#Repositories out of the Blind Spot of Initiatives to Correct the Scholarly Record
by Frédérique Bordignon
Learned Publishing, 2025, 38(2)
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Update. "‘Omg, did #PubMed go dark?’ Blackout stokes fears about database’s future"
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00674-3
"The NIH told Nature in an e-mail that, on 1 March 'some of NIH public-web services experienced service disruptions' but all services were restored on 2 March. 'NIH is committed to resilient and open access to PubMed and other NIH web services,' the team wrote. But [Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious-diseases physician] says any disruption — even if temporary — raises concerns about how researchers access essential scientific information. 'It also serves as a reminder of the need for contingency plans, such as alternative #repositories or offline access to critical research, to ensure that health-care providers and researchers are not left without crucial information when they need it most,' she says."
www.nature.com‘Omg, did PubMed go dark?’ Blackout stokes fears about database’s futureA brief outage has focused attention on scientists’ reliance on the US-government-funded website.
Super interesting 4-year tender... 
https://bidstats.uk/tenders/2025/W07/840565060
Manchester Open Research Environment, advancing the University's green open access (OA) strategy - Request for Information
bidstats.ukManchester Open Research Environment, Advancing the University's Green Open Access (OA) Strategy - Request for Information… [Notice]The University is undertaking a project to advance our green open access (OA) strategy. Green OA all... A Tender Notice by Manchester University.
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@neuralreckoning @internetarchive
Sorry if you already know this. The #NelsonMemo described #GreenOA policies. It required deposit in OA #repositories, not submission to OA #journals. Some publishers told authors that they'd have to pay #APCs to comply with the policy. But that was deception and spin. Compliance with the policy was always free of charge. When journals charge APCs to publish fed-funded research, it was to publish in those journals, not to comply with federal policy.
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in calmness I started referring to the AS/AP or #ActivityStreams / #ActivityPub based #Fediverse as the "as soon as possible" #fedi.
It's the federated universe that was the lowest hanging fruit in the #FOSS community, where individual projects are great at producing compiled #code and #OpenSource #repositories to inspire others to produce more compiled code.
The fedi we can't get is the one where we all #collaborate and #cocreate at the level of the #OpenStandards #ecosystem, where the true potential is.
I’ve been thinking lately (always a mistake) about all the cultural works to which we don't have access. Everything removed from streaming; everything locked behind DRM so that most libraries and archives won't have copies which can redundantly survive disruption. Sometimes I get real sad about the future readers and historians and others who just won't be able to find copies of the incredible things made during the current digital dark age.
As ever, I try to let this radicalize me rather than lead me into despair. I know that there are lots of horrors worth raging against, but this is one I feel well-positioned to work against. It's low-stakes enough that I won't feel self-loathing if I burn out or need to take a break. It's no secret that I like to read and organize books so this is a topic close to my heart and one which can bring me joy and allow me to share it with those around me too. There is a fair bit of tech nerd stuff to it, enough that I have an opportunity to learn & practice new things, but not so much that I’m totally out of my depth. And there are plenty of communities out there to help and share strategies.
But the big thing I see missing from my understanding and many of the conversations about shadow libraries and unauthorized archivism is the social and professional practice of librarianship rather than mechanical practice of data storage. I don't have space to go to library school, but I could definitely stand to read (and archive) introductory books on the topic, or take an online class. Friends who know: what are some of the better places to get started with an introduction to library & information science and archive science? #libraries #librarian #archivist #archives #archivism #archivist #libraryScience #informationScience #archiveScience #culture #repositories
Infosec.TownTilde Lowengrimm (@tilde)Corporations hoard & suppress culture. They try to lock the collected art of the last century behind DRM & streaming. They want us to own nothing & have no rights. Pay and consume; never create, never control. These artificial psychopaths (run by ordinary human sociopaths) are parasites. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Art and culture are just tools for profit, not things which hold meaning, tell stories, or inspire. They have no respect for the society which supports them or for the people who create. We should have just as much respect for them.
Simultaneously, the LLM-purveyors want to vacuum up every scrap of writing and every video & picture & podcast to replace human creation with synthetic slop. It's already ruined search & wordfreq. If the art-stealing robots are allowed to "train on" all art & culture so that they can churn out trash, then you sure as heck deserve to re-watch your own re-runs whenever you feel like it. Not just because it might inspire you to make something better than corporate synthetic dumbasses. But because you're a human person and that's a good enough reason to deserve a personal archive of all art and knowledge.
