About Hiras Software, Education and Consultancy Ltd.
Hiras Software, Education and Consultancy Ltd. is a research and development business, based at Fırat University, Teknokent, Elazığ. We develop educational software and provide training and consultancy services. Our company has reached an annual turnover of 14 million and is one of the most powerful businesses known in Turkey in the areas of publishing, software, education and consultancy. Hiras Software, Education and Consultancy Ltd. conducts its business projects with a number of research and development staff members.
What is the focus of our activities?
Our company is currently carrying out projects to provide consultancy and training services for 23 publishing houses to design their books, store and share research data, index data, and carry out publishing and printing processes by taking into account academic integrity.
Hiras Software, Education and Consultancy Ltd. is the developer of scholarly software and databases widely used in Turkey, including AYEUM, AKAGEV, and Librarytürk. It continues to carry out many software and education-oriented projects, such as TÜZYEM, zekatestianalizi, e-universitem. Currently, it provides regular services to more than 80 universities/institutions and organizations. It has the software, hardware and technical infrastructure to manage the most widely used distance education platforms in Turkey.
Hiras Software, which is the representative of multiple software programs in Turkey, is among the fastest growing academic research and development companies in Turkey. For more information, please visit our website to review our products that have been developed or are still in the process of development: https://www.hirasyazilim.com
Who are our collaborators?
We are the Turkish representative of MAXQDA, used in qualitative and mixed method data analysis, and Comprehensive Meta-Analysis Software (CMA), a program used in meta-analysis.
What are our publishing, research and development activities?
We have developed several high-impact projects to improve scholarly publication processes in Turkey. Here is more detailed information about them.
Training and Practice Centre for Research Methods (AYEUM)
AYEUM is an online learning management system. It is the 5th most used distance education portal in Turkey, currently serving more than 254.000 users. 80 universities and public institutions in Turkey are subscribers. See www.ayeum.com
Academic Development and Education Database (AKAGEV)
AKAGEV is a database established to meet the educational needs of university students, academic staff and the business world in an online and interactive environment. 13 universities and public institutions in Turkey are subscribers. See www.akagev.com
Librarytürk
Librarytürk is an artificial intelligence supported e-book portal where printed books are digitized and presented to the readers in e-book format. Librarytürk is the first and only e-book portal in terms of providing its users with the opportunity to scan and access literature through e-books. In addition, Librarytürk is the output of a research and development project and is a user-friendly database that provides access according to the corporate subscription model. The books and technical services of 23 well-known publishing houses in Turkey are provided through this platform.
DOITURK (Prospective New Brand Name)
To qualify as one of the DOI sponsors in Turkey, we have initiated the application process. In this respect, DOITURK (https://doiturk.com) intends to meet the following sponsorship criteria to offer high quality services to its members:
- to help its members register content to get DOI numbers,
- Provide administrative, technical, and (if applicable) local language support for Turkish and other less frequently used languages around Turkey,
- handle Crossref billing (which is in US$) on behalf of its members,
- and receive payment for our services in Turkish liras.
We are fully aware that a DOI number is not merely a number that is assigned to electronic publications; we know it is an element of academic infrastructure that has the potential for exchanging academic rich metadata among systems and scholarly databases. Therefore, we intend to train our members to input all necessary metadata about their publications to create a rich database and submit the essential information in required formats to Crossref regularly. In short, we understand that assigning doing numbers to the publications by our members is a tiny portion of our task; we have to compile and process rich data that could help academics to access scholarly publications with ease.
- As we offer one of the most frequently used academic and educational services, we do have the essential economic sources to pay for the annual sponsorship costs and DOI registration fees, and we can offer our services to a large number of members.
- We work in collaboration with academics with expertise about academic publishing, software development and scholarly databases. We also guarantee that we will offer our services to only those who are eligible for them, and we will certainly take into account possible cases in which international sanctions apply.
Sponsorship Plan
In the last two decades, there has been an exponential increase in the number of digital publications in Turkey, including but not limited to journal articles, books, conference proceedings, theses and dissertations. Although DOI numbers are assigned to some of the journal articles by academic publishers in Turkey, books and other publications are rarely assigned a DOI number. This is largely because academic publishers hardly know the importance of assigning DOI numbers to their publications and exchanging metadata. In this respect, we intend to disseminate information and educate the scholarly community and academic publishers, not only about the importance of DOI numbers but also about how to go through the processes of obtaining DOI numbers, along with providing and sharing metadata.
- Sponsors in Turkey do not seem to provide rich data (e.g., data bout funder registry IDs, funding award numbers, crossmarks enabled, text mining URLs, license URLs, similarity check URLs, abstracts, keywords etc.). We understand that we should be able to cooperate with our members to ensure high quality services and the accumulation of rich data. Therefore, we are planning to prepare video tutorials and hold online webinars and face-to-face meetings for our members and publishers. This will ensure that they are aware of the services we offer, along with our responsibilities and what we expect from them. Our staff and academics who support us have already been involved in training and education activities about Crossref. For instance, Dr. Abdullah Demir (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7825-6573, e-mail: abdullahdemir@aybu.edu.tr) delivered a speech about Crossref 2022 Türkiye Panel (Rich Metadata in Academic Publishing). Click here to see the video recording of the panel on YouTube. In 2024, we are planning to hold a meeting about corporation of the significance of rich academic metadata in cooperation with Oku Okut Academy, a renowned body that is specialised on academic publishing and offers free online and face-to-face educational seminars. Click here to see the website of the video-recorded activities. One of the presenters in this meeting will be Dr. Arif Bakla (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5412-4330, e-mail: arifbakla@aybu.edu.tr) (https://avesis.aybu.edu.tr/abakla).
- We are planning to provide detailed information on our website about Crossref services by using information from your website and translating it into Turkish (and other languages if necessary) (provided that you allow us to use such information).
- It is often not possible for smaller publishers to pay for annual DOI membership fee each year. If we qualify as a sponsor, we will be able to help them in this respect, but they will pay in Turkish liras for content registration. Then we will pay for the registrations in US dollars. Our annual publishing revenue is below 1 million dollars. We expect to assign around 1000 DOI numbers in the first year, but this number will certainly increase over time. We are planning to assign DOI numbers not only to current publications (the current calendar year + the previous two calendar years) but also to backfile records (anything older than what is considered as current, i.e., the present year and the previous two calendar years).
- We will provide assistance to our members during membership process and assigning DOI numbers.
- We will ask our members to provide up-to-date information and provide necessary updates by submitting them to us and Crossref whenever needed. We will also guide them to comply with new regulations and rules or perform new tasks and meet additional criteria whenever needed.
- We will inform our members about what we offer and what we expect of them, not only academically but also financially (by signing a bilateral written contract).
- We will be in contact with Crossref to keep ourselves updated and to offer timely solutions to possible problems and challenges that we and our members experience.
- Finally, we guarantee that we will perform our duties in an ethical and responsible manner; we will contribute to the reputation and mission of Crossref.