The Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO) was launched in October 2007 and, in this first phase, digitally published several thousand of Twain's letters, almost 100 facsimiles of original documents, and over 28,000 records of other correspondence. The partners involved in the building of MTPO - the Mark Twain Papers, the California Digital Library, and University of California Press - created the site on the premise that Web-accessible versions of this content, enhanced by innovative design and site architecture and a suite of research tools, would greatly improve scholars' ability to discover and work with this unique material. Anecdotal feedback supports this premise. Early data analysis confirms the usefulness of facsimiles and browsing functionality. Users tend to prefer simple keyword over complex searches; however, those conducting advanced searches are using the tool flexibly, as we had hoped. Further analysis is expected to improve our understanding of how researchers use these tools in combination.

Digital critical editions hold the promise of supporting new scholarly research activities not previously possible or practical with print critical editions. This promise resides in the specific ability to integrate corpora, their associated editorial material and other related content into system architectures and data structures that exploit the strengths of the digital publishing environment. The challenge is to do more than simply create an online copy of the print publication, but rather to provide the kind of resource that both eases and extends the research activities of scholars. Authoritative collections published online in this manner, and with the same rigor brought to the print publishing process, offer scholars: the ability to discover more elusive, granular pieces of information with greater facility; tighter, more obvious and more accessible connections between authoritative versions of texts, editorial matter and primary source material; and continually corrected and expanded "editions," no longer dependent upon the print lifecycle. This paper will explore these benefits and others as they are instantiated in the recently released Mark Twain Papers Online (MTPO) (http://www.marktwainproject.org), created and published as a joint project of the Mark Twain Papers & Project at The Bancroft Library of UC Berkeley (the Papers), the University of California Press (UC Press), and the California Digital Library of the University of California (CDL). This current release of MTPO is comprised of more than twenty three hundred letters written between 1853 and 1880; over twenty eight thousand records of other letters with text not held by the Papers; nearly one hundred facsimiles; and makes available the many decades of archival research on the part of the editors at the Papers. Of particular focus in this discussion will be several key features of the system which, despite the many challenges they presented in development, were felt to be essential pieces of a digital publication that could support scholarship in new and significant ways. Those features include facets, which create intellectual structure and support serendipity; advanced search, which provides a means for researchers to apply their own analytical frameworks; citation support functionality, which serves to secure and record the outcomes of research exploration; and complex displays of individual letters, which allow detailed inspection by collocating the pieces of the authoritative object. These features together maintain the integrity and stability of the collection, while concurrently allowing for fluidity in the continued expansion of the material. In this way, MTPO hopes to succeed as a digital critical edition that will support and extend the research activities of scholars.

Popular commercial on-line services such as Google, e-Bay, Amazon, and Netflix have evolved quickly over the last decade to help people find what they want, developing information retrieval strategies such as usefully ranked results, spelling correction, and recommender systems. Online library catalogs (OPACs), in contrast, have changed little and are notoriously difficult for patrons to use (University of California Libraries, 2005). Over the past year (June 2005 to the present), the Melvyl Recommender Project (California Digital Library, 2005) has been exploring methods and feasibility of closing the gap between features that library patrons want and have come to expect from information retrieval systems and what libraries are currently equipped to deliver.

The project team conducted exploratory work in five topic areas: relevance ranking, auto-correction, use of a text-based discovery system, user interface strategies, and recommending. This article focuses specifically on the recommending portion of the project and potential extensions to that work.

There is a need to establish a new publishing paradigm to cope with the deluge of data artifacts produced by data-intensive science, many of which are vital to data re-use and verification of published scientific conclusions. Due to the limitations of traditional publishing, most of these artifacts are not usually disseminated, cited, or preserved. These latent artifacts consist largely of datasets and data processing information that together form the foundations of the reasoned analyses that appear in the published literature. But this traditional record of science increasingly represents only the tip of the scientific iceberg.

One promising approach to this problem of data invisibility is to wrap these artifacts in the metaphor of a “data paper”, a somewhat unfamiliar bundle of scholarly output with a familiar facade. As envisioned, a data paper minimally consists of a cover sheet and a set of links to archived artifacts. The cover sheet contains familiar elements such as title, authors, date, abstract, and persistent identifier (e.g., a DOI or ARK) — just enough to permit basic exposure to and discovery of data by internet search engines; also just enough to build a basic data citation, to instill confidence in the identifier’s stability, and to be picked up by indexing services such as Google Scholar.

This simple format represents only the first stage of the evolution of the data paper. There is room for the format to increase in complexity with the incorporation of other valuable elements, both general-purpose and discipline-specific, to enrich discovery, re-use, and archiving. An exciting potential outcome of this development of the data paper as publication is the parallel emergence of a new kind of “data journal”. Like regular journals, data journals would spring up around disciplines and sub-disciplines as needed, and we could expect that some of them would also be peer-reviewed. The data journal is envisioned as an “overlay” journal; an editor would assemble an issue by selecting data papers from any number of source and archives, and combining them with front matter, a table of contents, editorial policies, submission guidelines, etc.

This new data publishing paradigm promises to strengthen the scientific community practices of data sharing, re-use, and preservation. Scientists want to do science, get credit for it, communicate about it with their peers, and improve the measurable outputs by which their funders and employers evaluate their performance. The elements of the data paper create a recognizable and standardized form for previously unpublished data artifacts, making them easier to approach, evaluate, and automatically index for basic discovery purposes. Those same elements can easily be repurposed to create familiar-looking citations suitable for reference in CVs and all manner of publication. Finally, unique persistent identifiers for data papers and data artifacts greatly facilitate automatic discovery of a data paper’s impact and re-use.

On October 16-17, 2018, University of California (UC) libraries hosted a working forum in Berkeley, California entitled “Choosing Pathways to Open Access” (“CP2OA”) (see https://cp2oa18.com/). Sponsored by the University of California’s Council of University Librarians (“CoUL”), the forum was designed to enable North American library or consortium leaders and key academic stakeholders to engage in action-focused deliberations about redirecting subscription and other funds toward sustainable open access (“OA”) publishing.

This report was prepared by members of the forum’s Planning Committee1 as a way to update CoUL on forum outcomes, and to synthesize these outcomes into recommendations for further collective (UC multi-institutional) action to advance OA. The recommendations reflect the opinions of the report drafters; they are not an official statement by CoUL, nor should publication of this report signify CoUL’s endorsement of our recommendations. We (the Planning Committee) instead hope that CoUL will consider the recommendations in due course, particularly as some of them reflect efforts already underway within various UC libraries.