The only obstacles to this are corporate & capitalist. Dust off your tricorn hat & update your NAS. Make local copies of the art which matters to you. Actual files on a physical hard drive or SD card in your hand. Back up your bookmarks offline — the web rots and that one post with the answer might not be there next time you need it. Don't rely on the Internet Archive; it's under attack and may not survive. Share with others; rebuild Alexandria.
This is not a new thought. I wasn't the first to say it; I won't be the last. But it bears repeating. This is not a post about tools or tactics; it's about outrage and action, resilience and community. But I'd love to hear your suggestions. What's your favorite tool for guerilla archivism? How do you keep backups of your bookmarks? What should aspiring archivists know?
Just for those who don't know what Infoseepage is talkn bout there is:
#Kiwix is a project to make large #information #repositories available in compact #offline forms - https://kiwix.org/en/ in various languages.
Several of their downloadable #libraries are subsets and snapshots of #Wikipedia. https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&q=Wikipedia
The "flagship" all-six-million-en_US article module of Wikipedia is ~110GB and I seed this torrent.
KiwixExplore Offline Wikipedia and Educational Content with Kiwix- KiwixDiscover the power of Kiwix - your gateway to offline Wikipedia and a vast array of educational content. Access knowledge anytime, anywhere without an internet connection. Explore the benefits of Kiwix today.
Good news from the US Repository Network (#USRN):
https://sparcopen.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Outcomes-of-the-USRN-Discovery-Pilot-Project.pdf
"At the beginning of the project, about half of the #repositories did not have their #OAIPMH interface properly configured and, therefore, could not be indexed by external discovery systems. After just over a year of the pilot, all but one repositories are now OAI-PMH compliant. This has resulted in a 50% increase in indexed content, with 728,770 new records now publicly accessible."
A recent survey of faculty at an R1 #university (with most respondents from the social sciences) revealed strong objections to #APCs at #OA #journals and deep ignorance of OA #repositories.
https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/jlsc/article/17647/galley/16356/view/
The survey did not ask whether respondents were familiar with no-APC (#DiamondOA) OA journals.
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Under the 2022 #OSTP #NelsonMemo, US federal funding agencies must make agency-funded research #OpenAccess in "agency-designated" #repositories. The same was true under the 2013 #HoldrenMemo. This is the first time that any federal agency has designated a repository neither built nor hosted by government agencies — an important milestone for #GreenOA. Kudos to #KnowledgeCommons (@hello).
New study: "Articles authored or co-authored by employees of the [US] National Cancer Institute [are in the #PublicDomain but frequently] omit any assertion of public domain status, and…many of them remain inaccessible to the general public behind publisher firewalls. Medical institutional #repositories and libraries can play an important role in making this literature (both current and historical) more widely available."
https://scholarlycommons.henryford.com/mirl/2024/program/3/
Henry Ford Health Scholarly CommonsAuthorship of articles by U.S. Government employees: implications and opportunities for medical institutional repositoriesArticles authored or co-authored by U.S. Government employees are generally in the public domain. The emerging National Institutes of Health Draft Public Access Policy, part of the 2022 OSTP memo "Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research," aligns with this spirit of copyright legislation regarding such articles. This presentation will share results from a recent study on the copyright labeling practices and open access status of articles authored or co-authored by employees of the National Cancer Institute. The study found that it is not uncommon for these articles to omit any assertion of public domain status, and that many of them remain inaccessible to the general public behind publisher firewalls. Medical institutional repositories and libraries can play an important role in making this literature (both current and historical) more widely available. However, there are complexities to consider, including issues related to co-authorship, international copyright, contractual override, library licensing, and downstream transformative uses such as generative artificial intelligence harvesting.
#Elsevier acquired #bepress in 2017.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/elsevier-acquires-bepress-a-leading-service-provider-used-by-academic-institutions-to-showcase-their-research-638101803.html
That triggered a mini-movement — #beprexit — of universities trying to migrate from bepress to other #repositories.
https://www.google.com/search?q=beprexit
A new study shows that "the total number of R1 and R2 bepress institutions grew from 76 in 2017 to 90 in 2019, followed by declines to 86 in 2021 and 82 in 2023. From 2017 to 2023, 15 R1 or R2 institutions were observed leaving bepress, and 12 joined."
https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/jlsc/article/id/17786/
Cision PR Newswire · Elsevier Acquires Bepress, a Leading Service Provider Used by Academic Institutions to Showcase Their Research/PRNewswire/ -- Elsevier, the global information analytics business specializing in science and health, today acquired bepress, a Berkeley, California-based...
