Design and Deployment of Network Testbed for Web Data Security

In recent years, the cyber security scenario has transformed predominantly from conventional response-based security mechanisms to proactive security strategies. And this transformation is still continuing which is shifting it from proactive security strategies to cyber immunity which eliminates the cyber threats by introducing stringent and adaptive security measures. In the process of developing new security algorithms/procedures, accurate modelling and effective simulation play a vital role for the robustness and effectiveness of proposed system. It is also necessary to analyze the behaviour of proposed system against multiple types of known cyber attacks. This paper focuses on the existing network testbeds for an effective analysis and monitoring while proposing a new network testbed for examining new security concepts like cyber immunity. The proposed network testbed is designed to incorporate the methods and procedures of Nature-inspired Cyber Security to accommodate the adaptive responses against the sophisticated and ever-advancing cyber attacks. The proposed testbed provides customizable analytical tool to design, test and examine the new security algorithms through a rich set of attack scenarios. It also allows developers to design, implement, and evaluate their defensive techniques with library support.

Making Open Access Book Funding Work Fairly

In late 2020, COPIM, an Arcadia and Research England funded project, announced an innovative revenue model to sustainably fund open access (OA) monographs: Opening the Future. This initiative harnesses the power of collective library funding: increasing collections through special access to highly-regarded backlists, and expanding the global shared OA collection while providing a less risky path for smaller publishers to make frontlist monographs OA. We introduced this model at the 15th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing 2020 but this is no ‘story so far’ conference presentation proposal. Since Opening the Future launched, we’ve seen several other collective library funding models emerge in quick succession, including MIT’s Direct 2 Open, Michigan’s Fund to Mission, and Cambridge University Press’ Flip it Open. In the same year, the UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) new policy was announced, and it included OA requirements for monographs. The landscape is clearly changing rapidly - in this presentation we will appraise our model in the context of this changing environment. The programme has had success since its launch. Within a few months the first publisher to adopt the model, CEU Press, had accrued enough library support to fund their first three OA monographs. Soon thereafter the initiative was recognised by the publishing community and nominated for an ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. And the programme is growing; a second well-respected publisher, Liverpool University Press, launched with Opening the Future in June 2021. The COPIM project has now begun to turn its focus to the thorny problem of scaling up. But herein lies a tension. OA monograph publishing needs to be sustainable not just for publishers, but also for libraries. Opening the Future was designed to be low-cost and simple, slotting into acquisitions budgets and existing library purchasing workflows. However, as we bring the programme to more university presses and libraries, how do we ensure we are not just adding another circle to the OA labyrinth that libraries are attempting to navigate? How might Opening the Future scale without increasing the administrative and decision-making burden already on collections and scholarly communications teams, who are already picking through a tangle of transformative agreements, pay-to-publish deals, author affiliations, and legacy subscriptions? In this session, we will engage the audience through these questions, as well as discuss the role of the programme in the wider policy landscape and how it is positioned alongside other emerging OA collective funding initiatives.

BioCantor: a Python library for genomic feature arithmetic in arbitrarily related coordinate systems

Motivation: Bioinformaticians frequently navigate among a diverse set of coordinate systems: for example, converting between genomic, transcript, and protein coordinates. The abstraction of coordinate systems and feature arithmetic allows genomic workflows to be expressed more elegantly and succinctly. However, no publicly available software library offers fully featured interoperable support for multiple coordinate systems. As such, bioinformatics programmers must either implement custom solutions, or make do with existing utilities, which may lack the full functionality they require. Results: We present BioCantor, a Python library that provides integrated library support for arbitrarily related coordinate systems and rich operations on genomic features, with I/O support for a variety of file formats. Availability and implementation: BioCantor is implemented as a Python 3 library with a minimal set of external dependencies. The library is freely available under the MIT license at https://github.com/InscriptaLabs/BioCantor and on the Python Package Index at https://pypi.org/project/BioCantor/. BioCantor has extensive documentation and vignettes available on ReadTheDocs at https://biocantor.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

Words matter: interpretations and implications of “para” in paraprofessional

Objective: While studies from the early 1990s show that library staff in nonlibrarian roles interpret the term “paraprofessional” as being demeaning to their roles, no recent research has been conducted on this topic. This study aims to investigate if health sciences library staff continue to have similar negative associations with the term “paraprofessional” and to determine if another term is preferred.Methods: The authors conducted a literature review to identify terms used to categorize library staff in nonlibrarian roles. Using these terms, we created an online Qualtrics survey asking participants to rank terms by preference. We distributed the survey via thirty-six professional email discussion lists, including MEDLIB-L, thirty-three MLA chapter and caucus email discussion lists, DOCLINE-L, and ACRL-HSIG-L. Survey participants included full-time and part-time health sciences library staff in any nonlibrarian position. Responses from librarians were not accepted.Results: Based on 178 completed surveys, “library staff” was the top choice of 49% of participants, over “other” (19%), “paraprofessional” (13%), “library support staff” (11%), “paralibrarian” (7%), and “nonprofessional” (1%). Although “library staff” was the top choice of participants across all ages, older participants (aged 45–75) preferred “library support staff” and “paraprofessional” to a greater degree than younger participants (aged 18–44), while younger participants preferred “other” to a greater degree. Out of 36 participants who specifically mentioned the terms “paraprofessional” or “paralibrarian,” 32 (89%) of those comments were negative, indicating that the “para” in “paraprofessional” and “paralibrarian” is either insulting, inapplicable, or unfamiliar.Conclusions: Our results suggest that although the term “paraprofessional” may not intentionally be used to demean library staff, many library staff interpret the term to be demeaning to their roles. Instead, “library staff,” a more inclusive and less divisive term, was preferred by survey participants. In accordance with our results, we believe the term “paraprofessional” should no longer be used in library and information scholarly literature or professional discourse.