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Thursday, October 15, 2020

India’s first Preprints Repository to improve research quality in the country

India’s first Preprints Repository to improve research quality in the country

Researchers in any field, accessing research publications face two main problems. One, it takes around one year in the whole process of submitting, reviewing, accepting, and publishing research work in an online journal to be accessible. Another one is most of the papers remain behind the paywall as they are published in journals that are accessible only after having a subscription. So, many researchers in different countries, and of different universities and colleges who don't have subscriptions to these journals are unaware of the research findings in their fields. The need to make the current research results, immediately and freely accessible to the research community for building the ground for further research, has given rise to Preprints servers. A growing number of disciplines are building online repositories of preprints that are openly accessible to all readers. India also launched its preprints service in 2017 in agricultural sciences and now launched the country's first community Preprints service IndiaRxiv.

TRUST to build Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs)

LibCognizance Archives , Digital Library

Digital repositories are information systems to collect, store, manage, preserve, and provide access to the content to the users.

TRUST to build Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs)

Digital repositories are information systems to collect, store, manage, preserve, and provide access to the content to the users. The content is either deposited by the content creator owner or third party. The collection is managed and curated by using standard metadata tools. The repository offers a minimum set of basic services eg. store, search, and access to the content.

A Concept of Trustworthy Digital Repositories has been evolved to increase the capability of the repositories in long term preservation, access and, build trust among the users about the sustainability and usefulness of these repositories over time. Developing trustworthy digital repositories will require the integration of new methods, policies, standards and technologies in the process of digital preservation.

What is digital preservation?

Digital preservation is the process of managing access to digital material irrespective of technological advances in a long time, making the format and media to access digital content obsolete.

According to a working group within the Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS) to draft a definition for digital preservation during the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2007 Midwinter Meeting, “Digital preservation combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and born digital content regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time.” (http://www.ala.org/alcts/resources/preserv/defdigpres0408)

It is important to develop the trust between the repositories and the communities that they intended to serve. The users must have trust in the repositories about their reliability and capability of managing the data they hold. Digital preservation is the process of managing access to digital material irrespective of technological advances in a long time, making the format and media to access digital content obsolete.

TRUST Principles

All efforts in the information world revolve around the one aim of making information Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. FAIR Data Principles are a set of guiding principles that provide the framework for scientific data management. (https://librarycognizance.blogspot.com/2018/08/fair-data-principles-for-scientific.html). To keep that data FAIR over time in digital repositories. And to maintain the trustworthiness of digital repositories in communities they serve, TRUST principles came into existence after several months of consultation with RDA (Research Data Alliance and discussion within the digital repositories community.

TRUST principles are a set of guiding principles to ensure trustworthy data management in digital repositories. TRUST principles are endorsed by Open Data Preservation Foundation and are recently published (May 2020) as an article for Scientific Data. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0486-7)

Open Preservation Foundation(OPF) is an independent, not for a profit membership organization, with a vision of open, sustainable preservation. It is an open-source community of digital preservation practitioners around the world. The organization provides practical digital preservation solutions and facilitates the best practices that support enduring access to digital collections.

According to Martin Wrigley, executive director of the Open Preservation Foundation, “We endorse these principles in our capacity as an advocate for best practice in digital preservation and in recognition of the fact that they are vital to securing a sustainable future for our digital information.”

Trust principles are a set of guiding principles that reminds the digital repositories stakeholders about the importance of developing and maintaining the repositories infrastructure in the way to cater to the needs of data to the community in a long run without any hindrance of technology change. TRUST is to build and maintain the trust of communities in the data repositories that they are reliable and capable of appropriately managing the data they hold.

Transparency

Transparency in the policies of any repository in areas like data deposition, data preservation, and data discovery. Clearly communicating the users about:

(i) policies in terms of the use of data holdings and digital preservation policies.
(ii) features and services that give an indication about the capability of repositories in holding sensitive data.

Responsibility

How responsible a digital repository is demonstrated by how well the data in repositories are managed by following metadata standards compliant with the community norms, which enhance the discoverability and usefulness of data. Responsibility involves:

(i) technical validation, documentation, quality control, authenticity protection, and long term preservation of data.

(ii) privacy and protection of sensitive information.

(iii)managing the intellectual property rights of data producers.

User Focus

Each digital repository should embed the best data practices being followed in its users’ communities. The user community involves the data depositors, users accessing data, funders, journal editors, institutions related to that community. User focus of the repository is demonstrated by:

(i) continuously monitoring and identifying the community changing expectations and needs with time and

(ii) evolving best practices to meet these requirements.

Sustainability

Sustainability involves ensuring:

(i) uninterrupted access to its data holdings for current and future user communities.

(ii) planning for disaster recovery, risk mitigation, and long term preservation of data. (iii) Securing funding to enable ongoing usage and to maintain successful rendering of services.