This is an important step in adding new layers of utility to #OpenAccess #repositories.
https://coar-repositories.org/news-updates/coar-notify-functionality-now-available-to-dspace-users/
COAR · COAR Notify functionality now available to DSpace usersCOAR and the University of Minho Libraries are very pleased to announce that COAR Notify is now available in the DSpace platform. COAR Notify allows repositories to send and receive messages to oth…
New study: "We found that nine Latin American countries carry out #OpenScience actions; eight develop research #data #repositories; eight implement technological infrastructure to develop repositories; seven collaborate with #libraries in open science actions; and seven have their repositories recorded in the Registry of Research Data Repositories [#re3data] and Dataverse, resulting in 62 research #DataRepositories in #LatinAmerica."
https://unisapressjournals.co.za/index.php/LIS/article/view/15112
unisapressjournals.co.za
Research Data Repositories from Latin America: Analysis and Proposal of Library Functions to Implement Open Science
| Mousaion: South African Journal of Information Studies
> the #TeaProtocol perversely incentivizes #software #developers to exaggerate their contribution to #openSource #development. Using a modified PageRank called #teaRank, #softwareDevelopers are rewarded based on their “Proof of Contribution”... and a few software developers have spammed #foss #repositories with absurd amounts of worthless #packages.
Phylum · The Great npm Garbage PatchHeaded to Black Hat USA? Come talk to us in Start-Up City at SC203!
In April of this year, the Phylum Research Team revealed the proliferation of spam packages in npm associated with the Tea protocol, a decentralized initiative that promises to compensate software developers in cryptocurrency for their open-source
Anyone can Access Deleted and Private Repository Data on GitHub
You can access data from deleted forks, deleted repositories and even private repositories on GitHub. And it is available forever. This is known by GitHub, and intentionally designed that way.
https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/anyone-can-access-deleted-and-private-repo-data-github
trufflesecurity.comAnyone can Access Deleted and Private Repository Data on GitHub ◆ Truffle Security Co.You can access data from deleted forks, deleted repositories and even private repositories on GitHub. And it is available forever. This is known by GitHub, and intentionally designed that way.
Kudos to #Japan for adopting a national #OpenAccess policy, for requiring OA through #repositories rather than #journals (#GreenOA rather than #GoldOA), and for funding to upgrade and standardize the country's institutional repositories (#IRs).
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01493-8
www.nature.comJapan’s push to make all research open access is taking shapeJapan will start allocating the ¥10 billion it promised to spend on institutional repositories to make the nation’s science free to read.
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Update. This new study follows up on three recommendations from #COAR on #multilingualism in #repositories — "[1] declaring the language(s) of the resource and…its #metadata, [2] writing personal name/s using the writing system used in the deposited document while providing a persistent identifier to disambiguate author/s…and…[3] enabling UTF-8 support so as to promote use of the original alphabet / the writing system whenever possible."
https://zenodo.org/records/11060284
ZenodoDealing with multilingualism and non-English content in open repositories: Challenges and perspectivesAbstract Several organizations and initiatives have recently called for more support of multilingualism in research to promote epistemic plurality and raise awareness of the adverse effects of an anglocentric research ecosystem. But this support for and practice of multilingualism and linguistic diversity cannot happen in a digital or technological vacuum. Open repositories can play an important role in ensuring that research infrastructures have the ability to implement and promote multilingualism at scale in an Open Science environment. This implementation, however, is complex and does not come without its own theoretical and technical challenges. One of these challenges is to recognize that the implementation of multilingualism in open repositories can hardly be dissociated from wider concerns of discoverability, research assessment practices, and the anglocentric nature of digital infrastructures and metadata standards or protocols. Drawing on the COAR (Coalition of Open Access Repositories) recommendations report produced by the COAR Task Force on Supporting Multilingualism and non-English Content in Repositories, this article presents and critically examines how and why three particular recommendations of this document are particularly well suited to support a decolonial trajectory for the management of multilingualism in open repositories. More specifically, this article discusses the decolonial aspects and praxis underlying guidelines such as declaring the language(s) of the resource and of its metadata, writing personal name/s using the writing system used in the deposited document while providing a persistent identifier to disambiguate author/s identification and, overlapping with the latter, enabling UTF-8 support so as to promote use of the original alphabet / the writing system whenever possible, without negating the possibility to transliterate metadata by means of recognized standards (e.g. ISO). In so doing, we argue that these recommendations enable a multifaceted technology and politics of recovery that promotes a form of linguistic revitalization and strengthens linguistic diversity.