provoking and radical solutions.
Our articles about transformative agreements always have a high readership, and earlier this year we published articles about the transition from library budget to information budget, how KU Leven fund open access and how Salford University assesses and manages these agreements. Arjan Schalken from the Dutch UKB consortium provides another angle and asks how we ensure that authors know about transformative agreements and take up the opportunities they offer. His article Five ways to optimize open access uptake after a signed read and publish contract is a must-read for everyone involved in negotiating and managing transformative agreements.
Our focus when talking about Diamond publishing is often on the business models, but Gaelle Bequet points out that these journals are poorly preserved, as shown by two recent studies based on an analysis of titles indexed by DOAJ. Her article, Journals preserved or how to turn Diamond into JASPER explains a collaborative project which proposes an archiving solution for journals without article processing charges.
Jenny Evans, Nina Watts, Taylor Mudd and Tom Renner tell us that research outputs in the arts and architecture have been neglected by the repository landscape and surrounding discoverability infrastructure, which has traditionally focused on text-based research publications in the STEM disciplines. A collaboration between the University of Westminster and Haplo has tackled this issue and the authors have shared their case study: From legacy to next generation: a story of collaboration to push the boundaries of the open source Haplo repository from Cayuse.
Michael Upshall points out that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) has a potential for problems including bias in the corpus, a poor training set, or poor use of metrics for evaluation. However, the goal is not to discredit AI but to make effective use of it, and to help do this, he provides an AI toolkit for libraries.
The is more to come before we stop for our Christmas break, and we look forward to publishing Katherine Skinner and Sarah Lippincott’s introduction to the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication, a toolkit and approach developed by the Next Generation Library Publishing project. Next year, Alicia Wise will tell us about the Tool Kit that has been created to help libraries and small independent publishers negotiate and implement transformative agreements and Peter Barr will discuss how to make library acquisitions truly ethical.
We give huge thanks to all our authors and peer reviewers who have worked so hard this year. We hope you, dear reader, might also be inspired to write for Insights in 2023! We’d like to hear about research projects, your case studies and your opinions on hot topics in scholarly communications.
Steve and Lorraine