Technology

Technology involves:

(i) the fitness and maintenance of software, hardware tools to run a data repository.

(ii) proactive decisions and preparations to incorporate new tools and technical services to ensure uninterrupted access to data when technology changes and a mechanism to prevent, detect and respond to security threats

(iii) implementing appropriate standards, technologies, and tools for data management and curation.

TRUST principles give the benefit to both digital repositories and the user communities. A digital repository infrastructure built on these principles develops trust among user communities that they are capable of fulfilling their needs, protecting the data they hold, preserving for the long term, and enabling access to the data in the future also despite technology changes. The repositories based on TRUST principles are called Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs).

References

Quiz on Archives and Digital preservation

LibCognizance Archives , Digital Preservation

.Quiz on Archives and Digital preservation

On International Archive Day (9th June), Lets check our knowledge about Archives and Digital preservation.

What is false about Digital Preservation?

1 point

A method of keeping digital material accessible.

It is a combination of policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to digital content overtime.

It does not involves planning and resource allocation for preservation of content.

The need of digital preservation mainly arises because of short lifespan of digital media.

International Archives Week: 8-14 June 2020(#IAW2020)

LibCognizance #IAW2020 , Archives

International Archives Week: 8-14 June 2020(#IAW2020)

n International Archives Week has started today on June 8th, with a theme of "Empowering Knowledge Society". From Monday to Sunday, the week will be An International Archives Week has started today on June 8th, with a theme of "Empowering Knowledge Societies". From Monday to Sunday, the week will be celebrated by discussing a different theme every day.

This global event is organized each year to raise awareness of the role of Archives, For sharing the experiences and the importance of the work of archivists and record managers within an institution or organization or company. Their role is indispensable in the preservation of the World's heritage and memory and empowering the knowledge societies.

To know more: https://www.ica.org/en/international-archives-week-8-14-june-2020

Piccredit: https://twitter.com/ICArchiv/status/1253770278276038661/photo/1

Archangel project: use of Blockchain technology in digital preservation

LibCognizance Archives , Blockchain technology

Archangel project: use of Blockchain technology in digital preservation

National archives of any country have a very precious collection of scientific, cultural, economic, social and historical digital records. In a rapidly changing digital world, it is important to save the national archives and transforming them with the change of technology. Long term sustainability of these digital records without any tampering, which questions the authenticity and originality of these records, is a big challenge to the Archival institutions and their governments.

History has many examples of expunging of records during major political unrest and happenings. To ensure the accessibility of digital records for long-term, the records need to be transformed into the other formats and transformation may result in a minor loss in fidelity of the original data. Currently, the archival practices are not able to cope up with these challenges.

Instead of cryptocurrencies and in the financial sector, many attempts are being done across the world to use the blockchain technology concept in other fields. Libraries are also running at this pace to find the possibilities in the various aspects of the library, digital preservation is one of them. To maintain the long term sustainability of digital records along with maintaining the authenticity and open accessibility of records to the public, the big leaders in this field along with the support of government have started the project using blockchain/ Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT): It is a technology behind the blockchain technology and other similar concepts.“It is an umbrella term used to describe technologies which store, distribute and facilitate the exchange of value between users, either privately or publicly. Blockchain is the first fully functional Distributed ledger technology, which became the most popular in the world.”¹

According to Wikipedia, “It is a consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data geographically spread across multiple sites, countries, or institutions. There is no central administrator or centralized data storage.”²

Archangel Project

The digital archives of any nation must be trustworthy for the public. To make sure the public about the policies of government regarding the safety

and integrity of records while migrating the data without any alteration in their originality, a 24 months project was started in June 2017 with the title “Archangel: trusted archives of digital public records” with the multidisciplinary partnership of University of Surrey, UK and a consortium of AMIs (Archives and Memory Institutions) stakeholders including the National Archives (One of the world's largest and oldest AMI preserving the digital records of UK Government) and Tim Berners Lee’s Open Data Institute (ODI).

Archangel project is to safeguard their integrity and open accessibility for future generations through the cutting edge technologies and models based on it. It involves the creation and evaluation of new prototypes of archival practice and their feasibility which also involves exploring the public attitude towards these new models and formulating the archival policies. The project uses DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) services.

Aim:

To ensure the integrity and safety and to promote open accessibility of digital records.
Creating and evaluating the models of new archival practice using DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) for long term sustainability of archival records.
Developing a novel cross AMIs model in which we have single DLT contributed to by multiple AMIs, across disciplines and nations. Its impact is not limited to AMIs but also on any Digital Public Archives and Research Data Repositories.
To formulate digital preservation and archival policies.
To build trust among the public about the authenticity and originality of digital records in archival institutions.
Finding out solutions for the transformation of digital records with the change of technology without any change and loss of content and maintaining their originality.